Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Josh McNeil to continue the Summer, 2010 movie preview. They get to three or four, with digressions into Mr. T day and the art of comedy.
Don’t miss the podcast recording livestream on the Overthinking It Podcast Ustream Channel every Sunday at 9:15pm ET (6:15pm PT).
Want new episodes of the Overthinking It Podcast to download automatically? Subscribe in iTunes! (Or grab the podcast RSS feed directly.)
Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call (203) 285-6401 to leave a voicemail.
The best vigilante is Homer Simpson in the episode “Homer the Vigilante.” He caught the cat burglar and cleaned up the streets of Springfield via a series of vicious heavy sack beatings. That’s vigilantism at its finest!
Knight and Day is Tom Cruise’s mid-life crisis. Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are trying to revive their lagging careers. It’s a shame, because at least one of them has acting talent. The trailer just reeks of desperation, as does the “viral” “clip” that was released recently.
At least that film is slightly original, in concept if not in execution. This Summer is not going to be good. There’ll be good movies, as there always has been, but these movies will make loadsa money, no matter what.
Knight and Day will be much funnier if you consider it as Mission Impossible IV.
Fenzel, I totally get the reference re: Serra Angel. Win.
Val Kilmer was actually *so* good in _Tombstone_ that the editors cut some of his scenes out because he overshadowed Kurt Russel’s Wyatt. I love that movie. Sam Neil and Bill Paxton play the other Earp brothers- awesome.
Wrather, I beg to differ a little. Cruise’s cameo in _Tropic Thunder_ was never advertised by the film company itself, but news of it spread like wildfire by word-of-mouth, much like the cameo in _Zombieland_. And remember, it was good enough to get him a Golden Globe nomination.
I’m a little disappointed _The Last Airbender_ is getting converted- the effects in the previews look like they could have been amazing 2-D ones, but they could end up being really crap-tastic 3-D ones, instead, because of the conversion. I have seen most of the cartoon, and yeah, it’s pretty clearly set in an alternate world where every culture is based on East Asian ones of ours, and I assume the apologetic excuse is, “It’s a different world, they don’t have to LOOK Asian, do they?” or something like that. The series itself is really awesome, so I’m hoping Shymalan doesn’t hurt it with the movie. The trailers look great, but trailers can be rather deceptive. I’d like to go see it in the theaters.
Re: Signs: I actually really liked it. If you approach it as a myth about people instead of a scientific story, you can have a good time. (I’m sort of taking a cue from Mlawski and her latest _Lost_ piece there, but it’s an apt description.) And I think that’s how all of Shymalan’s movies are- he gives a different meaning to “suspension of disbelief” than we’re used to as moviegoers because he is basically telling folk/moral/fairy tales but in our own world: we can do fantasy well enough, but it’s “supposed” to be set in a fantastical world to begin with, not our own, so the stories he tells are hard to swallow. But when I think of them the way people listening to Homer thought of his tales, or the way the brothers Grimm’s audience thought, or Hans Christian Anderson’s audience, I enjoy his originally inspired films more (and I say it this way because _The Last Airbender_ is based off of a cartoon, while the rest of his movies came totally from his own head, as far as I know- so I hope it will take a different direction, or that the fantastical world it’s set in will make the message clearer). The payoff all of the build-up leads to is in character and emotional development, not the plot, which makes it easy to miss. There usually is some sort of “reveal” in the end, yes, but it is a revelation for one or more of the characters, explaining and/or changing who they are and who we perceive them to be versus who they were and how we had perceived them to be up until that point- and sometimes how they perceive/ perceived themselves. I forgive the somewhat cheesiness the reveals have because it’s not about the cheese itself, but the rest of the dish.
Clowns are scary.
TOMBSTONE! I love that movie. Amazing mustaches. Great quips. A random montage of killing bad guys at the end. Awesome cast.
“You’re so drunk, I bet you’re seeing double.”
“I’ve got two guns, one for each of you.”
I forget what channel it was but Tombstone would have it’s two week run right after The Rock. Great pair for a movie night.
So happy.
*Sam Elliott
I made this mistake today in conversation and realized I probably did it here, too. Lo, ’twas the same. Whoops.
Although Sam Neil as a cowboy would probably be rather awesome.
And since it gets spoken of here, Tom Cruise’s character from _Tropic Thunder_ is “producing” the MTV Movie Awards on the sixth of June, meaning this Sunday.