I agree, in the scale of Michael Bay films it is a pretty good one. He's probably apologising because he feels that he sort of has an excuse for this one. He apparently feels he has no excuse for the truly dire ones like Pearl Harbour and the Transformers sequels.

Fair enough.

For the record, I mostly enjoyed the Transformers sequels.

My theory is that anything with Colonel Lennox and Chief Epps was fun to watch and enjoyable, but anything with Shia LeBeouf was when I would take my bathroom break. (I saw both 2 and 3 pretty well liquored up)

I'll give him a break on the first Transformers movie. As I said before, it was close to being about as good as we could expect from a live-action Transformers movie. (Seeing the GI Joe movie only made it look better.)

I think the problem with Pearl Harbor was that Bay was trying to make it his version of Titanic (love story over big effects movie) but missed that in Titanic the event is what brings the two together and then threatens them. In Pearl Harbor you know the movie isn't over for a long while after the raid itself, which means Kate can't die in it, and you know Ben and Josh aren't going to die in the raid itself because then you'd be coasting the entire Doolittle Raid with the B plot already resolved.

Not to mention the entire B plot is impossible because it relies on Ben being listed as killed in action in a situation where he was missing in action.

I don't know, you'd think that he'd get the core "it's about robots fighting" part down a bit better and have less of the boring puny humans and extremely awkward physical comedy. Plus the confuso-cam fight scenes where it seem the cameraman is the third combatant are entirely his fault.

I would have been far happier with Colonel Lennox and Chief Epps as the basis for the G.I. Joe team than Channing Tatum and Dwayne Johnson.

A gritty reboot for G.I. Joe perhaps?

I went back and watched a few episodes of the original Sunbow series. By today's standards, it wasn't great, and it definitely benefitted from the rose colored glasses of nostalgia. (Sepia colored glasses?) Given the source material, I think the writers and Bay did a decent job of it.

Oh yeah, I mean the old series is goofy as hell when you're not a kid anymore, but nostalgia is about remembering things as they should have been, not as they are. Though some of those episodes were utterly hilarious.

"It will take more than your puny arm to stop Devastator!"
"Riiight...Which is why it's lucky that the hand at the end of that arm...Is holding a gun!"

City of Steel, goddamn wonderful it was.

Anyway, I don't think it's as much a case study in point-missing as, say, John Frakes' absolutely godawful Thunderbirds movie, I'd just rather have had a director who was willing to let me see what was going on in fight scenes and mechanical designs that weren't confusing jumbles of tens of thousands of tiny moving parts. And for Bay to sign a declaration that he does not understand comedy and will stop trying to perpetrate it anyway.

Or race relations.

My God, "City of Steel" was TERRRRRIBLE. It had to be some of the worst animation of the entire series, and that's saying a lot given the hit or miss quality of the animation. (If you want a really gorgeous episode, check out "Call of the Primitives.")

Who exactly was the intended audience for the Thunderbirds film? And if you were going to make one, why wouldn't you make it with marionettes?

Oh, it's bad, but there's also the one part in Atlantis, Arise! where Optimus watches Optimus run towards the Washington Monument, and of course this shot for your dose of "wasn't there supposed to be one more cel here eh probably doesn't matter."

Could be worse, could be Energon. That cartoon is truly amazing in its limitless ability to find new ways of sucking.

My theory has always been that it was conceived of as a Spy Kids knock-off and the script hastily adapted when they got the Thunderbirds licence. It's either that or the standard belief in media that kids can't identify with a movie unless there's a kid character, even though everyone who was ever a fan of Thunderbirds as a kid wanted to be one of the pilots, not some kid tagging along and getting in the way. And I guess it's the same live-action-uber-alles idea that's made Hollywood do any number of cartoon adaptation movies that only really showed why the original was a cartoon to begin with.

I forget, was this before or after Team America?

I checked, it was right before Team America. It'd be impossible after Team America.

"Hey, you know what kids would love? A big budget live action movie based on a short-lived British children's series from the sixties!"

It wasn't just the often shoddy animation. There were a lot of inconsistencies that I noticed as a kid, like why it took them like ten episodes to sort out whether Autobots could fly or not, or why everyone's robot form look exactly the same on Cybertron even though their vehicle forms were different. Watching them as an adult, you notice even more, like the one episode where the Autobots DROVE TO AFRICA in a few hours, or why the wheelchair bound Chip insisted on always going with Bumblebee, the smallest car available. (And on another tangent: Wheeljack and Ratchet could build whole Autobots from scratch, but they couldn't give Chip cybernetic legs?)

Still, it's not nearly as embarrassing as lover-of-all-things-military Michael Bay not knowing which state The Pentagon is in in Revenge of the Fallen, or the plane graveyard in Tucson Arizona being accessible by the back door of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.

Well, you're the UK, so I understand why you wouldn't know about that massive desert aircraft boneyard at Dulles International Airport. I mean, where do you think they filmed Die Hard 2? :D

Yes, Transformers 2 might've been 15% better if someone had just handed Michael Bay a globe.

And the most alarming thing about Transformers 2? Someone from the Pentagon actually signed off on that script.

Military consultants always sign off on many scripts filled with inaccurate things about the military

It makes the military look good, it appeals to their target audience, I get that, but I'd like to think there's someone at the DoD film office or whatever it's called with a modicum of taste.

Just saw Oblivion and it's a good movie. I saw the twist a mile away, but didn't see the other twist as well.

Saw the rifle a few times, not close up enough to really get a good look at it but I can tell it's most likely an ACR because of the selector and the lower receiver itself.

I kinda want that sling for my AR on day because of how he easily slung the rifle over his shoulder and it almost snaps onto his back like it was magnetized or something like you see it in a lot of sci fi games.

Well, obviously he went to The Pentagon in DC to ask permission, not the one in Virginia. Maybe that's the name of a nursery school or something.

"This film will have explosions and jokes about willies!"
"Yaaaay!"
":cool:"

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollyw...for-armageddon

Too good to be true.

Because then they wouldn't be able to beat the "It's OK to be disabled" horse corpse.

I recall the dumbest one of those I ever saw was a He-Man episode where he meets a blind kid, is struck blind himself, and briefly needs the blind kid's help to get through a maze or something before getting his sight back and beating up Skeletor or whoever. Moral of the story: it's ok to be blind, unless you're the protagonist.

That or that wretched Extreme Ghostbusters series which seemed to take the "disabled people can do anything able-bodied people can" to the point one of the team was a guy in a wheelchair. That always struck me as kind of cruel, really: telling a kid with no legs he can do anything he wants doesn't really change that there's a shedload of things he'll never be able to do.

Well, it IS okay to be disabled. It's not like he has anything to be ashamed of. But I don't think there are a lot of people in wheelchairs who would say no to a chance to walk again. Especially since Spike AND his son had exosuits in the movie. They give a transforming exosuit to a kid, but not to Chip?

"Fuck Chip; He knows what he did"

Axis Powers Hetalia is the weirdest anime that I have ever seen.

I just saw the Alex Cross movie...and I when I returned it, I forgot to screencap it because....I was bored. Tyler Perry is just fucking stupid boring. I have never seen a Tyler Perry movie before but wow, I wanted more scenes of the assassin because he is an actual character. If Tyler Perry was cast with a better actor, the villain played by Matthew Fox would have been just tame but with Tyler Perry trying to act all mean and angry or serious or funny...it makes Matthew Fox's acting awesome and his character just cool. I don't understand a lot of the actions of the Alex Cross character in this movie. Morgan Freeman did a better Alex Cross

http://kotaku.com/this-is-the-new-ca...-nex-486232800

Let the speculation/complaining begin!

Yeah I saw that trailer and it tells us nothing

And of course all the fanboys come out from under the rocks to vomit their theories about non-existent fireproof vests and how being shot in the shoulder will never kill a person everywhere.

>.<

Well, we all know he was zombie Gaz anyway, maybe his undead status will be used to explain his regenerating health. Playing as a powerful undead commando would be like playing the whole game as Menendez.

Eh, I've got Blood Dragon for my daily doses of extreme silliness, I guess.

Watched The Hunger Games on Netflix recently. It was pretty average and not really sure worth all the billing and hype that surrounded its initial release IMO. :(

Go look up Battle Royale. It's a much better movie or better yet read the book

I think a lot of it was both hype for Jennifer Lawerence and a lot of teen to early 20s girls flocking to go see it because they had read the "edgy" and "dark" books.

I was disappointed too, just not all that good.

Even though it makes a great case for why a disarmed populace is bad, though.:D

BR, and BR2 are also on Netflix, I believe.

Oh and the Manga. If you ever find the manga for BR, read that. It is also pretty great...and graphic

I notice in the almost content-free CoD announcement there's one point of interest, that being a new engine. But I think this will be another CoD 3, released on too many formats for them to focus on any particular one. 3 looked like an HD Re-release of a PS2 game on the next gens because they tried to release for PS2, PS3, Xbox, Xbox 360 and Wii (I guess they didn't have time to release the versions for the Turbographix-16 and Antikythera mechanism) and this one could end up on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox whatever the next one's called, Wii U, PC and possibly even Wii. All that plus trying to build and debug a new engine in a two-year dev cycle...Unless Kotick is hiring programmers fresh from Hogwarts I don't see this ending well.

I played through Metal Gear Solid 4 yesterday and the day before on my brother's PS3 while he was at school

If you said that, I would have given you some advice to prepare. Step one...pace yourself. This is a LONGER game. Step 2, make sure you've played EVERY Metal Gear game because MGS4 ties up ALL of them. and Step 4...popcorn, lots of popcorn for the many cutscenes.

I skipped pretty much every cutscene. I was there to shoot dudes with a wide variety of handguns, not because of anything to do with the Metal Gear universe

Then you are playing the wrong game if all you care about is guns. The MGS series of games is part awesome gunplay and action and part really intense story telling.