johnboyjjb
Active member
Pitch Black? That\'s the first movie you think of? Bad guy winning - has to be Kevin Spacey. Usual Suspects or Se7en
Annoying conventions on the screen
- Thread starter treide
- Start date
We\'re not talking about the bad guys winning, we\'re talking about how there are shades of grey.
In the movies, the good guys are usually Lawful Good or Chaotic Good, the bad guys usually LE or CE.
In Pitch Black there were no pure good guys/bad guys. The pilot was going to kill the passengers to save her own neck, Riddick turns out to be not so much evil as animalistic, Johns, the good cop, turns out to be an addict who was willing to sacrifice anyone for his life being spared.
Plus Se7en was overrated garbage in my opinion.
About the wise old mentor dying...
If you want to know more about this, read up about Jung and cultural archetypes as well as Joseph Campbell \"The Hero with a 100 (1000? can\'t remember which) faces\". It explains how certain character types are so common in our stories and that it harks back to 1000\'s of years ago. Another of the archetypes is the hero who starts out not knowing his true origins and powers and going on a quest to find them. Frodo, Bilbo, Harry Potter, Luke and Anakin Skywalker, Pug (from Feist\'s Magician), young person in Edding\'s 1st series (honestly can\'t remember the name), etc, etc.
My favorite one is making huge technological advances and theories in short ammounts of time. Especially in Star Trek when they must have found 6 ways to negate cloaking technology but never bothered to keep any of them as standard procedures.
If you want to know more about this, read up about Jung and cultural archetypes as well as Joseph Campbell \"The Hero with a 100 (1000? can\'t remember which) faces\". It explains how certain character types are so common in our stories and that it harks back to 1000\'s of years ago. Another of the archetypes is the hero who starts out not knowing his true origins and powers and going on a quest to find them. Frodo, Bilbo, Harry Potter, Luke and Anakin Skywalker, Pug (from Feist\'s Magician), young person in Edding\'s 1st series (honestly can\'t remember the name), etc, etc.
My favorite one is making huge technological advances and theories in short ammounts of time. Especially in Star Trek when they must have found 6 ways to negate cloaking technology but never bothered to keep any of them as standard procedures.
In 5 keystrokes, an image is enhanced far beyond the detail it could ever have contained, the CIA\'s database is hacked, someone writes a virus that infects some pretty unique systems.
Bullshit!
In most stories, there just has to be some romance, doesn\'t there? It\'s annoying, it\'s cloying, it\'s bloody nauseating. Was some drop-dead gorgeous bint the best possible reason for Neo coming back to life in The Matrix? Why the need for romance?
And while we\'re ranting about all the well-used story-telling devices that are thousands of years old; why does the climax always come at the end of the film? Just for once, let\'s have it at the beginning.
Mind you, The Matrix managed that, diddinit!
Bullshit!
In most stories, there just has to be some romance, doesn\'t there? It\'s annoying, it\'s cloying, it\'s bloody nauseating. Was some drop-dead gorgeous bint the best possible reason for Neo coming back to life in The Matrix? Why the need for romance?
And while we\'re ranting about all the well-used story-telling devices that are thousands of years old; why does the climax always come at the end of the film? Just for once, let\'s have it at the beginning.
Mind you, The Matrix managed that, diddinit!Torn blue sky
New member
Yes.
And so would I!
Hey I have an accent................oh!:redface:
johnboyjjb
Active member
I can see that. Just watched Casablanca last night - is Bogart a bad good guy or a good bad guy? Or Louie the cop who is trading sex for exit visas but turns a blind eye to helping people escape the nazis.
One convention that Pitch Black did remind me of is more of recent problem - why must they tell us everything? Or worse SHOW us everything? Brutal murder - brutal rape can be hinted about and not shown and be just as effective if not more. And useless blatant nudity. Finally, foul language that doesn\'t fit the character or time line of the film but is thrown in, much like the nudity, to get a harder rating.
Pitch Black ties in because he says something at the very end that explains something to somebody else and we were just sitting there going \'well duh. How can that person have survived this long being that stupid?\' Explanations that are fairly obvious don\'t need to be explained.
On thing that bothers me is how someone falling freely can catch up with an object that was dropped earlier. Take Gandalf, for instance, when he has fallen of the bridge of Khazad Dûm, and catches up with the sword he dropped while hanging on to the bridge for a moment. Or, James Bond jumping after a plane, that has fallen off cliff high up in the mountains and is falling freely towards the ground, and he catches up with the plane and manage to start it!
How does that work? Is it another gravitation working on Gandalf than what is working on his sword? Surely, neither the sword or an airplane diving nose-first towards the ground have so much bigger aerodynamic resistance that Gandalf or James Bond can achieve a higher speed?
How does that work? Is it another gravitation working on Gandalf than what is working on his sword? Surely, neither the sword or an airplane diving nose-first towards the ground have so much bigger aerodynamic resistance that Gandalf or James Bond can achieve a higher speed?
Bignastyshark
New member
@ritual
Bra straps my friend....its all about the bra straps.
Bra straps my friend....its all about the bra straps.
Charlie\'s Angels have been dealt with: bra straps. :bouncy:Originally posted by Ritual
Bond using gadgets, elaborate please! What sort of gadget does he have that can fiddle with gravity? And, what did Charlie\'s Angels use when they caught up with a falling helicopter in mid-air?
James Blonde, however has a very special gadget. You know all these anti-gravity devices? Well, they actually work by transferring the gravity from one place to another, so as to preserve the law of gravity conservation. But now, the clever lads figured out a way to store it, and defer the actual transfer. This would appear to violate the law of gravity conservation, but when the gravity gets used, it all equals out in the end, and the universe doesn\'t mind now that everything has been equalled out. So, James Blonde\'s watch has extra gravity in it, and whiloe it is beneath him, he is pulled towards his watch. Of course his watch stays beneath him, and pulls him more. And more, and faster. And faster still. The odd sound that you hear when he falls is not actually when he breaks the sound barrier, oh no, it\'s the sound of when he breaks the gravity barrier. He\'s a clever boy, he is.
What I hate in sci-fi movies is the arch-enemy former baddie that is now a good guy. Worse still, he happens to stick out like a sore thumb, when he\'s standing next to his new-found friends. Even better, they still retain their old evil culture/ways/costume.
STtNG\'s Worf, and that grease-painted pseudo-Egyptian from Stargate:whatever being the prime 2 examples.
STtNG\'s Worf, and that grease-painted pseudo-Egyptian from Stargate:whatever being the prime 2 examples.
No, no, no! Wrong, all wrong! Planes violate the natural order of the Universe all the time, and the heavens are sorely affronted by this defiance. It is due punishment, therefore, that the plane should fall faster than Blonde. It is as a perfect merger of tried-and-trusted ancient philosophy and the alchemy of gravimatic watches, Blonde is able to fall faster. For Blonde himself has angered the perfect order of the Universe even more often than the planes.
Roger Bunting
New member
What I want to know is why Mod keeps calling him Blonde.
