Apropos of my comments about Sherlock Holmes, being a modern cookie-cutter movie and therefore, naturally, a movie about a guy with a funny accent kicking ass through Victorian London, the trailer for Robin Hood suggests that it is about a guy with a bow kicking ass through medieval England. Go ahead, tell me there aren't slow-motion fight scenes and giant explosions.

The consensus of meaningful reviews (i.e., not Joe's Movie Blog) is that it's a colossal train wreck of a movie that gets absolutely everything wrong.

Sherlock Holmes was at least fun. RH is apparently a dreadful slog that devolves to a history lesson on the Magna Carta for half an hour.

Ok, I will say it.

Ridley Scott sucks as a director.

"Gladiator" was a horrendously awful film that wouldn't know a Roman gladiatorial fight if it bit in the gladius....

It gets almost everything wrong...

He is almost as unwatchable as George Lucas post-1977....or Tim Burton....ever.

Burton wouldn't know how to tell a story if Mother Goose...well, goosed him.

He should have been kept an art director and gathered many, many Oscars serving someone who actually knows how to tell a story all the way through.

You know, I get grumpy when I am up too late these days....

Robert

Go watch Alien and Black Rain again and quit being grumpy. Then watch Blade Runner and get happy. Avoid any RS movies until you hear that one is a solid return to his original form.

Lucas... is hopeless. I mean, twelve years or whatever to write the next Star Wars episode, something with all the best, tested ingredients all lined up on the shelf, and we got that wretched mess.

Then there's Shyamalan, who had one fantastic movie in him, did good enough on a second that the sequel should have been greenlighted immediately, and then completely lost his abilities. He finally was smart enough to take a job working someone else's material, but anything that might have come of Last Airbender was totalled when they sent it out for 3Dification.

"Alien" is one of the dumbest films ever made. I was screaming at the screen, "open the hatch!!!" an hour before the film ended that way. "Aliens" is, in every way, a far better film.

"Blade Runner" is visually stimulating. But at its heart, incredibly stupid: why chase down criminals who will be dead in a couple of weeks?!? What is the freaking point?

I will keep an open mind and get a copy of "Black Rain" from the library to see it.

I agree with you about "Night" -- like most sf authors these days, because of reading trends, series books are required. Scalzi is trapped by the success of "Old Man's War" into writing less and less interesting sequels; fortunately, he is also writing other stuff.

Series sf.....makes me miss trilogies....

Robert

I never watched Blade Runner until recently. Daryl Hannah. That's all you need to know.

If they had opened the hatch too soon in Alien, you wouldn't have had much of a movie, would you?

I enjoyed Aliens as well. But, there was obviously a much larger budget for that one, made possible by the success of the original.

I saw Robin Hood. I liked the font they used on the title cards at the beginning. That's about the only positive comment I can come up with.

Lol...

And as to not solving a problem so soon as to end the movie, I say this: Hollywood is plagued with what the screenwriter William Goldman terms "make-stupid" plots. If the screenwriter cannot come up with a better way to solve the problem, or an explanation as to why the incredibly obvious will not work, and thus has to rely on the viewer intentionally disconnecting his brain in order for the film to work, then it is a movie that should not have been made.

I discount, of course, the films that intentionally stupid so as to be funny, and wink at us the entire time.

We have become a nation of smartasses -- which, I think, would have pleased Groucho Marx to no end, were it not for the fact that we have also become a nation which does not read or think enough to make the smartass comment worth hearing most of the time.

Who knew that we would come to live in Freedonia?

Robert