Transformers was cool, last movie i saw was last week and was disturbia very nice movie :) 

yes! i agree completly! it's an often overlooked (or not even noticed, surprisingly) thing, but the ridiculous use of close shots without any far shots to orient yourself and see where things are taking place was extremly irritating.
at the last big fight, i pretty much just started rolling my eyes at the stupidity of it. 

A woman moves to a new environment, meets a handsome man of high standing but they can't be together, something tragic happens to the woman and she leaves for good, the man loses some of his status in a hardship, the woman unexpectedly inherits a huge fortune, the couple meet again and all is different and love can blossom ever after.

Produced with good actors and style, often making and enjoying watching. There are variations of course, depends on when the books were written and how classical they are, and there are varying amounts of subplots. 

I exactly and completely agree with you. Like I wrote earlier, the zoomed in camera sucks because you can't orient yourself at all and can't build any anticipation or sense what is where. 

i mean "i have no fucking idea what just happened"-fast - like in tomb raider - suck ass, too. 

even the one scene where all the autobots meet up and transform near the middle of the movie, the camera is ridiculously close to optimus, and then pans by so fast from one to the other that you barely see anything.

seriously, i think they just realised that it would be possible to make proper transformation, so they just fudged it to look ok, and blew the camera by so fast so no one would notice...

of course, i've noticed this 'extreme close up' technique a lot for a few years now, so i *should* be used to it by now, but what can i say; it drives me nuts. :P 

you guys do know that Michael Bay sucks, right? 

http://www.avp-r.com/trailer.html 

Normally with these kind of big budget action movies they at least make the trailer look nice, but here even that looks shit. =) 

effects look pretty good, trailer looks kind of bad but there's no one good involved by the looks of it, biggest star they've got is Michelle Dessler from 24 (reiko aylesworth?).

Man, how good would this have been if it was directed by James Cameron, had some actual real actors in it and was called Alien 5 (or Alien 3, pretending Alien 3, Resurrection and vs. Predator never happened). I would cream myself. 

for Alien 3 is floating online somewhere. I only read the first third of it, but it seemed to be more interesting than what Alien 3 become, involving a full scale war on Earth between the aliens. 

I think Alien 3 rocks, so there. 

much more grim then the second, Aliens which I didn't like. A Summer box office action flick lacking the raw verve of the first one.

I just read where Ridley Scott has stated that science fiction movies are dead. WTF?!? There as yet been a movie made from the works of Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Gene Wolfe, Kate Wilhelm, Damon Knight, L Sprague DeCamp, Cordwainer Smith, Richard McKenna, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Vance, Keith Roberts, Brian Aldis, Joe Haldeman, Alfred Bester, Howard Waldrop, Lucius Shepard, Michael Swannick, Connie Willis, Bruce Stirling, James Tiptree Jr., R A Lafferty, Joanna Russ, Pat Cadigan, George Alec Effinger, or Gregory Benford just to name a few authors off the top of my head who have written excellent novels and novelas that could translate into movies.

As far as I am concerned Science Fiction is a genre that Hollywood has yet to tap. 

they could wait for a few decent screenwriters to cook up a good sci-fi script, then they don't have to butcher any classic novels. :) 

I agree with you, but honestly, most good sci-fi books wouldn't really make good movies...
Since where talking about Fincher and Sci-fi movies, he is working on Rendezvous with Rama. I haven't been dissapointed with Fincher yet, and Rama is a nice book, so hopefully the movie will rock. 

I offer you:

Sunshine
The Fountain
A Scanner Darkly

Very clear evidence science fiction is not a dead genre. 

really science fiction? o_O 

Pffft. 

...I always thought The Unicorn Variation by Zelazny would make an excellent transition to screenplay. 

I pretty much listed authors who've written things that I thought were cinematic when I was reading them.

A few good novels begging for the screen treatment:

Nova and Babel-17 by Delaney
Free Live Free by Gene Wolfe
Forever War by Haldeman
Heavy Weather by Stirling
Life During War Time and Green Eyes by Shepard
When Gravity Fails by Effinger 

some non english writing writers too.

But haven't read that many of the authors mentioned by HT. Mostly gettin what u get from library here, translated.

Probably the plots are too complex, weird or not right to make a low common denominator Mike Bay style film. What has always sucked and will suck about most movies are horrible and completely believability breaking scripts.

But I've ranted about this topic years ago. Nice that someone has similar thoughts.

Have you read Solaris and seen both the films? I don't know what Soderbergh was thinking at times. Why is the space station extremely clean, new and perfectly functional? Totally kills the atmosphere... Why is that one idiot (don't remember was his name changed from Snaut) just eating donut and minding his business as if nothing stressful and weird is happening on an isolated station far and away from everyone, he acts like it was an average weekday night after a normal day at the office? Etc etc... It's as if the director hadn't read the book at all.
Or if he had, he sure got some totally different impression than I did. The Soviet version gets many things right, but it suffers from a completely stiff lead. (co-lead Bondarchuk is amazing though.) 

and I haven't seen the movie versions though.

when I was a kid, some of the science-fiction magazines serialized several of Lem's short fiction works so I've got a lot of his work in the back of my head. I remember stories within a sort of Space Cadet framework that spoofed Heinlein's juvenile fiction as being pretty entertaining. 

has even great short fairy tales, dunno how children would react when read to about all kinds of strange robots struggling in their lives and the weird kings and kingdoms. :)

They could only be done for the silver screen in hand drawn animation format methinks. 

I pity the first person who attempts to make a film of the uplift universe

Also, Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. 

on the Hollywood Reporter to see if 3:10 to Yuma would be worth seeing tomorrow afternoon and I stumbled upon this gem:


While on the subject of time, both versions of the picture owe a tip of the Stetson to "High Noon," which also was governed by a ticking clock and featured good guys and bad guys who wore intricate shades of gray.

What the fuck?!? The villains in High Noon are only there in order to get shot at the end. There are no 'intricate shades of gray' there.

'Gee, Vern maybe we should cut this sheriff fella some slack. It's his last day of service and he is getting married and all ..." "No Innus, my momma beat with a brush handle when I were a yungin' I gots to take it out on somebody.",

No, it doesn't do 'gray area'. The sheriff is principled, the townsfolk are spineless, and the outlaws are cutthroats.

Admit it mister Hollywood Reporter critic, you have not seen the movie.

Anyway, there wasn't a comment forum on the page to harass and taunt the critic so I bumped this thread up instead.