Confused Matthew

Actually I happen to agree with that.

I don't think it aged as well as it could have, primarily because Brooks thinks the younger generation is dumb and needs every punchline spelled out for them.

Your joking right? About there being no room for debate on that?

I think I watched only a few of his videos a friend linked to me. About how the last season of Star Trek Deep Space Nine was "The worst season of trek ever". He made valid points during his videos, but his entire summation and premise is laughable.

It did make me laugh. Dude's clearly never watched season 1 of TNG. Or season 1 and 2 of Enterprise. Or 1 and 2 of Voyager.

Or season 7 of TNG, season 3 of TOS, and so on.

(Though, again, s.7 of Deep Space Nine is pretty high up there in awfulness )

The single worst season of any Star Trek series is Season 1 of TNG which has at most 2 episodes that even approach good. While Season 7 is DS 9 weakest I wouldn't even call it a below average season of television.

Actually, the opposite is true. Early TNG at least had good characterization, so if the plot sucked, the dialogue was still aces. That's the reason why crap like "Code of Honor" is still watchable.

DS9 s.1 is just aping TNG at the expense of the main cast, who are shafted in favor of Q, Lwaxana, the Maquis, Tom Riker, etc.

Nah the season 1 characterization was terrible too. Nobody could possibly take Troi seriously as a counselor, Picard seems to not be able to solve anything that even tangentially relates to violence, Riker doesn't seem good either, well he seems blank.

• The Maquis first appeared on DS 9 in season 2...
• Tom Riker appeared in DS 9 Season 3...

Amazing how half of the 4 things DS 9 season 1 was favoring over the main cast Didn't appear in DS 9 Season 1 (And one of them, Troi's mom, appears in 3 seasons)

edited 25th Oct '12 11:53:29 AM by CobraPrime

The main problem with the remake of The Producers is that they took a stage show and just put a camera in front of it. Broderick and Lane's performances are more over-the-top than they should be, because they'd been playing the parts on Broadway. Big, broad acting works in a big performance space like a stage, but that doesn't work so well on the screen.

The same thing happened with My Fair Lady, as I remember... Just cut and paste the stage version. Actually, that was even worse, because they kept the meta jokes that work in front of a live audience.

Say what you like about Rent, but at least Chris Columbus knew how to adapt that sucker for a big screen.

What about, say, Seventeen Seventy Six?

I disagree. The old MGM musicals knew how to do a stage-to-screen adaptation very well, with My Fair Lady and The Music Man being some of the best examples. Rent wasn't exactly perfect as a stage show, but at least it had a lot of energy - the film version was just so sterile by comparison. I can get that the "Tune-Up" and "Answering Machine" numbers wouldn't translate well to the screen, but they cut "Christmas Bells" - what the hell?

1776 is great - that film did a lot better with the hammy performances than The Producers for some reason. I think it helped that that film's comedy was more on the "quiet and quirky" side than the "loud and broad" side. Also, it had Ron Holgate as Richard Henry Lee and John Cullum as Edward Rutlege. Pretty awesome there.

edited 25th Oct '12 9:38:41 PM by Pannic

@Wildcard: Did he really say Mel Brooks sucks?! The hell?! The man is a comedy genius!

edited 31st Oct '12 6:31:05 PM by BewareTheWorlock

Not only that, but he said that Mel Brooks' movies are about as funny as the movies by Seltzer And Friedberg.

I seriously wish I was joking about that.

To put it in context, he's jumped on the "pop reference ≠ joke" bandwagon. However, he ought to make allowances for a parody film. Is Airplane! as bad as Epic Movie? I seriously wonder.

Anyone puts Mel Brooks on "their" level needs to have his head checked. A good chunk of his movies are hailed as comedy classics and for good reason.

He has a review of Sam Riami Spiderman up. I can't believe he missed the obvious J-H dynamic and the clear motivations, (Osbourn's repressed violence and need for control, revenge on his enemies he can't do in public etc..)

edited 12th Jan '13 10:09:38 AM by Wildcard

My mom could teach him a thing or two.

When she saw the second Raimi Spider-Man, when Kirsten is playing the lead in The Importance of Being Earnest, she (my mom the drama major) almost went berserk. "That hasn't been on broadway in forty years!"

This was before the revival, though.

Was she on Broadway in the second movie already? I thought she was just starting out her actual acting career off Broadway.

Well, it was a black tie event.

Matthew has Spiderman 2 up. He liked it a lot more than 1.

How does everyone feel about the Q&A videos? I quite like his answers and how in depth he goes and I asked him a question, (he didn't answer though)

I love his Q&A episodes almost as much as his regular reviews.

However I did find a problem with this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGUImeCNLGg

It is the part where he said Final Fantasy VII had a "rich story" without explaining "why" or "how" it has a rich story.

That bothers me.

It bothers me because he always explains his opinions. I love it when people explain their opinions. It is just so confusing because FF VII, is of course, written by Japanese hands and known for having and "uncut" translation with very little to zero American/European written Woolseyisms, which make a Japanese game's story accessible and understandable. I sent him an email asking him about this, and he has not responded. I wonder if he actually meant Final Fantasy VI(The Super Nintendo cut mind you!)?

edited 16th Jun '13 7:29:04 AM by TheDeclaration

I've been watching this guy for a couple years, and something has recently come to mind for me. He constantly pans movies which have no story, as he believes that a movie isn't a movie if it doesn't have a story. Now, it's weird that this is coming from me, because I do like works of art that have story over works that don't, but there's something I disagree with in terms of his philosophy of reviewing movies that lack story:

In one of his Responses 2 Responses videos, he paraphrased some story about a piece of art which couldn't be considered a painting, as an analogy for what he didn't like about Space Odyssey 2001. Here's my problem: he constantly panders some films as being the worst films ever made, based largely on the fact that they are "not movies" (examples include Space Odyssey 2001, Cloud Atlas, and No Country For Old Men; a thing to keep in mind, though, the only one I've actually seen is "No Country," which I didn't even like myself). He says that because they have no story, or that there are no logical connections between anything, that the films are terrible.

The best way I can convey my problem with this is using an analogy of my own: the use of written words. Now, as most people would agree with, words are not just a medium of communication; they are a medium of art. But how can words be made into art? We have many different ways of turning words into art, often each with their own name. Two particular methods of turning words into art are through poetry and through novels. Poetry uses words to convey raw beauty, or to prompt a response from the reader (these days, usually a response that is completely subjective). Novels, on the other hand, use words to tell a story; aside from what details of a novel are left out, the plot of a novel is purely objective (eg, you can't really debate "what happens" unless the story gives room to do so). From what I know of Matthew's reviews, he would absolutely LOVE to review novels, but he would hate to review poetry.

But keep in mind here, I'm not criticizing him for that. Everyone has their tastes, and I, too, would prefer a novel over a hundred pages of poetry. However, in some of his reviews, Matthew appears to be doing what is the equivalent of criticizing poetry, saying that it's terrible because it isn't a novel.

Just like words can convey poetry and story, so can moving picture. A film like SO 2001, from how Matthew describes it, is more of a visual/audio feast than it is an actual story (his definition of "a movie"). He criticizes this moving picture, along with others, because they do not convey as much of a story, or as coherent a story, as they could. These criticisms don't seem completely fair to me, as I believe visuals and audio can be be used to make works of art analogous to poetry, and be respected as such - they do not need to form a story, and if they don't, then the work of art should not be pandered for that reason alone.

Another analogy helps: games. Games, like words and moving picture, are an art medium. But the medium of games can do different things: on one hand, you have a game like pong, which truly is a game in the same sense that a sport like football is a game - you simply meet an objective, nothing else is involved in the medium other than the code and the hardware. On the other hand, you have games like Knights Of The Old Republic, Heavy Rain, Bioshock, Mass Effect, and, more recently, The Last Of Us. These games have a story in the same sense that "a movie" does (again using Matthew's definition of film), and use the medium of the game to convey it (though, technically, with the assistance of other mediums within it such as music and moving picture). You can have novels, games, and movies which all tell stories, and tell them really well; but on the other hand, you can also have works of art that are just words, just a game, and just moving picture. In this lattermost case, Matthew says it is terrible simply for not being something else.

One might be inclined to argue that the collection of movies in question (again, I haven't seen them myself except for No Country For Old Men) DID try to be stories - "novels" rather than "poetry" - and that they should be criticized as such. However, I'd like to expand my analogy a bit further: novels have poetic segments which don't convey story, but that type of prose need not be the only substance of the book; likewise, poetry can often convey a story, though not every single stanza or line has to directly progress that story. It works the same way with video games: on one end of the spectrum you have pong, which is pure objective, and on the other hand you have Knights Of The Old Republic, which uses objective to tell a story; however, in-between you have all sorts of video games that have been released over the years, particularly classic ones like Super Mario Bros, which do have some rudiments of a story (eg, a pair of plumbers named Mario and Luigi struggle across the land to save a princess and restore peace to the Mushroom Kingdom). The Mario series (even to this present day), along with Mega Man games, Sonic The Hedgehog games, and many others, only have story as a part of the work as opposed to the driving force (which is usually gameplay - visuals and audio serve the game in the same way that story does). So, to reiterate, words and games can really make anything - the involvement of story in words or in games can be considered more of a spectrum than an element which is take-it-or-leave-it. Works of art that have story as the driving force are commendable, and it is worthwhile spending time analyzing such works. However, though words and games have the ability to become such works, they can be used for other things. The same can be said of moving picture: films like Space Odyssey 2001, Cloud Atlas, and No Country For Old Men have story, but it could be argued that story is not the driving force behind these works of art so much as the visuals or audio, or the aural/poetic experience of the work. Though story-driven works are great, even fantastic, story can be "just another aspect" of the visual/audio creation that is moving picture. It is the same with all media, whether it be words, games, photos, paintings, or otherwise.

Oh, and a totally unrelated thing I disagree about: though 3D may just be a gimmick, I'd argue it's a gimick in the same sense that stylized outfits, black-and-white, fast-moving camera angles, etc. are gimicks. Even if he's right about 3D getting fazed out in a few years, it's just another way to make the film look pretty, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

edited 14th Jul '13 1:09:07 AM by Izon

I'd really love to see him pan something like Wild Strawberries or 8 1/2 or Gamorra because they "aren't movies" according to his definition.