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Sam Wiley
11-04-2001, 01:30 AM
I couldn't make it on opening night to see Jet Li's new movie, so I decided to go Saturday. A couple of friends and I dropped by the box office an hour early to pick up tickets, since this is the only theatre around for about 15 miles. Anyway, the chick at the counter said they were sold out. An hour before the show?

What ****es me off about this was not the fact that they were sold out. What ****es me off is that this past summer, Tomb Raider was displayed at this same theatre on 3 screens at the same time, Planet of the Apes was shown on 3 screens at the same time, and Jurassic Park was shown on 2 at the same time. And yet The One, one of this seasons biggest pictures is shown on only one, meaning that when the show is sold out, it's really sold out.

OHHHHHH...but the story gets worse. Not only was the last showing on Saturday sold out, but they are not showing the film again until Friday! ******* Friday! For Pete's sake, people, who in the name of **** shows one of the hottest pictures of the season only two days a week when the ******* theatre is open 7 days a week?!!!

Now, I realize that Romeo Must Die literally made some people ask for their money back. And I also know that Kiss of the Dragon didn't do so well in this area. (Not the film's fault. The *******s at this theatre showed it on one of their smaller screens and did not advertise that they were showing the film.) But the fact is that this film has been really hyped up, and a lot of people are dying to get in to see it. I think that Monsters Inc. can be shown on less than 2 screens, and so can some of the other crap out there. And on top of that, I think that if you're going to show all the big films, you should show all the big films every ******* day you're open!

I mean, Jesus Christ, people! How much money do they make off the crowd that goes to see Jet Li in this area?! $7.25 for admission, $4 for popcorn, $3 for candy, another $4 for a coke. And that's not to mention all the money their game company makes off of people hanging out in the lobby playing video games while they wait to rush to the good seats, and yes, there are good seats, even in a theatre with stadium seating. Bloody Hell, I go into the theatre with a 20 in my pocket and come out broke.

I was willing last night to go to a crappier theatre just to see this movie, but oh no! The only two other theatres in the area shut down about 2 years ago BEFORE this theatre opened. They just gave up, man! The closest theatre to this one was about 15 miles away, and I had already driven 10 miles to get there!

****

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Mr. Nemo
11-04-2001, 01:34 AM
I hear you, man. The university village theater near where I live shows jack sh!t. They have three screens and show the crappiest movie out on two of them, and the second crappiest on the third.

What's more, this theater is located in a mall that's right across the street from what is arguably the biggest film school in the world (USC school of cinema + television).

soy
11-04-2001, 01:56 AM
The one is just another hyped of action movie. Nobody with half a brain would actually pay to see it. The theatres know this.

Ryu
11-04-2001, 03:19 AM
:(
There there, Sam. If it makes you feel any better, Jet Li sucks. :D :D


;)

Ryu

http://judoinfo.com/images/kimuraosawa.jpg


"One who takes pride in shallow knowledge or understanding is like a monkey who delights in adorning itself with garbage."

rogue
11-04-2001, 03:37 AM
Give it another week Sam and it'll be on DVD.

Just took the kids to see Monsters Inc, excellent film.

"Americans don't have the courage to come here," Mullah Mohammed Omar, leader of the Taliban


There is only one tactical principle which is not subject to change; it is, 'To use the means at hand to inflict the maximum amount of wounds, death, and destruction on the enemy in the minimum amount of time.' Patton

Budokan
11-04-2001, 03:40 AM
The alternate title to the new Jet Li film "The One" is "Straight-To-Video".

K. Mark Hoover

Ryu
11-04-2001, 03:44 AM
LOL@Budokan

http://judoinfo.com/images/kimuraosawa.jpg


"One who takes pride in shallow knowledge or understanding is like a monkey who delights in adorning itself with garbage."

atsai
11-04-2001, 04:16 AM
I sometimes drive more than 25 mi to see a movie because I didn't like the megaplex ten minutes from where I live. But then I never had them sold out on me before..., nevermind.

The One is playing on some 2800 screens (not theatre). I think those summer blockbusters played on close to 4000 screens during opening week. The threatre make more money on snacks than movie tickets..., they probably figured people would sneak in and see da One anyway--as long as they buy some popcorns.

<TABLE BORDER="3" CELLSPACING="1" CELLPADDING="1"><TR><TD><form><INPUT TYPE="button" VALUE=" Art Tsai " onClick="parent.location='http://people.we.mediaone.net/arttsai/home.html'"></TD></TR></table></form><HR Width="97%">"You fight like you train." --Motto, USN Fighter Weapon School (TOPGUN)

Ky-Fi
11-04-2001, 04:23 AM
No plans to see "The One". Why must they persist in taking Jet Li, one of the most physically gifted action stars in the world, and adding tons of crappy FX to all his fight moves? Heck, after watching some of the fight scene documentaries on the Star Wars DVD, I"m more impressed with the skill level shown by Ewan Macgregor and Liam Neeson after only a few months of training---at least it's really them doing the fight scenes with no computer enhancement.

Sam Wiley
11-04-2001, 04:25 AM
Speaking of DVDs...I only own a few. Several martial arts flicks, a few Sci-fi flicks. But the one I enjoy having the most? Bring It On with Kirstin Dunst. Sometimes I still get requests from visitors for the deleted car wash scenes.

Anyway, my point is that so far, this film has kicked some major ass. It's right behind Monsters, Inc. So why the **** are they only showing it two days a week? Jurassic Park III, one of the worst films I have ever payed to see in theatres, surpassed only by Battlefield Earth, was shown on more than one screen, so why can't they just get real?

Anyway, I'm not a big fan of either Billy Crystal or John Goodman. I'd like to stooge slap them and yell, "What were you two thinking with City Slickers II and Blues Bros. 2000?! City Slickers didn't deserve a sequel and Blues Bros. didn't need one!!"

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Sam Wiley
11-04-2001, 04:41 AM
And while we're on the subject of the Phantom Menace DVD...I am so ****ed at Lucas. You know, he swore he'd never put any of them out on DVD, so like probably 20 million other suckers out there, I bought the VHS edition, and then the money-grubbing ******* comes out with the DVD a year later? WTF? My roommate, blinded by the flash and allure of deleted scenes bought the ****ed thing, never realizing that his most beloved director blatantly lied to him, and on top of that, stuck half of the deleted scenes into the movie for the DVD anyway. Not only does he sell you one copy of the movie by first telling you you can't have other than VHS, he then sells you a second copy on DVD with the promise of extra scenes, BUT the one on the DVD isn't even the movie as it appeared in theatres because he's stuck in several deleted scenes (totalling maybe a solid minute, if that). It's bad enough that some of the stuff he wanted to include and couldn't was only a few seconds long in the extras section, but he sticks them in the movie anyway, without even including the movie without them.

Sure, I loved the footage of Liam and Ewan practicing their fights, but give me a break. I'm more interested in the stuff that happens after Return of the Jedi than I am about what happened to Anakin. After all, I already know about all that. Remember, it was all explained in the original three movies.

And anyway, I've seen footage from the set of Episode II on the net and have a question. Jedi colors are light and neutral, like brown, beige, and tan. Earth tones, man. In the Attack of the Clones footage, Anakin is wearing dark colors, clearly not part of the traditional Jedi wardrobe. The same thing happens to Luke in Jedi he ends up wearing black. Now, given that Luke is destined to fall to the Dark Side and serve the Emperor (I estimate Episode VII here), and does briefly fall into it's embrace during his final battle with Darth Vader...I just want to know if it strikes the Jedi masters as wierd that most pupils stick to traditional colors, and those with a lot of anger in them tend to wear...I don't know...black? Do they not recognize this trend from their 80's handbooks on cult awareness?

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joedoe
11-04-2001, 05:16 AM
Man, you analyse way too much. I just watch the movies and enjoy them :)

cxxx[]:::::::::::>
You're fu(king up my chi

Sam Wiley
11-04-2001, 06:02 AM
I'm just saying, man. They should recognize that students liable to turn to the Dark Side wear black all the time. Check Anakin's bedroom, I'm sure you'll find Motley Crue and Deicide posters. Round about Episode III, Yoda will say, "Told you, I did."

Anyway, I guess I got it out of my system. It's not like The One is the best movie ever made. That would make it an Evil Dead movie, and Jet Li is no Bruce Campbell..

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joedoe
11-04-2001, 06:04 AM
No, I think the real sign is that a student that is likely to turn to the dark side is a whiney, snivelly, annoying character to start with and they aren't going to get better. :D

cxxx[]:::::::::::>
You're fu(king up my chi

Serpent
11-04-2001, 06:10 AM
But Lucas also said that there's not going to be nine movies as originally suggested and that these new three will complete a set of six. Then there'll be no more.

So Ep7 isn't going to happen, according to Lucas, so the theorising about Luke is a moot point.

Then again, Lucas is a lying ******* - he said the Force was in everything in the first movies, then pulls that Midichlorian BS out of his a$$ for Phantom Menace. The guy's a tool.

Not to mention the Great DVD Scam - I hear ya, Sam!

joedoe
11-04-2001, 06:13 AM
Well, to be fair, the midichlorian thing isn't necessarily contrary to the whole concept of the Force. Didn't he say in Phanton Menace that the midichlorians help to direct the Force, and that Jedi simply have a higher midichlorian count than normal? I don't think he meant that the midichlorians are the Force, just that they help people to use the Force.

cxxx[]:::::::::::>
You're fu(king up my chi

Crimson Phoenix
11-04-2001, 12:40 PM
What made me wonder is the fact that Anakin was born from an immaculate conception (his mother had no man, and she wonders how she got pregnant, right?). Then at the Jedi council, Qui Gon tells Yoda that he's never seen that much Midichlorian in a human and says "he might even have been conceived by the midichlorians"...so it sounds like Midichlorians are living organisms, an alien form of life, or maybe remnants or descendants from an alien civilisation that has disappeared? I'd like to know more about that...First I thought he pulled this explanation out of his azz, but after thinking about it you could really have a good story about it...
What about the Sith? Where do they come from? How come no one ever heard of them in thousands of years?
And Palpatine? The guy is obviously a Jedi in episode 6, is he already a Jedi in episode 1? If so, how could he go unnoticed as well? If not, how did he become one? Did he teach Darth Maul? Or did some other Sith teach him? Arrrghhhh I need to know
:D

Anyway for the black clothes thingie, I think I have seen some Jedi wearing black at the Jedi council...doesn't Samuel Jackson wear a black jacket (or maybe it's dark brown, don't remember...)

kungfu cowboy
11-04-2001, 01:04 PM
Is that true about the DVD thing? If yes, then there should be NO DVD. Period. He should have to buy back everybody's VHS version. Gee, that wasn't planned was it? And the Phantom Menace SUCKED anyway! P-U! Lucas is a dweeb!! I bet the ext two movies suck too!! :mad:

JasBourne
11-04-2001, 05:23 PM
Phantom Menace was only good if you are ten years old or under, and/or still developing your own personality and self-image. George Lucas is gearing his movies and marketing directly to the 7-to-14 male viewer (and emotional equivalent) demographic. Don't expect anything else from him.

Jet Li's movies have beautifully choreographed wushu fight scenes and really boring, predictable, mawkish plots. The One is no different. Jet really needs to take 1/10th of the budget allocation for SFX and invest it in decent writers, a concept that continually eludes him. Sorry, Jet, but the days when you could take a simplistic moral concept and wrap a two hour movie around it died when the talkies were born.

:p

Sam Wiley
11-05-2001, 02:34 AM
See, that's part of my point about Lucas. He lets all these writers write stories that happen after Jedi, instructing them that all the books have to be interlinked. So a character couldn't die in one book by one author and then pop up later in the timeline in another book by another author. A fine idea in itself, but he now plans to hang it up after Episode III? WTF man!? Who gives a rat's ass if Anakin gets with Amidala? We already know he had two kids with her, and we therefore know the story. We know what happened to the galaxy re: the phantom menace, the clone wars, and the extermination of the Jedi. We know that Anakin falls to the Dark Side and becomes Darth Vader. We know that Palpatine sets himself up to be emperor Hitler style and takes over. We know everything up until the end of Jedi. So unless there are some hardcore porn scenes with Natalie Portman in here somewhere, I'm more interested in the continuation of the story. I want to know more about Han and Leia's kids, Luke's relationship with the character most hated by Lucas- Mara Jade- the reconstruction of the galaxy, and the new Jedi order. I want more scenes with Rogue squadron, I want to see the Emperor Reborn stuff and I want to see Luke try to infiltrate the Dark Side to destroy it from within, become seduced by it, and have to be pulled from it's embrace by his sister.

He dropped us in in the middle of the story, filled us in on what came before and hinted at what's to come, and now he feels he has to rehash crap we already know and forego bringing us the promised rest of the story? It's not like he has to write the whole thing himself, ******. Hell, he had other people helping him write the others, why can't he just commision some scripts from the best writers in the biz and be done with it? It's not like they don't have plenty of material to work with.

But then again, we ARE talking about the guy who titled the last Indiana Jones movie "the last crusade" and immediately after filming ended began writing the next one, aren't we? I mean, c'mon. He found the Holy Grail, the unattainable, for Pete's sake, was reunited with his father, met Hitler at a book burning, etc. It doesn't get any better and doesn't need to be continued.

When they decided to put an end to A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, they did. Of course, there was no more audience for the films anyway. When Zemeckis promised a sequel at the end of Back to the Future with the words, "to be continued..." he bloody well delivered. In fact, he delivered two films at once and finished the **** story!

John Milton didn't give up one chapter shy of finishing Paradise Lost and publish it anyway! Stephen King didn't stop one book shy of finishing The Green Mile! The producers of Ultraviolet didn't give up halfway through the series and decide that they couldn't go on! Eidos didn't quit after the first Tomb Raider game! Gygax and Arneson didn't stop after their first edition of Dungeons & Dragons, they kept going with additions ot the game! The Christian Bible, which is a religious text and doesn't have to have an ending since it deals mostly with history, ends with the Revelation! Wouldn't you be ****ed if you started learning a martial art like Xingyi, and your teacher suddenly decided to stop teaching the Crossing Fist? What if you learned a Taiji form from your teacher and he refused to show you the last few moves, the finishing sequence? What if you signed up for a language course that claimed you would be taught to read AND write Mandarin Chinese, and halfway into the course, you were informed that the teacher no longer taught the writing portion? What if you bought a copy of the Karate Kid movie, and the tape stopped short of the final fight scene?

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[This message was edited by Sam Wiley on 11-05-01 at 04:58 PM.]

Sam Wiley
11-05-2001, 03:03 AM
Okay, I missed the question about the Sith. They were originally a band of renegade Jedi who left the order behind when they were forbidden to study the dark side. They found a planet where they could hide and study, whose inhabitants, the Sith race, worshiped them as gods pretty much, and they took over and ruled the Sith. (Hence the title Dark Lord of the Sith.) Eventually, they mixed the Sith religious beliefs with their own philosophies. If you go to your local hobby or book store, you can probably still find the Dark Side resource book for the Star Wars role playing game, which fills in some blanks and collects information from a bunch of the different writers in one place. The core rule book has a lot of interesting stuff abou the Jedi, and they'll probably come out with a Light Side resource book that will have more.

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joedoe
11-05-2001, 03:33 AM
If you listen carefully in Phantom Menace, Qui Gon explains midichlorians. They are a symbiont life form that dwells within all living things.

Someone once told me that there can only ever be 2 Sith Lords, a master and a student, because if there are more then they will fight amongst themselves until there is only 2. Kinda like what was happening at the end of ROTJ when Luke is fighting Darth Vader and Palpatine is egging him on. Darth Vader then exhorts Luke to kill the Emperor so that they can rule the galaxy as father and son.

cxxx[]:::::::::::>
You're fu(king up my chi

Fish of Fury
11-05-2001, 04:04 AM
"someone once told you..."?

yeah, that was yoda , dude!
what , you're on a first name basis, hangin' out down the jedi pub, rappin with samuel l jackson?

bloody name dropper!

:)

__________________________________________________ _________________________ "I'm just trying to lull you into a genuine sense of security!"

joedoe
11-05-2001, 04:11 AM
If you must know, yes it was Yoda. There we were, sitting in his little hut on Dagoba eating some brown slop, when he decided it was time for me to learn about the history of the Sith.

Samuel L. was there too but he was too busy killing some motherfu(ker to care about what Yoda was saying.

You're just jealous cos you didn't get an invite to the Jedi ball :D

cxxx[]:::::::::::>
You're fu(king up my chi

Crimson Phoenix
11-05-2001, 11:54 AM
Wow, Sam you're a master Jedi!!
I never read any Star War books and haven't seen the original trilogy in a LLOOOOONNNNNGGGGG while...I wasn't aware that all these aspects had already been developped in the books...so you mean that everything from the phantom menace to the attack of the clones to the destruction of the jedis is already described? It makes the current trilogy even more useless then...
Dang, so Anakin is going to do Amidala (she liked him a lot in episode 1 heheheh)??? So that's why Leia is a princess, I see!!!!
Do the books answer my questions about Palpatine??
Just wondering, but I'm amazed at your knowledge of Star War!!!

Crimson Phoenix
11-05-2001, 11:55 AM
and who is Mara Jade again? Where does this character apppear??

Sam Wiley
11-06-2001, 03:15 AM
I live with a Star Wars nut, and most of my friends are Star Wars nuts, so I get a lot of useless info coming in here. Anyway, it was Lucas who described everything that came before. "you helped my father during the clone wars," referring to Obi-wan. Etc...there's a whole bunch of stuff in the first three movies that people tend to overlook. The Emperor even tells Luke his destiny is to take Darth Vader's place at his side. But, yeah, pretty much any question you can think of is either answered in the novels or in the role playing rulebooks.

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