Oh, the wonder of expanded cable on a Friday night. Being old and boring, I often find myself shuttling through my vastly-overpriced premium movie tiers to while away a few idle hours, and last night I happened upon a showing of ‘The Dukes of Hazzard,’ a movie that I once actually looked forward to. As a fan of the original franchise, as well as the Broken Lizard team that brought us the film, I was horribly disappointed in what eventually made it to the screen. Even the presence of Willie Nelson, having fun though a little bit miscast as Uncle Jesse, didn’t make up for the in-name-only nature of the adaptation to film or it’s mostly nonsensical goings-on. Though usually not the type to get my hopes up, it was the kind of disappointment that I hadn’t felt since the debut of The New Monkees back in the late 80s, leading us to today’s hope-dashed query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) was looking forward to the latest ‘Paranormal Activity’ film, an expectation that went unfulfilled, asking: What film, book, movie or none of the above caused the biggest let down to your high expectations?
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Im not sure if this will count as let down, because I’ve never even seen it but somewhere along the way I lost every single bit of interest in Hobbit films. I adored LoTR movies when they came out, but I’ve not even seen any of these Hobbit movies and have zero intentions to do it. That goes for any media regarding that franchise, be that games, books movies or whatever. Also, the decision to divide much shorter and simpler book to as many parts as LoTR smells seriously like milking every single drop out of it.
Im pretty sure 1st movie and first part of second one will be the most boring strolling documentary with similar looking short, hairy guys ever made.
Green Lantern and the Transformers franchise immediately spring to mind. Don’t get me wrong, they both had some good stuff in them, but they just felt like they weren’t living up to their potential.
Similarly, almost every sequel to the original Highlander movie. With the exception of “Highlander: The Series”, “Highlander: Endgame” and the anime, they just continued to get worse and worse. It is pretty bad when I’d actually prefer to watch the original “Highlander 2” over the more recent “Highlander: The Source”.
And Power Rangers ever since Saban bought the rights back from Disney. I guess I just got spoiled by the fact that under Disney they actually had some decent storylines and actors who could, you know, act. Even the cheese of the first season of MMPR isn’t nearly as bad as Samurai through Super Megaforce.
“Green Lantern and the Transformers franchise immediately spring to mind. Don’t get me wrong, they both had some good stuff in them”
“Don’t get me wrong, they both had some good stuff in them”
“they both had some good stuff in them”
!!!Lies, lies and subterfuge!!!
I’ll even throw out some examples.
GL: Many of the alien members of the Corps looked pretty good. It still makes me as giddy as a little kid to see some of them represented in “live action” CGI. I also thought the visuals of the ring constructs wasn’t too shabby, and while I wasn’t particularly fond of the redesign of the Power Battery, I still thought it would be a cool design for an alien’s battery (as some comics have shown GLs with uniquely shaped Power Batteries).
Transformers: If you skip the so-called storyline and the humans and just watch the giant robot parts, they are visually pretty decent. I’m not too fond of some of the redesigns of characters, but I still thought they looked decent when beating the crap out of each other.
Neither had a particularly good plot (if they had one at all), but I thought they did a good job with some of the visual stuff.
SUBTERFUGE and lie– okay, point taken.
I really liked fishbeak as well and his twirling oroboros bow cloud.
The Man Of Steel trailers promised us a hopeful Morrison/Waid-type humanistic Superman. (They stole their lines and missed their points)
The movie gave us what essentially boils down to a Mark Millar style “Ultimate Superman” but with a grey filter and a lack of storytelling chops.
There’s a lot of animosity towards the movie’s last couple of minutes: Zod’s murder, a destroyed Metropolis.
What that animosity rarely acknowledges is how awful a Superman-movie the flick was in the preceding 90 minutes. Dreary, convoluted, unoriginal. Not exciting, not funny, no pathos, not smart, not scary.. What was it trying to deliver to the viewer again?
The discrepancy between the very, very well-cut trailers and the movie resulted in a singularly agonizing experience as the realization slowly dawned on me.
Yep, MoS is really high in my list of disappointments too, and you’re absolutely right. Dreary, boring, and depressing…three words that should never really be associated with a Superman movie.
Although if it were a Superman vs Doomsday movie that ends with Superman’s death (leaving the return story for the sequel), two of those three words would be acceptable.
I’d have to say John Carter. As a huge fan of the books, the movie really broke my heart, mostly because it was ‘so near yet so far.’ There was clearly an incredible attempt to bring the story to the screen, but what we ended up with just didn’t work and passed over too many opportunities.
That would be the movie 2010 – the novel 2010 is much better than 2001 in that it mades sense and actually has a plot and it also begins to address a lot of the nonsense that went unexplained in both the movie and film versions of 2001 while telling a cracking good story at the same time.
A summary of the novel is as follows: Although the US is building Discovery II to return to Jupiter and discover what happened to Dave and Hal and all their pals and recover Discovery if possible, they discover that the Discovery’s orbit is decaying too fast and the abandoned ship will crash into IO before Discovery II is complete, so Russia offers to carry the American team to Jupiter aboard their own mission which is slated to arrive 6 months earlier. Russia and the USA are good friends at this point, though Russia is on the verge of a conflict with China over various border disputes. Once the mission is underway, The Chinese strap an engine on what everybody assumed was a space station that China was constructing, turning it into a space ship. The Chinese ship blows past the Leonov, burning an impossible amount of propellant. When then Chinese ship reaches Europa a month before the Russian ship can, it lands, melts a whole in the ice, and begins to synthesize fuel from the water and other elements on Europa. But the lights of their working detail attracts the attention of something below the ice – a giant plant kraken – which inadvertently crushes the Chinese ship while trying to reach the life-giving lights strung around the work site. The Russian ship finally reaches Jupiter. They send a manned probe to the monolith they find near Discovery. The Monolith awakens and launches an invisible Dave Bowman out into space, accidently destroying the probe. Discovery is boarded. They find that conflicting orders had driven HAL mad. The computer is rehabilitated. Discovery is prepared for the voyage home. Then the monolith vanishes. It is discovered down on Jupiter, sucking up gas and creating more monoliths. After visiting scenes significant to his Childhood, Spirit Bowman (who is NOT a giant space baby) returns to Jupiter, where his handlers allow him to warn the crew of the Leonov to get out of Dodge before the shooting starts. Using Discovery as a first stage, they leave for earth early. The monoliths increase Jupiter’s mass to the point where it ignites, turning the Solar system into a Binary System and Jupiter and its surviving moons into a mini-solar system contained within our own. HAL is turned into a spirit being like Dave in order to provide Dave with come companionship. Hundreds of years pass. Whenever an earth probe nears Europa a monolith there destroys it. Tens of thousands of years pass, and the descendants of the plant kraken stand before the monolith and ponder their place in the universe. Cue Also Sprack Zarenthustra. End of Book. Damn! Nice Story Arthur.
The movie: Wanks on and on about Dr. Floyd’s failing marriage (barely mentioned in the book) and completely excises the Chinese subplot. Discovering that they also jettisoned the only thing near to the villains of the piece, the producers write in a whole plot point about the US and Russia being almost at war because of some made-up conflict in a fictional country in Central America. The Leonov’s probe finds chlorolphyl on Europabefore it is destroyed, since they have to find some way of putting the Chinese’s discoveries back into the movie after excising the Chinese sub plot. Ghost David visits Earth and brushes his mama’s hair. HAL is sort of fixed. Russia and the USA declare war on each other. The Americans move over to Discovery. The monolith vanishes, etc. Dr. Floyd figures out that the Space Engineers who made the monolith are trying to ignite Jupiter. Ignoring the political tensions, Dr. Floyd convinces the crew of the Leonov to work with his crew and they use the Discovery to boost the Leonov out of orbit. Ghost Dave, at the behest of the Space Engineers, sends a message to Earth telling everybody to play nice or else, and also stay off of Europa. Movie ends with monolith sticking out of swamp on Europa. Cue funky space music. Cue my weeping, wondering why in the hell they gelded one of my favorite sci-fi novels of all time to make a second rate movie, when if they had followed the plot of the novel closer it would have been a much better movie!!!
Would say star wars attack of el clones.
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Another case of a gloriously well made trailer for a bloated mess of a film.
I almost had the prequels in my list, but I decided against it since after Episode I, my expectations were seriously low (which is hard for me to admit as I’m otherwise a huge Star Wars fan).
However, I still firmly believe that with a little creative editing and maybe some narration (such as by C-3PO or the narrator of The Clone Wars animated series) to fill in some details, they could make one REALLY good film out of the prequels.
I have to say the 1995 Dredd film because there was so much potential there. They absolutely nailedthe look and feel of Megacity, the flyimg cars the crazy cits the cool robots. They included classic villians Rico and the Angle Gang but somehow failed to draw it all together with anything relsembing a coherent plot and completelyfailing to grasp Dredd’s character or what makes his world interesting.
Tl;dr? Stalone ruined the best action movie of the 90’s.
Well it appears the population of consumers with high expectations of the Dukes of Hazzard movies was 1. Come on, really? That one just screamed “stinker” from a mile away!
What can I say? Broken Lizard makes good movies. It was really only Johnny Knoxville that worried me going in…
2000. Dungeons and Dragons.
/barf.
I can’t believe I forgot about that. Well, actually, I can because I spend a lot of time trying to forget about that film.
Surprisingly, though, I do enjoy the low budget sequels. The first sequel did keep ties to the first since Damodar was the main villain (and played by the same actor as in the first movie), but otherwise it felt NOTHING like the first movie to me.
The Girl Meets World pilot. Girl Meets World is the sequel to Boy Meets World. Amazingly they have the character’s original actors returning for the show! Awesome. The pilot, however, was a let down. The theme music was off in some manner and all the actors were trying too hard coupled with too much slap-stick for my tastes.
My expectations were crushed.
Since pilots are often pretty rough I went ahead and watched the second episode. It was much the same. I was afraid it would not last the season.
It was then that the third episode comes in to save the day! They did something to the theme music to balance out the sound levels and it’s actually quite catchy. The actors are gelling together, hitting their groove, and relaxing into their roles. (Or maybe the director eases up and isn’t pushing them so hard? I don’t know. But if all the actor’s are having the same problem, then chances are it’s not the actors’ fault, I’m thinking.) And it’s funny and it will make you cry. Success! And renewed for a second season.
So, yes, the Pilot really let me down, but the show itself is great.
To me, it feels a lot like the early episodes of Boy Meets World, so I’m not really that disappointed. Plus, it is a Disney Channel teen series, so my expectations were actually exceeded as they were pretty low to begin with.
I don’t think it is as good as it should be, though, so I can understand where you’re coming from. I just hope that by the time the holiday episode with Corey’s parents and Shawn comes along that the show will have found better footing.