Dissolve's Forgotbusters: Movie Hits That Audiences Forgot

I like his asides.

xp he has a schtick which can be effective when skewering the ludicrous but can also get a bit wearing, I think

Also apparently Charlton Heston is in it, which I've forgotten completely and doesn't bode well either.

http://cinemasights.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/truelies-dialogue.png

Goodbar is still cultural shorthand. In my world, anyway.

Goodbear you mean

Last Action Hero had funny/weird stuff in it! I didn't mind it at all, considering the total shit it's been followed by.

Haven't seen True Lies since it was released, didn't really mind that either; racism and misogyny about par, it was Reagantimes.

voted secret of my success because i loved it when i was a kid and i like to wind morbs up.

And for all I know it's the second-best choice. Try harder.

Reagantimes?

agree with morbz here, the racism/misogyny wasn't much different from every non-Terminator Arnie movie. never occurred to me that it was worse than his others, still dumbly enjoyable

http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/r/u/n/running-man-02-g.jpg

i suppose i should applaud your restraint for not going with Sub-Zero

Hannibal is a blast. Makes no attempt to swim the deep waters of SOTL and is all the better for it.

i think the racism and misogyny in a lot of other arnie flicks is more 'received wisdom' type shit that wasn't a major plot element of the story, though, whereas w/true lies the movie stops for entire scenes where arnold and arnold can bitch about women or speculate about the virginity of a 14 yr old girl or w/e.

Reagan...times?

in high school i wrote an op-ed chastising bob dole for praising true lies over true romance

the right ta-ta but the wrong ho-ho

nathan rabin is the king of writing unreadable shit like i'd to read about

on subjects i'd like to read about, i mean

Didn't "True Lies" also cast an Arabic actor (dunno the guy's name) as one of the comedy-relief computer/gadget geeks at the agency? I figured that was Cameron (or the casting department) being self-reflexive about all the negative Arab stereotypes and the anticipated uproar.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

hahaha

Weird.

ilx's male predominance at work?

XXX one vote short of "3" votes (3 Xes in title)

guess I should watch The Secret of My Success for the first time in....28 years?

Those of you who voted for it, come forth! why should I rent it?

Dragnet?? we were voting for best right?

What Women Want is a lot of fun if you like a good trainwreck.

I can believe 5 ilxors have fond memories of seeing Dragnet on TV in elementary school that outrank their feelings about any of the other films.

I didn't vote cuz i've seen less than half of these but of what i have, it would have been Tango & Cash.

Which I enjoyed watching drunk with other nerds in college.

The Toy = easiest the creepiest movie in this list.

kid asks his dad to buy a black man.

what do y'all got against nathan rabin? i think he's great.

I kinda liked the guy until he named something Forgotbusters.

I read the one about tango & cash, which is the film I voted for because it is awesome and crazy, and it read a lot like - what was that shitty website that did "funny" scene-by-scene descriptions of bad movies

Guy has good ideas for features, and 1-3 good observations usually buried in there, but my god, word count, people! Yeah, it's really infected by the 'recap' school - I actually don't need to know all the plot details of Chairman of the Board or the blow-by-blow of the Norm Macdonald clip, but if you do have something unexpected to say about the movie I'd be interested to get to it, quickly. Also, a bunch of them seem to give up quickly on the idea of "explor(ing) what originally attracted audiences" to the movies, and just beats up on them as misguided ideas and so on. Really not what I need a critic for, at that point.

Ultimately we don't know why a film that's not a sequel becomes a hit; to be honest, I never mind reading the plot points of The Toy just to tell myself, "An audience in 1982 paid money to watch this."

he writes too long. he writes as if no one else at the site looks at his work before it goes online. and he writes as if he thinks observations like "Throughout his heyday, Alan Alda reigned as arguably the preeminent Alan Alda type" are Wildean bon mots of unparalleled excellence.

actually I don't think anyone at the site looks at his work

I mean, Forgotbusters? I don't think this is getting the scrutiny it deserves.

He is not even a real forgotBuster.

"Forgotbusters, whaddya want?"

The studios promised Stallone untold wealth (and with it, untold sandwiches) if he would give his script over to them as a star vehicle for someone audiences would actually pay money to see, someone like James Caan or Robert Redford, rather than a relative unknown who talked like he had marbles in his mouth and looked like his head was made of rocks covered in skin. This was a great role for a movie star, and everyone but Sylvester Stallone agreed that Sylvester Stallone was no movie star. He seemed like someone with a one-way ticket straight to Palookaville, population: Sylvester Stallone.

Like, I get what he's going for here, but it's just a waste of my time. First of all, the "population" joke never adds anything to a paragraph, it's just redundant, and in this case nonsensical since it starts from the premise that he was just an ordinary schmoe... meaning that we have to assume Palookaville would have a large population, right? It's also just riding on the hope that if you repeat "Sylvester Stallone" a few times, it'll give this recap of his career a joke's rhythm. Maybe he worked backwards from the "population" joke and realized it would be funnier (?) if he'd said "Sylvester Stallone" a few extra times.

The thing is, all he actually needs here, to make his points about Tango and Cash (Russell vs. Stallone, early Stallone vs. late) is "Stallone's career was originally based on his underdog appeal, which bled over from the plot of Rocky to its production. The no-name actor took on the big studios, went the distance, and audiences loved him for it. But by 1989..." Or something. But the 'joke' part plus a couple more additional sentences, not quoted, pad this little bit of groundwork out to 225.

I'm not trying to beat up on Rabin - it's just that this kind of writing is basically everywhere on the internet at this point, especially in pop culture writing, and especially in Onion-land. He's better at it than most - I think we all know how wince-inducing this stuff is in the hands of nerd amateurs scripting themselves for Youtube reviews of N64 games - but I really think it saps good writers of their powers. It renders essays flabby and without structure, just a string of samey paragraphs. It washes out tone, so that you have to read every sentence as if it might be the setup for a weak-tea joke. And it buries content, so that if he did actually have something unique to say about Tango and Cash (or, per the feature's premise, why it connected with audiences), I totally missed it.

Or, I mean, just...

At this point, I started imagining that Ray Tango had Bruce Vilanch lying in the backseat of his car, feeding him wisecracks and punching up his lines on the fly. It’s established that Ray Tango is independently wealthy, thanks to his wise investments, and is involved in law enforcement solely for the action. That’s communicated when Tango’s superior (played by Geoffrey Lewis, one of a handful of great, eccentric character actors in the cast, in addition to Michael J. Pollard, Michael Jeter, Brion James, and Jack Palance) asks Ray—whom he’s apparently known well for years—“I don’t understand you! You make a shit-ton of money. You dress like a banker. What are you doing this for?”

Making perfectly timed jokes that literally add insult to injury (in the sense that he’s insulting people he’s also physically injuring) seems to be as important to Ray as fighting crime. So why not have his own personal gag-man helping him be the sassiest cop he can possibly be? I like to think of Ray asking Vilanch for some good gags for the arrest he’s about to make, and the tiny jokesmith spitballing, “How about, ‘Metal is in this season!’ No, how about, ‘I ain’t Carmen, but these are your Miranda rights!’ No, how about, ‘Do you like jewelry?’”

Bring on the x-acto knives. If you have to go with this whole conceit at all - and I guess it could convey how Stallone's one-liners feel more bloodless or artificial than the ones in every other movie - how about just

At this point, I started imagining that Ray Tango had Bruce Vilanch lying in the backseat of his car, feeding him wisecracks and punching up his lines on the fly. It’s established that Ray Tango is independently wealthy, thanks to his wise investments, and is involved in law enforcement solely for the action. So why not hire his own personal gag-man?

okay okay i'll stop now

Perret makes an extravagant show of bringing two small rats out of an expensive wooden box, calling them mice for some reason, sniffing them inexplicably but deeply, and placing them back into that box, just so he can climactically place them in a maze to symbolize how lost Tango and Cash (the hero cops, not the rat-mice representing them) will be once they’re safely tucked away in prison.

i'm getting an education reading this, having missed out on 'spoofs' for the last 20 years.

http://thedissolve.com/features/forgotbusters/665-hot-shots-helped-popularize-a-broader-dumber-sort-/

Thanks to the intertwined forces of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer and the Wayans brothers, the standards for parody have fallen so low over the past 15 years that I no longer dare expect to laugh at movies from either camp. After joining forces for the sadly precedent-setting, zeitgeist-capturing abomination that was 2000’s Scary Movie, Friedberg/Seltzer and the Wayans split apart, so as to inflict the maximum amount of harm on our culture. At this point, I’m satisfied if their movies don’t broadcast contempt for their characters, their audience, and humanity as a whole. I no longer expect spoofs to be funny; I just want them to not make the world a coarser, sadder, stupider place.

Scary Movie is great. Leagues better than anything ZAZ mustered after the second Naked Gun movie.

i actually liked zucker's scary movie 3 more than scary movie

I know humor is subjective and all but ... really? Michael Jackson jokes?

ok you can either say "really? michael jackson jokes?" OR "scary movie 1 is better than scary movie 3" you can't do both

like, the idea that 3 is when it starts to wallow in weak culture refs