Red Letter Media

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Favorite recurring character? (Select 4)

  • Jack / AIDSMobdy

    Votes: 257 24.0%
  • Josh / the Wizard

    Votes: 77 7.2%
  • Colin (Canadian #1)

    Votes: 460 42.9%
  • Jim (Canadian #2)

    Votes: 230 21.4%
  • Tim

    Votes: 386 36.0%
  • Len Kabasinski

    Votes: 208 19.4%
  • Freddie Williams

    Votes: 274 25.5%
  • Patton Oswalt

    Votes: 27 2.5%
  • Macaulay Culkin

    Votes: 541 50.4%
  • Max Landis

    Votes: 64 6.0%

  • Total voters
    1,073
No, it's not a good movie. Terrible writing, ridiculous script. It's fun, but I wouldn't call it a masterpiece
Perfection in the genre: Stuffs What Blows Up Right Gud.

Maybe I'm biased from seeing it in an actual honest to god drive in as a kid then having my friends dad tell us irl alien stories (with art bell playing in the bg) during the drive home.
 
I doubt anybody else remembers this, but I'm pretty sure I saw a TV movie about 15 or so years ago about the moon crashing into the Earth. Damned if I can remember what the name was.

Never mind, I just looked it up. It was a miniseries called Impact, about a meteor shower that knocks the moon out of orbit.
There was a decent novel a few years ago called Seveneves by Neal Stephenson that started with the moon being randomly yeeted by what is suspected to be a naked singularity and about a third of the resulting debris ends up thrown at earth ending all life a few years later. First half of the story is basically about the effort to get some people into space to start a colony in an extremely short period of time with near current technology. Last half of the book is just dwelling on the more or less post human results millennium later after they manage to terraform earth back into something livable.
 
Nigga I didn't say it was citizen kane, I said it was a great flick. Watching it in the cinemas and seeing the White House blow up was fucking insane, and everyone cheering when the dog survived, who the fuck cares about the writing or the script, or the fact the alien use MacOS? It's a fucking barrel of fun.

Do you bitch how haunted houses are not realistic, too?
 
Nigga I didn't say it was citizen kane, I said it was a great flick. Watching it in the cinemas and seeing the White House blow up was fucking insane, and everyone cheering when the dog survived, who the fuck cares about the writing or the script, or the fact the alien use MacOS? It's a fucking barrel of fun.

Do you bitch how haunted houses are not realistic, too?
Reminds me of how the Phil Plait orbit of space nerds used to hold up Deep Impact as 'good' because it was 2.5% more scientifically plausible than Armageddon. Like they're both in 'lmfao no' land science-wise but this one's more serious!
 
Nigga I didn't say it was citizen kane, I said it was a great flick. Watching it in the cinemas and seeing the White House blow up was fucking insane, and everyone cheering when the dog survived, who the fuck cares about the writing or the script, or the fact the alien use MacOS? It's a fucking barrel of fun.

Do you bitch how haunted houses are not realistic, too?
I guess some people think that the cinematic equivalent of a big Mac is also good for you, rather than something delicious but will ultimately clog your arteries
 
Independence Day was always a great flick, and never a guilty pleasure, the only people who ever thought anything else are millenial and zoomer faggots.
It has great moments but too many dull parts that drags it down from it being a great flick for me. Really should have been a 2 hour or less movie.

Thinking about it all Roland Emmerich movies feel about 30 minutes too long
 
Nigga I didn't say it was citizen kane, I said it was a great flick. Watching it in the cinemas and seeing the White House blow up was fucking insane, and everyone cheering when the dog survived, who the fuck cares about the writing or the script, or the fact the alien use MacOS? It's a fucking barrel of fun.

Do you bitch how haunted houses are not realistic, too?
I think an Alien using MacOS is the most realistic part of that movie.
 
I guess some people think that the cinematic equivalent of a big Mac is also good for you, rather than something delicious but will ultimately clog your arteries
There's a reason why no one ever calls you over to watch movies with them you insufferable faggot.
Thinking about it all Roland Emmerich movies feel about 30 minutes too long
Not gonna disagree with that
I think an Alien using MacOS is the most realistic part of that movie.
It's more likely than africans managing to down one of their ships, I'm gonna give you that.

Or the Aliens even showing up over Africa in the first place, with that kind of technology they should have gone 'lmao ok' and diverted that shit elsewhere.
 
Independence Day was always a great flick, and never a guilty pleasure, the only people who ever thought anything else are millenial and zoomer faggots.
Taken on it's own it's a good movie, but it did start a bad trend by dumbing down the summer blockbuster and marked the end of the golden age of that type of movie that started with Jaws and Star Wars.

Spielberg and Lucas' movies had a lot of class and other filmmakers followed suit, what Bay and Emmerich did was make the genre a lot dumber, louder and more aggressive and for the next ten years movies like that mostly got stupid as shit before finally devolving into franchise hell which is where we still are stuck in.

You can trace about a few different periods, the golden age started with Jaws and Star Wars and ended with Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, the next wave started with Independence Day and The Rock and then the third wave started with Transformers and Iron Man.

The late 90s and early to mid 2000s movies may be dumb as hell but at least they aren't Woke and soy infused like today's Marvel and Star Wars flicks, so they've aged well and are more enjoyable as goofy, dumb fun today, but it's still a shame what Bay and Emmerich did to that type of movie, though I like I said, they showed promise at the beginning.

It's actually kind of hilarious how the quality of American culture can only be traced going downwards over the last handful of decades, it's just a law of our modern world that the more time goes on the stupider things get.
 
Reminds me of how the Phil Plait orbit of space nerds used to hold up Deep Impact as 'good' because it was 2.5% more scientifically plausible than Armageddon. Like they're both in 'lmfao no' land science-wise but this one's more serious!
It is rumored NASA uses Armageddon to test the general scientific literacy of some applicants. If they can't find enough errors, they're out.
 
Already I'm seeing the people demanding to know why they aren't reviewing the latest superhero film "I NEED TO KNOW WHAT THESE INTERNET VIDEOS GUYS SAY ABOUT IT SO I KNOW HOW TO THINK ABOUT IT AND PARROT THEIR OPINION"
I'd rather they stick to reviewing stuff they are passionate about or stuff they really hate instead of just reviewing some generic superhero film they think is OK. I really liked this episode because they had so many axes to grind with the movie and so many ways to make fun of it by pointing out the junk innacurate science or comparing it to The Asylum and saying the Asylum was better than Moonfall at times. We even got a science lesson on stars and why having a white dwarf star in the center of the moon is impossible. I don't understand why some of the fans want them to watch The Batman or the new MCU film and go "it was OK". Only one i really would want them to review would be the new Spider Man but only to compare it to the Rami trilogy and they've already given their thoughts on it here and in the Darkman review.

My friend dragged me to the theater to watch Norbit. It definitely wasn't because shit like that you could still get away with in 2006/2007, where as it comes off as a novelty today.

Also I feel like anyone screaming for them to review super hero films at this point really missed the fucking boat on what RLM is really about.
I watched it when I was younger and even though I liked dumb stupid movies as a teenager even I had trouble liking it. I saw it during lockdown and was in stitches the whole time because, like you said, you don't see those kinds of comedy anymore. Just good old fashioned fat jokes.

Maybe all those SFX guys kept saying, "You want more?! We've already used up all the dynamite. We'll have to wait for the next shipment" and "Well, these miniatures take like a week to make. We're going to need another week if you blow up this one."

RLM shitting on ID4 is one of the few times I hard disagree with them. The other is their Starship Troopers review. That movie wasn't really satire, but a failure of satire which I said in the Unpopular movies thread.
Yeah I don't get why they can't just leave ID4 at "we don't like it and think its dumb, but we get why people like it so whatever". People can like dumb stupid crap for valid reasons.

It is rumored NASA uses Armageddon to test the general scientific literacy of some applicants. If they can't find enough errors, they're out.
You think the people at NASA have their own version of MST3K or BOTW where they watch terrible space movies, get drunk, and laugh at all the inaccurate portrayals of space travel in the film? Like they put on a 50s B movie where everyone is wearing silver jumpsuits on a moon colony set in the year 1997 and just laugh at how silly it is?
 
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You think the people at NASA have their own version of MST3K or BOTW where they watch terrible space movies, get drunk, and laugh at all the inaccurate portrayals of space travel in the film? Like they put on a 50s B movie where everyone is wearing silver jumpsuits on a moon colony set in the year 1997 and just laugh at how silly it is?
Could be, but those 50s B movies often did better at depicting space travel then the stuff being made now.
 
It's actually kind of hilarious how the quality of American culture can only be traced going downwards over the last handful of decades, it's just a law of our modern world that the more time goes on the stupider things get.
If you think that the downward spiral of American culture only started in the last handful of decades, you really haven't watched a lot of 30s-40s-50s movies. The very late 60s and early 70s is when it really started to go to shit.

Same thing with literature, general education, etc...

Taken on it's own it's a good movie, but it did start a bad trend by dumbing down the summer blockbuster and marked the end of the golden age of that type of movie that started with Jaws and Star Wars.
Not gonna argue with the fact that it lead to a hilarious bad trend of things getting more and more over the top.
 
If you think that the downward spiral of American culture only started in the last handful of decades, you really haven't watched a lot of 30s-40s-50s movies. The very late 60s and early 70s is when it really started to go to shit.

Same thing with literature, general education, etc...
In some ways yes, in some ways no.

I think Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a pretty worthy successor to something like The Day The Earth Stood Still, don't you? But is Independence Day as good a movie as Close Encounters?


Not gonna argue with the fact that it lead to a hilarious bad trend of things getting more and more over the top.
A lot of 90s trends were like that, they may have started off ok but wound up really obnoxious as people just kept pushing the envelope.

There's Something About Mary is another movie example, hilarious movie, but as people tried to push the "gross out" comedy genre harder and harder by the 2000s it became something very obnoxious.
 
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"cinematic equivalent of a big mac"
"cope and seethe"
"soy"
callout to null in your avatar

nigga you put the dit in reddit letter media.

In some ways yes, in some ways no.

I think Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a pretty worthy successor to something like The Day The Earth Stood Still, don't you? But is Independence Day as good a movie as Close Encounters?
I think restricting ourselves to one specific genre doesn't help.

Comedies were more clever 70 years ago than they are today for the most part. That doesn't mean that there aren't clever comedies today, and there weren't dumb ones back then. On average, however, today is lower than it was then. Same thing with pretty much any genre or subgenre.

The only thing that has really improved are special effects, which allowed to do things that you weren't able to do back then.

And yet, find me a single thriller in the last 25 years that is more nailbiting, intelligent and impressive than Hitchcock's Rope.

A lot 90s trends were like that, they may have started off ok but wound up really obnoxious as people just kept pushing the envelope.
That's because, unlike in previous generations, we entered a mood for 'If 1 is good, two is better! Like a big mac? Here's a double big mac? Like Jurassic Park? How about Jurassic Worlds!' Spiderman? How about THREEEEEEEE SPIDERMAN?!?!

People are happy with that slop, it makes profits, so bigger = better and that's why you don't see movies with medium budgets anymore, it's either indie shit or 150m+ juggernauts.
 
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I think restricting ourselves to one specific genre doesn't help.

Comedies were more clever 70 years ago than they are today for the most part. That doesn't mean that there aren't clever comedies today, and there weren't dumb ones back then. On average, however, today is lower than it was then. Same thing with pretty much any genre or subgenre.

The only thing that has really improved are special effects, which allowed to do things that you weren't able to do back then.

And yet, find me a single thriller in the last 25 years that is more nailbiting, intelligent and impressive than Hitchcock's Rope.
Click to expand...
I know classic, pre-60s era Hollywood has a big following, but for me personally live action filmmaking doesn't start to get really interesting until 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that those are my tastes, I've been meaning to see more classic cinema, Hitchcock is definitely impressive from what I've seen.

But focusing on just the last 54 years of cinema, we go from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jaws, Close Encounters, the original Star Wars trilogy, Alien, Blade Runner and Raiders of The Lost Ark to... Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, Transformers and now the Woke era of Marvel and Star Wars? That's a pretty clear line of de-evolution, from brilliant, to dumb, to actively hateful and repellent, even dumb becomes preferable.

That's because, unlike in previous generations, we entered a mood for 'If 1 is good, two is better! Like a big mac? Here's a double big mac? Like Jurassic Park? How about Jurassic Worlds!' Spiderman? How about THREEEEEEEE SPIDERMAN?!?!

People are happy with that slop, it makes profits, so bigger = better and that's why you don't see movies with medium budgets anymore, it's either indie shit or 150m+ juggernauts.
Indeed, that's a big part of today's problem, we never show any restraint, it's always bigger and bigger, but there comes a point where if everything is big, nothing is.

The Back To The Future trilogy stands out because Marty's adventures are much more small scale compared to say cities being destroyed, but that's precisely what makes them particularly exciting.
 
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