Bonus: if you win, you can slap JJ Abrams.

Seriously, someone needs to slap that dude. I have entered just so I can potentially slap him.

I saw the first one when it came out, more out of curiosity than anything else. I was a big transformers fan as a kid, but I wasn't expecting much from Bay. Even my low expectations weren't met.

Tonight, by coincidence, Dark of the Moon was on TV. "Maybe I'm being too hard" I thought. I mean, they're only glorified toy commercials anyway, right? Maybe I'm guilty of just jumping on the Bay-hate band wagon...

Nope.

Aside from being a completely un-fucking-watchable mess, it was just boring. How the hell do you spend that much money (and the money clearly didn't go on writers or actors), have that many explosions and still have it be boring?

I didn't like JJ Abrams new Star Trek movies, but at lest he was in trying (in his own half-assed, ham-fisted way) to pay homage to the property. Bay clearly hates this whole concept. He hates the characters, the design, the plot lines, he's not even really interested in the central concept of robots that bloody transform. And to top it all off, you couldn't even let kids watch this. Instead of the noble, if naïve leader of the 80s, Optimus is just a dick here. And a psychopathic one too. He flat out murders his defeated enemy at the end.

FFS, if it's a terrible movie and you can't use it to sell toys to kids..what is the goddamn point of its existence?

Almost anything would have been better. To my mind, the single biggest flaw with the prequels was that the originals focused on a small set of largely likeable characters who were generally together having adventures in space. The Prequels were just all over the place and there weren't really any likeable characters, and... and... for the sake of brevity, let's just say they suck in every way.

Also, for the love of god, George Lucas should not have been allowed to direct. He is a terrible, terrible, terrible director. Everyone knows that. Everyone has known that since the first one, and George should have known that too. He isn't a great artist in any sense of the word. I'd say the prequels are a textbook example of why the role of director is so important. How can such an accomplished cast deliver a performance barely better than what you'd expect from, say, "Sharktopus."

I think the next three will be decent. They don't have to be great (and really, the original three weren't *great* per se, they were just novel fun, imaginative, and hit a sweet spot. I think JJ Abrams will do fine.

Anyways, this guys plot would have worked. So would have a lot of others though.

Probably none, or simply render times. My guess is their goal is to allow a frozen moment, such as when the runner comes into home, to show from various angles that A) the ball was in the mitt but B) the runners foot was already on base. Mostly, but not limiting the view angles you can more clearly see the action while if the motion was still ongoing while the camera moved, it'd cause a jarring effect on the viewer and make it even more confusing as to what really happened.

It's why JJ Abrams shakes the camera a lot. It helps hide the flaws in action scenes such as where people don't actually stab each other or hit each other etc.

I liked this film too. Most sci-fi movies these days are action movies in space, no offense to JJ Abrams, but Oblivion actually had some ideas working for it. Nice twists and turns. My only complaint is that they could have come up with a more interesting ending.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Good stuff - all of the lens flares and lighting reminds me of a JJ Abrams film.

You're bashing season 3... seriously? The Season with Flaming Moe's, among many other classics. Simpsons bashing is so in vogue, you'd think it's a JJ Abrams Star Trek movie trailer.

As with all things, it's not necessarily a law change that need to happen. Laws don't drive the zeitgeist, the zeitgeist drive laws (or should).

People need to be dissuaded from wanting to have guns. In Europe, people don't really want a gun, and don't even see a need for one. Sure, there are hunters and they have guns, and sure you can get one if you're in a dangerous area with bears and shit, but actually getting a gun is when you're hunted by mafia or something like that and you're desperate. Why would you ever want to walk around with a gun? I don't really get it.

Perhaps people have a fantasy about being a hero, where they shoot the bad guy. Everyone has that as a kid; most kids also grow up.

There's something deeply satisfying about firing a gun - power at your fingertips. Control. Maybe it's a control thing. People don't like to be out of control, with a gun they always have something to fall back on to control the situation.

Maybe it's a macho thing, although women carry guns too. I don't know the statistic of it, but I would imagine more men do than women. Men are intrinsically destructive while women are creative - it's our nature. We men beat up our rivals to gain access to that sweetest fruit of all: peach. Perhaps it's an extension of power; an penis extension. Don't pull the trigger, squeeze it tenderly. You are the gun; look down the aim at your target and fire.

Maybe there's some brain vs brawn in it. I would wager good money that as intelligence goes up, gun ownership goes down. No statistics to back it up, but I'd love to see if it's true. Brains are taking over everything - it's the decade of the Nerd. Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams could get all the girls and gets all the admiration in the big world, while Dick McKickaball failed to make the team and married Candace the exotic dancer his friends hired for him on his 21st birthday. But at least he could shoot JJ Abrams in the face with his 4½ inch death stick.

Society doesn't really gain much from guns does it?

It has its own market and thus gets people to move money around with someone around to skim the top. dft said this in point 2 as well. This could be done for worse stuff though - snuff porn has a market; heroin has a market.

Mutually Assured Destruction is always a fun acronym to throw around. If everyone does eye for an eye, the world will go blind, I've heard somewhere. Probably a shitty western or something.

Feelings of security? If I have a gun, do I feel safer from the people around me that may or may not also have guns? I would feel safer in my home, I think. If I feared home invasions. Home invasions are a weird thing; very rare in europe to the best of my knowledge, even though we don't have guns. Seems like something that would only happen if there was an enormous disparity between poor and rich, making the poor desperate (and lazy) enough to want to do a home invasion. If Brian the Aryan Man-God makes 10 million billion $$ a year, and Rommel the Dirty Mexican doesn't get anything because he has to pay child support off his social security and also cover his meth addication, then the chance of Rommel doing a home invasion is greater than if Rommel makes half of what Brian does. Maybe we need to raise the floor, instead of raising the ceiling on the extrema of wealth to lose the desire of guns.

Maybe it's all of the factors at once, and we have someone like the NRA pushing everyone to want all of them. I want security. I'm afraid. I have a small dick. Home invasions happen all the time. Schools get shot by crazies, I need to defend myself.

Bang!

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

There... the demons went away. Guns are your friends.

Ha, thanks.

I was actually regretting that I didn't go for my original impulse and ask whether this might be a clip from JJ Abrams old childhood home movies.

>> ^radx:

Well, this seems to work, sort of. But it's as wonky as it gets, if you ask me.
<object width="500" height="344" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="ep">
<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
<param name="movie" value="http://i.cdn.turner.com/v5cache/TBS/cvp/teamcoco_drupal_embed.swf?context=teamcoco_embed_offsite&videoId=41587" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" />
<embed wmode="transparent" allowscriptaccess="always" src="http://i.cdn.turner.com/v5cache/TBS/cvp/teamcoco_drupal_embed.swf?context=teamcoco_embed_offsite&videoId=41587" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="500" height="344">
</embed><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/>
</object>
If you want to embed other Team Coco videos, just replace the "41587" with the respective ID of your clip. Twice. >> ^ant:
>> ^radx:
@lucky760, could you take a look at this? Or are those iframe shenanigans on hold until 5.0 is deployed?

Bah, http://teamcoco.com/video/jj-abrams-gives-an-exclu
sive-sneak-peek-of-star-trek-into-darkness as well.



Thanks. I will try that later. We need an automated iframe converter for VS.

Well, this seems to work, sort of. But it's as wonky as it gets, if you ask me.

<object width="500" height="344" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="ep">
<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
<param name="movie" value="http://i.cdn.turner.com/v5cache/TBS/cvp/teamcoco_drupal_embed.swf?context=teamcoco_embed_offsite&videoId=41587" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" />
<embed wmode="transparent" allowscriptaccess="always" src="http://i.cdn.turner.com/v5cache/TBS/cvp/teamcoco_drupal_embed.swf?context=teamcoco_embed_offsite&videoId=41587" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="500" height="344">
</embed><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/>
</object>

If you want to embed other Team Coco videos, just replace the "41587" with the respective ID of your clip. Twice. >> ^ant:

>> ^radx:
@lucky760, could you take a look at this? Or are those iframe shenanigans on hold until 5.0 is deployed?

Bah, http://teamcoco.com/video/jj-abrams-gives-an-exclu
sive-sneak-peek-of-star-trek-into-darkness as well.

>> ^radx:

@lucky760, could you take a look at this? Or are those iframe shenanigans on hold until 5.0 is deployed?


Bah, http://teamcoco.com/video/jj-abrams-gives-an-exclusive-sneak-peek-of-star-trek-into-darkness as well.

I'd like an alternate universe where JJ Abrams doesn't make Star Trek movies.

He makes things that are glossy on the surface but flounder at any depth. His first Star Trek was basically just a generic sci-fi flick, a pedestrian one, only barely tied to to the Star Trek universe by character names and oh-so-hilarious nods and in-jokes.

Ideally at this point they should shelve Star Trek for a decade or so and then do a proper TV series.

I watched the episode of "Spoilers" on Hulu with Damon Lindelof talking about Prometheus. It seems like he just comes up with ideas that make JJ Abrams say "cool" and then the guy doesn't bother to figure out how to make a coherent plot out of it.

If you take into consideration that he was a fan-boy who apparently had a producer friend who got him "in the room" to pitch ideas for "Lost," its no surprise he kind of sucks.

JJ Abrams sucks, and everything he's ever made has sucked.

There, I said it!