The son of "What the hell are YOU staring at?"

[Hugh Akston]

Saw Rapture-Palooza, which had the potential to be absolutely great, and there were some funny (IMO) parts to it, but for the most part they completely squandered the premise. The narrator and main character is a teenage girl named Lindsey, who was out bowling with her boyfriend Ben when the rapture happened, and suddenly half the people in the bowling alley were gone. Lindsey and Ben both had their moms raptured, but Lindsey's was sent back for being obnoxious, and Ben's dad eventually gets a job working for the Beast (played by Craig Robinson, the evil prison warden from Mr. Robot), who wants to marry her, so she and her boyfriend hatch a plot to bring him down instead. They almost-completely wasted Robinson, by having "The Beast" be little more than a one-note character: super-horny, and constantly making super-gross sexual comments to Lindsey. The truly evil (and potentially interesting) stuff he does is only mentioned in passing as a sort of "oh, yeah, he did that too" understatement kind of way.

I always get a laugh about any portrayal of 'The Rapture'. As far as I can tell from reading ' _The Revelation of St. John the Divine_ ' , only 144,000 get raptured. The rest have to stick it out through the 'Tribulations', including the 'good, but not good enough to be raptured'. And that 144,000 is drawn from both the living and the dead among Christians, going right back to the time of Christ. That's 144,000 out of billions of people, living and dead. In other words, the number of the Raptured is going to be absolutely insignificant and the chances of being among the raptured is less than one in ten thousand.

It also means The Rapture could've already happened, and no one noticed.

I mean America just lost 500,000 people and housing prices are still outrageous.

[D.A. Ridgely]

Saw Rapture-Palooza, which had the potential to be absolutely great, and there were some funny (IMO) parts to it, but for the most part they completely squandered the premise. The narrator and main character is a teenage girl named Lindsey, who was out bowling with her boyfriend Ben when the rapture happened, and suddenly half the people in the bowling alley were gone. Lindsey and Ben both had their moms raptured, but Lindsey's was sent back for being obnoxious, and Ben's dad eventually gets a job working for the Beast (played by Craig Robinson, the evil prison warden from Mr. Robot), who wants to marry her, so she and her boyfriend hatch a plot to bring him down instead. They almost-completely wasted Robinson, by having "The Beast" be little more than a one-note character: super-horny, and constantly making super-gross sexual comments to Lindsey. The truly evil (and potentially interesting) stuff he does is only mentioned in passing as a sort of "oh, yeah, he did that too" understatement kind of way.

I always get a laugh about any portrayal of 'The Rapture'. As far as I can tell from reading ' _The Revelation of St. John the Divine_ ' , only 144,000 get raptured. The rest have to stick it out through the 'Tribulations', including the 'good, but not good enough to be raptured'. And that 144,000 is drawn from both the living and the dead among Christians, going right back to the time of Christ. That's 144,000 out of billions of people, living and dead. In other words, the number of the Raptured is going to be absolutely insignificant and the chances of being among the raptured is less than one in ten thousand.

It also means The Rapture could've already happened, and no one noticed.

Make's it especially tough to be a Jehovah's Witness these days.

[lunchstealer]

What if they had a rapture and no one came?

[Jennifer]

Saw Rapture-Palooza, which had the potential to be absolutely great, and there were some funny (IMO) parts to it, but for the most part they completely squandered the premise. The narrator and main character is a teenage girl named Lindsey, who was out bowling with her boyfriend Ben when the rapture happened, and suddenly half the people in the bowling alley were gone. Lindsey and Ben both had their moms raptured, but Lindsey's was sent back for being obnoxious, and Ben's dad eventually gets a job working for the Beast (played by Craig Robinson, the evil prison warden from Mr. Robot), who wants to marry her, so she and her boyfriend hatch a plot to bring him down instead. They almost-completely wasted Robinson, by having "The Beast" be little more than a one-note character: super-horny, and constantly making super-gross sexual comments to Lindsey. The truly evil (and potentially interesting) stuff he does is only mentioned in passing as a sort of "oh, yeah, he did that too" understatement kind of way.

I always get a laugh about any portrayal of 'The Rapture'. As far as I can tell from reading ' _The Revelation of St. John the Divine_ ' , only 144,000 get raptured. The rest have to stick it out through the 'Tribulations', including the 'good, but not good enough to be raptured'. And that 144,000 is drawn from both the living and the dead among Christians, going right back to the time of Christ. That's 144,000 out of billions of people, living and dead. In other words, the number of the Raptured is going to be absolutely insignificant and the chances of being among the raptured is less than one in ten thousand.

Oh, sure, the whole premise was full of holes -- I won't say the ending in case anyone here wants to watch it without spoilers; FWIW it is worth watching if you can do so for little to no cost and you're still under covid-avoidance house arrest and have time to kill -- but I wish the movie had spent more time on showing Lindsey's and Ben's day-to-day life during the Apocalypse, since a lot of the movie's actually-funny parts took place then. And IMO, the movie had special resonance, watching almost a year into covid: it shows how sooner or later people can get used to anything, even rains of blood, nasty biting locusts that go around telling people to "SUFFER!", big flaming rocks periodically falling from the sky, and flocks of crows that fly around saying obscene insults to people. But they soon abandoned most of this to spend most of the movie having The Beast be super-horny and super-gross.

But before this, the rapture took a sizeable, very noticeable, percentage of the earth's population, enough that everybody noticed it.

[Warren]

What if they had a rapture and no one came?

Not even Deborah and Fred?

[Ellie]

'. As far as I can tell from reading ' _The Revelation of St. John the Divine_ ' , only 144,000 get raptured. The rest have to stick it out through the 'Tribulations', including the 'good, but not good enough to be raptured'. And that 144,000 is drawn from both the living and the dead among Christians, going right back to the time of Christ.

That kind of makes me want to see a movie about the Rapture where the main character, a regular modern day American, gets raptured up and is stuck hanging out with 143,999 first-century peasants because the queue filled up so fast. (He gets in due to some wacky clerical error, of course. Conjoined twins get in as one person and leave an opening, or something). I have no idea what actually HAPPENS in the movie, of course, but there's your setup.

[thoreau]

'. As far as I can tell from reading ' _The Revelation of St. John the Divine_ ' , only 144,000 get raptured. The rest have to stick it out through the 'Tribulations', including the 'good, but not good enough to be raptured'. And that 144,000 is drawn from both the living and the dead among Christians, going right back to the time of Christ.

That kind of makes me want to see a movie about the Rapture where the main character, a regular modern day American, gets raptured up and is stuck hanging out with 143,999 first-century peasants because the queue filled up so fast. (He gets in due to some wacky clerical error, of course. Conjoined twins get in as one person and leave an opening, or something). I have no idea what actually HAPPENS in the movie, of course, but there's your setup.

Kickstarter. Now. My money. Take it.

[Jennifer]

'. As far as I can tell from reading ' _The Revelation of St. John the Divine_ ' , only 144,000 get raptured. The rest have to stick it out through the 'Tribulations', including the 'good, but not good enough to be raptured'. And that 144,000 is drawn from both the living and the dead among Christians, going right back to the time of Christ.

That kind of makes me want to see a movie about the Rapture where the main character, a regular modern day American, gets raptured up and is stuck hanging out with 143,999 first-century peasants because the queue filled up so fast. (He gets in due to some wacky clerical error, of course. Conjoined twins get in as one person and leave an opening, or something). I have no idea what actually HAPPENS in the movie, of course, but there's your setup.

Possible plot: turns out the ONE modern person to be raptured was also the one scheduled to be the Antichrist, so the whole Apocalypse is stalled while God and Satan both try convincing the Antichrist to leave heaven and start a reign of terror on earth. Initially he wants to, because being stuck in heaven with all those pious 2,000-year-old peasants is really boring, but God and Satan are both such pushy assholes about it, the Antichrist ends up staying in heaven out of spite.

[dbcooper]

Vyto Ruginis looks a lot like another actor, but I cannot remember whom.

[dbcooper]

[Hugh Akston]

I'm having trouble processing the phrase 'Oscar-nominated Golan-Globus movie', but I'll have to add it to my queue and see it for myself.

[dbcooper]

I'm having trouble processing the phrase 'Oscar-nominated Golan-Globus movie', but I'll have to add it to my queue and see it for myself.

It's good. Kurosawa screenplay!

[Hugh Akston]

In other news I watched the Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the Iron Man of the le Carre Cinematic Universe. The ending was a little hollow, even if it was somewhat inevitable. But otherwise it was very good. Richard Burton did an excellent job pretending to be an embittered drunk.

[D.A. Ridgely]

In other news I watched the Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the Iron Man of the le Carre Cinematic Universe. The ending was a little hollow, even if it was somewhat inevitable. But otherwise it was very good. Richard Burton did an excellent job pretending to be an embittered drunk.

ICWYDT

[dbcooper]

[Hugh Akston]

The Year of Living Dangerously was pretty good, but the narrative and characters took a back seat to the focus on theme. I'm glad it got made when it did, because Linda Hunt was excellent but she'd never get cast in a role like that today.

[JD]

Last night I watched Dark Star, John Carpenter's first film. It's not good, but it has occasional unexpected flashes of brilliance. The best way I can describe it is "Alien, but as a stoner comedy that doesn't usually succeed in being funny." The screenwriter was Dan O'Bannon, who went on to write Alien, which explains a lot of the similarities.

[dead_elvis]

a stoner comedy that doesn't usually succeed in being funny."

Can confirm. I liked Dark Star, but it was a slow burn. Wife left early in the movie. I decided to finish for the sake of finishing but it kept getting better and better through the end.

[JD]

a stoner comedy that doesn't usually succeed in being funny."

Can confirm. I liked Dark Star, but it was a slow burn. Wife left early in the movie. I decided to finish for the sake of finishing but it kept getting better and better through the end.

Yeah, I was surprised because I had read the synopsis beforehand, and I was sitting there going, "You know, we've only got about 20 minutes left to go and none of those things has happened yet..." And then stuff starts happening and it gets really good. Actually, the elevator shaft scene was pretty well-done too, even if it didn't make a whole lot of sense.

The funny thing about DS is that the special effects are terrible, the writing is inconsistent, the acting iffy...but damned if there isn't the skeleton of a really good idea in there. I see what Carpenter meant when he said, "This could have been the world's best student film, instead of the world's worst commercial film."

[dbcooper]

@dhex

[dhex]

Fuck yes that's a lot of commas

Over the top, even.

[thoreau]

Saw Palm Springs on Hulu. It was an amusing variation on the Groundhog Day theme, so I approved. I like that there were multiple people in the time loop, all reacting differently.

Also saw Deadly Illusions on Netflix. That was just a terrible movie.

[Hugh Akston]

Night Moves, a vague noir that predates the Bob Seger song by a year, and has nothing in common with it. It's a strong candidate for the ultimate 70s movie. Everything is grainy and grimy and gross. The plot was vague and meandering, the dialogue was at least 50% non-sequitur and none of it devoted to character development. Plenty of gratuitous nudity. The women were attractive and even well-dressed, but it was impossible for a man to look good in that decade. Gene Hackman was good I suppose, but it was really hard not to be distracted by his bad 70s mustache and gradually disintegrating Dry Look.

All the way through an MST3k riff kept coming to mind: "You know, it's economical not to have a story, because you can just film people saying things."

[dhex]

The Muppet Show got a lot of mileage out of miss piggy being a violent and jealous maniac.

[Warren]

The Muppet Show got a lot of mileage out of miss piggy being a violent and jealous maniac.

I haven't sat down and watched it in a long time. I think I've got the first season on disc around here somewhere, but they cut them down to a half hour, which blows.

Anyhow, I don't remember her as a maniac, more of a narcissist. Much more relatable.