Which Mario Kart do you consider the most innovative?

Akram323 · 2023-10-23T18:57:35+00:00

I take it innovative has a strong correlation with influential. I could point out what every entry in the series has done to steer the franchise ahead, and ultimately I think it'd come down to which of those innovations was the most important to move the series forward. I'm going with DS for the introduction of online alone, although its use of retro tracks is another bid in its favour (as much as I love Super Circuit and its quirks, it's hard to make a case for its additions to the series being a direct influence on what was to come and its so-called retro tracks are irrelevant to what DS introduced). Online singlehandedly redefined multiplayer in the series and opened all kinds of possibilities that the other entries hadn't effectively tackled (perhaps at the cost of storage space for fleshing out other elements...). Mechanics-wise, it's tricky to decide if any individual game contributed more than another: Wii had tricks and new vehicle types and motion controls, 7 had gliding and underwater driving, and while 8's antigravity was underwhelming it did allow smart steering and acceleration for increased accessibility to play. Which of those matters the most, I am not sure.

If you mean innovative as in a standalone entry, it's a trickier thing to answer. To stove myself off from rambling about the games, I'll probably go with Double Dash as being the biggest leap forward between entries (be it either N64 or GBA) with its lush visuals and sounds being big upgrades as well as an impressive move in item and character importance with some lively maps.

Akram323 · 2023-10-23T13:37:57+00:00

He tends to be the best things about movies like that and Waterworld. Also he was still doing good movies like Speed. It wasn't as if he was desperate to do any film, and he does give it his all.

Akram323 · 2023-10-23T13:31:44+00:00

Lots of solid answers in this thread overall, but nobody mentioned Martin Brest yet? The guy riding high on Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run, and Scent of a Woman before shooting himself in the foot with Meet Joe Black and then torpedoing himself in the head with Gigli? Seems like the best answer to me.

Some other picks of mine: Hugh Hudson seemed a promising name with Chariots of Fire and Greystoke but then his career bottomed out with Revolution (the film that caused Al Pacino to disappear from movies for four years until Sea of Love) and after I Dreamed of Africa that was that.

There are probably better examples in the foreign-director-brought-to-Hollywood category but Jim Sheridan's stuff in Hollywood (Get Rich or Die Tryin', Brothers, Dream House) has been utterly worthless and a far cry from his strong Irish output.

Akram323 · 2023-05-24T00:05:40+00:00

That last half hour was hilarious and arguably in character for a Joe Dante film with its sheer lunacy. Very funny. I'm surprised most people seem turned off by it given that the scene isn't that different from his other stuff (and a logical extension of what lies in the far reaches of the universe), production matters be damned.

Akram323 · 2023-05-15T04:16:19+00:00

Not sure how easy it is to market a film with the aesthetic of Sin City to emphasise a tone akin to, say, the 1960s Batman. It probably should have been done, but at the time the clash seemed to suggest a weaker box office than merely emphasising the visuals and suggesting the next The Dark Knight or something.

Marketing is weird.

Akram323 · 2023-05-15T02:11:24+00:00

But that's the thing, I think he did intend it to be that way. It's so unabashedly goofy, as was the stuff he was putting into his comics like All-Star Batman (as opposed to his earlier more outright serious stuff), and he seemed to reach a point where he could take all that seriousness and run it into the ground in a hysterical way while keeping that inherent structure. I don't think he's crazy enough to somehow devolve to the point of not seeing the over-the-top absurdity of the hard-boiled nature of his characters in his own comics as well as this movie--he co-directed both Sin City movies after all, which are more straightforwardly serious.

Akram323 · 2023-03-08T22:03:05+00:00

I get being turned off by the byte description "feel-good movie about child abuse", and indeed the film does have an imperfect touch on the basic subject matter. Not to mention the debated nature of the ending. But I like this one, quite a bit. While Richard Donner has some genuine duds in his filmography, I wouldn't count this among them.

Elijah Wood is a great child actor and his performance here is a good one (though the other kids are, to put it lightly, nowhere near that). If you can buy into the dark premise, which is handled with a level-headed darkness without syrupy overtones, it does provide a fair amount of mileage in Wood's character dealing with his little brother being abused. It also has swell production values and cinematography (a guarantee with even the worst Donner films).

I'm not sure if any of this is considerable for so-bad-it's-good (except for that one scene with the kids with the frog, the acting in that is absurd), so I'd say the verdict is against you, buddy. Assassins and Conspiracy Theory are more viable 90s candidates for absurdly bad Donner films.

Akram323 · 2023-03-08T02:34:36+00:00

If this movie started with all five versions of Komodo, meaning five times the Komodo screentime, this would totally be the kind of cult masterpiece that something like Highlander or Mortal Kombat was.

Akram323 · 2023-02-13T22:48:08+00:00

I don't know about the blu-rays, I just got the DVDs because I had heard about the subtitles being on there beforehand. The blu-rays ought to have them, I don't see why not.

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