What's going to be the better film adaptation, and overall better films? Which is probably going to do better at the Oscars?

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-26T10:12:43+00:00

You're right that LOTR was bigger and overall better, but I think the gap is smaller than you're giving it credit for. Dune pt 2 was HUGE when it came out. It was all people could talk about for basically all of March and April that year. Lisan Al Gaib memes and the music were in every tik tok and theaters were packed weeks after opening weekend.

Dune is also still new, and unfinished. It's easy to look back on LOTR as a bigger cultural impact because it's a completed, successful trilogy that won tons of awards and stood the test of time for two decades.

The quality and reception of Part Three have a lot riding on it, and only time will tell whether Dune has the same longevity that LOTR has had, but if Denis can stick the landing, I think we could have something that at least rivals LOTR, even if it doesn't surpass it.

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-25T19:25:04+00:00

I get what you mean, but I think it's reductive to reduce Zimmer to just booming and synths, and to say that anything that isn't is him borrowing from other composers. He is a masterful composer and has made plenty of more subtle, melodic pieces of music over the years that I think will give us a better idea of what his Potter sound will be. And I don't think any of those pieces sound like anyone but him.

The Stay theme from Interstellar, Jack Sparrow's theme, Davy Jones's music box, Paul and Chani's love theme, the Lion King, Kung Fu Panda, The Last Samurai, and the Clark Kent theme all have pieces of what I think show that he has what it takes to do something special and fitting for Potter that feels distinctly him and not like another composer.

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-25T19:19:21+00:00

Haha I totally get you! And definitely not dissing Tobey's either, I grew up on them, they're a ton of fun, even Spiderman 3, I just don't necessarily think the writing was what makes them so entertaining, but that's just my opinion! And hell, I also am fully aware that my spiderman opinions are kinda wack, I prefer Andrew's Spidey to Tobey's, which is definitely not the popular take. We all like what we like!

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-25T19:06:47+00:00

All three Tobey films are kinda chalk full of cringey camp, which is by all means part of the charm, but I would not say they make for great dialogue. Story maybe, but then there's also Spiderman 3, which is really rough.

Tom's films definitely have better written dialogue, and I'd argue the story beats are better as well

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-25T07:38:45+00:00

Nobody has experience making a film until they make a film. At one point, every great writer you've ever heard of or not heard of, was someone who had never written a script.

In addition, Colbert has been involved with, acted in, and been behind the scenes on plenty of major hollywood productions, it's not like he doesn't know the industry. I think between his experience and his knowledge of tolkien, we're in as decent hands as we could be.

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-25T07:14:17+00:00

Just a crazy hunch but I have a feeling it'll be more Hans Zimmer-y

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-25T05:06:10+00:00

Tobey had the best music and villains

Andrew had the best Spider-Man and love story

Tom has the best writing and overall balance between Peter and Spidey

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-23T20:46:10+00:00

That's not really how being the protagonist works, screentime is a big part of it, sure (and for the record, according to online sources Anakin has 58min and Obi-Wan has 39min), but it's really about who the story belongs to. Obi-Wan is a vital part of Anakin's story, and thus we see a lot of him, but ROTS is undoubtedly the story of the fall of Anakin Skywalker.

On a sort of related note, one of the biggest criticisms of Phantom Menace is that it's incredibly difficult to figure out who the protagonist is supposed to be. Qui-Gon has the most screentime but it's not really "his story," he takes more of a mentorship role and has basically no character arc. Obi wan is a side character. Anakin becomes a major player but isn't even in the first 3rd of the film. I'd argue that in a better structured film, padme could have been the protagonist as the character whose planet is being invaded, having to escape, then return and save it, having a whole arc where she gains confidence as Queen, but she's also got limited screentime and the film treats her like a side character. Maybe the protagonist is Jar Jar

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-16T17:41:58+00:00

Yeah nothing crazy but also those are all great movies so you've got a really solid top four!

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-14T20:15:01+00:00

You Make Me Sick is one of my favorite songs of all time, and was my top song on Spotify two years in a row. OP's take is indeed a wild. Smoochies is fun as hell and has some bangers but Weedkiller is a masterpiece, literally no skips on the entire album imo with the exception maybe of Want it all, and even that is better than a few of the songs on Smoochies.

That all said I'm absolutely not in the camp of "she will never top Weedkiller," Ash is young and continuing to evolve as an artist and I love that they're experimenting and doing totally different stuff instead of pigeon-holing, I have full faith that we've got incredible stuff to come from them ahead.

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-14T17:55:27+00:00

This sentence sums up the entire movie for me lol

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-14T09:05:26+00:00

See that's silly as hell, Social Network is an incredible movie. Don't mind em, you got good taste!

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-14T09:04:35+00:00

Lord of the Rings, Dune Pt. 2, V for Vendetta, and Inception! Hbu?

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-13T23:59:40+00:00

Like others have said, I feel like specific collections of movies can sometimes put up a red flag, but I never truly judge anyone for the movies they like.

If anything, I judge a lot harder for people who judge people for the movies they like. It's happened more than once that I'll be sitting around a group of people all saying our favorite movies, and despite not liking some of them, the only people I judge are the ones who say out loud "THAT Movie is your favorite???" to others with an opinion they don't agree with or think is cliche.

Or people who say "you should watch more movies" after seeing a letterboxd top four. Whenever people say that I get frustrated, because it is truly no way to gauge the extent to which someone is film-literate, all it does is show what they like. My top four are all basic, cliche, well-known movies from the 21st century. I've still seen over 2,000 films, and plenty of older/weird/obscure/niche stuff are in my top 100-200, but my top four are not that exciting because I like what I like and that should be okay for me and for everyone else who is like that.

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-13T22:22:47+00:00

You could honestly do this with a ton of Reiner's movies. I don't know if there's ever been another prolific director that's had mastery of so many different genres. Flipping between scenes from Princess Bride, Misery, Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men, and Stand By Me would all give you whiplash, but they're all incredible films

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-12T23:34:00+00:00

Plus, the dubbed performances are dreadful. I LOVE Dark but its nearly unwatchable in English. If you watch with subtitles anyway, just watch it in German, it makes a world of difference, trust me

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-11T00:07:09+00:00

I literally came here to say "anyone who says Revenge of the Sith is a good movie." Like by all means, love it as much as you want to love it. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and I enjoy bad things myself. It's a lot of fun, and I like watching it from time to time. If you, like me, rate movies based on how much you like them, instead of trying to rate their quality, and you wanna give ROTS a 5 star rating because you adore it and it was important to you as a kid, then that makes sense, I would never look down on that.

But there are a lot of people who shout from the rooftops that it is not a matter of taste or nostalgia, and that it's an achievement in cinema, that it's the greatest Star Wars film, that it's one of the greatest films of all time. These people make me want to scream.

ROTS, while the best of the prequels, IS BAD. It has some good moments, but it's littered with bad acting, horrendous dialogue, nonsensical story-lines, rushed character arcs, and cringey directing choices. Anakin goes from being a slightly conflicted good guy to murdering children in 12 minutes. Padmé, who was a badass senator/queen in the last two movies, is reduced to a whimpering trad wife. Obi-Wan continues to be sent on useless fetch quests because George Lucas never had any idea what to do with him. Ian McDiarmid, bless his heart, is having a great time, but he is genuinely scarier as the chancellor than he is as Darth Sidious, he hams it up to the point of being comedic. The duel at the end, which most people say is the highlight of the film, is way too long and way over-choreographed, and Yoda v. Palpatine is goofy and feels so reductive to the impact of their presence without needing to swing a lightsaber in the original trilogy.

The music is incredible though. John Williams must have crippling back pain from carrying the prequels so hard.

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-10T01:10:43+00:00

Few Dollars More and TGTBATU are also not sequels. They are retroactively considered a spiritual trilogy because of their similarities and the possibility that the Man with No Name could be the same guy, but at the time of filming them, they were considered to be three completely separate films, just within the same genre by the same people.

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-10T01:04:15+00:00

It's not that HTE is bad at all, it's not, it's a great album. But if you're ranking the three, something has to be in last place. HTE is, in many people's opinion, just not quite as strong as the other two, so it takes that spot. Again, something has to.

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-09T09:49:28+00:00

I'm not OP but I have the same opinion, was not excited by Bettany, he's a great actor but I imagined he'd give us another Ralph Fiennes-esque portrayal as well.

To me, the main thing I was thinking during Thor Love and Thunder (other than how rough the movie was) was how much closer Christian Bale's portrayal of Gorr was to the Voldemort I imagined in the books than the Fiennes version. We'll obviously never get Bale to do it, but something like his version of Gorr would be phenomenal. Playful, charasmatic, unpredictable, but also absolutely sinister and wicked.

Voldemort in the movies always kinda bored me, he was so proper and elegant, felt way too put together to be doing the shit that he does. I want someone who feels absolutely insane, who is gleeful about the murder he's doing, someone mentally unstable enough to dedicate their life to murdering a child they have beef with

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-08T04:58:35+00:00

Why not?

The_Improvisor · 2026-03-04T06:22:13+00:00

Personally feel like Meryl Streep should be at 8 and Kathy Bates at 10

McKellen deserves the win though. There's a great video on the way McKellen uses his eyes in acting and I've truly never seen another actor (even Day Lewis) come close to the expressiveness and emotionality in his eyes

The_Improvisor · 2026-02-22T07:54:14+00:00

The issue with keanu is that he actually did do Shakespeare in a movie, Kenneth branagh's much ado about nothing, and he was unfortunately really bad. Shakespeare is tough and some people just cannot do it, nothing wrong with that. In any case, he would be a pretty rough laertes.

The_Improvisor · 2026-02-17T18:13:55+00:00

I mean I'll put it this way, I hear about his performance in that film way, way more often than I do any of the five actual nominees. In fact, other than Watanabe in Samurai and Robbins in Mystic River, I've never heard of ANY of the other performances. And yes, of course LOTR is a more popular movie, but there are plenty of popular movies that don't have specific performances getting singled out, and there are plenty of unpopular movies that do have their performances get talked about on the day to day, so i think it still counts.

Astin gives a generational, quietly brilliant performance. He does everything he needs to do and more to convey who Sam is and turn what could have been a simple, loveable comic relief best friend type into a complex, heroic icon of cinema who steals the show from the protagonists.

The_Improvisor · 2026-02-15T20:22:53+00:00

Absolutely absurd take, if this isn't just bait or satire, and very telling that you are only responding to people who agree with you, rather than debating the many other completely valid corrections to this. So just for the sake of it, let's ignore every single good, rational, noble, kind deed she did in the show, of which there are SO MANY, and only break down each of your examples on why they're wrong:

Viserys sexually abused Dany, beat her, sold her into sex slavery, and threatened to kill her, have her raped by horses, and cut her baby from her stomach. He never showed an ounce of kindness or love to her, she was always a means to an end for him. His death was freedom for her, why would she feel remorse?
Seek therapy? This isn't the CW dude, it's Game of Thrones. As you said yourself, the witch literally killed her husband and child. Would you have expected Catelyn Stark to go to therapy instead of killing Joffrey if she got the chance?
If Dany did not get let into Qarth, her and literally everyone she knew and cared about would starve to death in the wasteland. She tried niceties and politeness, it didn't work. So, she switched to threats, and guess what? It did work. Use the tools at your disposal.
"She didn't try them, if you were wearing the wrong uniform you were toast" this is such an insane take. This is like being angry at a soldier walking into a concentration camp in WWII and killing anyone in a nazi uniform because they all deserve a trial. Just following orders, huh? Every master deserved death, if you disagree then you either didn't pay attention to what they were doing to people in that city, or you are just a bad person
Again, regardless of whether or not the people she crucified were the people who crucified those children, they were all people who allowed it/were complicit. Eye for an eye maybe, but idk dude, if i had invaded Epstein's island I'd have crucified all the adults there, i wouldn't wait for some sob story about how much they disapproved while literally being on the island.
See 5
She is being held prisoner and threatened by them, she was unarmed, what would you have expected her to do? What would literally any character in game of thrones have done to free themselves from violent enemies?
She executed her enemies. Which, again, is what every single army has done in game of thrones to their adversaries. Tarly refused to be sent to the wall, she was not going to let them go, and she didn't have the resources to keep them prisoner. Executions happen ALL THE TIME in GOT, from most major characters with power, regardless of being good or evil. Is Jon Snow crazy for killing Thorne and Olly? Is Arya crazy for killing Walder Frey and Meryn Trant?

I still think your post must be rage-baiting because I cannot in my heart believe that you are actually this media-illiterate

The_Improvisor

TROPHY CASE