Game Over, Man

Scott Hardie | February 27, 2017
R.I.P. Bill Paxton. Do you have a favorite memory of him or his work?

Samir Mehta | February 27, 2017
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Scott Hardie | February 27, 2017
Heh, I was going to say much the same. I wasn't as impressed by Frailty overall; I thought it leaned too heavily on surprises that weren't very surprising. But it had style to spare, and a willingness to go dark, that more conservative directors wouldn't have tried. Sometimes first-timers can produce movies that other people can't. It will always be the first movie that I think of when I think of Bill Paxton.

Samir Mehta | February 27, 2017
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Samir Mehta | February 28, 2017
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Chris Lemler | February 28, 2017
The two movies I liked Bill Paxton in were Twister and The Titanic. He played a really good part in Twister and a decent part in Titanic. Cause he wasn't like actually in the movie just when he was talking to that lady about the necklace that was giving to her in the movie

Scott Hardie | February 28, 2017
Yeah, they're both fun movies. Titanic in particular is a longtime favorite of mine. Maybe not for Samir, though; as I recall, he is not a fan of James Cameron.

Titanic originally had a longer ending where instead of elderly Rose dropping the billion-dollar necklace in the ocean by herself in secret, she does it in front of the whole treasure-hunting crew, and Bill Paxton's character laughs about it because he has learned a valuable life lesson or something. It's terrible, and luckily Cameron had the good sense to change it.

Samir Mehta | February 28, 2017
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Scott Hardie | February 28, 2017
Avatar has gone through this weird evolution. Before it came out, people thought it was going to be this massive flop, creatively and commercially. Then it was released and stunned everyone by being a massive popular phenomenon, even outgrossing Titanic. It had a few detractors at the time who (as I recall) primarily complained about the unoriginal story, but the movie was well-regarded enough to rack up lots of Oscar nominations including best picture, which is rare for a sci-fi flick. Then within less than a year, the popularity faded, and since then it has come to be regarded poorly, as an overrated work of hackery whose effects are ho-hum. The fact that Disney once signed an expensive contract to convert an entire section of one of its theme parks into an adaptation of the film now seems like madness, but it's about to open after years of construction, and it feels like an eternity has passed since anyone would have been fired up about that opening. For his part, Cameron remains so bullish on Avatar that he's planning FOUR sequels to be filmed simultaneously, but he hasn't even shot a single frame yet, in a development process that has been dragging on forever. Cameron's films tend to be massively underrated prior to release (everyone thought Terminator 2 and Titanic would be huge flops), so maybe the Avatar sequels will turn out to surprise everyone and be worth the wait, but at the current rate we're not going to see them until well into the 2020s. What a weird life that movie has had.