the machine

Correct. Sorry to be pedantic nufan, but I was looking for "car rental," not car salesman.

It's a good show, you should watch it. And no, he was not a hot dog vendor.

Eh, I'm not offended. Anyway does the buffer rule not apply in this thread? You asked the last question. Besides, you're wrong, he's not a car salesman.

Shia LeBeouf! Correct, when I watched it I was thinking... no way it can't be but sure enough when the credits rolled it was the future Samuel James Witwicky. sooo did it take long to google the answer :-p Sir, you have offended my honor! I'm just a fan of the show who watched it after Shia was already relatively famous. Anyways, Joss Whedon made a rare appearance as an actor (playing a character with a giant head, obviously) on Veronica Mars. What type of business was his character involved in?

Shia LeBeouf!

According to her Wiki page, she was in Annihilation and will be in an Avengers special series called "Chaos War", so... Sorry I may not have been 100% correct that she never appeared again but you seemed to miss what I was going for: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThePoochie I hate linking to TV Tropes, so realize that I was making a reference to that character who had to go back to their planet. My point is that the character was so awful it wouldn't be enough to just stop writing about her, she had to be put on a plane with a one way ticket to her home planet just so fans would be able to breathe easier knowing she wasn't going to show up at the next Avengers softball game.

It's so sad when I think about how the industry was moving forward before the 90's. New characters like Thunderstrike actually becoming prominent, X-Men becoming adults and moving out of the X-Mansion, but since the mid-90's it's become a big nostalgia fest run by a bunch of writers who grew up reading during the 70's. I mean granted, the near-collapse of the industry to the point that it basically exists as a medium to pitch movie ideas probably didn't help, but it sucks to see how much comics from the big 2 have made negative character progress in the past decade and a half. As much as I'm not naturally a big Morrison fan he's one of the few guys who sets long-term goals to push characters forward. I agree US Agent is asshole America, he's basically just Guy Gardener only without the dumb haircut, and to my knowledge he was never taken out in one punch, although I know he got in a punch up with Hawkeye. The only other guys that are almost as bad for team chemistry are probably Namor and Quicksilver. Namor because he's a prince who thinks he's better than everybody and doesn't care much about humanity, Quicksilver because he's impatient from waiting around all the time for normal-speed jerks. Plus he's the son of Magneto and is sometimes creepily over-protective of his sister. And I liked Silverclaw! She had an interesting twist on the shapeshifting power, and she's a POC who doesn't run around calling herself "La Gaucha" or anything lame like that. Plus, I don't think she was ever anything beyond a reserve Avenger, so it's hard to dislike her as much as Dr. Druid, who was the focus of entire awful storylines. But yeah, Deathcry was terrible. You know a character sucks when while taking apart the Avengers team they have to specifically take her to her home planet. Editor's Note: Deathcry died on the way to her home planet. Or at least, she's never been seen since.

Its definitely a bad idea. Hopefully it will be short term. Hey US Agent rules! There's far worse choices for Avengers. Off the top of my head: Moon Knight (unreliable powers, less of a team player than Batman, schizophrenic) The Sentry (unreliable in general, schizophrenically becomes his own arch-nemesis) The Falcon (why does earth's mightiest heroes include a guy who can... fly? And talk to a bird?) Lionheart/Captain Britain (Chuck Austen is terrible and all his ideas are terrible, including Captain Britain) I'm sure there's worse. Also that spoiler is really depressing. I don't see him actually joining any avengers team long-term. What a terrible character.

I don't think I can answer, but I can say: "Oh, cousin Merle, REALLY?"

Yup. She dated Simon, and then dated one of the dozens of random kids that lived with the Camdens over the course of that show.

What terrible pop singer had a role as a recurring character on the show 7th Heaven?

Kurtwood Smith, Peter Weller, and, um.... the guy from Twin Peaks. Ray Wise?

Yup. That was probably still too easy. Also would've accepted Lock-Up, the forgettable one-off villain that was made into a forgettable comic book villain in the 90's.

Been re-watching my old 90's Batman DVD's, so here's a question about Batman: Name two characters created for Batman the Animated Series that would later be introduced into Batman comics (one is way too easy).

Dolph Lundgren!!!! He must break criminals!

My memory of the clone saga is that it started off being pretty decent, but eventually turned into a huge mess. I hated the ending in Spider-Man #75. At the time it was about the vilest Spider-Man story I had ever read. Of course this was before vile Spider-Man stories became par for the course. I wish there could've been a way to keep Ben Reilly around, as his character at the time was a lot more relatable than Peter Parker.

Yes, Ferrell was great in In Bruges, but he was also great in the New World and solid in Crazy Heart. He's young, he has charisma, and he's improving: so what if he's not the best, at least he hasn't thrown in the towel. I don't feel like it's that hard to defend an actor that actually acts. If it were a narration contest or a "who do you wish your grandfather was" contest, everybody's love of Freeman would make a little more sense. You know who else is better than Freeman? Tim Robbins. That guy never gets a lot of attention but he was a solid leading man who could also do great work in smaller parts, particularly as pretentious jerks. Mr. TKzorrance, my point was that your statement was regrettably incorrect. So I corrected you. No doubt Caine was the man in the 60's and 70's, but there's also no doubt he took a lot of checks to make an appearance in the 80's and 90's and even into the 00's. More power to him if he wants to start acting again, but my point is lauding Freeman for anything post-Shawshank is up there with lauding Caine's role in Jaws: The Revenge. I only included living actors on my list but Alec Guinness is another great actor that I haven't seen on these lists. Also let's just move on: I made an off-hand comment that I don't get why everybody loves their fake grand-dad, and yes, it's a position I can defend, but there's really no need to get anything in a twist over it. And by name-dropping other people hopefully somebody reads this and picks someone who's not Morgan Freeman, like Caine or Guinness or Duvall.

From the Corner (2008) A Raisin in the Sun (2008) Slavery and the Making of America (2005) A Remarkable Promise (2004) The Hunting of The President (2004) The Long Way Home (1997) And that's not including the dozen or so TV shows, IMAX movies, and children's bar mitzvah's narrated by Freeman over the past 15 years.

The guy has been in a load of films....a load of good films....where he acts good in them. It's not that hard to fathom people voting for him. I guess it wouldn't be if that were true, but it's not. If by "acts good" you mean turns in the same performance a dozen times? It's a little like saying post-retirement Michael Caine is your favorite actor. I mean yes, he was in Dark Knight and Prestige and Inception, but would anyone argue he "acts good" in them, or did he just turn in the same standard performance he'd done dozens of times already? Oh, but you know who's Freeman's age and still acts? Robert Duvall. That dude's awesome.

1. Jack Nicholson 2. Leo DiCaprio 3. Julianne Moore 4. Johnny Depp 5. Cate Blanchett 6. Colin Ferrell 7. Daniel Day-Lewis 8. Robin Williams 9. Sean Penn 10. Maggie Gyllenhaal Honorable Mentions: Catherine Keener, Steve Buscemi, John Malkovich, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Guy Pearce, Kate Winslet, Sam Rockwell, Alec Guinness. I'm baffled by the love for Morgan Freeman. Are we talking "favorite actors" or "favorite narration/voiceover guy"?

Man that poster is em-bear-assing. What?

While you're watching the Prestige you should really watch Memento again. Just like Inception, it's worth seeing more than once to understand some of the ambiguity in the story and see how Nolan tells the story in such a creative way. Knowing the plot really shouldn't effect the enjoyment of movies like that.

The Prestige really is class. Hell, I got really upset on a different forum a few weeks back when people were talking about copyright infringement versus "borrowing" ideas and then mentioned that The Prestige and The Illusionist came out at roughly the same time and compared them. For those playing the home games, about the only decent comparison between those movies is that they both have magicians. The similarities end right there. Comparing two movies with distinctive plots that came out in the same year doesn't seem like that big of a stretch as far as comparisons go. While they both developed in different ways, is it so hard to believe that somebody at Yari heard that Warner Brothers had greenlit a film centered around a 19th century magician and turned around and came out with a similar project? That'd be like arguing that Lionsgate was in no way influenced by word that 20th Century Fox was doing a Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz action comedy about a spy in their decision to make Killers, an action comedy where spy Ashton Kutcher runs into blonde normal person Katherine Heigl. Also I saw the movie again, and it's so amazing. For a big budget action film to develop such an amazing system of visual and audio storytelling is an accomplishment that can't be emphasized enough. Not only does it have sound editing that's equally amazing as the Dark Knight's, it gives us a storyteller's eye that shows us things that we don't immediately understand: these images are then planted in out subconscious so that later when we get the context the symbols become loaded with meaning. The shaking train tracks, the spinning top, the wine glass crunching underfoot: we see and hear all of it before we know what they mean and when we finally learn their meanings they have that much more emotional weight because we've already been introduced to them. Critics complaining about the shot to shot moments not feeling like a dream are out of their minds because this is exactly the sort of sensory recognition and subconscious symbolism that dreams are full of. The film also contains numerous examples of "dream logic," where things with no inherent significance become increasingly important. In the top level dream, Fischer seems to just make up six numbers: they don't have any independent meaning. We see those numbers again when Eames, as the blonde woman, writes them down in front of Fischer. Then the numbers correspond to two hotel rooms that are inexplicably below one another even though common sense says that 428 would be under 528. Finally, in the third level, these random numbers are the combination to the locked room. This isn't inception as Fischer made up the numbers in the first place, but he's taken these random numbers and turned them into the keys that unlock his father's final wishes. That a movie that features car chases, emotional weight and incredible sound mixing also features this level of psychological depth is an incredible feat. It's an action film with real emotion and intellectual depth. Movies like this are why I love movies.

The subconscious (soldiers, pedestrians, etc.) is what was recognizing something foreign and try to kill it (kick it out of the dream), while the conscious mind wouldn't realize they were dreaming until afterward, if at all. Not really a contradiction.

Yeah that was easily the most original and thought provoking big budget film since the Matrix.