Originally published at: Why Mars Attacks! is underrated | Boing Boing
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Also prophetic: I think before Face###k and Twitter Donald Trump’s New Republican Party I don’t think anyone believed that an entire group of organisms could be motivated purely by spite and lulz.
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dude seriously listed Batman 2 but left off Big Adventure… shame.
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I didn’t realize it did so poorly because my circle of friends liked it.
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He has many good points, which I will ignore in order to complain about his not mentioning PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE, which I see has already been mentioned.
Also a little disappointed that he didn’t use the ineffectual efforts of the brains in charge of us to make nice with the single-minded killers as a metaphor for Dems trying to make the Gops wuv them. It’s just lying there.
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Ugh. I feel like the only people who say this sort of thing never listen to anything one could consider punk.
Really? Big Fish is hardly a safe film. Or Sweeney Todd? Nightmare Before Xmas is hardly evidence that he would be able to pull off a port of a Sondheim musical designed for the stage (different target age, different rating, animation vs live action, Sondheim’s vocal layering). I appreciate him Stanning for Burton as I agree much of his output is unfairly maligned because of drivel like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but boy, he’s full of hot takes.
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Nope. It was Indian Love Call by Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy, IIRC.
I really liked this movie. And the line printers in the network center where I worked that year sounded exactly like the Martians when heard over the phone, causing many fun conversations.
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I’ve only walked out of a couple of movies before the credits rolled. Titanic was one. And Mars Attacks was another. That was a very long time ago, and maybe it’s improved with age, but I’ll never know.
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The slim whitman song wrapped up the movie within the time limit, but I wish it followed the original cards with an earth counterattack on mars, with multi-cannoned space tanks rolling into martian’s mid-century decor living rooms.
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I laughed myself (literally) somewhat nauseous, seeing “Mars Attacks!” for the first time. I experienced vigorous Coca-Cola sinus lavage, when they killed Congress:
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Seriously, this! I can understand that there are people that love this film. I just can’t understand WHY they loved this film. It felt pointless and boring when I watched it all those many years ago.
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I watched it for the first time a couple months back, and it just seemed like an excuse to stack (somewhat dated) cameos for their own sake. That shit’s amusing when it’s Sammy Davis Jr chatting to Adam West for a few seconds when he’s climbing a building or whatever, but it gets tiresome when it’s used to support an entire movie.
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Why does no one ever talk about the fact that this is the same plot beat that resolves Attack of the Killer Tomatoes?
(I have no idea whether this is a deliberate homage or convergent evolution.)
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It’s the Slim Whitman version of that song.
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They’d have to have seen it?
Which Tim Burton must have.
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Burton’s masterstroke here was using his access to blockbuster budgets to produce an alien invasion movie based on a series of nihilistic and gruesome trading cards that really upset Cold-War era conservatives with sticks up their arses.
I remember really enjoying the movie for what it was and also remember that at least half the people in the audience weren’t laughing throughout it as the big stars met their grotesque fates (some probably walked out – it was that kind of picture).
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You’d think, except I never hear anyone talking about the fact that &c.
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Enjoyed it. Crass, goofy, silly. Might watch it again if it were airing someplace free.
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Which is exactly what Burton excelled at. His stuff was seriously subversive, but his success and our retconned memory makes it seem like people weren’t deeply offended by basically everything he did. The religious right absolutely freaked out over Batman (yes, Batman) and the LGBTQ characters in Ed Wood. What was great about his work is how he did this without resorting to shock and gore; just empathetic portrayals of the characters that never get portrayed as anything other than cheap caricature. In fact, the only people he really did seem to ridicule were the squares.
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I really enjoyed it and have watched it several times. It seems to be an effective filter for outing people that take movies too seriously and refer to them with terms like “films” or “pieces.”
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