‘Land of the Lost’ Opens Everywhere Friday

Aww, that's so nice. Don't you feel better, now? As far as Will Ferrell goes, his popularity is an utter mystery to me. To paraphrase the superb Arrested Development, "Are people taking their stupid pills?"

The episode is on tonight. I think I'll skip it. There's plenty of baseball on.

Baseball and football are sports I love. Yes, they are alike.

I have a dilemma. My two boys want to go see this, and I definitely do not. Don't want to disappoint them, so they may end up dragging me (kicking and screaming) into the -900,000th century…

Might be a good time for a long overdue nap.

Most of the time I don't care for Ferrell, but then he'll catch me off guard and make me laugh ("Elf" comes to mind). I may cut this some slack only because "Land of the Lost" was so cheesy in its own right. Don't get me wrong, I was a loyal watcher of all things Sid and Marty Krofft (Bugaloos anyone?). But I don't think most Krofft productions lend themselves to serious film making. "Sigmund and the Sea Monsters," "H.R. Puffinstuf" and "Wonderbug" just don't scream Academy Award winning material to me. So… I just don't see the harm in this remake.

Ferrell's middle name is turd; because I look at his success and say "WTF?"

The original Land of the Lost (the first two seasons, anyway) had episodes written by people involved in the classic Star Trek including David Gerrold (The Trouble with Tribbles), D.C. Fontana (Charlie X, Tomorrow is Yesterday, This Side of Paradise, Friday's Child, Journey to Babel, By Any Other Name, The Ultimate Computer, The Enterprise Incident, That Which Survives, The Way to Eden), Walter Koenig (Chekov), Theodore Sturgeon (Amok Time, Shore Leave), Norman Spinrad (The Doomsday Machine), and Margaret Arman (The Cloud Minders, The Paradise Syndrome, The Gamesters of Triskelion) as well as science fiction authors Larry Niven and Ben Bova. David Gerrold was the script editor and got the best writers he could get his hands on and he's responsible for a lot of the mythos of the show.

I've had that dilemma with my two children regarding Night at the Museum, and that's exactly what happened. You have my empathy.

Elf was good, and so was Stranger than Fiction, which I think was his best film. All of them feel like they are about 30 minutes too long (minimum) except Stranger than Fiction, and I think that's because it was the only one that wasn't a Ferrell vehicle. It could also be because it's not stupid-silly. But I'm kind of a snob that way.

This will be a "watch on late night FX" deal for me.

You could try to find some of the Krofft TV series for them to see,
I think Sci-Fi ran some episodes recently.

That ought to change their minds.

Re: Night at the Museum II, Dittos.
The first was entertaining, this one is Number Two.

It looks bad, Ferrell is on a role of bad movies (and his lame Bush-bashing play), and it's coming in between some excellent movie weekends. I'm guessing it's going to do well enough to not be a disaster, but will finish a distant second (or possibly third) then quietly disappear from the theaters within a couple of weeks.

As I mentioned in my reply to Another Carolyn earlier, Land of the Lost had top-notch writing talent and a background mythology for the first two years because of story editor David Gerrold, who had written the classic Star Trek episode The Trouble with Tribbles and worked on the animated Star Trek. A lot of the writers for the first two seasons of Land of the Lost were either classic Star Trek alumni and/or well-known science fiction authors who have won prizes in their field, so Land of the Lost was a notch above the usually psychedelic "drug trip" writing found in most other Sid and Marty Krofft shows like H. R. Puffinstuff, Lidsville, or the Bugaloos (though one of my first TV crushes was on the girl from the Bugaloos). I suppose I should mention that the writing for The Lost Saucer was also sometimes sound science fiction writing, too.

Why oh why do people insist on remaking things that should not be??? Land of the Lost, Planet of the Apes, the Brady Bunch, American Pie, etc. Come up with something original and stop spoiling our gems for the next generation. ____I remember when Lady Marmalade (which was a decent remake) was just out and I was DJ-ing at a Cancer Walk-a-thon. A group of young girls requested Lady Marmalade and I purpously put on LaBelle's version. The girls yelled at me for putting on the wrong song. I turned to them and told them it was the orginal of thesong and if they listened to it, they might like it.

Bugaloos! Yes! Girl Bug = Hot! LOL None of my friends remember Bugaloos. Is it sad because they've forgotten, or sad because I watch(ed) WAY too much television?

A new Will Ferrell movie? Has suck written all over it. Hate, hate him in any film. Cast him in a film and watch it just turn into a turd instantly. Example? Bewitched. Great cast, great story, great acting by the other actors in the film and then Will happened. Thank goodness for DVDs and fast forward. Just skip the scenes with him in it and I can enjoy the film. Though I lament how good it could have been.

When I saw the big screen was making "Land of the Lost" I immediately put it on my radar as a "must see". Silly me; I thought it would be an update of the old seventies series which was a campy delight but with a big enough budget for "real" dinosaurs and Sleestaks.

Then I saw the trailer and I knew my barfometer would not sustain a 2+ hour sit down for what would have been great fun were it not for casting.

Casting is a lot of what's wrong with Hollywood these days. The writing generally sucks but with a good enough cast and special effects, we can overlook that. Casting is the one thing that cannot be overlooked. When we sit down in the darkened theatre, we want to believe the people we're seeing on the screen ARE the characters they're playing. Will Ferrell no longer is an actor or a comedian. He's just another Lefty making fun of George Bush — a dime a dozen. Casting Ferrell in anything is a big mistake, casting him AS anything but Bush is a bigger mistake. Like Tina Fey was destroyed by her determination to destroy Sarah Palin, Ferrell has been destroyed by the character he tried to mock.

HARD TO BELIEVE THIS GUY IS …..FUNNY? AS FOR HIS BUSH THING…..COOL.I HATE BUSH!!! I HATE ANYBODY WHO LIKES HIM. WHAT A JOKE MAN! YOU HAVE TO BE AN IDIOT IF YOU ACTUALLY LIKE THAT A#$HOLE!!

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