Spoiler Steve talks Movies

🤘🏼

Go see #ProjectHailMary in theaters

RT @hdwmovies: Mario: we need to team up to smash bowser my bros Kirby: say that again Fox:

It takes place in a school for six of the seven years…

I'll always remember Chuck Norris as the man who changed the course of dodgeball history by casting the deciding vote that allowed Average Joes to play in the championship of the Las Vegas International Dodgeball Open where they upset the heavily favored Globo Gym Purple Cobras. RIP. 🙏

You're watching a $248 million film and not a single green or blue screen was used. The alien is a handmade puppet. The cockpit physically rotates to simulate gravity. I looked at the production tech behind this 95% score, and the engineering is wild. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directing their first live-action movie in 12 years, built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a real set at Shepperton Studios in England. Not a miniature. Not a digital model. A full-size ship interior you can walk through. Production designer Charlie Wood studied the International Space Station, Russia's Mir station, and the Boeing 747 cockpit to get the look right. He deliberately made the panels mismatched, because real spacecraft are assembled from parts made by different companies. Nothing matches perfectly. That's what makes it feel real. The cockpit is only about 8 feet wide. It sits on a mechanical platform that can tilt, spin, and shake, so when the ship changes direction or enters different gravity conditions, the whole set moves. Chairs end up on walls. Ladders flip direction. Gosling was suspended inside a spinning ring so he could float and move through the ship for real, reacting to actual hardware around him. No guessing where a wall might be added later. Then there's Rocky. He's the alien co-lead, and he's not CGI. Neal Scanlan, the creature designer who built the Porgs for Star Wars, spent a full year on this character. Over 300 designs before they landed on the final look. Rocky is a thin, hollow shell, 3D-printed from a digital sculpture, then hand-painted in see-through layers so light passes through him like skin. His arms pop off and swap out depending on the scene: one set has a closed fist for walking, another has tiny motorized fingers strong enough to pick up objects. Five puppeteers (nicknamed the "Rockyteers") operated him in every scene. James Ortiz, an award-winning puppet designer from New York theater, voiced Rocky and controlled him on set. When Scanlan met him, he told Ortiz, "You're Frank Oz, and I'm making Yoda for you." Every reaction Gosling gives to the alien is to something physically in front of him. Greig Fraser, who won the Oscar for shooting Dune, filmed the space scenes in the larger IMAX format (that taller image you see in IMAX theaters) and the Earth flashbacks in regular widescreen. Then the team did something unusual: they took the digital footage and printed it onto real film strips, twice, using two different types of film stock. Then they scanned those strips back into digital. It sounds redundant, but it adds a texture and warmth that you can only get from physical film. Fraser used the same technique on Dune and The Batman. Drew Goddard spent six years writing this screenplay. His last adaptation of Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, earned him an Oscar nomination. He described the challenge this way: a screenplay gets about 5% of a novel's word count. The lead is alone for most of the runtime. When he finally gets a co-star, that co-star doesn't speak English, communicates through sounds closer to whale song, and has no face. Goddard called it a screenwriter's nightmare, then said that difficulty was the whole point. He and the directors fought studio pushback to keep Weir's original ending intact. 95% from 212 critics. 98% from over 2,500 audience ratings. And the lead isn't a superhero, a cop, or a soldier. He's just an ordinary middle school science teacher.

Updated top 12 of 2026

My current top ten of 2026

RT @DrClownPhD: This is fire! 🔥

Congratulations to this year’s Casting nominees! #Oscars

Delroy Lindo is officially an Academy Award nominee.

Has anyone checked on Variety?

Hedda should’ve been here (and in many other places)

Pizza Hut back in the 1990s. The coolest old school photos: bit.ly/4cFoZT1

SIGN. ME. UP.

RT @AMAZlNGNATURE: Massive Leatherback sea turtle near the Gulfstream yesterday

I love this. This is why I love movie discussions. Whether it’s your favorite of all time or a film you can’t get out of your head, the discussions created from these type of posts gives me hope with future filmmakers.

My Top 25 Films of 2025

9 films worth watching in January 2026