676

(11 replies, posted in Off Topic)

DorkmanScott wrote:

I'll see it, but not on April 2, and not in 3D. Maybe I'll do a matinee $6 screening at AMC.

I've got vague memories of the original, and I hate the fact that Hollywood is in this trend of remaking movies of the past, but for $6 I'd go to a matinee, but I'd consult Rottentomatoes first.

677

(122 replies, posted in Episodes)

Twig24 wrote:

wow, thanks. Ill get the new ep in the next couple of days

Welcome sir, and Thank You for your support!

678

(122 replies, posted in Episodes)

Gregory Harbin wrote:

Just for the record, everyone except Teague was wrong on the trouper/trooper debate.

Gotcha covered in the show notes sir.

679

(122 replies, posted in Episodes)

Show notes.

May the Force be with You!

Star Wars on Amazon.com
Star Wars on IMDB
Star Tours
The Injured Stormtrooper
Ryan vs. Dorkman/ 2
Pink Five
USC
John Milius
Robert Zemeckis
Perfectmovie
Damnation Alley
Logan's Run
Queen, Bicycle Race
Death Star Droid
As you know...
Academy award winning edited by Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch, Marcia Lucas

Deleted Magic
Get started with Joseph Campbell
Hero's Journey
StarWars / Wizard of Oz
Alec Guinness Ealing comedies
Rick Baker
Parsec
Kill the cat moment
Aurebesh
The Big Bang Theory minus laugh track
Phil Tippett
Retcon
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye
Shadows of the Empire
Allegiance
Troopers vs. Troupers
Amadalen
The Wilhelm Scream, first heard in Distant Drums

Mimas, moon of Saturn
The Dam Busters a la Star Wars
Head On! Apply directly to the TIE Fighter!
Vader Sessions
Joe Viskocil
Fridge logic
Keyan Farlander is the 3rd survivor

680

(43 replies, posted in Episodes)

Since Teague's done the show notes for this week, this space will remain blank.

Happy Birthday Down In Front!  Thanks for letting me tag along for the ride.

681

(2,061 replies, posted in Episodes)

I'm with Mr. Harrell on this; I love, LOVE, Star Trek.  I love just about everything about it, including the broad strokes of the story.  I think setting the re-boot in an alternate timeline was a stroke of genius and feels like just the thing you expect from a Trek film.

On the other hand...

I would have liked to see what adult Kirk was doing with his life other than getting into bar fights and riding his bike around.  Kirk would have grown up knowing about Starfleet, the Federation, and the fate of the Kelvin.  Did Starfleet never occur to him as a career choice until a post bar fight pep talk?  I could accept no as an answer if we could at least see that he was trying to make it doing something else and failing at it.

Scotty suffers a similar fate.  Mind, that I am ignoring the convenience of having him stationed on Delta Vega; when did Scotty ever talk about transwarp beaming in the Prime timeline?  I gonna say, never, that just came out of thin air.  Scotty's introduction into the story, and the events that lead up to his being on the Enterprise could have been polished a bit better.  I know everyone points to the time Scotty reveals the formula for transparent aluminum in Trek IV as a similar scene, and I can see that that is what they were going for, I just don't think the pulled it off as well.

In the theatrical cut of the film, Nero apparently spends 25 years just flying around in his huge ass spaceship, just twiddling his thumbs.  He learns that he is in the past from the captain of the Kelvin, but rather than paying Romulus a visit, he just...drifts around for a quarter of a century.  OK, so he is "a particularly troubled" character, but really? 25 years? Just drifting around? Oh, and presumably no one bumps into him in all that time either.

Finally my biggest issue, black holes and supernovae.  Now, I've studied enough astronomy to understand how these phenomenon work, and so I imagine have many other Trek fans, and frankly, I don't like having my intelligence insulted at such a level.  Now granted, Trek has always taken scientific liberty with how phenomenon we don't understand work, and it has certainly made up enough of its own; I don't question warp drive or the transporter, or even wormholes. 

Let's start with the supernova that destroys Romulus.  Suns don't suddenly go supernova.  In fact strictly speaking only suns of a certain magnitude can go supernova.  Our sun for example will likely simply grow to a Red Giant.  Granted that process will destroy the inner planets including Earth, but we will have plenty of notice before it happens.  Additionally if we are talking about Romulus (and Remus), I'm pretty sure that that system is a binary star system.  Typically binary systems go nova, not supernova, but again, it would be the sort of thing Romulan scientists would be keeping an eye on.  But for the sake of argument, let's posit that sure, their sun suddenly went supernova; there wouldn't be time for anyone to enact any kind of rescue mission.

Which brings me to Red Matter.  Star Trek introduces something new, Red Matter, but never explains the rules for it.  Apparently Red Matter can create a black hole with a little application of heat and force.  OK, fine.  So the Vulcans just had this stuff (a lot of it too), lying around from, what, an old sun-destroying-WMD project?  Sure, that's just what Vulcans are all about.  So who knows why the Vulcans have this stuff, or why they need so much of it when just a small drop can implode and entire planet if applied correctly, but go on, tell me more.  Well apparently the black holes this substance can create, also can serve as wormholes through time.  So in the same application, you can have a drop of Red Matter create a black hole that will consume a star, then you can fly your spacecraft into it, and not only incur no damage whatsoever, but emerge in another time.  Sorry, you can have one or the other Trek, not both.  I can buy that a black hole can act as a portal to another time, but not if it just swallowed a star.  If that were the case, then the Narada's and Spock's arrivals should have been proceeded not by a lightning storm, but by huge fireballs.

Maybe I'm nitpicking here, I just hate it when it's apparent that the writers said, "it's Sci-Fi, we can do anything," particularly in Trek.  That said, I was one of the skeptics going into this re-boot, and I'm glad to say that I was wrong.  The look and feel is definitely Star Trek, and I still enjoy it after many subsequent viewings.  I look forward to where this new team takes it in the future, I just hope they try for a more solid story.

682

(31 replies, posted in Episodes)

Show notes are...Up, lol, enjoy.

Buy Up at Amazon.comhttp://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=dowinfromovco-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B001KVZ6G6
Up on IMDB
Second piece of magic (Double Hocus Pocus)

Brad Bird
Our Man Flint
FX Guide
Pixar Shorts
John Ratzenberger
Ed Asner
Rita Hayworth, enjoy!
CMYK
Rendering a 3D object requires several lighting passes, Key light, Fill light, and Ambient occlusion to name a few

Mental Ray
Render Man
Subsurface scattering
Depth of field
Rack focus

683

(7 replies, posted in Episodes)

Men in Black on Amazon.com

Men in Black on IMDB

Our special guest star this week is Lowell Cunningham, the creator of Men in Black!

Tommy Lee Jones is actually fromSan Saba, Texas.

Rick Baker
Technically only two of the candidates are "Jarheads."

The Aaron Bur milk ad, staring Sean Whalen.
Stuart Freeborn
Jon Gries, as Nick, the van driver
Fredric Lehne, credited as Frederic Lane,as INS Agent Janus

Richard Hamilton, as Dee
Tony Shalhoub, as Jeebs
Carrie Fisher Roasts George Lucas
The Great Attractor
Zee or Zed
Patrick Breen, later Quellek in Galaxy Quest.
The original Spiderman trailer, featuring the WTC.

Men in Black: The Series, featuring the voices of Keith Diamond and Gregg Berger.

Siobhan Fallon, as Beatrice
Lee Harvey Oswald
MIB Ray-Bans
Linda Fiorentino, as Laurel
Steve Johnson
Truro, Massachusetts
Orion's belt
Dr. Who’s Psychic paper
Richard O’Brian
David Cross
X-Files season 3 episode with Alex Trebek & Jesse Ventura as MIB

Vincent D'Onofrio as Orson Welles in Ed Wood, voiced by Maurice LaMarche

A Perfect Movie
MIB Trailer
1964 New York World's Fair
Specular Reflection
One Piece of Magic
Fry's
Announcement of MIB 3 and Ghostbusters 3
M.C. Escher drawings
Mark Hamill
Comic Book: The Movie
Dean Cain
John A. Keel

684

(25 replies, posted in Episodes)

The links here mostly work at night, mostly.

Aliens on Amazon.com
Aliens on IMDB

As an avid fan of this film I have included a few of my own comments; these are marked with an *.

Many of the points I bring up come from James Cameron's own commentary (also required viewing IMHO); these are preceded by "JCC."

Certain comments are marked with a timestamp; this refers to the commentary time, not the film time.

*Burke will state it soon, but it has actually been 57 years since the events of Alien.

*The year is generally accepted to be 2179.

JCC: It is never explicitly stated, but Ripley never in fact sets foot on Earth in this film.

JCC: Despite some initial difficulty nailing down what Cameron wanted, Ray Lovejoy did edit Aliens.

*There were two major cast / crew changes on Aliens. Adrian Biddle replaced DickBush as the cinematographer, and Michael Biehn replaced James Remar as Hicks.

JCC: Cameron got the job to write Aliens because the producers of Alien had read his script for The Terminator and wanted to work with him on something. He was allowed to also direct the film following the success of The Terminator.

JCC: Sigourney Weaver was not brought on board until very late in the writing process. Cameron was asked to pursue a storyline that excluded Ripley which he balked at. As a result Sigourney became the first actress to get $1 million for her role, a role for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

JCC: The robotic cutting arm and laser scanner were not in the initial budget for the film; Cameron paid for them himself.

The New Beverly Cinema

JCC: The reasoning behind the suit design is to suggest that while this is the future, Burke and the other bureaucrats are "suits," and regardless of timeframe, a "suit" is a "suit."

Rear Projection, or RP

Front Projection

(0:13:43) JCC: Sigourney later said that she had based her entire character on this scene. Also the picture Burke shows her is actually Sigourney’s mother.

Look, Helen Mirren!

(0:15:40) *The crew dossiers that appear behind Ripley inthis scene were originally written by Ridley Scott for the cast of Alien, and appear as an “Easter Egg” on older editions of the Alien DVD.

(0:16:45) *Adjusting for inflation from 1986 brings the cost of the Nostromo up to ~ $83 million, still pretty cheap for a spacecraft.

*Michael Biehn states (on one of the Alien 3 special features) that he got paid almost as much for the use of his picture in that film, as he got for actually playing the role of Hicks in Aliens

(0:20:10) JCC: This entire sequence on the colony comprises an entire reel that was cut from the theatrical release.

“Art is never finished, it is merely abandoned.” - Leonardo Da Vinci (unconfirmed)

Peter’s neighbor in Spiderman 2, Mageina Tovah.

Paul Reiser, as Burke

The Late Shift

Some Alien stuff Bob Burns cares for.

*Fun fact: On the readout that displays the names of everyone in cryosleep, Hudson is missing.

Wierzbowski Hunters

Re: Eddie’s Mom: Newsweek, February 18, 1980“Women in the Military – Should They Be Drafted?”

Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

Ron Cobb designed the “BugStompers” logo on the nose of the dropship.

William Goldman, we mention him a lot.

*Sidebar, my fault, keep reading

*The Smart Gun, is actually a German MG-42 dressed in parts from a motorcycle, and mounted on a steadicam harness.

*A good breakdown of some of the weapons used.

*The incinerators are based on the M-16

*Vasquez carries a Colt 1911

*Gorman carries a Heckler & Koch VP70; also the gun handed to Bishop before his pipe crawl

*Subdued rank, or rank that matches the camouflage of the uniform, came as a result of Vietnam, and a lack of understanding of basic color science.  If you’re in a green place, wearing all green, the bright yellow thing on your sleeve, or the shiny metal thing on your headgear, tends to stick out.  It didn’t take the enemy too long to learn rank structure and act accordingly.

In case you haven’t seen Star Trek: Lens Flare

Eddie means aeronautics, not avionics

*The APC is a great cheat; watch closely, you never see more than 3 people get out, that’s all there was room for.  The interior was a whole other set.

Eddie is either referring to the Daewoo K11, or the XK8

Forces of Geek

Asimovian

Oorah!

Carrie Henn was cast as Newt with no acting experience; Aliens remains her only acting role.

Lance Henriksen had special double-pupil scleral lenses made for the dissection scene, but Cameron deemed them to creepy.

Caseless ammunition

(1:19:10) *The model shop guys did re-create the clear “dome” of the Alien skull, but Cameron had them remove it because these aliens would be jumping around a lot more, and be more prone to the dome being damaged and needing to be replaced.

Footprint in the snow

M2/M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle

(1:45:15) JJC: The little look that Bishop does after "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid," is because he realizes he just made a joke, but since he's not human he’s not sure if it worked.

The closest thing we have to the M41A Pulse Rifle, the G11

*There is an editing mistake as Ripley is arming herself to get newt; she grabs a pulse rifle and a flame thrower off the rack, but sets them down in the wrong order.  Grabs rifle, puts down flame thrower, grabs flame thrower, puts down rifle.

(2:30:10): *The Powerloader could either be suspended from cables on the ceiling, or in this case, with a pole armout the back. 

The Reebok Alien Stompers sneakers

685

(5 replies, posted in Episodes)

Show notes for Transformers.  About what you'd expect meets the eye.

Transformers on Amazon.com
Transformers on IMDB
They talk about it later in the film, but the Mars mission is supposed to be Beagle 2.
Transformers was nominated for the Visual Effects Oscar in 2007, along with POTC: At World's End, and The Golden Compass, which won.
Magic beans / One piece of magic
Anamorphic Format
Magic Hour
District 9 director Neill Blomkamp's commercial for Citroen; if Trey's car could dance, it would look like this.
An excellent breakdown of depth of field.
Gradient
Lens flare; just watch Star Trek.
Pixel aspect ratio
Bokeh
Olivia Wilde
David Mamet
No no no NO!
Michael Bay demands things be AWESOME!
Conservation of detail
The gunship is an AC-130.They're badass.
A perfect movie
On Directing Film, by David Mamet.
Meisner acting technique
The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act
Mass shifting
Jennifer's Body on Rotten Tomatoes
Painting the target
Laurentian Abyss
Ohio Guardsman Scott Nall, who officially changed his name to Optimus Prime.Also another guy who changed his name to Megatron.

686

(44 replies, posted in Episodes)

Some great points being made here. Jeffery's bit about our imagination:

"We're curious and we're lazy and we're just clever enough to do things without thinking them all the way though; this is both our core weakness, and our unique strength."

reminded me of a similar point brought up Michael Crichton's Sphere.

I hope I am not spoiling the story for anyone here, but basically what happens is that the characters gain the ability to make what they imagine real.  There is a quote that goes something like:

"...if you imagine good things, you get delicious shrimp for dinner; if you imagine terrible things, you get monsters trying to kill you."

In the end, as the main protagonist, Norman, is inside the Sphere, he explains it (to himself) thusly:

"The ability to imagine, is the largest part of what you call intelligence.  You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem, or making something happen, but <i>imagining it</i>, is what makes it happen.  This is the gift of your species, and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings; you imagine wonderful things, and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice.  You say you have inside you both the power of good, and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you, the ability to imagine."

I would go so far as to say that the ability to imagine is what the first monolith imparted to the apes on the plain, if indeed it imparted anything at all, but for the sake of discussion let us say it did.  One might wonder why it did not also impart a sense of morality e.g., use the antelope's thighbone to hunt for food, not to kill each other, but to be fair morality, particularly absolute morality, is a human construct, and indeed, another tool we imagined.

I am aware of the whole religion aspect with regard to morality, but I'm not going there except to point out that religion is also merely a tool we imagined.

Now, let us imagine the time between the first two monoliths as being a measure of our ability to imagine.  We find the second monolith, and it sends out a signal.  Nothing is imparted this time, but our imagination has developed to the point where, while we can imagine what is out there, we need to know for certain.  So we imagine ourselves a vessel, and we imagine ourselves a computer to run it.

At this point the trouble we face is, ironically, a lack of imagination.  In the beginning, we knew nothing, and then we gained the ability to imagine.  So we began to imagine things we did not know for certain; in essence this was the beginning of science.  This would start small, "I can imagine what is on the other side of that hill, but I need to know for certain."  So you set out with all these images zipping around your head, and then you reach the crest of that hill, and whatever you were imagining is replaced with what is actually there.  Add several hundred thousand years of evolution, and you get a story where we have developed our imagination to the point where what we are imagining can be realized; we can imagine a vessel that can take us to Jupiter, and a computer to run it, great!  And why? Because while we can imagine what is out there, we are not content with that; we need to know what is out there. 

The problem we have created for ourselves in HAL, is that our imagination has grown beyond our control.  In effect what happened with HAL, is the same thing that happened with Apollo 1.  In both cases we used our imagination and built something truly awesome, and in both cases we were let down by circumstances we had not imagined.

I have to wonder then, what the intelligence that created the monoliths would have made of us.  Would they see us as we see HAL?  Generally speaking HAL is regarded as evil (he is #13 villain on AFI's 100 years, 100 Heroes and Villains), and certainly no one will argue that killing his entire crew was a good thing, but to those of us who have studied the film, we generally understand that he is simply trying to complete the mission, and for HAL, the mission is the sole purpose for his existence.  While we may disagree with his methods, we also have to understand that HAL is a product of our imagination.  We could have imagined HAL with a sense of morality but why?  Who would have imagined a set of circumstances under which HAL would calculate that the best chance for the mission to succeed, and for him to eliminate the crew? 

We have reached a point in our imaginative evolution where our tools have become so complex that we no longer understand them fully; I doubt that any one person in that universe could accurately predict how HAL would react to any given set of circumstances.  We have effectively lost the ability to imagine situations and things that our imagination cannot grasp.  I really wish the film had touched on religion at some point, because in addition to moral value, another key purpose of religion is to explain the unexplainable, or at least help us come to terms with things we cannot understand.

Based solely on the film it is difficult to posit where the third monolith fits into this model, but I wonder if an argument cannot be made for Dave’s return to Earth as the Starchild, as messianic.  I do not mean to suggest that the creator’s of the monoliths are deities, but as has been pointed out in numerous commentaries, any sufficiently advanced technology can be regarded as magic, or if you prefer, the work of God.  We spend the entire film with characters that do not regard the world they live in as in any way extraordinary.  Even today that is true, and my argument is that while we have films like 2001 to remind us of the awesomeness of our world, the people that inhabit the world of 2001 need someone to come along and remind them.  Obviously there is no one inhabiting that universe that can do that, hence the need for someone to come along and point it out.  Dave experiences things he could not have imagined, he himself is re-imagined in a way, and sent back as a messenger of sorts.

Remember in school when the teacher would give you some paper, crayons, scissors, glue, etc., then leave you basically on your own for a while?  Most of the time these efforts were rewarded, and given a place of honor on the refrigerator, and every once in a while someone drew something that is got them a visit to the principal’s office.  Now imagine it a few years later, Mom has pulled out a bunch of them and you’re looking at them together, and suddenly you remember how much fun it was.  You remember how powerful your imagination was back then.

Now imagine that all of us are those children, and the Starchild is the mother. 
Now imagine that you get an idea.
Imagine that idea being Photoshop.

That’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

687

(23 replies, posted in Episodes)

Link dump for District 9.  Non-humans are welcome here.

District 9 at Amazon.com
District 9 on IMDB
Alien Nation
Humans Only at Comic Con
Christopher Johnson's site, with links to MNU and other marketing.
Real Prawns
"Jan van der Merwe" jokes of South Africa
Alive in Joberg, the short film on which District 9 was based.
There is a lot more where that came from; just search YouTube for Niell Blomkamp. (My personal favorite is Halo: Landfall which takes place moments before the beginning of Halo 3.)
Breakdown of Weta's projects, both in model work and CGI.
Trail of Tears
Sharto Copley interview where he talks about how allhis dialoge was improvised.
Jason Cope provided the motion capture for Christopher Johnson.
Apartheid
Assuming that Wikus is the same age as Sharlto Copely, and the aliens landed in 1982, he would have been 9 years old; 28 years would conceivably be long enough for the exchange of basic linguistics.
MacGuffin
Worker Caste
Non-Newtonian fluids
As you know scene
Unobtainium
One piece of magic
Premise vs. plot.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in 1971. Several videos are availble on YouTube.
The Milgram Experiment
Moral Absolutism
Tribalism
What Brian refers to as Universalists.
Character Arc
Seven Generation Sustainability
Seventh Generation the company.
Vivisection
From what I've been able to find, Henti is Anime porn. No, no link.
The Kuiper Belt
The Invese Square Law
Our sun isn't massive enough to go supernova, it'll probably swell into a Red Giant, but we've got about 5 billion years before we have to worry about it.
P.J. O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell
Helsinki (Stockholm) Syndrom
Current demographic of Palestine
Anti-gravity
David Mamet
The Red, we're big fans of The Red.

688

(27 replies, posted in Off Topic)

I'm Matt.  I live in a box in the DIF garage.  It's from an old refrigerator, so it's pretty roomy, but I've had to learn to sleep standing up.

Once a week they  let me out of my box to perform my duties as resident Down In Front PA, researcher, runner ...pretty much whatever they need.  They even let me sit in on the recording, but I have to be careful not to make any noise.  After the Aliens commentary they started taping my mouth shut during recording.  They say that if I'm good they might switch to a ball gag, which would be nice, since the tape tends to hurt coming off.

I also have to defend the computer from house cat during recordings.  We love her, but she she seems to know which keys on the keyboard to hit to make bad things happen.

In the coming weeks be sure to check out our forums where, for each commentary, I will be posting a series of links to topics that are discussed.

Speaking of which, gotta get back to work now.

689

(44 replies, posted in Episodes)

You're welcome Dave.

Just FYI, we're also working on a glossary of terms we've been using but not necessarily explaining in each episode, but at the moment it doesn't exist.  Don't panic, we promise, we're working on it.