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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Zarban
Nick Hoult’s “peasant” garments looked almost identical to the jeans and hoodie he wore in WARM BODIES.
OMG I just had an idea for KING ARTHUR'S PEASANT IN A CONNECTICUT COURT. ©! ©! ©!
NOW YOU SEE ME (2013)
Great-looking and rather novel heist movie with a great cast that is not done justice by the lackluster script. Some fun, but the story feels like it was sold with the pitch "It's an ensemble heist like Ocean's 11 crossed with the impossible nonsense (and random hot foreign chick) of National Treasure". This would be a fun one to hear WAYDM take on.
A group of street magicians/con artists get recruited by a mysterious person to become a special team of stage magicians. They stage the heist of a Parisian bank, attracting the attention of the police, who learn more or less how it was done and... immediately give up on the case. They then rip off an insurance executive they've conned. In both cases, they give the money to the audience. Then they go on the lam before a final show/heist.
The point of view varies inexpertly, sometimes trying to get us inside with the magicians to build some character, but mostly staying with the cops, where we aren't in danger of figuring out the magicians' plan. This makes Mark Ruffalo's detective the main character, which sort of works except that we have a hard time figuring out whom to root for.
To be sure, we want to see the Robin Hood heists come off, so Ruffalo and Hot Foreign Chick are the bad guys, except they're kind of likeable (not a LOT, but enough). But then out of the blue we're given reason to hate Michael Caine as the insurance executive and reason to like Morgan Freeman as an Amazing-Randi-style debunker (but a debunker of magicians??). His character is pretty minor, tho, so it's confusing.
Also, most of the magic is so impossible that it's done with CGI, so what the fuck? But then the logistics of the heists are equally unlikely.
Note to screenwriters:
If you're handcuffed to a table in a police interrogation room, you are already under arrest. You are officially detained by the police against your will.
No one, no matter how rich, keeps $140 million in an ordinary bank account. Their accountant constantly shuffles money between checking and investment accounts as it comes in and goes out.
Magicians practice their tricks. Especially the dangerous ones.
I completely agree with Teague. There's something in my setup (Samson CO3U recorded in Audacity) that often produces a significant drop in quality when output to MP3 even at 80 or 96 Mbps, whereas I notice other podcasts output at 64 Mbps or even lower don't seem to suffer the same slight digital muddiness. If I were a better audio engineer, I'd figure it out. Maybe it has to do with sample rate or the LAME engine or something.
And of course mike technique is a huge factor. It always bugs me to hear podcasts recorded with headsets, and the speaker jams the mike against his lips like an airline pilot and pops every plosive in the language.
EDIT: re: John's Goldwave mention.... Noise reduction in Audacity is really quite good now and has been for 3 or 4 versions. Same with compression, which used to be disastrous. I use compression to raise whole tracks if they were recorded quietly (I process other people's commentaries sometimes before listening to them because it annoys me when they don't sound decent) but otherwise use it pretty sparingly because it's effects are not as predictable as I'd like.
ADDITIONAL EDIT: Teague is too modest. FIYH always sounds professional quality.
Slap Shot (1977) is a very funny sports movie in the usual sports movie formula, but weirdly almost falls apart in the third act, just when most sports movies are really coming together. (Compare Major League, the quintessential sports film in that it pretty much nails every trope just the right way.) In the Hollywood sports formula, the loveable losers get their act together and start winning, but it may not be enough. In the end, everything is resolved by winning the big game, including somehow repairing the main character's love life. But in Slap Shot, things actually get more complicated during the big game.
The story concerns a minor league hockey team called the Chiefs that is on the skids. The manager hires three thuggish brothers to create some interest, and the player/coach Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman, looking like he's having the time of his life) reacts by turning the whole team into thugs. But one, a smarter, more sensitive type named Ned Braden, refuses to get into fights. Now you might be thinking "that's pretty strange for a hockey player" and you'd be right, but it plays okay because the fighting is cartoonishly outrageous.
Reggie also lies to the players about the team moving to Florida to bolster their spirits, and with these tactics, the Chiefs start winning. Braden's marriage falls apart and Reggie can't get his estranged wife Francine to come back to him, but it looks like Reggie might be able to convince the mysterious owner not to dissolve the team.
That's when things get weird. It starts when Reggie meets the owner and reacts bizarrely to what he hears. But it really nearly goes off the rails when Braden sees his rehabbed wife during the big game. What happens next isn't set up beforehand, so the audience is just as baffled as the characters. It's especially weird because Braden has said some of the same things the owner says (and he cheats on his wife), yet we're supposed to like him and hate the owner.
It seems to me that Braden and his wife need a conversation about his behavior and hers that gets resolved by that climactic scene. ("If you give up hockey, I'll give up booze," and he counters "If you give up booze, I'll give up hockey.") The two characters are set up nicely as foils for Reggie and Francine, so part of it could be set up with a conversation with them. Then when Lily shows up, and Braden does what Reggie ought to have done, his marriage is repaired. Then Reggie would understand what's happening and answer some baffled character with "That's a man who's decided to fight for his marriage" instead of "Way to go, Ned. Way to go" which means nothing.
The cast is a lot of fun. Aside from the wonderful Newman, there's the great Strother Martin (failing to communicate, as usual), a young Lindsay Crouse as Braden's wife Lily, a young Swoosie Kurtz as another player's wife, and a host of real hockey players essentially playing themselves.
It was directed by George Roy Hill, who did Butch & Sundance and The Sting, among others. The directing, together with the charming performances, save the film really. Hill has characters react in ways that help the audience get how they're supposed to feel, even tho the story hasn't actually set up those feelings properly. It's really interesting.
I hadn't heard that he'd changed from Pym to Lang. That suggests he didn't have much of a script for a long time. Maybe then the creative differences lie in the realm of Wright failing to tie the story into the Avengers stuff once he did have a script.
I wonder if it was something like him insisting on exploring the bad marriage storyline, and the studio saying no way, which is the right choice. Comic books have hundreds of stories to tell, so they can go dark with one, but movies are far more limited and can't necessarily recover from something like that.
In my opinion, they shouldn't have gone the (half-assed) route of "Demon in a Bottle" in Iron Man 2 for just that reason. If you're going to make a movie out of Diff'rent Strokes, you don't do the molestation episode.
Thanks, everyone! Your kind, reassuring words are the perfect birthday present for me, today. I'll be sure to respond to them in detail, tomorrow.
Happy birthday, John. Keep in mind that childhood friends are merely friends of proximity. Those you make as an adult are friends of community.
On a side note, hey Heather Langenkamp... How YOU doin'?
This is unfortunate and comes obviously at a particularly depressing time, but it sounds like you're well rid of such a person.
One of the great things about this forum (and our own commentary collaborations) is the mutual respect we all afford one another's opinions. You can't have a meaningful discussion if you can't see some of what the other person is saying, and you certainly can't be persuasive. It sounds like this guy never developed that engine, and his contempt for and resentment of others was always lurking beneath the surface, even during the best times you spent with him.
I really hope for the best for you and your mom. My own mother's health is declining, and I find it confusing, frustrating, and saddening.
This was great fun. Thanks, guys.
EDIT: around 1:35:00, Fred Armisen should show up and demand "STUART, WHATREYUDOING?" because you totally become an episode of The Californians, talking about California highways and islands and shit.
...as a dad in his 30's...
...upper end of the age demo...
Re: Crash Course, John and Hank Green also do Mental Floss videos, which I usually find entertaining.
Link in the doobly-do.
Musk's tweeted offer to help is a classy move. He has the resources to get people involved in forming a proper board of directors and raising the money to build a proper museum. And it won't cost him $8 million personally.
It's possible that he has thought (or been told by his PR staff) that he needs to build a Tesla museum of some kind anyway, even if it's just in a corner of his corporate headquarters, off the lobby waiting room. It's just good policy. Most big corporations have something somewhere that displays some of their history.
EDIT: And I don't regard it as especially crass of Inman to ask. Everything he says is true, and it's the kind of thing that museum directors say to potential donors all the time. He's just a little clumsy to say it publicly on his little cat cartoons website.
I strongly suspect that a conversation between an established museum director and a potential donor would sound a lot like a Medieval friar trying sell an indulgence to a merchant.
I think I'm correct in saying that Ridley Scott was inspired by Giger's art and that he brought Giger on to Alien to help with production design even tho that wasn't Giger's thing. I wish there was more of that in the film industry.
Does anybody else get these invitations from Amazon Preview to take a survey about original content they're considering producing at Amazon Studios?
http://studios.amazon.com/development-slate/series
I don't know who's in charge, but they all seem to be the weirdest, lamest, nonsense I've ever heard pitched. And they all seem to have names like The Rich Inner Life of Penelope Cloud and Gortimer Gibbon's Life on Normal Street.
The ones I get asked about all seem to be aimed at 30- and 40-something women and feature fanciful career women getting their crazy, mixed up lives back together and traveling to Dubai or something. I don't have any special problem with that (other than the level twee going on) but why ask me about it?
And speaking of twee, not only is the main character of the latest one called Penelope Cloud, but she's a novelist and guest lecturer at Berkeley, has someone in her life mysteriously described as "her eleven-year-old, Spanish-speaking 'little sister', Adoración", and is infatuated with a male student named "Ivy".
However, it looks like anyone can submit a script to Amazon Studios, so maybe I'll finally have an outlet for my series about six gorgeous, brilliant, athletic, ethnically-diverse young people who are recruited by their college professor to travel back in time to right wrongs and fix the future and along the way find love and learn about life. But I'll have to find a better name than Sequence. Maybe Jilly, Jake, Jennifer, Jack, Tango, and Cash and the Tremendous Time Machine of Professor Marzipan.
Watching a bad actor who thinks he's a good actor is surreal. It's genuinely disorienting.
Maybe it's the cold medicine, tho.
I didn't like Psycho the first time I saw it. Not sure why. Now I think it's terrific.
I liked John Carpenter's The Thing just fine when I was a kid, but I thought of it as just a monster movie. Since then, tho, it's become one of my favorite films.
The Big Lebowski has gone from a 5 or so to a 6 or maybe 7. I have a hard time getting past why the Dude would hang out with Walter. It doesn't seem right for his character, and it makes no sense as part of the sly take on the noir subgenre.
Great episode. I don't watch most of those shows, but it was great to hear this retrospective.
And the Tokes & Stokes talk was fun. I bought two of those shirts, and they really look great.
Some people don't like Wes Anderson's arch style of writing and directing, but I do... at least enough to catch up with his films eventually. Even his love story is bloodless and twee, but that's where it derives its charm, in my opinion. If it were more serious, it would be ridiculous; if it were more comedic, it would be without heart. I love it.
I think it has taken Anderson time to perfect his idiom. I saw his films out of order and like the later ones more by steadily increasing measures, altho I have yet to catch up with Darjeeling Limited or his new one, Grand Budapest Hotel.
Yeah, hidey holes and secret playrooms seem to be pretty popular ideas on Pinterest too. I like the idea of a secret door under the eaves and into the adjoining hall closet, maybe.
I'm doing some home renovations that include finishing a room over the garage with 4-foot knee walls on either side. I love odd architectural details, so I'm trying to think of ways to use the sloped ceiling and space under the eaves. I already plan on a few cabinets that will be built into the knee wall and maybe a huge drawer containing a trundle bed. But I'd love to hear any more unusual ideas.
This will very likely be my new bedroom, but I'd be open to incorporating an element or two that would be interesting to a family with kids who would be the next buyer. (Hence the trundle bed idea; I don't host many sleepovers.)
Pinterest's ideas are basically variations on built-in cabinets.
https://www.pinterest.com/terrarosa/eaves/
Happy zombie apocalypse, Vladimir!
Weird. Friendsinyourhead.com scores perfectly clean across the board. Zarban.com scores poorly, for adult content, alcohol, and offensive language!
As a result of something I saw on Twitter regarding a Salon article, I'd like to vent for a moment about evolution. I wish people would stop saying that evolution produces more and more complex organisms and culminates in consciousness.
Evolution has no directionality. Evolution produces a great deal more single celled organisms than anything else. It has only produced consciousness one time in about a million. Humans and other higher animals are basically just wind-swept piles of sand in a vast landscape of nearly flat land. We are piles of accidents.
That is all.
John Hodgman had a really interesting take on sports on one Judge John Hodgman podcast. He eventually realized that he, like other nerds, missed out on the major advantages of sports: the rules provide a way of deciding for sure who is the winner and enable young people to practice physical, real-life conflict resolution. And when you lose (and you definitely sometimes will), you have a coach and teammates who will tell you to change your stance, practice your moves, try again, and don't give up.
So that's the point of any sport, I suppose. Actual board games and such don't have those things. (Whereas they do have strategy, turn-taking, rule-following, and so on).
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