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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Jeffery Harrell
Posts found: 801 to 825 of 845
802 2010-04-04 05:01:11
Topic: The era of personal computing is over (8 replies, posted in Off Topic)
"I'm interested," Teague says. "Make it a thread in OT," Teague says. Oy. Once invited into someone's house for a play-date comes the obligation to behave like a good guest. I don't do well under pressure.
Anyway. As the title says, the era of personal computing is over. Well. Almost over. Well. Ending. A bit. Ish.
Let's draw a line totally arbitrarily and declare that the era of personal computing began in 1977, with the invention of the Apple II. A saner person would probably plant the flag in 1984 at the advent of the Macintosh, but what the hell, let's be bold.
The killer app for the Apple II was really word processing. That wasn't the only thing you could do with one, but it was really the only practical thing. You could sit and stare at 40 columns of eye-scrapingly green type, then if you were very lucky (and a bit affluent) you could print what you'd written on a dot-matrix printer that sounded not entirely unlike a velociraptor with a tooth abscess. That's the practical thing that personal computers were good for in 1977.
They were also good for a small set of entirely impractical things. You could buy database programs for them, which you were then supposed to use to replace your drawer full of 3x5 cards with recipes written on them, or to record the serial numbers of all your possessions just in case you were ever robbed and needed to provide the police with a manifest of your house. Once you notice that the computer was in the den or the upstairs spare bedroom and conspicuously not the kitchen, or that if you were robbed the very first thing they'd have nicked would've been your insanely expensive personal computer, you can see why these ideas never took off.
If you wanted, you could buy computer magazines, take them home, flip to the back, and then spend two laborious hours carefully typing the BASIC program you found there into your computer only to discover that you'd made a typo that you absolutely cannot find.
Or you could also play games on your computer, if you were the sort of person who enjoyed Lemonade Stand or Oregon Trail or Zork. I lost a whole summer to Zork, thank you very much, and returned to junior high all pasty and pale for my trouble. "West of House" my ass. Fuckers.
Oh, the fun we had.
Anyway, eventually along came the Mac, and that's when computers started to become useful for things other than not storing your recipes, not getting programs to run and not making out with girls. With the Mac, and later the LaserWriter, then the Mac II and so on, computers became surprisingly capable tools for creativity. They were limited at first — in the earliest days, your creativity was limited to writing things in fonts that looked vaguely calligraphic — but they got better.
Oh. And I think some businesses used them too. Mostly for filling out forms, as best I can gather. And later, for inventing new kinds of forms and then requiring that they be filled out and then losing them because the computer malfunctioned.
But really, even in the early 1990s, the air-quotes "personal computer" was a fairly pointless thing. Some people chose to own computers for business reasons, some people considered computer-tinkering to be their hobby, but really there just wasn't much of a reason for the average individual to own a computer, or even to aspire someday to own one.
Then the Internet happened, and shit suddenly got real.
For (by that point) about fifteen years, personal computers had existed as tools for making things. They started out rudimentary — think fire-hardened pointy sticks and chips of flint — and eventually became slightly less rudimentary — hammers and chisels. But whether primitive or state-of-the-then-art they were really exclusively for making things; that's what they were good for.
With the Internet, computers were suddenly tools for consuming things. By the time the World Wide Web came along, it was possible to sit at a computer for an entire hour and do nothing but read and look at pictures. And then you had to go do something else because you'd finished reading everything on the Internet at that time. But the point is, there was stuff out there, and you could get to it through a computer.
There's a painting by Whistler. It's called "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket." It's a very dark painting, being of a firework at night. There's a story behind it, a pretty amusing one involving a famous art critic of the day. I'd learned about it in an art history class in high school. But I'd never seen the painting. Because it's very dark, you see. And the reproduction in the textbook was practically solid black. The teacher had a slide of it, but it was also practically indistinguishable. I could have gone to a library and found a book with a better picture, but I never bothered, because that was a pain.
One day in college I was hanging out in the computer lab between classes — because I'd spent my formative summers failing to beat Zork and thus didn't know how to talk to girls — and idly surfing this "World Wide Web" thing I'd heard about. (We didn't call it "surfing" in those days; back then, "surfing" still meant "channel surfing," which was sitting in front of the TV with the remote in your hand, flicking from channel to channel.) Purely by accident, I happened upon a photograph of that painting, "The Falling Rocket." It was incredibly low-resolution by our standards, maybe 200 pixels across or something. But for the first time, I could see it. Because it wasn't all gunked up with printing ink, or projected by a dim bulb in a half-lit classroom. There it was, right there in front of me, on a computer screen.
This was big.
Over the next decade, the computer screen became a window into the sum total of all human knowledge and culture. And I mean the sum total, warts and all. Great novels, great art, textbooks, encyclopedias, music, movies, porn, all of it. Our whole planetary culture, or at least as much of it as we'd been able to digitize, was out there just on the other side of the glass.
And suddenly the whole idea of a "personal computer" made sense. Fuck the recipes. Fuck Zork. (Fuck Zork anyway, because really, shit, man. A maze of twisty little passages all alike? Fuck.) The personal computer was your window into the sum total of all knowledge and culture.
And it was right around that time — say, ten or fifteen years ago — when we all started to realize that the window was really small. And it was covered in shit. And it had bars over it.
See, computers are pretty good tools for making things. They're not perfect, to be sure, and they sure have evolved a lot from those early days of the Apple II. But when you think about the fact that you can use your laptop to do everything from write a novel to compose a song to make a feature film to sequence the DNA of some frog nobody's ever heard of, they're kind of awesome, as tools go.
But computers are shit for looking at things. Seriously, they're just appallingly bad. If you go look at a painting in a museum, all you have to do is walk up to it and stand there. You can get as close as you want — well, within reason — or you can stand back and view it from a distance. You can look at it from this side or that side just by moving your head, or maybe your feet if it's one of those really big paintings. To read a book, all you have to know how to do is turn pages. And, well, read I suppose, but let's take that one as a given. To listen to recorded music, your mandatory skill set basically starts and stops with knowing how to identify and press the "play" button.
But computers? Man, computers have to be understood. They have to be learned. There's a whole galaxy of basic skills you need just to use a computer. We even had a name for it once: "computer literacy," they called it. It was taught in schools! To kids! "This is a keyboard," they would say. "This is a mouse." Shit you guys all take for granted was once homework material. There were tests. And you had to study to pass them.
It's understandable that we have to teach kids to read. But can you imagine sending kids to a whole semester of classes to teach them how to use a book? Or how to watch a movie? I don't mean like film-school watch-a-movie; I mean just how to watch a movie. "Okay, class, this week we're going to cover how to walk down an aisle and sit in a seat. I know that sounds intimidating, but if you study hard and do all the exercises, I'm sure you can master it." It's ridiculous!
We took the sum total of all human knowledge and culture and locked it up in a warehouse with tiny, grime-encrusted windows with bars on them. And in order to peek through the bars, we made people pass a test.
It's insane, is what it is.
But things are changing. For the first time, things are really actually starting to change. People have talked about changing things for years, but it's all been locked up in research labs and doctoral theses. Today — I mean literally today, this very day — things are actually starting to change out here in the real world.
And it's 'cause of the iPad.
Now, I don't like to sound all worked-up. But it's hard to avoid it in this case. The iPad is the first high-profile, widespread device that's specifically designed to be invisible. When you're using it, you're directly interacting with whatever's on the screen. The device itself is supposed to just vanish, leaving you standing there with a Web page hanging in the air in front of you. Or a movie. Or a book. Or whatever.
The nerds call it "transparent computing." I call it a healthy shot of Windex on the shit-caked window into our culture we call the personal computer.
There are folks out there who declare that the iPad is a bad thing. A three-eyed goat born under a full moon is taken as no surer sign of the apocalypse. Yes, Cory Doctorow, I'm looking at you. The iPad is all sealed up, these people say. You can't get inside it and tinker around. You can't break it, and fix it, and learn about it. You can't install some random, obsolete freeware you downloaded off an FTP site on it. And these things are supposed to be, somehow, bad.
But guys. Seriously. That stuff is the shit on the window. Those are the things that prevent people from being able to consume, experience and participate in our culture. Guys like Cory Doctorow think these obstacles are like those little pleasure nubs on exotic condoms, designed to give bursts of delight to the unsuspecting newbie. They don't get that they're actually severe-tire-damage spikes lining the onramp to the information superhighway.
(There's another blast from the past. Oh, how the mighty metaphors have fallen.)
Are computers going to go away? Of course not. To be pedantic, there are now more computers in the world than there are red blood cells in the average person's body. There are computers everywhere. Your Blu-Ray player has a fucking sophisticated computer inside it, just so you can see every pore on George Clooney's beautiful, beautiful face. Computers are ubiquitous these days.
To be less pedantic and more in the spirit of the question, computer workstations aren't going to go away either. We use them all the time to make stuff! They're essential to our society now, and nothing is going to displace them any time soon.
But the idea of the "personal computer" has reached its zenith and has begun to wane. People should have access to everything the Internet contains — all the art, all the literature, all the entertainment, all the porn, all the opinion, all the porn, all the discussion, all the porn. All of it, the whole shebang. It should be there, at everybody's fingertips. But a personal computer makes a lousy window into that repository. And I think we've finally begun to recognize that. And more importantly, I think we've finally begun, as a culture, to make a concerted effort to do things differently.
I don't think the iPad is anywhere close to the be-all, end-all. But it's a good start. And more important than any of the iPad's actual merits or shortcomings, it's significant as being the first large-scale push toward something better than a shitty, grime-encrusted, barred window into the Internet. It's a sign that smart people are thinking about this stuff, and that's good.
But we should also bear in mind that thirty years from now, there's gonna be something in our everyday lives — some device, or system, or something — that makes the iPad look as primitive and as pointless as an Apple II.
I don't know about you guys, but that thought both thrills and terrifies me.
803 2010-04-04 04:59:51
Re: damn trojans (3 replies, posted in Off Topic)
I had a nasty case of nVIR A back in 1987. Pain in the ass, that one was.
804 2010-04-04 00:45:27
Re: So, uh. (9 replies, posted in Off Topic)
I have this whole rant queued up in my brain titled "The era of personal computing is over." I'd type it up and paste it in here, but you guys would throw me off your forum for being a bore.
805 2010-04-03 11:48:56
Re: So, uh. (9 replies, posted in Off Topic)
I see the iPad as a pure luxury device, like a gold-plated gravy boat or a toothbrush handle carved out of a chunk of the True Cross. I see absolutely no practical application for it in my life, but that doesn't stop me wanting one.
Okay, I can think of one practical application for it. I've been doing a consulting gig lately, and because it's very button-down-Dockers-make-these-your-primary-action-items, I've had to shuffle a lot of documents around. I've grown remarkably tired of printing crap out, showing it to managers in meetings, then seeing it go right into the shredder. If I had an iPad with Dropbox on it, I could just pass the iPad around to show people things, rather than wasting paper. Want a copy for yourself? Here, lemme email you the PDF.
But back in the real world, it'll be a pure toy. If I'm doing an editing or compositing job, say, I'd keep it propped up on the console to show me my email. Kick off a render? I'd grab the iPad and surf or check Twitter or what have you. Pure toy.
But a really, really cool toy. I want.
Anybody got $900 they're not using for anything? I'll give it a good home.
806 2010-04-03 04:04:46
Re: So, uh. (9 replies, posted in Off Topic)
Or did you mean something movie-related? Um. I want an iPad 'cause there's a Netflix app for to watch the movies.
Or did you mean something interesting? I got nothin', brother.
808 2010-04-01 00:46:36
Re: Transformers 2 - Revenge of the Fallen (52 replies, posted in Episodes)
No farting parachutes, though, right? Somebody tell me that there can be no farting of parachutes.
809 2010-04-01 00:36:10
Re: Transformers 2 - Revenge of the Fallen (52 replies, posted in Episodes)
Trey wrote:
and then live on TV the Decepticons attack, and right behind the President Air Force One transforms into a giant fucking robot?
Holy.
Shit.
Friends and well-wishers, that's a movie I'd watch the fuck out of.
810 2010-03-31 23:17:58
Re: Transformers 2 - Revenge of the Fallen (52 replies, posted in Episodes)
Aw shucks. I mean, thanks and all, but I'm really not sure what I spewed out would be such a good movie at all. I just walked down to the corner store and back, and while I did I was thinking about where you could squeeze a human being and some conflict into that story. Cause what's in my head sort of depends on the alien robots being both alien and robotic. They're REALLY different from us, which has the potential to be interesting if you're into that sort of thing, but it doesn't make 'em relateable. Relatable? However you spell that.
So I'm thinking, okay. The President comes out and says … here, blah, whatever he says. The President can't take a shit without 30% of the country thinking it's the end of the world, so obviously there's a conflict there. There's the "We're harboring refugees" angle versus the whole "It's not our war" angle, and that's a story that's both relevant and (hey, bonus) easy to tell. But it's awfully cerebral, y'know? I don't mind that, 'cause those are the kinds of movies I happen to like, but that's not the only snack on the craft services table. What I think both the Transformers movies did well was to take a fairly relatable human character and put him in the center of the story. So much else was wrong, but props to them for that, 'cause that could have been on their list of failures, and they averted it. So yeah.
On the other hand, we could take a total War of the Worlds angle here, and introduce a POV character with absolutely no power in the story, and no large-scale goals. He just wants to get out of the burning city, he wants to find his kids, whatever. And the Big Story™ happens around him, or whatever. That's okay too, but that story has been told before, so I'm not wild about it.
I guess what attracts me about the Transformers concept — not the cartoons or the toys or the movies, but just the central concept — is this idea of mixing the utterly mundane with the ineffably incomprehensible. There's this giant robot from outer space who literally could not be more different from me, who I'd probably have a hard time even recognizing as sentient he's so different, and yet he hides out for fear of his life by disguising himself as a garbage truck.
That idea feels, like, sexy to me, or whatever. It's seductive. That premise is a great big sandbox, and there's a lot of playing you can do in it. I'm just pissed that what we've gotten instead is a decades-long series of kids' shows and stupid movies that exist for no purpose other than to sell toys and cars, respectively.
Anyway. That's how I see it. But I'm just some guy who listened to a podcast and got all typey.
811 2010-03-31 22:48:13
Re: Transformers 2 - Revenge of the Fallen (52 replies, posted in Episodes)
Trey wrote:
Oddly enough, I get it now. The podcast still works even with no knowledge of the movie. Whaddaya know.
Well, I'm sorry to say that I think this isn't the best test case of that. During the second hour, I think it was, the guys totally flipped off the movie and talked about skydiving for like ten minutes. Which was great, by the way.
I gotta say, it seems like this movie is one that very nearly broke the whole four-friends-in-your-head concept. I'm not complaining, but you guys just seemed so deeply, deeply unhappy. Even Teague's heroic attempts to get a workshop-thing going didn't really take off, 'cause what can you say other than "This movie sucks."
I've always had a problem with Transformers for some reason, way before the movies. I guess it's cause I was just slightly too old when the cartoon was a thing, or maybe too young, or anyway not in exactly the right demographic group. I was seven years old (or whatever) on a Saturday morning asking those same questions Twig brought up. Why cars? Why a gun? (I think Megatron turned into a gun, one that mysteriously got small.) Why do they turn into ANYTHING, and more specifically, why these things? It just never clicked for me.
So I think I'd suck at workshopping these movies, 'cause I'd be all stuck-up insistent that we start all the way over. Okay, robots that turn into mundane things. That's our given. Well … why? Obviously they're disguising themselves; they're hiding. Hiding from what? Okay, there was a robot civil war on their home planet, and the heroes LOST, like big-time. I don't mean to be offensive, but I'm thinking like Jews-in-1944-type lost. Victims of genocide, handful of survivors fleeing and trying to hide just to stay alive. Why was there a war? Oh, who cares. Ethnic cleansing. Religion. Water rights. There are plenty of stupid but entirely plausible reasons in history for wars of extermination.
So these refugees scatter themselves around the galaxy, and eventually come to Earth. They can disguise themselves to hide, but only within the strict rules of mechanics and stuff. So a robot couldn't turn into a hot sorority chick, JUST TO NAME A TOTALLY RANDOM EXAMPLE. And they're big, thirty feet tall or whatever. So what do they become? Machines. Big machines, like locomotives. Like turbine generators in coal plants. Like tanks. Oooh, yeah, maybe that's what drew them to Earth in the first place. They sniffed at us and discovered that we were just starting to build big machines (think 1900-ish here), so they thought this was a plausible place to hide out.
So they do, they manage somehow (handwave) to sneak into power plants after dark and turn themselves into generators, whatever. And little by little, our technology evolves, and they're with us all the way, hiding in plain sight. The Large Hadron Collider? That's like a dozen Transformers, man.
But there's a reversal! The bad Transformers, on their genocidal crusade, detect Earth by our radio emissions or something (even though that's way implausible), and come to check us out. They find the surface of the planet positively TEEMING with Transformers! Or so they think, because it never occurs to them that organic life might build big machines that AREN'T transforming robots. So they go full-on war on us, shooting planes out of the sky and shit, blasting power plants, destroying trains, taking out every large machine they see, cause they think they're Transformers.
(There's your justification for the war, by the way. The Decepticons are pseudo-religious zealots who think that Transformer-kind was created in the image of their divine creator, and that to change their form is blasphemy. In the most literal sense. Only God has the power to choose a sentient being's form, blah blah blah. Fill in the blanks yourself.)
So here's Earth, early 21st century, us mindin' our own. And out of the sky comes this handful — like six or eight, whatever — Decepticons. Just a few, 'cause they're basically the Decepticon equivalent of a recon patrol poking around in the bush. They come screaming out of the sky and start senselessly destroying every large machine they encounter. Maybe they're not even aware that we exist at first; maybe they see us as organic parasites and pay no attention. But it's this big thing, tens of thousands die in mere hours, all over the news, big crisis.
And then the President gets on TV and is all, "Uh, yeah. What do you think, that we're stupid? That we can't tell the difference between a turbine generator and a giant freakin' robot?"
And then we cut to an aerial shot of a 747 cargo plane transforming into a giant fucking robot and opening up a can of whoopass on the Decepticons.
See, it turns out the Transformers have been an almost-open secret for a hundred years. We let them hide here, and in return they're basically our willing slaves. They run our nuclear reactors and all that stuff, and we keep their existence a secret. They're really good with mechanics and electronics and whatnot — it's innate with them — so they help us out, technologically. That's why the advancement of the practical sciences exploded in the 20th century, 'cause we had these basically idiot savants helping us out. It's not that they've got all this magic technology and they're giving it to us; why would they ever need to design a nuclear reactor? It's just that they GET engineering and stuff on a level humans can't, so they solve problems for us. It took decades to learn how to express the problems in terms they understand, but once we did, we got shit like transistors and MRI machines and iPhones. Oh, and those big canister things on utility poles that step down the high-voltage power lines to feed our houses. Yeah, some wise guy thought it'd be a HILARIOUS joke to name those things "transformers." Almost had an XK-class breach of security over that one. You probably heard of him. Guy by the name of Julius Rosenberg.
Anyway, so the President's like "Yeah, we knew this day might come, but we were foolish enough to think it wouldn't be in our lifetimes, so we blew it. We didn't tell you the truth. But that doesn't mean we were idle." And all over the planet, locomotive engines and ballistic missile subs and cargo planes all start transforming, while the President's all "Don't worry, it'll all be over soon, just stay indoors," and fucking war erupts in the upper atmosphere.
And the sequel hook writes itself. "We're safe now, wight, Mr. Giant Wobot?" "For the moment, Little Timmy. But that was just the first battle of a new war. A war in which you, someday, must fight." "But not awone, wight, Mr. Wobot?" "No, Little Timmy. Not alone. For just as we have been for a hundred years, we will be with you."
Music swells, smash cut to credits, please deposit your trash in the receptacles by the exits.
I guess there'd probably need to be, like, a character or two in there. Maybe somebody who wants something, and spends the movie doing interesting things in a series of attempts to get whatever he wants. But that's really just fluff. You can squeeze that in there right after you spell-check and right before you put the pages numbers on, right?
812 2010-03-26 00:47:13
Re: Suggest a movie! (2,061 replies, posted in Episodes)
Oh good lord. Merely thinking about Primer gives me a headache. Don't get me wrong; I think it's a brilliant film. But I've seen it three times, and I'm no closer to understanding the plot than I was before my first viewing.
Which means it'd either be the best Down in Front ever, or ninety minutes of "four friends in your head" going "Fuck if I know" over and over again.
813 2010-03-24 11:16:06
Re: Suggest a movie! (2,061 replies, posted in Episodes)
This might not make any sense, but I loved Synecdoche even though I didn't enjoy watching it at all. It's in the same category as Antichrist and Requiem for a Dream for me.
I don't think it's supposed to make-sense-make-sense. I think it's dream logic. I found it uncomfortable and unpleasant to watch, but it resonated with me.
If you guys do that one, it'll be one I listen to without the film going.
What about There Will Be Blood? That one popped into my head 'cause on that same list of resonated-even-though-I-didn't-enjoy is Punch Drunk Love, which I admit I have never yet seen all the way through. I was captivated by the long takes and the idiosyncratic camera work, but Adam Sandler just made me too damn uncomfortable. I turned it off two thirds of the way through 'cause I was just too freaked out.
814 2010-03-23 22:06:35
Re: Reading List (10 replies, posted in Off Topic)
If we're willing to expand this to books-on-film in general (which we may not be; feel free to slap me), I can't recommend strongly enough Walter Murch's "In the Blink of an Eye." It's an editing book by an editor for editors, but it will also get you thinking of the natural of film as a storytelling medium in new and wonderful ways. He goes into great length about why, for example, a cut works. Not any specific cut; I mean cuts in general. Cause if you think about it, they should work. They should be disorienting as hell, but they're not, and Murch talks about why.
It's also a deliciously bite-sized little book. I loaned my copy away years ago never expecting to get it back, but if it's 200 pages long I'll eat my shoe.
815 2010-03-23 03:20:52
Re: Titanic (36 replies, posted in Episodes)
I gotta say, I was so glad to hear you guys give some love to this movie. Cause I'm man enough to admit that I saw "Titanic" seven times in the theater. I'm not kidding, I really did. The first few time was mostly fueled by the trailer, the second time was so I could absorb what blew me away the first time. The third time I got it to see it in 70mm with THX sound in a great theater that doesn't exist any more. And the freakin' fourth through seventh times were just for the sheer joy of it.
I forget who said it. It might've been one of my friends, or it might have been a reviewer or something. But the point made was that the movie was so skillfully made that by the time the iceberg showed up, I was genuinely surprised and horrified. I fell for every cheap trick the movie pulled, and I dug that.
Like you guys pointed out, there are plenty of things to criticize about the movie. But at least for me, the ways the movie works far outweigh the things that don't succeed. Even though it became fashionable to hate on it, I think despite its flaws it's a genuinely good movie.
One thing was pretty funny though, at least to me at the time. I remember back in 95 or 96, some stills from the movie's visual effects made it into some industry magazine or other. I'm pretty sure it wasn't "Cinefex," but it was something in that genre. And we passed them around the shop I was working in at the time, and laughed because they were so cheap-looking. Turns out they were stills from the animated exposition scene at the beginning of the film. When I got to see the whole thing in theaters, I was duly impressed.
816 2010-03-22 23:51:38
Re: Titanic (36 replies, posted in Episodes)
I hain't listened to it yet, 'cause my iTunes just grabbed it — so no spoilers! — but I gotta say. A 202-minute podcast about a 194-minute film? You guys really didn't spend a lot of extra time on this one, huh? Sit down, get serious, 'cause there's a hell of a lot of movie to watch.
817 2010-03-22 11:58:23
Re: Guilty pleasure movies. (34 replies, posted in Off Topic)
Deep Rising! An unappreciated masterpiece!
818 2010-03-20 23:21:40
Re: Revolutions (54 replies, posted in Episodes)
Let me make this clear from the up-front: I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
But that said, it didn't bother me when Neo short-circuited the Sentinels at the end of Reloaded. And it didn't bother me when he blew up the artillery-shell-things in Revolutions.
But it bothered the shit out of me that after he'd been blinded he could still "see."
The other stuff? It's at least possible to fanwank that. Neo left a residual "echo" of himself in the Matrix after his encounter with the Architect. (How? Don't care, just roll with me for a sec.) That "echo" manifested itself in the real world as an override directive in the machines' programming. The Sentinels self-destructed or whatever because they were about to harm Neo. Same with the artillery shells. Is this a good explanation? Not particularly, but I would have gone along with it. As Trey likes to say occasionally, "I'm going to allow this."
But the whole "seeing" thing? There's no way that can be handwaved or fanwanked. We're talking about Neo, outside the Matrix, somehow getting sensory input that he should not be getting. It simply can't be explained by the established rules of the universe.
But frankly, even that could have been played with in a way that would have salvaged the sequels for me. Remember Morpheus' speech from the dojo? "It has rules, rules like gravity. Some can be bent, others can be broken." Of course this makes literal sense in the Matrix — Morpheus and the others, and Neo most of all, are in a video game, and they've got the cheat codes. Morpheus teaches him to turn on noclip, and at the end of the movie Neo stumbles upon god mode.
All Neo had to do was say to Morpheus, half-conscious, in a whisper, "Some can be bent, others can be broken." And I'd be like, "Wow, okay. They're expanding the premise of the first movie to tell us that reality is more nuanced and complex than we think it is."
A second magic bean? Eh, maybe, depending on how it's handled on the page and on the screen. Done right, it could have been, there's only one magic bean, but it's larger and more interesting than you thought it was.
But the whole "Neo as the blind prophet" thing was just bullshit, sorry, but it was. Not only was it unsupported — nay, unsupportable! — by anything that came before or after, it was a shameless rip-off of Muad'dib's character arc from the first Dune sequel novel, and yes, I'm a nerd, please kill me. At least in that case it was established early on that the character had powers either supernatural or at least preternatural, and the whole "where we're going we don't need eyes" thing was built upon that. But Neo with his magical spidey senses? Bullshit, I say. Bullshit.
That said, I have to confess I actually like the Matrix sequels. They're not great, but they entertain me. I just don't wanna think about them very hard, 'cause it angries up the blood.
819 2010-03-20 14:42:02
Re: Studio 60 (7 replies, posted in Off Topic)
I guess I'm the one guy who's never seen "30 Rock." I'm seeing a therapist about it, though, so it's gonna be okay. I'll get through it.
I don't think Sorkin's seriousness was, by itself, a problem. EVERYBODY takes what they do that seriously. Dorkman's totally got a point that the audience can more easily get invested in the drama surrounding the presidency than in the drama surrounding a weekly sketch show, but I think there was a real opportunity there to make that part of the story. Hell, there was an opportunity there to add a metatextual comment (ugh, sorry) about Sorkin himself. Making the fact that they take themselves too seriously part of the characters, you know? And somehow making it endearing instead of infuriating.
JACK
For God’s sake, Danny, you
work in television! You’re
not running the free world
here. This isn’t that
important!
DANNY
It is that important.
JACK
It’s not important!
DANNY
You know what thirty
million people do every
Friday night? They watch
us. They’re tired, they’ve
worked all week, they’ve
fought with their wives
and yelled at their kids.
They’re behind on the
mortgage and can’t afford
their insurance. We forget
that, you and me, because
when was the last time you
had hamburger helper for
dinner, you in your
three-thousand-dollar
suit. Your shoes cost more
than most people make in a
week. We have no idea what
it’s like out there for
these people, living
paycheck to paycheck, just
trying to scrape up enough
to maybe buy Christmas
presents. And every Friday
night, they watch us. And
we tell them it’s gonna be
okay. We tell them the
world sucks and the people
in charge are stupid and
you know what? It’s gonna
be okay. Sit down, take a
load off, have a couple
laughs--
MATT
A couple?
DANNY
You been off your game
lately.
MATT
Fair point.
DANNY
(to JACK)
Life sucks, Jack. Not for
me and not for you, but
for the people out there
in what you so derisively
call flyover country …
life sucks out there. We
make it a little better.
JACK
You really do think you’re
some kinda messiah, don’t
you, Danny?
DANNY
No.
(beat)
But if He’s out there, I
hope He tunes in tonight.
Cause it’s gonna be a
great show.
JACK, speechless and shaking
his head, walks out.
DANNY
Too much?
MATT
No, I liked it. But
apparently I've been off
my game lately, so what do
I know.
DANNY
Shut up.
MATT
Okay.Instead it was all "This is serious business!" "Yes, I agree that this is serious business!" "Let us take it as a given that this is serious business and proceed with our serious business!" "Indubitably!"
820 2010-03-20 13:01:31
Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.) (122 replies, posted in Episodes)
When I first saw eps 1 and 2, I thought they were setting up the Jedi as a decadent and proud order so lost in their own navel-gazing that they were headed for a tragic fall. And past all the awkward writing and overpowering VFX, I thought that was a bold move, to make them flawed and arrogant rather than god-like.
Except they never got their comeuppance in part 3. There's a sort of head-fake toward Palpatine blaming the Jedi for a coup that never happened, but that's all we got. I would rather the Jedi HAD tried to assassinate the chancellor, doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons, and being galactically discredited because of it. Some historical allegories would have been uncomfortably fun too, maybe throwing in a little dialogue to allege that the Jedi use the blood of human children as part of their dark rituals inside that mysterious temple.
Not sure how that would have worked in a movie, though. It might be great in a novel, but too expository for a film. I dunno.
(Pre-coffee edit for clarity: Yes, I remember the whole Mace Windu fight thing, much as I've tried to put it behind me. I guess what I meant was that I wish the Jedi had spent two movies smug and overconfident, only to realize what was up and be driven to the point of desperation by it. And that they'd decided not to try to arrest the chancellor or play by the rules, but that he just had to be flat-out murdered for the good of the galaxy. Plan backfires, Jedi discredited, blah blah blah.)
821 2010-03-19 17:23:23
Re: Studio 60 (7 replies, posted in Off Topic)
Agreed that the pilot is one of the best ever. I was a little disappointed that they changed the callsign of the fictional network from UBS to whatever it ended up being; the "Network" shout-out was too good to last, I guess.
But for whatever reason, the rest of the series didn't really work for me. It was missing something, I don't know what. And I worship The West Wing; I've got the first four seasons on DVD, and the rest of the show I never bothered to watch after fucking Wells left Leo fucking dying in the fucking woods. Not that I'm bitter.
Sports Night, on the other hand … man. It's got some of the tightest writing ever. There's this whole story arc that totally pivots on just one quietly delivered line, and the writing is so tight I'm not even spoiling anything for anybody when I quote it:
"You're wearing my shirt."
822 2010-03-19 17:18:51
Re: Suggest a movie! (2,061 replies, posted in Episodes)
redxavier wrote:
though it's amusing that Sam Jones had to be dubbed.
He was? I had no idea. I actually saw him not that long ago, on an episode of Stargate SG-1 of all things. Yeah, he's still workin'. A little older, a little thicker about the middle, but still workin'. And he sounded not at all unlike he did in the movie.
On the subject of The Fifth Element, all I can say is "a thousand times yes." Also, "mooltipass."
823 2010-03-19 17:15:05
Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.) (122 replies, posted in Episodes)
I'm getting to this one late 'cause I just now this very minute discovered you can do an RSS thing with the forum (hi, I'm an idiot).
I think it's fair to call out the whole "Luke has magical powers" thing. Tim's right, that his tapping into those powers is the whole arc of the movie, but at the same time, it's never given more than a handwave. Some people can use the Force, and some can't, and that's just an axiom of the universe. It's not much of a stretch to say it's hereditary, given Luke's parentage, but if I remember right that's only hinted at in the movies, and only by Luke himself in Jedi. "The Force is strong in my family," he says, or something like that.
It's far easier to point and laugh at Han's line that he's never seen anything to make him believe in the Force, given that he would have been a teenager during the Clone Wars when armies of Jedi Knights swept across the galaxy. But hey, maybe he was just especially cynical. A flock of angels could sweep down from the sky and give everybody free cupcakes and lattes right now, and a lot of people (myself probably included) would declare the whole thing a viral marketing hoax by Starbucks, so who knows.
824 2010-03-16 15:27:48
Re: Suggest a movie! (2,061 replies, posted in Episodes)
"Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void. Without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all … you would've hidden from it in terror."
I can get down with some Flash Gordon. I mean, come on. Max von Sydow, Timothy Dalton, Brian Freakin' Blessed, and that guy whose name I'm blanking on from Fiddler on the Roof. It's a hell of a cast, and they play it absolutely straight every step of the way. I think Flash Gordon is in the same general class as The Princess Bride, only separated from it by some inherent charm and a Mark Knopfler soundtrack.
825 2010-03-11 01:07:52
Re: Suggest a movie! (2,061 replies, posted in Episodes)
I'm all for that, Trey. I've listened to a lot of Down-in-fronts on the train, or walking to the shops. With few exceptions, it's less like listening to a commentary sans movie and more like listening to four bright guys talk about a movie I've seen.
And now that I've said "with few exceptions" I feel morally obligated to name at least one, but I'm drawing a blank.
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