876

(473 replies, posted in Episodes)

Life-size Falcon project...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20536090

877

(28 replies, posted in Episodes)

Here in Britain, books are a great way to avoid hearing about the royal womb for the next few months

Is there a list of Commentaries that were recorded but for whatever reason (loss of audio file?) the recording was lost?

Tolkien fans not arsed whether The Hobbit is loyal to book...

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/arts … 2112951061

There'll probably be completists out there that have to see it in every combination possible.

It'll be interesting to see if HFR takes off, or just feels like cheap video.

Here in the London, the main BFI IMAX cinema has just announced it won't be screening The Hobbit in HFR (48fps) IMAX, just the normal 24fps. Lots of irate geeks who want to experience to new technology will have settle for a regular cinema. Talk about a first-world problem.
And still lots of confusion between 15/70 3D IMAX and digital projection (with or without the 9 minute Star Trek prologue).

The Sydney IMAX is also not showing The Hobbit in 48fps

So you have the choice of either high resolution or high frame rate but finding both will be difficult unless you live in California...

http://www.48fpsmovies.com/48-fps-theater-list/

882

(28 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Jimmy B wrote:

My favourite line of dialogue from the prequels, said with a straight face is this-

Padmé- Hold me, like you did by the lake on Naboo; so long ago when there was nothing but our love. No politics, no plotting, no war.

I thank you......

Ow, that's painful. But is it as cringeworthy as this infamous example...

Anakin: I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth.

883

(28 replies, posted in Off Topic)

What's worse? Obscurantist academic writing, or fingernails on a chalkboard, or a dentist's drill, or this...?

Anakin: "You... are so... beautiful."
Padme: "It's only because I'm so in love."
Anakin: "No, it's because I'm so in love with you."
Padme: "So love has blinded you?"
Anakin: "Well that's not exactly what I meant."
Padme: "It's probably true."

884

(28 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Here's the winner of a Bad Writing Prize... Judith Butler...

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

885

(2 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Wow!! For all you VFX artists out here... now here's a pipeline...

886

(216 replies, posted in Episodes)

fireproof78 wrote:

But tight costumes and unrealistic bodies are not the only problem-look at the evolution of Power Girl's outfit:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-n6pCU1pKiG8/Tic-RDBHbjI/AAAAAAAAABE/UirmoJ37VFU/s320/power-girl-through-the-years-power-girl-supergirl-dc-comics-demotivational-poster-1276076621.jpg

If I get out my ruler, there's more flesh showing in the first image than the last one, due to the high boots.

You have to admit that since Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor, women are portrayed a lot less passively than in previous decades. Today they can be strong, independent, snarky, decisive, and confident.

887

(29 replies, posted in Off Topic)

What Darth Praxus said  big_smile

888

(216 replies, posted in Episodes)

Dorkman wrote:
avatar wrote:

Men and women are different. What is sexual to one, is not necessarily sexual to the other. That's why Dorkman's example of Ironman bending over is a false comparison. No woman would find that sexy. She may find a ripped male standing upright in a dominant position just as sexualized as men do of a woman bending over. It's the end result or the concept of sexualization that's the key, not the specific pose, as different poses work depending on gender. In that way, both males and females are sexualized, but in ways that reflect different readers' instincts.

As Trey says, you guys are making creationist arguments, where no matter what I say in response you're just going to repeat the same thing you said the first time as if I hadn't spoken at all. If you go back to my previous posts, I've already addressed exactly these points: sexualized and sexy are not the same, the fact that someone may incidentally find an image sexy is not the same as it being the primary purpose of the image, some people find feet sexy but a barefoot character is not inherently sexualized, etc.

And this is why an Intermission on the topic would be a complete waste of time.

Sexualized and sexy and idealized and "primary purpose" are just abstract categories with no clearly defined boundaries and lots of grey area in between. You have your own interpretation where one ends and another begins and that's fine. One man's "fuck doll" is another's "meh". I don't find the Scarlett pose that qualitatively different from the male poses.  So I'm going to have to repeat what Brian said, and politely disagree with you on this topic, Dorkman. When it came to the Looper discussion on the equivalence of killing a child with killing an innocent adult, I agreed with you on that point, against most others who were arguing there was a difference.

889

(216 replies, posted in Episodes)

Men and women are different. What is sexual to one, is not necessarily sexual to the other. That's why Dorkman's example of Ironman bending over is a false comparison. No woman would find that sexy. She may find a ripped male standing upright in a dominant position just as sexualized as men do of a woman bending over. It's the end result or the concept of sexualization that's the key, not the specific pose, as different poses work depending on gender. In that way, both males and females are sexualized, but in ways that reflect different readers' instincts.

890

(316 replies, posted in Episodes)

Trey wrote:

The three most overrated songs in rock history are Knights in White Satin, Hotel California, and Stairway to Heaven.   There have been plenty of other songs that are as pretentious and overblown as those three, but none were so goddam long.    I realize this opinion is partly due to my age - those songs were hits in a time when there was maybe one good rock station in any market.  If any of those songs started up you had no choice but to turn the radio off for ten minutes, because there was nothing else to listen to.

That's just a function of over-saturation. They're awesome songs for the first 300 listens. But enough already. Which is not the song's fault. If Megan Fox and Scarlett Johansson were begging you for threesomes every hour of the day, you'd get sick of it after the first few years. Not them again. Leave me alone.

891

(216 replies, posted in Episodes)

Dorkman wrote:

what we're talking about is a clear pattern with a long and pervasive history.

If you just scan the movie posters of Apple Trailers throughout 2012... http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/, hardly any depict a sexualized woman.

I remember growing up in the 1980s/90s, every second poster had some chick with her jugs half out or legs open or hanging onto a man's leg, or something equally degrading.

Strangely, when they did cast Megan Fox in her own 'sexy' film, Jennifers Body (female writer), blokes ignored it. They even put in a lesbian scene with Amanda Seyfried. Weirdly, men won't pay to see mainstream movies that feature only chicks, no matter how sexy. That's come a long way since the days of Marilyn Monroe and Bridget Bardot.

Um... If I was determined to be offended, I could say that all this female flesh is offensive to men, because the film-makers are assuming that men are mere reflexive Pavlovian animals that need to be kept in a permanent state of arousal in order to maintain our attention. It's condescending misandry, and I'm oh so offended.

892

(216 replies, posted in Episodes)

Dorkman wrote:

Megan Fox fixing a motorcycle in TRANSFORMERS -- she wears a halter top and shortie shorts AND leans, rubs, and stretches against the thing so that the only thing you're thinking of is sex.

http://img547.imageshack.us/img547/1521/foxbike.jpg

Phwoar. Nice bike!
(I like how the bloke in the back is totally oblivious)

893

(216 replies, posted in Episodes)

Dorkman wrote:

But what you said is exactly the point:

  • Women tend to be reduced, by men, almost entirely to their physical attributes.

  • Men are primarily the ones who read (and create) comics and watch (and make) comic book/action films.

  • As a result, Comics and comic book/action films tend to reduce women almost entirely to their physical attributes.

Women in most media only exist to the extent that they are interesting to men. That is the problem.

Agreed. On the other hand, the portrayal of women has improved immensely over the decades. Consider that just a century ago that women had to cover their heads with bonnets, it wasn't deemed ladylike to go out unaccompanied, they couldn't vote, a woman at university was very rare, and women were considered the property of men and couldn't inherit land in their own right.

Now you have Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor, female Secretaries of State, female Prime Ministers, female nuclear scientists, women in combat, Sex and the City, etc. They're in charge of their own fertility, it's easy to get divorced, women form the majority of university students, domestic abuse and rape statistics have fallen for 30 years, and the family courts usually favour women in regards to custody battles.
And the Single Woman demographic kept Romney from power.

So things have improved. Comics may be one of the last bastions of sexism in western society, but give it 20-30 years and they may catch up too.

894

(216 replies, posted in Episodes)

The mistake in all this discussion is assuming that what works for men (in regards to viewing women as sexy) also applies to women (in viewing men as sexy). Sexiness to a man is primarily about looks (youth, slimness, symmetry, health, fitness). Men don't care as much about the woman's social status, income, job, brain, etc. Women, on the other hand, have physical appearance as only one of many attributes. Consider it on a points-system where different attributes are weighted. Let's say anything over 100 points is deemed 'sexy'. For men, almost all the points come from the woman's looks: 20 points for long legs, 20 points for large eyes & lips, 20 points for hair, 20 points for flawless skin, 20 points for perky breasts, etc. For women, it may only be 30% weighted to men's looks, the rest coming from social status, wit, intelligence, leadership, humour, extroversion/confidence, positive outlook, etc. That's why withered old men can still get hot chicks because they make up the points in other areas. It doesn't work the other way around.

So equating sexualization of characters based solely on poses or revealing costumes is not a fair comparison.

895

(216 replies, posted in Episodes)

Anne Hathaway's Catwoman takes out hardened mercenaries wearing stilettos, which makes Scarlett's character look almost plausible.

896

(2,061 replies, posted in Episodes)

Marty J wrote:
Doctor Submarine wrote:

I'm starting a petition for some foreign language films!

If so, how about the Soviet Solaris movie? Someone brought it up 2 years ago...

That movie is so frigg'n slow. I had to watch it on 2X speed and it still felt long.

897

(2,061 replies, posted in Episodes)

Dark Knight Rises is out soon, so surely DiF should get around to Batman Begins, so that Nolan's astonishing cinematic achievement will be covered.

898

(316 replies, posted in Episodes)

I knew a 38 year old bloke with Star Wars posters up in his pad, but chicks don't dig a man-child, so he took them down. Classic slacker plot-line (e.g. Ted)

899

(316 replies, posted in Episodes)

Hextable - Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker defines "Hextable" as: The album you find in someone else's collection which instantly tells you you could never go out with them. In other words, the deal-breaker.

So you're on a hot date, things are going well, she brings you back to her place, but then you see 'x' in her Blu-Ray collection. You immediately gather your things and take your leave. What's your deal-breaker? Anything by Eddie Murphy? Uwe Boll? Twilight?

Where were the hot birds in Skyfall? At least Quantum of Solace had Olga, although Bond didn't touch her. Now he's hanging around his 'mother'. Given his hint in Skyfall that he swings both ways, I'm beginning to suspect Bond has lost his appetite for the fairer sex.