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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Zarban
The Internet was crap until about 1995, when Yahoo developed a decent search algorithm. Prior to that, it was mostly murky BBSs and gated communities like AOL.
I've waxed nostalgic before about the conversations I had on the Blackadder mailing list in '96 and '97. 80 messages a day from some of the wittiest, driest, most literate people you could hope to meet.
But aside from that, the Internet was a sea of this image....
Oh god. Is that true? I would never have agreed to the nude scene if I'd known that.
Just finished the third and final Zen movie and ohmygodilovethissohard. It is just genius and—dare I say it?—better than Sherlock. It really works very well as a trilogy of 90-minute movies. It's baffling, thrilling, sexy, and funny, much like a Japanese cos-play girl.
An older one, I mean. Legal, anyway.
Streaming on Amazon Instant, free with Prime.
I FINALLY get my fucking car back tomorrow. Then, I will be able to travel to a place with better computers for editing. Sorry for the delay. Blame shitty weather and the son of a bitch who decided to brake completely while merging and cause me to swerve out of the way into a guardrail to avoid a collision.
This was no accident. Tell me everything you know and TRUST NO ONE. I'm on it.
Yup, Hawkeye is still the most idiotic one.
Oh, you are so on Santa's naughty list already this year....
It's now past midnight in the US Eastern time zone. Best wishes to all for a safer, more prosperous year filled with great movies.
I watched Exit Through the Gift Shop the other day with friends and parts of it again today. I started to get kind of bored with it at first since it isn't so much about street artists as it is about the guy who filmed them. But then it got much more interesting toward the end.
I think that the accusations that it's all a hoax perpetrated by Banksy and Shepard Fairey go too far, but I do think that the ending was engineered by a small collective of street artists as a (very lucrative) bit of social commentary. Regardless, it's a very clever film.
I watched The Adventures of Tintin today and found it to be pretty much just what I thought it would be. The world is so overly real that the characters often seem to just be real people wearing cartoon heads. Daniel Craig and Andy Serkis are terrific, but the animation on Tintin himself is nearly as dull-eyed and blank as the characters in Polar Express (or Jamie Bell himself). Still, it's a rollicking adventure, and I'll definitely see the next one. I loved the Canadian animated series from the '90s.
I also just watched the first episode of Zen, and ohmygodilovethisshow. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. It's Rufus Sewell and a bunch of other Brits pretending to be cops in Italy. He's given a special assignment that's a lose-lose proposition, but he keeps his cool and just works the case. The locations are gorgeous; as is the woman he'd like to get involved with: Caterina Murino, a genuine Italian (who played poor, doomed Solange in Casino Royale). They're 90-minute episodes like Sherlock, so there are feature-like depth and twists. Like butterscotch hard candy, it's more luscious than sweet; and don't chew; just suck.
This commentary was a lot of fun. Thanks, guys.
As an American, I paid no attention to Doctor Who until I started listening to MMM Commentaries and their Fantragic podcast in 2008. Then I tried it and liked it a lot. (Funnily, the first full episode I watched was "The Unicorn and the Wasp", which made me say, "I like these characters and actors, so I'll bet most episodes are better than this.")
I went back to the beginning of New Who and watched them in order on DVD and liked the Ninth Doctor a lot, then liked the Tenth Doctor even better. His lengthy tenure made him my Doctor, I suppose, so I was astonished to find that I like the Eleventh Doctor better still. Overall, I think Ten has had the best scripts, tho, so I like that era best.
I was with the entire internet in thinking that Moffat's episodes were far and away the strongest of the Russell T. Davies era. ... But it's become clear to me that Moffat is kind of a three-trick pony, as far as his plotting is concerned. Jumbled timeline with predestination paradoxes, scary everyday thing, glib prophesizing.
And he's a ONE trick pony when it comes to writing women.
I hate that I'm agreeing with you. It feels as tho, once he was put in charge and encountered all the pressure of budgets and deadlines that Davies contended with, he ends up doing much the same things as Davies: writing whatever seems exciting and mysterious without much planning and pulling answers out of his ass at the last minute.
And he draws women as "strong" in a way that can too easily be characterized as pushy, selfish, and arrogant, and CONSTANTLY second guessing the Doctor. They do run a gamut, I think, from Sally to Madame du Pompadour to Clara to Jenny to Amy to River to Vastra, but they're all of a type. The Widow from last Christmas at least had to develop into a Moffat woman. The dying singer of the Christmas is probably the notable exception.
Excuse me while I put my pendant's hat on.
"pedant"
Enough with the "How will you be seeing the Hobbit" thread. This is a proper story discussion thread.
I just saw it (24fps 2D), and I liked it very much. It's too long, but it felt like watching the extended edition. I was relieved that it had a lighter tone than LOTR.
Radagast was great but a bit cartoony. The orc warlord was too similar to the gimpy one in LOTR (and too CG). The opening legends and dwarf dinner sequence were too long. Some of the action sequences were too long and too cartoony but had me wishing I'd been that clever as a D&D dungeon master.
Storywise, the film has two jobs: get Bilbo integrated into the party and get the party over a major obstacle on their way to the Lonely Mountain. The former felt a bit forced because Bilbo never really has a reason to want it. And the latter was done with the orc warlord instead of something more organic.
For example, show that Gandalf's needling really gets to Bilbo and makes him want to prove his mettle. Have the dwarves discuss what monsters they're likely to encounter, scaring Bilbo; Thorin explicitly states that if they get captured by goblins they're screwed. Then have Bilbo enable their escape via invisibility, paying off both requirements.
That's one of the funniest things I've seen in a lone time.
Because dogs are way better than cats. By, like, a million.
Was anyone else disappointed in all the Sherlock Holmes references in the Christmas special? Not only was it pointlessly silly, it suggests we'll never get a spin-off featuring Madame Vastra and Jenny.
Of course, I suppose that also saves us from endless we-are-great-big-lesbians-what-do-you-think-of-that scenes.
I fuckin' hate River Song.
Albeit, not so much the character, as Alex Kingston's interpretation of it. I really don't like her.
I really liked River in her first (two part) appearance, but became more and more disenchanted with her as she was portrayed as a self-satisfied twat. But by the end, she had won me back over. I really think it was Moffat and not Kingston that was the problem.
Karen Gillan was cutesy and always seemed a bit selfish, altho she is still probably my second favorite companion.
I'm fully prepared to adore Jenna Louise-Coleman.
The park where Clara found the ladder was just round the back of my local pub
O REALLY? Then you won't mind going around the back, climbing up that ladder, and taking a picture of the Tardis, will you? We'll wait.
I don't know who has been "asking for four years" for this. I asked for a Red Ryder BB gun.
Vivian Kubrick (17 at the time) made The Making of The Shining.
She's even done a commentary track...
http://soundcloud.com/gadushoon/making- … commentary
That's her with pops in this famous photo on the set. You might remember her as Floyd's daughter on the videophone in 2001.
My family (which celebrates X-mas Eve all together) raided my Amazon wish list and showered me with Blu-rays and movie snacks. It was the best Christmas ever.
But giving is the best gift of all, so I went back with a sackful of DVDs and Blu-rays that I no longer needed. That included my whole James Bond collection, for example, since I got the 50th anniversary Blu-ray box set. Hooray!
*Christmas video by God's gift to 1970s Scotland*
That's hilarious. I just heard that for the first time SECONDS BEFORE at the beginning of the Dr. Action and the Kick Ass Kid Christmas episode. I literally turned off DA&KAK to play that video. 
I'll repost this with best holiday wishes to all....
This has been such a great thread. Love David Mitchell.
[Miller] dated Rachel Weisz. His real desire was acting
Okay, that's a red flag.
If I can add a question, Do you guys come up with your titles first or last?
First.
And then I don't write the story.
Aaaaaaand "Out There" is a worse title. Thoughts?
Yeah, that's awful. The point of the title "Galaxy Quest" is that it's the title of the dumb sci fi TV show and so it's kind of a dumb title in exactly the same way as "Star Trek" is kind of a dumb title.
A good title, in my opinion, is one that is intriguing but doesn't make a lot of sense until you watch the movie/read the book and then it makes perfect sense.
The Pixar films run the gamut. Toy Story, Cars, and A Bug's Life are meaningless and could literally be about anything involving toys, cars, and bugs. Whereas Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille are peculiar until you see the movie and then seem like they could ONLY be stories about a company run by monsters, the search for a fish (or else a submarine captain), and a rat who wants to be a French chef.
EDIT: But if you do choose a simple title, it has to be the be-all and end-all of that thing. If you make a movie called The Godfather, it needs to be the last word on godfathers.
Snow and intermittent power and Internet outages here in Indiana.
THE END IS NIGH! ONLY DAVE"S FETUS CAN SAVE US!
Zarban wrote:Terraforming Mars.
That's not going to work unless you can get Mars' core working again and bring the magnetic field back. Otherwise our Sun will make sure everyone is going to have a bad day.
I believe a Dutch researcher named Verhoeven presented a medium-scale solution in a speculative paper in 1990 that was later expanded upon by Professors Shore and Baldwin in 1996.
They don't call it the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and SCIENCES for nothing.
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Zarban
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