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Hurt Locker v Avatar: A film no one saw beat a film everyone saw.
Yes, I know Best Picture shouldn't equal biggest box office. And rarely does it. But movies are about entertainment. And a lot more people were entertained, enthralled, enchanted, amazed, etc by Avatar than by Hurt Locker.
Anyway, that was a weak year (like this year is) with no clear Best Picture. Perhaps there should be 'jackpot' and next year's winner gets two trophies... 
I'm Australian, so speak for yourself. I'm not swearing allegiance to someone who just happened to be born in the right family. I'd much rather live in a Republic where the head of state is someone we've all voted in, like George W Bush... no wait...
If Hitler had his way, that diagram would be whole lot simpler. Just "Germany" from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Geography class would be a breeze.
How about an Intermission on Awards
Are there too many award shows?
Are there too many or too few categories? e.g. What's with the Best Song?
Why is the acting category segregated out between men and women? We don't do that for directing or composing or any other category. We don't have old/young black/white first timers/veteran categories for acting. Why can't women compete equally with men in acting just like any other category? It's not sports.
Are the Oscars rigged? How much politics is involved?
Greatest snubbs? Hurt Locker over Avatar, Paltrow over Blanchett, etc
Greatest undeserved Oscars? e.g. for retrospective roles, as in 'it was his turn'
Is it fair what in some years it's a weak field and some years it's a strong field?
Should there be awards for fan commentaries?
I also endorse the MPAA intermission discussion. Why has censorship become more prudish when it comes to nudity but less when it comes to violence? Kiss a breast and it's R, but run it through with a sword and it's only PG13. WTF?
I've noticed a difference between British v USA sci-fi since the 1980s & 1990s, in that the perspective of rebels versus empire is much more prevalent in England (Blakes 7) whereas USA sci-fi (Star Trek, Stargate, etc) generally the perspective is from the military/empire/centre of power.
Firefly/Serenity tried to flirt with the rebels v empire theme, but it didn't really get that political and then got cancelled anyway. They were more smugglers trying to earn a living rather than guerillas/terrorists blowing up government installations in cause of liberty.
So if a DUNE remake was greenlit, you'd have a sequence of desert-dwelling religious freedom fighters engaged in a systemic sabotage campaign of shutting down spice (oil?) supplies. Unless the screenplay writers just de-emphasised that, like Firefly did.
I'm a big fan of Dune, but if I re-read it now, I couldn't help associating the Fremen with the Mujahideen.
The case of Avatar is an interesting one, as there's considerable overlap with Dune. Religious natives having their lands exploited for their resources, a dude going native and leading them to overthrow the empire. However there was no sabotage campaign - which would have undermined the simple black v white morality (actually pink skin v blue skin). The 'message' of ecological stewardship was prevalent.
Only in the very beginning, when Jake first arrived on Pandora, did you see arrows in a giant truck's wheels - the only subtle hint of a concerted resistance.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed, and there's only one superpower, I don't think movies like Rambo III would be possible today.
Hard science movies:
You mentioned that 'Contact' is one of the few examples of 'hard science' done well in the movies. I'd agree and also nominate 'Gattaca' that does 'hard science' well without resorting to technobabble or fantasy elements.
Clint Mansell is touring LA in 2012 if you're interested in hearing his great scores live e.g. Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler, Moon, etc.
Great commentary guys - heard it today.
Did you know George Miller (Mad Max, Babe Pig in the City) was the first director on this before Zemeckis took over. Also, WETA Digital did some of the wormhole effects shots (around the time they did Frighteners).
Jodie Foster's character is based on an amalgam of two real people: Jill Tarter from SETI and Carolyn Porco (Cassini mission).
Lots of Australians in this movie - I can count at least four.
Salon has the best explanation for the movie I've read...
Dune - the novel, was divided up into several parts i.e. 'books' and the 1984 movie really needed the 3 x 3 hour LOTR treatment to convey all the richness of Frank Herbert's vision.
The other political issue with DUNE today is that it makes the Fremen proxies for the Taliban/insurgents i.e. religious desert people fighting a foreign invader that wants to exploit them for their resources (used for transport).
As for the intended remake, which studio is going to greenlight a big budget for a movie that romanticises fundamentalist freedom fighters? Last one was Rambo III.
Add Blade Runner to the above list of "Cinematography + Music trumps Story"
Yes, Dune is okay as a flawed work, but to critique it properly as an adaptation, you'd need to knew the book(s) well.
Thanks for the info on the Fountain - queuing it up now.
Just realized that there's something that Heat, Barry Lyndon, The Fountain, Gladiator, and The Road have in common - evocative atmospheric soundtracks and great cinematography. The narrative is.... almost incidental.
Heat
Gladiator
The Fountain
The Road
Barry Lyndon
I’ve just listened to Professor Sir Christopher Frayling’s commentary on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and out of the dozens of OFFICIAL commentary tracks I’ve heard, it’s got to be one of the best. Have you heard it?
As the biographer of Sergio Leone, he relates hundreds of interesting behind-the-scenes info on the making of all those great Spaghetti Westerns. I’d hold that up as THE template by which informative film commentaries should look up to.
But it’s not as fun as what you guys do. And I hope that one day, a studio picks up DIF for an additional commentary track to stick on a DVD or Blu-Ray, either for a new release or an old restored classic.
So the idea of an Intermission episode relating to what you guys do… commentary tracks, struck me as worth listening to.
1. What are the best commentary tracks you guys have heard?
2. Who are the directors you like to hear speak (Fincher, Scott, Cameron, Jackson?)
3. Who are the directors you WOULD LIKE to hear speak but won’t (Spielberg?) or can’t (because they’re dead e.g. Kubrick).
4. Any other non-director commentaries you like (actors, crew, film critics, historians, etc)
5. What are your favourite fan commentaries (Rifftrax, Red Letter Media, etc?)
6. What are some waste-of-time commentary tracks?
I haven’t heard all your commentaries but of the 30-40 I have heard, I would nominate The Abyss as one of DIF’s best due to the insider knowledge and highlighting the enormous effort that went into that oft-overlooked film.
So there you go – just an idea – an INTERMISSION on audio commentaries.
Cheers from London
It's astounding how forgiving the studio system is to directors/actors i.e. JUST ONE HIT is enough to keep greenlighting endless lame crap.
Not just M Night Shyamalan, but Kevin Smith falls into this category too.
British film critic Mark Kermode makes the observation that the international market is now so large that's it's almost IMPOSSIBLE for a big budget movie (with a tentpole actor) to bomb. It doesn't matter if its Rotten Tomato score is 0%, so long as there's 'spectacle' and some actor someone's heard of, it'll recoup its money, if not by the initial theatre run, then certainly with the subsequent release rights e.g. TV, blu-ray, netflix, etc.
Hey everybody, Teague here. Rarely does a movie come along that single-handedly revitalizes a genre. Once one does, a wave of sub-par imitators is bound to follow, and sure enough, we’re only now emerging from a decade-long necklace of crappy Se7en knockoffs.
Silence of the Lambs, it can be argued, was the first of the 1990s' wave of serial-killer movies, and got a lot of praise, Oscar recognition (the rare trifecta of all the top awards), box office, etc. It preceded Se7en by a couple of years.
Still, Se7en is brilliant for all the reasons you guys mentioned and has more atmosphere than Lambs, and doesn't resort to the 'boss fight' cliché at the end, which even Lambs succumbed to.
Great commentary. Perfect movie.
Great commentary dudes - would like to hear more commentaries on Fincher and Ridley Scott films if you ever get the time.
Just a quick addendum - The Insider (Michael Mann) is another "recent period" movie made just after the actual events portrayed in the movie. In fact, the time period between the events depicted in The Insider and the movie is even shorter than The Social Network.
Dark Knight
Unforgiven
Transformers 3
Barry Lyndon - best film ever from a cinematography perspective!
The Road
Requiem for a Dream
If not Lord of the Rings, then Heat (best crime movie) and Dark Knight (best superhero movie)
Dorkman: "true science fiction is always a period piece"
I'd agree with that, simply because it's impossible for one author to imagine all the social, political, economic, religious, philosophical, etc consequences of future developments. Almost all 'predictions' in sci-fi films turn out to be wrong, grossly overestimating developments in transport (which has largely stagnated since Apollo was cancelled) and grossly underestimating telecommunications.
From what I've read about Cameron, I doubt he'd resort to 'magic'. I'm sure he subscribes to the basic assumption of science: that the laws of physics are the same in all places, in all times.
No, we don't know what the properties of unobtanium are. I assumed it was just a room-temperature superconductor. But we do know how much energy it would take to send a mass of, say, 10,000 tonnes over 4 light years to Alpha Centuri. That's a relatively straightforward physics calculation and the result is staggering.
Yes, it could be that Earth is suffering environmentally. But I maintain that if we've solved the gargantuan engineering problem of interstellar travel, then we'd already have the know-how to solve just about any other technological problem.
It's a MacGuffin. Some device to bring two cultures into conflict, even if it is just recreates 16th century geopolitics. In that sense, Avatar is not science fiction, but a period piece.
CERN, Fermilab, Unilac, etc can turn one element into another by neutron bombardment. Fission and fusion are 'alchemical' processes in that they transmute elements. Since the quantum revolution of the 1920s, we know that adding or subtracting protons can change an element. In fact, the very definition of an element is solely dependent on the number of protons and nothing else.
We can even make elements that don't exist in nature. One facility in Germany specialises in that. Natural elements only occur up to 92 (Uranium), but we can make elements up to 118 (and rising).
The point is we knew how to do this in the 1940s, but it won't be for hundreds of years until we can reach other stars. If anything, we're going backwards now that the Shuttle is retired.
And if "unobtanium" is a mineral, we'll that's even easier to produce than a new element, as minerals are simply a function of temperature pressure, and composition.
So I think the conclusion is valid: travelling to other stars is vastly more difficult than producing a mineral or an element. There'll be scientific reasons for interstellar travel (especially with probes), but not for mining ore. Avatar is just commentary on the 16th century Spanish conquest of the Americas, and all other subsequent colonisations. The dynamics of Earth's geopolitics have just been lazily transposed to space, but without allowing for the fact that space significantly alters the cost/benefit equation.
Interstellar travel is orders of magnitude more difficult that simply sailing or flying across the ocean. Surely you've seen those scaling demonstrations that highlight the vast distances between stars. Then you factor in the speed of light limit, and no one is going anywhere.
To land a man on nearby Mars for a few months by 2050 would cost $1 trillion, and no country is even thinking about it. Imagine the cost of sending mining equipment and sending back ore. It'd cost more than the combined GDP of Earth. Far simpler just to make it ourselves. All stuff is just atoms. Each proton is the same as any other proton.
And that's just the local neighborhood, let alone another star system which would take hundreds of years to get to and back from.
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