"Some members of the audience in Toronto fainted without injury due to the realistic amputation scenes."

I'm never watching this movie.

Now that he's given YouTube the finger and deals with the video hosting himself, he won't have to deal with DMCA struggles or "video processing" wait times, so I think this big release will probably go smoothly.

It's come up before.

We avoid comedies on the show because there's often not much to say other than to explain why the jokes are funny. IMO, it's essentially the same thing with THE ROOM. Talking about why a given scene, line, or performance is bad is pretty much just explaining the joke.

So anyway.

I think it's very much worth seeing. I actually have to agree with the reviewers who have said this is a film that defines this generation. Not in the sense that this is now the "David Fincher's THE SOCIAL NETWORK generation," but in the sense that the character of Zuckerberg (if not the actual person) is a representative of the people of his/our generation. He blogs before he thinks, succeeds before he's ready, and peers out at the whole world through the internet, realizing too late that the world is peering back. When it was first announced, the title THE SOCIAL NETWORK seemed like an amusing pretense to get around what everyone knew was actually "the Facebook movie." But having watched the movie, one could argue that the title isn't really referring to Facebook at all. (Multilayered titles! I love 'em!)

I'd just warn you to have patience through the opening scene. The characters talk too fast and the scene is dark and kind of greenish as if to say "YES THIS IS REALLY THE WEST WING GUY WRITING AND THE ZODIAC GUY DIRECTING WHAT IS HAPPENING ON THE SCREEN." But after that first scene they get out of your face and the movie stands on its own.

Yeah, I could be wrong, but something tells me that if they HAD consulted Zuckerberg, you'd be decrying the film as a sham vanity project serving as little more than a corporate mouthpiece.i Knd of a no-win.

I saw and liked it and will say more when I'm not posting from my phone.

The male lead in DARK KNIGHT was Christian Bale, hence Ledger is supporting. If the male lead was not Anthony Hopkins in SILENCE, who was it?

It's not a matter of screen time, it's about their significance to the story. Hannibal Lecter is clearly the most important character in Clarice's story -- there IS no story without him. Likewise, you can tell a story about Batman without the Joker -- but not without Batman.

Well, for one thing, you seem under the mistaken impression that Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook had anything to do with the production of this film. They didn't. It's not some unholy union of Hollywood and social media. It's a dramatization of a story in the public record, which last I heard Zuckerberg wasn't hugely thrilled about but it's not like he could stop it.

Do you object to the existence of CITIZEN KANE? THE AVIATOR? PIRATES OF SILICON VALLEY? MAN ON THE MOON? RAY? ALI?

Not to say TSN is on the same quality level as any of those films (haven't seen it), but a biopic's a biopic. If you're cool with biopics, I don't see what makes this one any different other than it's about Facebook and it's hip to hate on Facebook. Not judging, I do it too.

For the record, I don't see anything inherently wrong with the pop culture machine. SERENITY was the result of the pop culture machine. BATMAN BEGINS and DARK KNIGHT were results of the pop culture machine. Hell, EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was the result of the pop culture machine of its time.

But of course, the pop culture machine also brought us pretty much every shitty and unnecessary sequel ever made, and a number of adaptations we probably could also have done without (I'm looking at you, every movie based on a video game). The pop culture machine is amoral, it's all a question of whether or not it falls into the wrong hands.

Just because something had its roots in a business decision doesn't mean it can't also be artistically valid and powerful. The Sistine Chapel was a work-for-hire, let's not forget. As were most of the works of Shakespeare. The question is, did they just slap something together, assuming the pop culture association would do the work for them, or did they treat it as seriously as any other project and make a real movie?

Again, I can't answer that question, because I haven't seen SOCIAL NETWORK. But dismissing it based on its premise or the fact that it's a commercially lucrative premise seems a little wrongheaded, since pretty much no film gets greenlit unless the studio thinks it has the potential to be commercially lucrative.

That being said, I think it's perfectly fine not to be interested in it. I'm not particularly interested, since I don't much care for Facebook or biopics and I feel like I've seen the fall from grace story plenty of times, but it's getting good reviews and a few people I know have already seen and recommended it, so I expect I'll find the time to see it before the weekend is over.

It makes as much sense as the rest of the dreams do -- which is of course to say that your mileage may vary.

The whole premise is that one dreamer constructs the world of the dream, which everyone then enters and shares. At the top level, Yusuf was the dreamer and everyone was sharing the world that Ariadne had taught him and that he constructed in his mind. The next level down, same thing, but this time the world was a construct in Arthur's mind that everyone was sharing. Next level down, a construct in Eames' mind shared by everyone.

Because Cobb had, in another context, already been to limbo, there was already a construct in his mind to inhabit if they went down that far. Hence, anyone who wound up in limbo wound up in Cobb's dream.

If Cobb had not been part of the team, or alternatively if Cobb had never been to limbo, limbo would have been formless for the first person to arrive there, but whatever he or she constructed in limbo would then have become the common construct for anyone else. But because a construct already existed in one member of the team, when they shared minds they shared the construct.

Presumably, if two of them had previously -- but separately -- been to limbo, the team's shared limbo would have been an amalgamation of the two preexisting constructs.

You LOSE!

Good DAY sir!

(Sidenote: Try a Google image search of that phrase with Safe Search off. The results may surprise you. I know they surprised me.)

Also:

They almost certainly won't.

Okay, two things.

1) You bring up Pixar. When Pixar decided to re-release the TOY STORY films in stereo 3D, they didn't do a conversion, they went back to the original files, made artistic depth decisions shot-by-shot, and re-rendered the films from scratch. Doing this required that they take several months to rewrite and reverse engineer their current code to be backwards-compatible with 15-year-old assets. ILM will likely have to do the same to update the SE assets. Assuming that they can just drag and drop those assets into their current pipeline is...not a fair assumption.

2) Almost every film you have seen since the advent of digital post was mastered in 2K or below. Sometimes they scan film higher than that for really complex shots, but the final master that is printed to film was 2K. NO film has EVER mastered 8K. The highest scans done on THE DARK KNIGHT, for the IMAX work, was 5.6K. AVATAR was shot (what parts of it were actually shot) and mastered at stereo 1080p. AOTC and ROTS, too, have a 1080p negative. I highly doubt that they are going to go back to the negative for the OT -- the idea, remember, is to get the MOST bang for the buck. That means dimensionalizing what's already there, not rebuilding the movie from scratch.

Then -- and I acknowledge this is a tangent, but -- fuck Lucas again for claiming that simply restoring the originals to BD quality would be prohibitively expensive.

Assuming that the standard relationship is still in effect, Fox has no say. They'll distribute what Lucas gives them and like it.

And rotomation will not happen. As Teague mentions, a person doesn't really have that much depth, certainly not enough to make the difference between full rotomation and a gradient roto worthwhile. Especially when, between the ubiquitous bluescreen keys and roto already in place to accomplish the existing comps, that work is already mostly done.

Maybe -- maybe -- they'd do it for really dynamic close-ups (the immolation comes to mind; that's probably rotomated in the first place for the burning effects) but not for an entire film.

Well then I suppose you CAN expect to like the SW3D conversions, regardless of any of these other factors. But if you don't care about a movie's quality, I don't know why you bother defending the notion that it will BE of quality.

I have no idea why it matters -- you brought him up.

Incorrect. I disagreed with your appeal to authority, which was, and I quote:

"Even James Cameron is a fan of the in-depth, lengthy conversion processes they're using on his older films like Titanic."

Emphasis mine. To which I pointed out that his position on in-depth, lengthy conversion processes is in fact fluid and inconsistent. When I should have just pointed out that you were committing an appeal to authority and evading the larger point, which is twofold:

1) One should not necessarily assume that a 3D conversion will be "awesome and you fucking know it" if one has not actually seen the results of the 3D conversion process, which was why I was asking Vidina, who was making that assumption, whether or not he had seen any post-converted 3D films; and
2) One should not necessarily assume that just because LFL can do a quality conversion means they will, as they have shown little concern for anything but squeezing every last dollar out of the franchise.

My prediction is that they will spend the minimum necessary to produce a passable conversion; I base this prediction on the QC of various re-releases of the STAR WARS films (remember what the last DVD release did to the lightsabers?) and the general attitude Lucas has towards the films. He has no affection for these films. If he didn't think these would make money, he wouldn't do them. And the more money he spends, the less money he'll make.

Anyone who thinks they'll actually break the bank to make sure every greeblie on the surface of the Death Star is accurately dimensionalized is living in a fucking delusion. The only question is where in the range between "perfect" and "disgraceful" these will fall. If we're lucky, I'm betting right in the middle.