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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Trey
Another thumbs up for Collateral from me. Gets a bit silly in the third act, but damn, Cruise as a villain is awesome. He does the dark version of the character he plays in most every other movie, and shows there's not actually much difference between the two. 'cause whether a guy is a superhero or a supervillain all kinda depends on whether you approve of what he's doing, don't it?
Hmm. Now I wanna watch it again.
Pretty much.
And so's this thread, apparently.
/just glad somebody in the world is still doing a stop motion project
Matt Damon, Chevy Chase, Jessie Jackson, RL Stine and Sigourney Goddam Weaver. Score.
Both Tim Burton's first Batman and both of Nolan's are interesting case studies as well.
In Burton's Batman, Michael Keaton is already Batman at the beginning of the movie, and he's still Batman at the end. No arc there. But Nicholson's Joker has a complete arc - we see him become the Joker, we see him BE the Joker, and we follow his story all the way to its end.
In Batman Begins, we see.. well, Batman begin. So Bruce Wayne gets a full character arc in that one. But in The Dark Knight, he's the same throughout. Sure, he suffers a lot and becomes a pariah at the end, but these are just things that happen to him, they don't actually change his character at all.
Ledger's Joker has no arc either, he also stays the same through the entire movie. Of all the main characters in TDK, Harvey Dent is the only one with an arc, albeit a tragic one.
It's the same dynamic as the classic Western anti-hero like Shane, or the Road Warrior, or Yojimbo... the title character doesn't change - he just shows up, does his thing, and then moves on. The arc-ing is carried by the supporting characters.
Hackers I haz not seen. But The Incredibles? I'm so there.
Well, my my. Best non-human, best Actor and Best Feature? Awesome. Curious to see what the actual results are tomorrow.
I gotta check out Sherlock Holmes (Asylum version). I hear it's kinda wacky fun. And the steampunk robot thingie that appears in the movie is prominently displayed in the Asylum lobby to this day, it's pretty nifty.
Rachel Goldenberg was prepping Princess and Pony while we were in post on Moby, so I saw her around the office a lot. She seems nice. If she ends up taking the coveted Best Director award, I'm okay widdit.
Re: Dean Kreyling, apparently he's just somebody Asylum likes working with. Mike Gaglio and Matt Lagan are two other Asylum veterans who appeared in Moby as well, nice guys all. None of them came in to audition, the Asylum honchos just cast them according to type. I didn't meet any of them myself until they came to set.
But they all knew what to do, I just pointed a camera at 'em. ![]()
As I recall we already referenced that scene while discussing the head explosion in Dawn of the Dead '78...
The Empire's high command in the OT are the space-Nazis, but the stormtroopers are more the equivalent of the regular German army. The German Army did most of the fighting and dying in WWII, but they weren't necessarily Nazis. The Nazis were busy running the concentration camps, etc, and they were just as ruthless when dealing with any army regular who didn't do as ordered.
The average German army soldier signed up for the same variety of reasons that people enlist in the military to this day, unfortunately for them their government went batshit and sent them out to serve its own demented ends.
I think that's all the SW stormtroopers are, just ordinary guys doing what their commanding officers tell them. What are their choices, really? Shoot that princess, or refuse and get tortured to death by Vader? Tough call.
The faceless uniforms also make it easier to say "yay!" when our heroes mow them down by the dozens. ![]()
Again, the novel Allegiance touches on this, it's about a squad of troopers who go rogue when they realize they're working for the "bad guys".
And no, I'm not referencing Allegiance because it's the novel where Pink Five makes a cameo appearance, really I'm not. Really. Not. Really.
It was never a common assumption that the stormtroopers were clones, back in the day. Always seemed to me, and still does, that they're just a random assortment of guys who signed up to be troops for the Empire, because the Empire is the reigning goverment after all, so that's the army you sign up for.
SW books like Allegiance certainly portray them as different people as well, if that counts.
What stormtroopers REALLY are is a cost-effective way to kill the same stuntmen over and over and get away with it, but that's probably not what you were asking. ![]()
Or - since movies lately have tended to have more than one editor, more editors have been getting nominations, and being nominated is the primary way you become an Academy member in the first place.
So as the percentage of editors within the overall Academy membership grows, relative to other specialties (actor/director membership wouldn't be subject to the multi-nomination effect) their edit-aware votes may be skewing the Best Picture noms toward the better-edited films...
I'm totally spitballing the above, might not actually be true at all. Just saying that there can be plenty of non-intuitive explanations for things.
Seriously, either Nate Silver or the Freakonomics guy could probably get a whole book out of finding the hidden oddities of how Oscars get awarded. Problem is, there's very little data to crunch - the Academy never reveals the actual vote numbers. So we'll never know if Shakespeare in Love beat Private Ryan by one vote, or a thousand.
Except there's no correlation between the two categories: editors nominate editors, whereas all Academy voters nominate Best Picture, regardless of whether they know jack about editing or not. There's no secret society within the Academy that makes adjustments to the overall outcome.
Usually you see the mechanics of the process when things conspicuously DON'T get nominated for something, a la Prince of Tides getting Best Pic/Best Actor/Best Actress noms because the Academy overall liked the movie and the actors' branch thought the performances were worthy, and yet didn't get a Best Director nom because the directors' branch apparently didn't think of Barbra Streisand as being one of the club.
There are so many factors that it'd take a Nate Silver to crunch the numbers and see if there's any particular reason behind the editor/Best Pic factoid. I'll bet it's a combination of factors rather than just one, or maybe even just a lengthy run of concidence that will end next year. But it's definitely not because somebody in the back room is "deciding" it, tho.
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Trey
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