You are not logged in. Please login or register.
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Zarban
Damn you, your website and the horse you rode in on.
You're welcome! It's always nice to know that the things I do instead of having a life are ruining the lives of others. Try my room-for-room, whole-history documentation of the White House....
I've used laptops for work almost exclusively for 15 years, but I work for ConHugeCo Technology Unlimited*, so we get high performance machines.
I've bought more modest laptops for home use exclusively for about 8 years, so they're easy to give away to a niece and nephew after a year when they're still useful.**
* Not its real name
** I AM THE AWESOME UNCLE
I'd say you're bilingual. That was a convincingly English post.
I read it, as I read most things, in the voice of Miley Cyrus.
WELCOME!
Says the guy who thinks this week's movie is called Tropical Thunder.
Trowned AGAIN. How DID I do that? I already had an entry for Tropic Thunder. I normally just copy the existing one.
Well if it makes you feel better, we could heap ridicule on you....
Actually that's a pretty interesting example - the girl is Brenda Song, who played Eduardo's scarf-burning girlfriend in The Social Network, and her performance there was obviously different. In fact, she's one of my favorite actors in that movie.
Oh yeah, I see what you're saying. Movie acting IS different....
I don't know how to characterize movie acting, but this is TV acting.
Yeah, Science-Beyond-Current-Reckoning is the magic bean in the Marvel universe. A second magic bean would be non-science-related magic. I think Marvel accepts that also, but it always felt wrong to me.
It's well-regarded, but I find it kind of dull. It's beautifully shot, crazy as a shithouse rat, and the chicks are hot, but that's about it. I'd say you're normal—with the exception of having a tall, narrow, skinless skull.
It's funny how it's called Bram Stoker's Dracula when it's really a combination of every Dracula movie: lines from Browning, lighting from Murnau, visuals from Herzog, science from early Hammer, tits from late Hammer... I'm not familiar with the Frank Langela one, but there's probably some of that in there too.
I think from Favreau and Theroux's point of view, Tony couldn't pull himself together on his own. But money and (for some reason) love are out as external motivators, and Tony seems to be unaware that he has a rivalry with Sam Rockwell. So SHIELD was looking pretty good.
But the first half was already wobbly. Rockwell and Ivan have the same goal of taking Tony down, and thematically they should be foils for him, so they should have their shit together, not be butting heads. But really, Rockwell isn't necessary. And Rhodey's decision to steal a multibillion-dollar technology and give it to Tony's rival is bizarre. In any sane movie, that would be the heel turn that provides the main conflict. But they had just done the whole betrayal/fight-your-own-invention thing in the first movie.
IM2 should have been about Tony's spiral, with Whiplash as the villain—and suffering from the same palladium toxicity as Tony. Whiplash attacks him at the track, where he has no suit, and again later and is captured by War Machine and the mysterious Black Widow after Tony fails because he's drunk.
Rhodey hides all of Tony's suits (and car keys) and shows Tony what a pathetic, bitter, dying drunk Ivan is. Tony pulls himself together with help from Pepper and Rhodey and old films of his dad. Tony solves the palladium problem with help from Natasha. Then Ivan escapes cleverly and fights him and Black Widow and ends up dying in Tony's arms even tho Tony is trying to get him surrender so he can be cured. Roll credits...and Sam Jackson shows up and reveals that Black Widow is working for him and so should Iron Man.
Worse: unless he has a "concealed carry" permit, he's got to wear it out in the open for everyone to see.
Like a cowboy.
A penis cowboy.
/Thor was mildly entertaining. Could have been a lot better.
I think TV budgets have the same underlying issue that movies do. You CAN make something good on a low budget, but the guys who do that immediately command MUCH higher fees. And it doesn't make sense to saddle a top creative type with a budget barely bigger than his fee.
It's a surprise that HBO and AMC and such are able to do even whey they do accomplish.
I agree more with Switch 1.0. Reality shows, like game shows and sticoms before them, are very cheap, but they still need to pull in network-level numbers to allow networks to charge what they charge for ads.
But when you get a huge hit like Frasier and your show goes from cheap (2 standing sets, 3 cameras, 5 regular actors) to expensive (paying Kelsey Grammer something like $1.6 mil an episode), you can—and must—charge even more.
But it doesn't matter if the show costs a buck-0-9 (Family Feud). It still needs competitive ratings for its slot (daytime being way less than prime time, etc.).
Finally actually got to this one. I had liked it the first time around and felt it was more accessible than Lynch's other personal-vision films. I like that the panel didn't try to tease it apart completely but kind just got the idea and let the rest wash over them. I think that's the way Lynch would like people to look at his films.
I actually liked Barton Fink more than this (also about people getting crushed by Hollywood) even tho I KNOW BF really doesn't have a coherent "solution", whereas MD does, and the deeper you go into it the more interesting it gets. The titles The Sylvia North Story and Gilda and even a painting that is prominent in a couple of shots have hidden meaning.
...And yes, Chris, you can be on the quotes page.
I enjoyed the first three or four Dragonriders of Pern books when I was a teenager. They started to seem like chick lit, tho. Maybe they always were.
I joked at one time that in the next Batman movie we'd discover that Bruce's parents actually committed suicide and it was Bruce's fault, because Nolan does that ALL THE TIME. I just watched Batman Begins again and was stunned to realize that Bruce really does blame himself for his parents' death.
NO BRUCE. You blame CRIMINALS. That's WHY you become a COSTUMED VIGILANTE!
I dunno how other people define it, but I consider it to mainly be scenes that go too far and pile on the emotion just to get a stronger emotional response from the audience. Usually it's pushed too far and the scene ends up feeling hollow and fake. Contrived. Manipulative.
Right. Anybody can write a scene where a kid grieves over an injured dog and immediately jerk some tears, but earning an emotional payoff means building up characters that the audience doesn't automatically care about and yet making them care about the things (good OR bad) happening to those characters.
And you rarely need to actually play out a scene where a character grieves or whatever, anyway. Playing the action the character takes because of the emotion is usually stronger and less manipulative.
Surprisingly not bad super-low-budget silent movie The Call of Cthulu, done a few years ago by the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, free via Hulu (click me for madness).
GOD DAMN IT!
EDIT
*Deep breath* The panelists love BttF but don't know what to say about it. They plan to do it eventually, but the joke is that every time someone asks about it, they push it back a few more weeks.
Pfft. The Soviets did 5-year plans and stealth continuity DECADES earlier. Also, retconning.
But nobody was blurring faces and logos in the 1960s. Isn't public display covered by plenty of case history?
Hey, what's with the trend of blurring out signs, T-shirts, and other stuff on TV shows shot "in the wild"? I mean stuff like American Chopper* will feature the cast out and about in public and have stuff blurred all over. Who decided that should be a thing?
* A show about bad parenting with occasional shots of fancy custom motorcycles being built
For supposedly hating Terra Nova, you sure talk about her a lot, Trey, and you seem to know everything about her. Why don't go pull her pigtails and tell her she has cooties?
You know you're gonna be all over her as soon as she grows boobs.
Sure, but Marty McFly didn't attend Time High and buy his hoverboard in Futuristic Alley and keep his golden hours and silver minutes in Zemeckis Bank and play timeball and get bothered by a time elf and nearly get his soul sucked out by time dementors and sneak into the Ministry of Time....
Potter's world is just a whole lot richer, and very little of it has been explored.
Oh, and thanks a lot....
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Zarban
Powered by PunBB, supported by Informer Technologies, Inc.
Currently installed 9 official extensions. Copyright © 2003–2009 PunBB.
