Ok understood, that's exactly what I needed to hear then.  I guess kids are a little more diverse in their thinking than we sometimes give them credit for.  I'm glad the movie worked for you.  I was really looking forward to it myself, but not every movie has to be made for everybody.

Finally caught up with this one, and I'm sad to say it fell kinda flat for me.  I definitely plan on revisiting it, I am hoping it will grow on me after repeat viewings.

But as for my theater experience, I really wasn't into it.  I get the whole only show the "mundane-day-to-day snippets" approach, I get this is supposed to be real life.  I was expecting and looking forward to that.  But shit, my own childhood was pretty uneventful...and what I did on the day-to-day was wayyyyyy more interesting than Mason.

It seems silly to break out the screenwriting book for a film like this, but he was just too inactive of a protagonist to keep my attention.  For the first half, I felt like I was watching Warhorse.  Mason just wanders from vignette to vignette, all cute, and big-eyed, and blank-slatey.  There were some quiet, interesting moments happening around him for sure, but it wasn't enough. 

I'm not asking for him and his buddies to uncover a dead body on a camping trip, but for heaven's sake make a decision Mason!  Do something stupid, pick on a kid at the playground and then learn and feel shitty about it.  Fight with your mom about making you a healthy dinner.  Just do or say something.

As far as the high school years and the psychology-babble, I haven't seen a lot of Linklater, so this may be a taste thing.  I am just less partial to movies where characters talk about stuff they are gonna do or that they did.  I'd rather see them do the stuff.  Again, probably just a taste thing.

I do want to check this out again, because there was a good amount that I enjoyed...particularly the adult characters, and the sibling interaction in the earliest scenes.  But boy are millennials uninteresting people sometimes.  I am just a few years older than Mason, and this makes me a little weary of my generation.  Is this what happens when you make a movie about us?  I'm starting to get the too-many-video games thing.

There's actually no concrete way to determine how many K film is.  There are some out there who argue 35mm is closer to 10k.  There's just no answer. 

I saw this over the summer so don't remember too many specifics, but it felt like there was a digital slant to it, if unconscious.  The "side by side" comparison is half-false advertising...the doc really was more like a narrative about the history of the debate and sort of took the position that digital had already won [which, yeah, it probably will].  I would have preferred there to be more of a legitimate debate and back and forth.

There were a few odd moments though, like this off-topic rant from the Wachowski's about digital social media that was inserted into a conversation about film vs. digital...when ironically they shot Cloud Atlas on film.  I am curious why do not discuss that choice in the doc at all.

And the people they got to argue for film did a poor job.  Nolan came off as whiney and made some hail-mary arguments. 

There really is only one argument you can make in favor of film: the look.  And honestly, it's a strong enough argument by itself. 

Person A argues: Digital is cheaper and easier for me to use, and I have more creative freedom.
Person B: Cool, well, this film stuff still looks better.  So I'm gonna use the better stuff.

Should have been more of that in the doc.

I'm shooting a short this April on film.  It's costing me a few more pesos, and I might get a few less takes...but personally it's worth it for me in the end.  I still believe film has a special quality that can't be matched.

Yeah, last week I tried softening the highlights and changing the tree color.  Got ehh results, there is definitely more to do.  Here were the results:

I will probably go back to this shot at some point, but by and large the darker shots have been much nicer to me.

Well, I enjoyed it...if for superficial reasons.  Great score, 3D that for some reason didn't bother me.  Couple of half-baked original ideas.  And I wasn't rolling my eyes consistently, which is more than I can say for for most films I have seen in the last year.  Did I walk out of it feeling like it just wasted my time?  Yeah.  But such is life at the cinema nowadays...

See here's my thing with the 3D, and I don't know why titanic is finally the one that broke my back.

I disagree with the idea that technical advances in film over the last hundred years have been made to put you there with the characters.  Perhaps emotionally, that might be the end game.  But up until this point, that is not what has literally been happening to film form.

First we had standard, single images.  Electrocuting an elephant, arrival of a train, etc.  Cinema of attractions, that kinda thing.

I guess you can call editing the first big advancement.  But editing isn't putting you in the character's world.  It is putting the characters in their own world.  It is giving them a story and a realized universe to play it out in.

Then sound.  Sound is literally giving the characters a voice.  It is making them sound and act more like us.  It is making their world richer.

Color and widescreen, I can kind of agree with you.  It is more of a visceral experience for the audience or an expansion of film art, than an actual storytelling tool.  But color and widescreen do not actually change your relationship with what is happening in the world of the film.

BUT 3D DOES.  It is, literally, breaking the fourth wall of the film...and in the case of the titanic, for no good reason.    And standard narrative film, by its nature, is a projected image of events existing in another time and place...self-contained in their own world.  The magic of film is that I can be transported emotionally through good storytelling and this bizarre concept of film editing. 

These two things contradict each other.  Something happening in the same room as you, and something happening off in another world.  You can't have both at once.  And every problem I have with 3D stems from that.  When Rose is floating on a door saying her goodbyes to Jack, even if I have to devote one ounce of brain power into processing that her elbow is closer to me than her head...it is too much.

I agree with dorkman that if 3D becomes the next thing, our film grammar will definitely have to change.  But I would even go as far as to say our storytelling may have to change to adopt more of a meta feel.  To acknowledge the audience's presence. 

To date, the best thing I have seen in 3D is the spidey ride at universal.  And while it is really cool, I would prefer to not have our films evolve in that direction.  I enjoy a good, old-fashioned story.

I had not read the books, and was with the film (for the most part) up until

.  What follows after is a totally unwarranted rebellion scene (which I understand is not part of the books).  And then that tacky love story, which also comes out of nowhere (apparently it was the focus of the books). 

That, and what felt like a very rushed climax, brought it down from a 3-star to 2-star flick for me.  The Capital scenes, and some of the performances, were the highlight.  Everything else just seemed to get worse and worse as it went on...