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(431 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Hi everybody. I have posted here a few times but never said much, so now I am posting in the thread.

My username is Dorkman, but I go by the name Michael. I am a compositor at Encore. I was coming back from dinner at the end of September 2014 and was at Cedars Sinai for nearly a year after that. I then spent time from October 2015 to April 2016 at Rancho Los Amigos in ABI DRC classes every Monday and Wednesday of the year. Though I got better, I still go to Brains in Motion class and visit Driving Techniques classes on Tuesdays. I got my job back at Encore so I do not need to get another any time soon.

I do not have my sister's phone number, but mine is now [REDACTED]. Call me if you want to and I will add your number as well.

I came across FIYH by being a member. I also used the forum at TheForce.net while I was a member there, though I haven't seen that since before my accident.

Mod edit: I know we're your friends here, but having your phone number publicly available online can be a bad idea.

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(248 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Thank you for posting this here.

Hi everyone! I went to dinner at the end of September 2014, and was hit by a car and pinned to the wall. I was in the hospital from then until October 2015, when I went to Rancho Los Amigos. It took a while to find this site, but now I am here and have read through this page.

I did not get any postcards from you guys, but they were probably removed before I could see them. Both STAR WARS: EPISODE 7 and GHOSTBUSTERS I saw at home and not in theaters. (Both would be good commentaries when we are ready for that.) Let me know what you want to do.

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(20 replies, posted in Episodes)

RE: theme parks -- it should be pointed out (the guys were a bit fuzzy on this during the ep) that none of the discussed parks are stand-alone. Star Wars Land will be Disney; Wizarding World of Harry Potter is Universal Studios. WWHP will have its own discrete entrance, the same way California Adventure has a discrete entrance from Disneyland, but it's a Universal Studios experience.

What I'm surprised no one brought up is that these theme parks/lands/however you want to think of them are based on media for which a tremendous chunk of its appeal is the world of the story itself.

Yes, people love Harry Potter for the whole adventure good-vs-evil story, but what they love even more -- what really made it transcend other stories of the same kind -- is the idea that THEY could someday get a Hogwarts letter and go get a wand at Ollivanders and walk through the doors of the Great Hall for the Sorting. People love Luke and Leia and Han but -- as we are all well aware -- they love even more the idea of living in that world, of swinging their own lightsaber or piloting their own fighter in a space battle. Avatar -- for which Disney is also building a Land in Florida -- didn't make a billion dollars because anyone gave a tin shit about Jake and Neytiri, it made a billion dollars because people wanted to take a three hour trip to Pandora as many times as they could.

So given the resources, why WOULDN'T you do the obvious thing and make that world people want to inhabit a world they can inhabit?

EDIT: LOCKE is great. Watched it because it's very much the aesthetic and sensibility I want for a project I'm hacking away at. The guys know what I'm talking about, hopefully the rest of you will soon enough too. But yeah, it's Tom Hardy in a car taking phone calls - half of them about pouring concrete for god's sake - and it's somehow riveting.

The other recent (couple years now but) 80s throwback action flick Trey may have been thinking of is JACK REACHER.

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(16 replies, posted in Off Topic)

But you better believe we're doing an episode on this bad boy once it airs (which is presumably only a few weeks away).

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(34 replies, posted in Episodes)

avatar wrote:

Imagine saying 'the problem with this movie is you' to Cameron. And then telling Jim his movie would be better if he stayed away.

I almost had a panic seizure just now.

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(95 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Jp12x wrote:

The best way to distribute a fanedit is by file-sharing (as opposed to post or whatever). There is also not a single illegal thing happening when you share such a file with a small group, not for profit (in the USA, at least). By it's very nature, a re-cut is a transformative act and protected.

Pretty sure that wouldn't hold up in court. For one thing, copyright infringement has nothing to do with whether or not you are making a profit. It makes it somewhat less likely that anyone will notice or care about what you're doing, but if they did decide to shut you down, they'd be within their legal rights. Transformative acts also have limitations -- simply rearranging an existing work doesn't really count, you have to add significantly to it.

I'm not anti-remix personally (I'm flirting with the idea of a fanedit of HOBBIT myself, if I can come to terms with having to watch the third) but let's not kid ourselves. It's playing in an area that's only grey so long as the copyright holders deign to allow it to be so.

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(2,068 replies, posted in Off Topic)

bullet3 wrote:

Just in the last decade, you've got Kingdom of Heaven, Matchstick Men, and American Gangster as highs, and Prometheus, Robin Hood, and The Counselor as lows.

It doesn't concern you at least a little that those are pretty much in chronological order?

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(2,068 replies, posted in Off Topic)

The 4-hour making of doc "The Furious Gods" is pretty great though. Watching it actually made me feel kind of excited about the film even though I already knew it was barrel-aged diarrhea. Lots of people giving Ridley backhanded compliments, pinning all the bad decisions on him by "crediting" his creativity.

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(11 replies, posted in Episodes)

By the way, according to the Blu-Ray.com review, the SORCERER release in fact has pretty much no special features. PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, however, has them coming out of all available orifices. On Trey's recommendation (and he's also not the first to bang the SORCERER drum), I took a chance and just blind-bought them both.

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(11 replies, posted in Episodes)

Re: the "do you believe in god" scene in GHOSTBUSTERS -- as I recall from the official commentaries, that was inserted where it is to bring Ray and Winston back into the story a bit, and also explain where they've been while most of the movie went down -- because up to that point they've both been missing since the Twinkie conversation, before the terror dog took Dana, and don't show up again until they pull up to the blown-out headquarters. It also serves, as the guys pointed out, as a tonal transition for the film to emphasize the potentially serious implications of what they do, as well as a literal transition from night to day to get us into the Walter Peck scene.

It's actually appropriate you should mention the ghostbeej straight after -- it was part of a much longer sequence where Ray and Winston spend the night at an old maritime museum (or something) and Ray falls asleep on the bed after having played dress-up with some of the clothing (which is why he's wearing the admiral's jacket in the scene). It killed the pace and so they dropped it, minus the bit they retained for the montage. The "do you believe in god" conversation was originally them coming back from that bust.

/iknowthatyouknowthat

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(58 replies, posted in Off Topic)

I've been getting back into podcasts with the advent of a great app for iPhone called Overcast that works WAY WAY better than the built-in iOS one that put me off, and has a bunch of cool playback settings like "Smart Speed" which shortens silences without changing the actual playback speed otherwise. (Highly recommended.) Having a renewed interest, I'm grateful to this thread for turning me on to some of them.

I've got a bunch in my list I have yet to even really get to, but the standouts to me have been:

Welcome to Night Vale - Haven't seen this mentioned here -- which is surprising considering how much I heard about it prior to listening. A fun ongoing story in the style of community radio updates of the local goings on of a fictional desert town where, in the words of the creator, "All conspiracy theories are true - and we go from there." It's surreal, Lovecraftian, funny and scary and often heartfelt all at once. I got hooked in the first few episodes and plowed through the rest of them straight through, and now await each new biweekly episode with semi-patience.

How Did This Get Made - I'll throw in my love for this one as well. I appreciate this show not just because it's funny, but because they approach movies the same way we do -- taking them on their own terms as much as possible, while still being critical and more than happy to mock away. Sometimes they're frustrating because they get hung up on a point of contention that's actually a result of them misunderstanding something in the film, but of course our listeners would be quick to point out that's also approaching movies the same way we do. wink I'm about halfway through the backlog and the only complaint I've got is that the sponsored ad breaks are a bit annoying and becoming lengthier as the show goes on, but a few taps of the "jump forward 15 seconds" button make quick work of them. The only episode I couldn't listen to was 88 MINUTES, because their guest host Pete Holmes was WAY too manic and obnoxious.

We Have Concerns - a fairly new podcast by a couple of guys I guess are probably known in certain circles (gaming, I get the impression) but are new to me, they talk about new science/technology news from a pros-cons perspective -- though, despite the impression you might get from the name, it's often mostly pros. They're extremely positive, upbeat, witty guys who you can tell just have fun talking to each other, and that makes it fun to listen to. I laugh aloud every episode. I liked them so much I jumped on board to support them on Patreon, and if you give them a listen I think there's a good chance you'll do the same.

Tons more I'm planning to get to, but those are the ones that are consistent must-listens for me as of the last few months.

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(16 replies, posted in Off Topic)

As someone who glances at my phone with annoying frequency, the Watch is actually a cool concept. Just not $350-cool.

Thing about Apple is they've never actually been in the lead -- at their best, they've had a great nose for which way the wind is blowing and have managed to envision the really strong, next-gen implementation of an idea. They don't come up with the idea themselves -- they didn't come up with tablets, or wearables, or a digital wallet -- but they've always figured out the most solid, straightforward way to bring it to the masses.

EDIT: Then again, it's hard to argue with this.

We have "whoring" to thank for the Sistine Chapel, many of Shakespeare's plays and nearly all of his sonnets, WIZARD OF OZ, GONE WITH THE WIND, and much of the work of Sidney Lumet. Oh, and all those Marvel movies the kids love so much.

IMO the difference between a hack and an artist isn't why you took the gig, it's whether you bring your A-game once you've got it.

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(59 replies, posted in Episodes)

Noah doesn't hear anything, he's given visions he must interpret. But at no point is it a matter of interpretation or ambiguity that the Creator exists and is quite actively engaged in the process.

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(59 replies, posted in Episodes)

I still don't see how you're getting "pro-God" out of it. It treats God as a given, sure -- the same way GHOSTBUSTERS treats ghosts as a given. I don't think of GHOSTBUSTERS as pro-ghost nor is NOAH pro-God. As Doc said, the big climax of the film is NOAH deciding he doesn't care what God wants, humanity is worth preserving. It's probably one of the most pro-human films I've seen in years.

EDIT: And yeah, it's pretty clear in the Torah that God isn't all-powerful or transcendently wise at all. He's capricious and jealous, prone to genocidal mood swings and fucking up in assorted ways he regrets later. With very little effort you can read the stories as a comedy of errors about an incompetent creator who keeps making things exponentially worse as he tries to fix a previous mistake, like some cosmic Mr. Bean. Some of it can be attributed to the Hebrew religion originally being polytheistic and all the gods being collapsed into one -- but not all of it can. The idea of his omnipotence is clearly "my god is better than your god" propaganda.

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(59 replies, posted in Episodes)

something something SURROGATES

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(59 replies, posted in Episodes)

I think the part that was confusing was "When I heard about this, it sounded awesome. This was everything I expected it to be. Meh."

Having had a few days to understand, I think I feel the same way about THE LEGO MOVIE that Teague does about NOAH. People seem largely blown away by it because it never entered their minds that it could even be remotely good. But I'm like "Uh, yeah, did you guys not see CLOUDY? This is a slam dunk for these guys." and as such I think it's fine and enjoyable but wasn't floored by it.

If I'm floored by NOAH, it's less that Aronofsky made a movie like this -- because of course -- and more that he was allowed to do so.

EDIT: It raises an interesting question, actually. Is it possible to really love a movie that meets your expectations? Or can you only appreciate it? If that's what you think the movie ought to be, can it only be adequate if it is exactly that? Does strong affection, like humor, rely on being surprised? You can understand a joke is funny and chuckle at it if you see it coming, but it's the ones you don't see coming that knock you down.

I don't have an answer but I'm inclined to think yes: a movie has to surprise you to reach that level.

This is why I refuse to get excited about anything until I see it.

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(17 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Yeah, though as I recall there's some weird corporate ouroboros going on where DNeg owns a chunk of Prime Focus' parent company, and Prime Focus is now a controlling shareholder in DNeg (or not? As I recall DNeg insisted they won't be controlling operations but I think just numerically they have a controlling interest).

I guess that's no different than an individual owning stock in the company they work for... but it's still a bit wonky.

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(17 replies, posted in Off Topic)

http://io9.com/how-badly-will-sin-city- … 1621451688

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(9 replies, posted in Episodes)

So I finally experienced listening to one of our commentaries not only without the film, but never having seen it at all. It really does work surprisingly well.

Anyway, cool stories bro. Really fun to listen to.

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(25 replies, posted in Off Topic)

I think what interested Linklater in the story is in not knowing what the story would be. He was making it up on the fly as the actors aged in real time. All he knew is he wanted to explore a character's life via an approach nobody else ever had.

It's not a typical Hollywood movie -- it's more of a French movie taken to the extreme. Not to get all "it's about the notes they don't play," but I think Linklater made deliberate choices NOT to go for the drama and just to show a fairly mundane boyhood. There's no tearful Lifetime blowout when Mason comes home drunk/high in his late teens (I liked the "Hey buddy, what time is it" fakeout from the stepfather a lot there); there's no horrific accident when the kids are throwing saw blades with a buzz on, or awkward losing-virginity-to-a-hooker scene. I feel like he clearly set up "This is the way movies tell you a kid's life would go -- this is the way it would probably go, though."

Yes, the form is largely the substance. As we have often said on the show, I don't want all movies to be like this, but I'm glad this one is.

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(17 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Oh, also, they're releasing  this one in 3D -- and as far as I can tell, they shot it that way natively rather than converting. So I guess instead of doing two times the work, they're doing half the work twice.

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(17 replies, posted in Off Topic)

First and foremost, I would guess that the sequel does have a significantly smaller budget. It's been nearly ten years since the original, which indicates that the studio wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to go back to that well, nor does Rodriguez exactly blow the doors off the box office when he puts out a film. I can't find any info on the budget but Google does show me press releases that the VFX for the sequel are being handled by Prime Focus -- who on the fast-cheap-good triangle have the reputation (and track record) of being squarely the fast-cheap choice.

Rodriguez's recent efforts are plagued by the fact that he was never a particularly good filmmaker to begin with -- the method and attitude with which he approached filmmaking were far more interesting than the final results -- compounded by the fact that since GRINDHOUSE he's discovered that there is an audience that enjoys deliberately cheesy shit like MACHETE, and he's riding a sweet spot of spending just enough to be a cut above ASYLUM films, but not so much his films are actually financially risky.

The first SIN CITY was made by a guy who was still growing as a filmmaker and trying to elevate the material artistically and bring it to life. This one is being made by a guy whose whole schtick has settled into deliberately targeting so-bad-it's-good absurdity. Why spend the money and time when his target audience doesn't care?

100% guessing, of course. No inside knowledge of production and I'm not the dude's therapist or anything.

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(18 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Yeah, the Nazgul didn't start riding the fell beasts until after their defeat at the Ford, but it's not like those things didn't exist already and were probably all over the place.

Even if not, the defense so often made (by me as well) is that the Eagles are a proud race who won't be treated as Middle Earth taxis -- but the other part is just that they're not stupid and have no more interest in getting near the damn place than any other "good" race of Middle Earth does. That's why they had to send the hobbits!

Solid retcon though.

I have to laugh at "defining chapter" just because the Battle of Five Armies is the part most people forget is in the book at all. If you read it as a kid you remember Riddles in the Dark, you remember Smaug, and then you re-read it as an adult and go "Whoa, there's a whole battle in here!"