but you got it by being locked into a year of wow. Their perogative was to keep wow numbers inflated, and it worked, around 4-6 million subs locked in for 12 months.
Yeah well I was going to pay for a year's worth of wow anyway, so why -wouldn't- I want get a free Diablo 3 out of it?
Upon reflection, Lich King really was the high point of the game. Hardcores and casuals alike marching on Arthas.
I think Lich King dealt the game a blow that it never recovered from. For the first time, five-mans were -easy- (and boring). The initial raid was drop-dead easy (and had no hard mode). It set expectations in a lot of peoples' minds that everything should have been easy. Fortunately one of their worst raids (Naxx 10/25) they followed up with possibly their best (Ulduar). Cataclysm reintroduced challenging 5-man heroics (as it should have been all along) but halfway through the expansion Blizzard reversed course again and nerfed the 5-mans so they were easy, and introduced new five-mans that, once again, you had to sleep through for them to be challenging and it's been that way ever since. Fortunately, if you activated hard-modes raids were still difficult. There was challenge to be had, but only in raiding and pvp. The old world has all the challenge taken out of it so leveling a new character is sadly boring. 5-mans are super-easy. LFRs aren't too challenging, but they're not really supposed to be so that's fine.
But worst of all... during Lich King it was a -full year- from the release of the last major content patch until the release of the next expansion. That killed quite a few guilds.
My personal feeling? I miss the challenge of the 1-60 experience, and 5-man heroics, but despite that I think the game is the strongest now than it's been since BC, maybe even since vanilla. I think Mists really hit the right balance in giving you things to do at max level besides raiding.
The notion that griping about Diablo 3 is all due to the first week's disaster is truly myopic. I soldiered through that, as stupid as the whole Blizzard-caused situation was, and had a fine time for awhile in the game. It has its good points, but it also has its truly negative points.
On the plus side? I love the skill system, and combat in general is quite fun. The health orb system is kindof goofy, but I got used to it. The skills are generally well-thought-out.
On the negative side? The item system sucks. The items are uninspired and uninteresting, and for an item hunt game, that's a real killer. At higher levels you find the difficulty has been tuned so you need high-quality items from the auction house. Forget finding them yourself, you'll spend hours and hours grinding on the earlier stages trying to find gear to survive on later stages when a quick trip to the auction house is what you need. So instead you'll just grind for gold to spend on the AC and that's a far less interesting and rewarding way of getting items than most games have. The auction house hurt and seriously damaged the Diablo 3 endgame, and it's not just bitter bloggers saying that, that's an admission from the Diablo 3 lead developers themselves. It was an experiment that ultimately didn't pan out. It is, however, a response to combat a very real problem from Diablo 2 -- the black market.
I'd contrast the item system to D2's more-available sets and uniques (the real strength of the game) and crafted items. Items with character, not just "yet another blue/yellow item with randomly-generated stats that perfectly match the stats I need." Hunting for items was fun in Diablo2. In Diablo 3 you end up just selling most things for gold so you can afford the prices on the auction house.
D2's primitive quest system wasn't exactly great, but Diablo 3 goes overboard with its story-driven quest interface. It's too WoW-like, and I speak as someone who still spends most of his gaming time in World of Warcraft.
The skill system is fun, but having quick, easy respecs lets you try out everything about a class on one character. What need have I to create a second monk when I can do everything with my first monk? I'd contrast that to rolling new characters in Diablo 2 to try all the various different builds people managed to make work, but in D2 I did get really sick of seeing Act 1 Normal so much. I used a trainer program to get my new single-player characters to level 20 or so quickly so the real game can begin, but shit, you can't do that in D3 thanks to its ridonculous online-only requirement. So you have to play the lower levels on normal whenever you make a new character, but the designers killed the replay value anyway, so I guess that doesn't matter as much.
Diablo 3 has a lot of good stuff in it, so it's frustrating when some of the truly major flaws just make the game not-that-interesting. I'm hoping that these issues (especially the item problems) can be addressed in the expansion. Diablo2 went through a lot of changes in the 8+ years that Blizzard was actively retuning and fixing it, maybe Diablo3 will get the same.
As long as it's not something epically lame like Kirk falling from a poorly-secured railing while a rocket running on a solid rocket booster goes from an earth-like planet to its sun in a matter of seconds. Just to pick a potential scenario at random. That would be truly unforgiveable.
No no, it all makes sense. The sun was really only about 5000 feet from the surface of the planet, that's why the rocket gets there so quickly.
But what about the shots from space showing the sun being far away? Uhh.... they are... really small. Yeah, the planet is 50 miles wide, and the sun just bigger. Don't look at me like that, I didn't write the screenplay. >_
Re:They shot themselves in the foot
on
The Last GUADEC?
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· Score: 1
I have rarely heard of people using Skype on GNU/Linux and I do nothing but support GNU/Linux.
It's difficult to chat with friends on IM these days without using Skype, since that's what everyone's moving to. I'm not too fond of it, but my skype plugin for pidgin works ok. At least it's not Steam.
Pacific Rim has practically made it's production costs back, as of today.
That is not quite true, because "production budget" is a bit misleading. First, you have the domestic gross, about 50% which goes back to the studios to pay for the production budget, which means solely considering domestic, a $180m budget needs to make at least $360m to "break even." That's an average also, films that make less has a smaller percentage of the take go to studios. But fortunately there's the foreign haul, right? Yet that 50% number is lower in foreign markets. Their theaters keep more money, you'll often have tariffs that take a % of the profit.. so the amount of $$$ coming back to studios is certainly less. But each movie is different, some can get sweetheart deals with foreign countries, some can't. So whenever you ask any of these questions, the answer is always a confusing "it depends."
The general rule of thumb I hear, even from people in the industry, is that a movie breaks even if it makes twice its production budget worldwide.
So if Pacific Rim cost $180m and it's made $170m so far (and hey, it's still going and there are a lot of foreign markets still to open), it's still in a much deeper hole than $10m.
Of course, that depends on whether that $180m is accurate. Studios do not like to release numbers, so most of these budget numbers are guesses anyway.
I think Star Trek: First Contact was a decent film that should not have featured the Borg. Alice Krieg(sp) did a fantastic job as the Borg Queen, but the notion of a Borg Queen itself sapped the Borg of much of their horror. The Next Gen crew got away with one on that movie, since I agree with Plinkett that the studios tried to turn the ST:TNG movies into action movies with a cast that was not suited for action... AT ALL.
Maybe they could have even included some heroic last stand for Captain Kirk, where he does something cool like he dies ramming a crippled starship into a fleet of Klingon battle cruisers or something
So the death they gave to George Kirk in the 2009 movie.:-9
Flying cars are not going to happen, in no small part because they're just not a good idea... for a whole host of reasons. The hoverboard is more plausible, the jacket and shoes should be totally doable.
But it was highly entertaining, in a way that none of Michael Bay's shit ever is. I'd watch it again when it's available on disc; if for nothing else than to play TV Tropes Bingo.
Wouldn't that be a bingo card with 50 rows and columns! Man, how tedious that would be to fill in.
He's talking about domestic grosses, the usual figure used for film box office success. If you want to get into worldwide grosses, your "is this successful" number needs to go way up. I loved Oblivion (and Cruise really makes the movie as well), but $285 global is not a high number anymore for a movie with that budget.
Congratulations, you accurately nailed exactly the parts that I liked and disliked about the Hobbit.:-)
Add to that the whole Morgul knife/necromancer plot that really feels more like filler even if Tolkien readers know what is going on. I wanted maybe a smaller more cohesive story. All of this other stuff.. while in the continuity of the universe it really did happen (the Quest of Erebor was concurrent to the White Council driving the Necromancer from Mirkwood -- they felt Smaug and the Necromancer might aid each other if one was attacked alone), but it really feels like it breaks the pacing the flow of the story. This was not a problem Jackson had with LotR, but it's a really big problem with the Hobbit so far.
Good acting and characterization for the most part with the dwarves. You have 13 of them, it'd be really hard to keep track of them and have people be able to tell the difference between Balin and Dwalin. Special props go to the characterization of Thorin (made a more complex and interesting character than you had in the books) and Fili and Kili (actually giving you a taste of what "young, impulsive" dwarves would be like). The Bilbo/Gollum scene was perfect. Well done, as was Bilbo's speech at the end where he comes into his own and earns the respect of the dwarves. Azog the Goblin was pretty cool; he works as a semi-new character providing a real antagonist the way Lurtz did in Fellowship. I could have used less of (or none of) Radagast, maybe even less of the White Council. Even an action-oriented journey through the Misty Mountains might have been fine, the LotR films had a perfectly-done Moria trip.
Overall, the Hobbit (the book) was a much lighter story than the Lord of the Rings and it was written in a lighter, less realistic manner, and the Hobbit movie feels like it inherited that -- the action features dire circumstances (omg, kidnapped by goblins) but it's treated as being not very serious either (fall 300 feet on a plank of wood, no one even has a broken bone!). So it was hard for me to reconcile the mood whiplash that generated.
You mean the Pirates Of The Caribbean? They did pretty well at the box office didn't they?
Pirates of the Caribbean has more to do with this than most people realize. The Lone Ranger is one of the movies mentioned as flopping, and it has the same actor/producer/director which made Pirates of the Caribbean. It was given a high budget in th ehopes that it would do Pirates-like numbers.
Peter Jackson was given a grain silo full of money to make Lord of the Rings. His previous film was The Frighteners, which was a commercial failure. Before that he was mostly known for godawful horror/comedy flicks that had niche appeal at best.
In film circles, Peter Jackson was best known for "Heavenly Creatures" which he was nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar. It was quite well regarded and showed he would write as well as direct, and handle serious and emotional topics and not just gross-out and horror humor flicks. If he didn't have Heavenly Creatures under his belt, I doubt he would have been given $300+ million for the Lord of the Rings.
The Frighteners was the film that, fortunately, convinced him that he would prefer to stay in New Zealand to make movies rather than stay in Hollywood.
They could have given that project to any number of "safe" choices, but they chose the freak who made a good pitch.
Does that happen as often as it should? No. But if you say it never happens at all, then you're either a liar or you have no idea what you're talking about.
I liked Star Trek 5! I've actually watched it several times.
I would never mod someone's guilty pleasure flamebait! I willingly bought a copy of Xanadu for God's sake.
I thought Star Trek 5 was horrible but it had good intentions. The quest for God? Super-highbrow concept but they went with a totally low-brow approach.
Back to the Future 2 depressing? Sure, I can see that. It presents a dystopia, a future they need a reason to change.:-)
Quality in Hollywood's eyes nowadays is determined by how much money is thrown at CGI explosions and annoying post-processing effects, while the original Star Wars movies (pre Special Edition) still manage to look more realistic and visually interesting than anything made since, while telling an original story with incredibly unique and memorable characters.
There is definitely an overuse of CG, and the best effects that I see are a hybrid of techniques... mattes, miniatures, CG.
But even the Star Wars movies pre-Special Edition definitely have their cases of unconvincing special effects, whether it was the visible paste lines where Tie Fighters were pasted onto the star field frames, or the AT-AT attack on Hoth in Empire (It looks good... but it's still Go-Motion, and it's still too strobey), or the very unconvincing yeti also in Empire, the giant monster in Return of the Jedi that Luke kills... There are LOT of good effects though, ILM was at their modelmaking prime there with the original trilogy, and I'll take the scuffed-up-looking practical model ships over the CG shiny ships of the prequel trilogy any time.
There was no Star Trek 5. It never got made. Capiche? Never mention it again. Ever.
Having looked at extras and read what they were trying to do with it I have... I have sympathy. There were a lot of good intentions, bumbling, and confusion on that movie.
And even Back to the Future had the sub-par part III.
Sub-par is being very kind. Very hard to imagine that 2 and 3 were shot at the same time. Sort of seems like they put all the good stuff in 2, and the rest in 3. Which is pretty sad, because even 2 wasn't as good as the first (which also suffered in a few minor ways, but fortunately not too many).
I... like parts of part 3. It was kindof fun, but overall not terribly memorable. I wouldn't say it's bad, but it's nowhere close to the first or second in the series.
The second movie, while not quite as good as the first, I just loved for the audacity of having McFly follow himself around again in 1955, putting a whole new layer of plot atop the events we already knew. Plus, all those future gadgets REALLY tickled this 14-year-old's fancy. I wanted that flying Delorean. I wanted that hoverboard. The self-drying jacket, self-tying shoes. I wanted the future!!!!
Hollywood takes risks all the time. Give a somewhat unproven director $100 million to make "his vision" that he sold you on storyboards? That can be a hell of a risk. Sometimes they pan out, sometimes they don't.
I'd say Star Trek IV was an excellent ensemble comedy that falls apart a bit in the third act. I'd say it's not approachable for non-Trekkies, but I think the cast chemistry overcomes any problems caused by the technobabble.
When you were enjoying those 80's movies as a kid, the grownups were making the exact same criticisms of those movies and saying they were garbage compared to the movies they grew up with in the 60's.
Yeah, watch a bunch of the older Siskel and Ebert movies on Youtube. Man, Gene Siskel could be such a grouch!
its just that the movies being produced today are unappealing garbage compared to what they were 25 years ago
No they're not. They're about at the same level of quality as they were 25 years ago. You just remember the really good ones, you forget the stinkers that came out to the theaters every weekend. Good movies stuck around longer too, these days a movie has a month or two to earn almost everything, but 25 years ago a good movie could stick around for 6+ months. So they were more "present."
The summers of 1982 and 1984 were spectacular years for movies, but otherwise I think the movie quality is about the same. Production values are way way up though, which is part of the problem. No way should The Lone Ranger have had that high a budget. I know they were trying to recapture the Pirates magic, but still... Sounds like it had the same problems as John Carter -- decent movie that was budgeted way too high for it to be able to break even on modest returns.
I grew up in the 1980s, seeing Back to the Future, Batman (1989), the Original Star Trek movie series, non sci fi such as Funny Farm,
I did too! However, you have to acknowledge the quality even of the movies you just mentioned -- Star Trek 1 was edited and directed poorly and comes across as listless and plodding. Star Trek 5 was a disaster all around. I loved Batman(1989) when it came out, but I have to admit that it doesn't hold a candle to the Christopher Nolan movies. Though Michael Keaton made the best "Brooding Bruce Wayne."
And even Back to the Future had the sub-par part III.
It's curious that the co-author of the original paper, Professor Walker-Smith [huffingtonpost.co.uk], was subsequently totally exonerated
Totally exonerated is being so generous that you're being disingenuous. This case was about if an elderly man (who had long been retired) deserved to be "struck off" the medical record. It was the judge's conclusion that Walker-Smith was essentially an unwitting dupe rather than someone knowingly performing unapproved research on children whose parents hadn't given consent either. It doesn't say a lot for Walker-Smith's judgement, but it's better to be a pawn than a cheat, and the former isn't really enough to pull a license. Especially since he's no longer practicing.
Professor Walker-Smith's position was always that it was too early to even recommend suspending the MMR vaccine and that more (and larger) tests needed to be run. It was Wakefield who called his own press conference to urge suspension of the vaccine and claim that it was causing autism.
Wakefield earns his contempt among the scientific community not for being a poor scientist but that he committed fraud to supply evidence for trial lawyers and bolster his own company. We have plenty of evidence that that is what Wakefield did, but there's little strong evidence that Walker-Smith committed any fraud.
None of this though affects whether Wakefield's Lancet paper is valid. Legal rulings are not science, and the judge cannot expect to be a peer-reviewer of a paper in a field of which he has no expertise. So the decision says nothing about the Lancet MMR paper's results, or Wakefield for that matter. It's a good try trying to spin this as exoneration for the Wakefield and the antivax movement, but there's no evidence of that, which has been the antivax problem all these years.
And he loses his radio show because nobody listens.
For that you can blame Citadel Broadcasting which purchased KGO Radio. They messed with a good thing, KGO's ratings slipped to third in the area (after a news station and soft-rock station), so Citadel copied the all-new format of the #1 station. Almost no more newstalk, nothing. Edell was wise to get out when he did, that station sunk quickly after. The loss of his radio show was the first of Citadel's panic moves trying to get more mid-day listeners.
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but you got it by being locked into a year of wow. Their perogative was to keep wow numbers inflated, and it worked, around 4-6 million subs locked in for 12 months.
Yeah well I was going to pay for a year's worth of wow anyway, so why -wouldn't- I want get a free Diablo 3 out of it?
Upon reflection, Lich King really was the high point of the game. Hardcores and casuals alike marching on Arthas.
I think Lich King dealt the game a blow that it never recovered from. For the first time, five-mans were -easy- (and boring). The initial raid was drop-dead easy (and had no hard mode). It set expectations in a lot of peoples' minds that everything should have been easy. Fortunately one of their worst raids (Naxx 10/25) they followed up with possibly their best (Ulduar). Cataclysm reintroduced challenging 5-man heroics (as it should have been all along) but halfway through the expansion Blizzard reversed course again and nerfed the 5-mans so they were easy, and introduced new five-mans that, once again, you had to sleep through for them to be challenging and it's been that way ever since. Fortunately, if you activated hard-modes raids were still difficult. There was challenge to be had, but only in raiding and pvp. The old world has all the challenge taken out of it so leveling a new character is sadly boring. 5-mans are super-easy. LFRs aren't too challenging, but they're not really supposed to be so that's fine.
But worst of all... during Lich King it was a -full year- from the release of the last major content patch until the release of the next expansion. That killed quite a few guilds.
My personal feeling? I miss the challenge of the 1-60 experience, and 5-man heroics, but despite that I think the game is the strongest now than it's been since BC, maybe even since vanilla. I think Mists really hit the right balance in giving you things to do at max level besides raiding.
The notion that griping about Diablo 3 is all due to the first week's disaster is truly myopic. I soldiered through that, as stupid as the whole Blizzard-caused situation was, and had a fine time for awhile in the game. It has its good points, but it also has its truly negative points.
On the plus side? I love the skill system, and combat in general is quite fun. The health orb system is kindof goofy, but I got used to it. The skills are generally well-thought-out.
On the negative side? The item system sucks. The items are uninspired and uninteresting, and for an item hunt game, that's a real killer. At higher levels you find the difficulty has been tuned so you need high-quality items from the auction house. Forget finding them yourself, you'll spend hours and hours grinding on the earlier stages trying to find gear to survive on later stages when a quick trip to the auction house is what you need. So instead you'll just grind for gold to spend on the AC and that's a far less interesting and rewarding way of getting items than most games have. The auction house hurt and seriously damaged the Diablo 3 endgame, and it's not just bitter bloggers saying that, that's an admission from the Diablo 3 lead developers themselves. It was an experiment that ultimately didn't pan out. It is, however, a response to combat a very real problem from Diablo 2 -- the black market.
I'd contrast the item system to D2's more-available sets and uniques (the real strength of the game) and crafted items. Items with character, not just "yet another blue/yellow item with randomly-generated stats that perfectly match the stats I need." Hunting for items was fun in Diablo2. In Diablo 3 you end up just selling most things for gold so you can afford the prices on the auction house.
D2's primitive quest system wasn't exactly great, but Diablo 3 goes overboard with its story-driven quest interface. It's too WoW-like, and I speak as someone who still spends most of his gaming time in World of Warcraft.
The skill system is fun, but having quick, easy respecs lets you try out everything about a class on one character. What need have I to create a second monk when I can do everything with my first monk? I'd contrast that to rolling new characters in Diablo 2 to try all the various different builds people managed to make work, but in D2 I did get really sick of seeing Act 1 Normal so much. I used a trainer program to get my new single-player characters to level 20 or so quickly so the real game can begin, but shit, you can't do that in D3 thanks to its ridonculous online-only requirement. So you have to play the lower levels on normal whenever you make a new character, but the designers killed the replay value anyway, so I guess that doesn't matter as much.
Diablo 3 has a lot of good stuff in it, so it's frustrating when some of the truly major flaws just make the game not-that-interesting. I'm hoping that these issues (especially the item problems) can be addressed in the expansion. Diablo2 went through a lot of changes in the 8+ years that Blizzard was actively retuning and fixing it, maybe Diablo3 will get the same.
Wow. What a terrible dystopia you come up with. It's not easy to come up with a system worse than the current one, so... well done!
As long as it's not something epically lame like Kirk falling from a poorly-secured railing while a rocket running on a solid rocket booster goes from an earth-like planet to its sun in a matter of seconds. Just to pick a potential scenario at random. That would be truly unforgiveable.
No no, it all makes sense. The sun was really only about 5000 feet from the surface of the planet, that's why the rocket gets there so quickly.
But what about the shots from space showing the sun being far away? Uhh.... they are... really small. Yeah, the planet is 50 miles wide, and the sun just bigger. Don't look at me like that, I didn't write the screenplay. >_
I have rarely heard of people using Skype on GNU/Linux and I do nothing but support GNU/Linux.
It's difficult to chat with friends on IM these days without using Skype, since that's what everyone's moving to. I'm not too fond of it, but my skype plugin for pidgin works ok. At least it's not Steam.
Pacific Rim has practically made it's production costs back, as of today.
That is not quite true, because "production budget" is a bit misleading. First, you have the domestic gross, about 50% which goes back to the studios to pay for the production budget, which means solely considering domestic, a $180m budget needs to make at least $360m to "break even." That's an average also, films that make less has a smaller percentage of the take go to studios. But fortunately there's the foreign haul, right? Yet that 50% number is lower in foreign markets. Their theaters keep more money, you'll often have tariffs that take a % of the profit.. so the amount of $$$ coming back to studios is certainly less. But each movie is different, some can get sweetheart deals with foreign countries, some can't. So whenever you ask any of these questions, the answer is always a confusing "it depends."
The general rule of thumb I hear, even from people in the industry, is that a movie breaks even if it makes twice its production budget worldwide.
So if Pacific Rim cost $180m and it's made $170m so far (and hey, it's still going and there are a lot of foreign markets still to open), it's still in a much deeper hole than $10m.
Of course, that depends on whether that $180m is accurate. Studios do not like to release numbers, so most of these budget numbers are guesses anyway.
I think Star Trek: First Contact was a decent film that should not have featured the Borg. Alice Krieg(sp) did a fantastic job as the Borg Queen, but the notion of a Borg Queen itself sapped the Borg of much of their horror. The Next Gen crew got away with one on that movie, since I agree with Plinkett that the studios tried to turn the ST:TNG movies into action movies with a cast that was not suited for action... AT ALL.
Maybe they could have even included some heroic last stand for Captain Kirk, where he does something cool like he dies ramming a crippled starship into a fleet of Klingon battle cruisers or something
So the death they gave to George Kirk in the 2009 movie. :-9
Flying cars are not going to happen, in no small part because they're just not a good idea... for a whole host of reasons. The hoverboard is more plausible, the jacket and shoes should be totally doable.
But it was highly entertaining, in a way that none of Michael Bay's shit ever is. I'd watch it again when it's available on disc; if for nothing else than to play TV Tropes Bingo.
Wouldn't that be a bingo card with 50 rows and columns! Man, how tedious that would be to fill in.
Because then you make Cloud Atlas and lose big time.
He's talking about domestic grosses, the usual figure used for film box office success. If you want to get into worldwide grosses, your "is this successful" number needs to go way up. I loved Oblivion (and Cruise really makes the movie as well), but $285 global is not a high number anymore for a movie with that budget.
Congratulations, you accurately nailed exactly the parts that I liked and disliked about the Hobbit. :-)
Add to that the whole Morgul knife/necromancer plot that really feels more like filler even if Tolkien readers know what is going on. I wanted maybe a smaller more cohesive story. All of this other stuff.. while in the continuity of the universe it really did happen (the Quest of Erebor was concurrent to the White Council driving the Necromancer from Mirkwood -- they felt Smaug and the Necromancer might aid each other if one was attacked alone), but it really feels like it breaks the pacing the flow of the story. This was not a problem Jackson had with LotR, but it's a really big problem with the Hobbit so far.
Good acting and characterization for the most part with the dwarves. You have 13 of them, it'd be really hard to keep track of them and have people be able to tell the difference between Balin and Dwalin. Special props go to the characterization of Thorin (made a more complex and interesting character than you had in the books) and Fili and Kili (actually giving you a taste of what "young, impulsive" dwarves would be like). The Bilbo/Gollum scene was perfect. Well done, as was Bilbo's speech at the end where he comes into his own and earns the respect of the dwarves. Azog the Goblin was pretty cool; he works as a semi-new character providing a real antagonist the way Lurtz did in Fellowship. I could have used less of (or none of) Radagast, maybe even less of the White Council. Even an action-oriented journey through the Misty Mountains might have been fine, the LotR films had a perfectly-done Moria trip.
Overall, the Hobbit (the book) was a much lighter story than the Lord of the Rings and it was written in a lighter, less realistic manner, and the Hobbit movie feels like it inherited that -- the action features dire circumstances (omg, kidnapped by goblins) but it's treated as being not very serious either (fall 300 feet on a plank of wood, no one even has a broken bone!). So it was hard for me to reconcile the mood whiplash that generated.
You mean the Pirates Of The Caribbean?
They did pretty well at the box office didn't they?
Pirates of the Caribbean has more to do with this than most people realize.
The Lone Ranger is one of the movies mentioned as flopping, and it has the same actor/producer/director which made Pirates of the Caribbean. It was given a high budget in th ehopes that it would do Pirates-like numbers.
Peter Jackson was given a grain silo full of money to make Lord of the Rings. His previous film was The Frighteners, which was a commercial failure. Before that he was mostly known for godawful horror/comedy flicks that had niche appeal at best.
In film circles, Peter Jackson was best known for "Heavenly Creatures" which he was nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar. It was quite well regarded and showed he would write as well as direct, and handle serious and emotional topics and not just gross-out and horror humor flicks. If he didn't have Heavenly Creatures under his belt, I doubt he would have been given $300+ million for the Lord of the Rings.
The Frighteners was the film that, fortunately, convinced him that he would prefer to stay in New Zealand to make movies rather than stay in Hollywood.
They could have given that project to any number of "safe" choices, but they chose the freak who made a good pitch.
Does that happen as often as it should? No. But if you say it never happens at all, then you're either a liar or you have no idea what you're talking about.
At the risk of being modded "flamebait"...
I liked Star Trek 5! I've actually watched it several times.
I would never mod someone's guilty pleasure flamebait! I willingly bought a copy of Xanadu for God's sake.
I thought Star Trek 5 was horrible but it had good intentions. The quest for God? Super-highbrow concept but they went with a totally low-brow approach.
Back to the Future 2 depressing? Sure, I can see that. It presents a dystopia, a future they need a reason to change. :-)
Quality in Hollywood's eyes nowadays is determined by how much money is thrown at CGI explosions and annoying post-processing effects, while the original Star Wars movies (pre Special Edition) still manage to look more realistic and visually interesting than anything made since, while telling an original story with incredibly unique and memorable characters.
There is definitely an overuse of CG, and the best effects that I see are a hybrid of techniques... mattes, miniatures, CG.
But even the Star Wars movies pre-Special Edition definitely have their cases of unconvincing special effects, whether it was the visible paste lines where Tie Fighters were pasted onto the star field frames, or the AT-AT attack on Hoth in Empire (It looks good... but it's still Go-Motion, and it's still too strobey), or the very unconvincing yeti also in Empire, the giant monster in Return of the Jedi that Luke kills... There are LOT of good effects though, ILM was at their modelmaking prime there with the original trilogy, and I'll take the scuffed-up-looking practical model ships over the CG shiny ships of the prequel trilogy any time.
There was no Star Trek 5. It never got made. Capiche? Never mention it again. Ever.
Having looked at extras and read what they were trying to do with it I have... I have sympathy. There were a lot of good intentions, bumbling, and confusion on that movie.
And even Back to the Future had the sub-par part III.
Sub-par is being very kind. Very hard to imagine that 2 and 3 were shot at the same time. Sort of seems like they put all the good stuff in 2, and the rest in 3. Which is pretty sad, because even 2 wasn't as good as the first (which also suffered in a few minor ways, but fortunately not too many).
I... like parts of part 3. It was kindof fun, but overall not terribly memorable. I wouldn't say it's bad, but it's nowhere close to the first or second in the series.
The second movie, while not quite as good as the first, I just loved for the audacity of having McFly follow himself around again in 1955, putting a whole new layer of plot atop the events we already knew. Plus, all those future gadgets REALLY tickled this 14-year-old's fancy. I wanted that flying Delorean. I wanted that hoverboard. The self-drying jacket, self-tying shoes. I wanted the future!!!!
And it was Elijah Wood's first movie! Hehe.
You mean having Hollywood take risks?
Hollywood takes risks all the time. Give a somewhat unproven director $100 million to make "his vision" that he sold you on storyboards? That can be a hell of a risk. Sometimes they pan out, sometimes they don't.
I'd say Star Trek IV was an excellent ensemble comedy that falls apart a bit in the third act. I'd say it's not approachable for non-Trekkies, but I think the cast chemistry overcomes any problems caused by the technobabble.
When you were enjoying those 80's movies as a kid, the grownups were making the exact same criticisms of those movies and saying they were garbage compared to the movies they grew up with in the 60's.
Yeah, watch a bunch of the older Siskel and Ebert movies on Youtube. Man, Gene Siskel could be such a grouch!
its just that the movies being produced today are unappealing garbage compared to what they were 25 years ago
No they're not. They're about at the same level of quality as they were 25 years ago. You just remember the really good ones, you forget the stinkers that came out to the theaters every weekend. Good movies stuck around longer too, these days a movie has a month or two to earn almost everything, but 25 years ago a good movie could stick around for 6+ months. So they were more "present."
The summers of 1982 and 1984 were spectacular years for movies, but otherwise I think the movie quality is about the same. Production values are way way up though, which is part of the problem. No way should The Lone Ranger have had that high a budget. I know they were trying to recapture the Pirates magic, but still... Sounds like it had the same problems as John Carter -- decent movie that was budgeted way too high for it to be able to break even on modest returns.
I grew up in the 1980s, seeing Back to the Future, Batman (1989), the Original Star Trek movie series, non sci fi such as Funny Farm,
I did too! However, you have to acknowledge the quality even of the movies you just mentioned -- Star Trek 1 was edited and directed poorly and comes across as listless and plodding. Star Trek 5 was a disaster all around. I loved Batman(1989) when it came out, but I have to admit that it doesn't hold a candle to the Christopher Nolan movies. Though Michael Keaton made the best "Brooding Bruce Wayne."
And even Back to the Future had the sub-par part III.
It's curious that the co-author of the original paper, Professor Walker-Smith [huffingtonpost.co.uk], was subsequently totally exonerated
Totally exonerated is being so generous that you're being disingenuous. This case was about if an elderly man (who had long been retired) deserved to be "struck off" the medical record. It was the judge's conclusion that Walker-Smith was essentially an unwitting dupe rather than someone knowingly performing unapproved research on children whose parents hadn't given consent either. It doesn't say a lot for Walker-Smith's judgement, but it's better to be a pawn than a cheat, and the former isn't really enough to pull a license. Especially since he's no longer practicing.
Professor Walker-Smith's position was always that it was too early to even recommend suspending the MMR vaccine and that more (and larger) tests needed to be run. It was Wakefield who called his own press conference to urge suspension of the vaccine and claim that it was causing autism.
Wakefield earns his contempt among the scientific community not for being a poor scientist but that he committed fraud to supply evidence for trial lawyers and bolster his own company. We have plenty of evidence that that is what Wakefield did, but there's little strong evidence that Walker-Smith committed any fraud.
None of this though affects whether Wakefield's Lancet paper is valid. Legal rulings are not science, and the judge cannot expect to be a peer-reviewer of a paper in a field of which he has no expertise. So the decision says nothing about the Lancet MMR paper's results, or Wakefield for that matter. It's a good try trying to spin this as exoneration for the Wakefield and the antivax movement, but there's no evidence of that, which has been the antivax problem all these years.
And he loses his radio show because nobody listens.
For that you can blame Citadel Broadcasting which purchased KGO Radio. They messed with a good thing, KGO's ratings slipped to third in the area (after a news station and soft-rock station), so Citadel copied the all-new format of the #1 station. Almost no more newstalk, nothing. Edell was wise to get out when he did, that station sunk quickly after. The loss of his radio show was the first of Citadel's panic moves trying to get more mid-day listeners.