That Buster Keaton was not run over by a train or fell off a cliff or got impaled by a spike or cut apart by glass in just his first movie is a miracle. He was a lucky lucky man. Oh sure, he had an excellent sense of timing, knew exactly how long he had to get out of a dangerous situation, and what he had to do to do it, but that he never got his foot caught on a railway tie or something similar that would have held him up for the few seconds needed to kill him is amazing.
In a series of films about an archaeologist who fights Nazis, Thuggee cultists, and Soviet psychics, and keeps unleashing vast supernatural powers stored in antiques, the monkeys are what struck you as implausible?
Amazingly enough, the monkeys (not to mention catching up to a speeding truck by swinging on vines) were what was most out of place and unbelievable. Indy swinging on a whip into the soviet car at the start of the movie? That looked good; but the big problem there was it broke suspension of disbelief again, since there was no way 68-year-old Harrison Ford could move like that. I'd say the biggest problem with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is that it just came 20 years too late. Hell, in Raiders of the Lost Ark (26 years earlier) Indy was grumbling that he was getting too old for action, that aches and pains lasted longer, and that basically he'd been through more in the previous decade then most people did their entire lives, and we believed that. Raiders was when Indy was winding down his active life, Last Crusade was pretty much at the very end.
I just recently got the chance to watch T2 on bluray, I'm still amazed at the CGI in the film. I'm not certain if it's because it's comparatively "simple" effects or if it was just more tasteful use of the tool but it stands up a hell of a lot better than many more expensive/elaborate CG used in recent films. Some of the traditional FX appliances look like appliances but they did back then, too. OTOH, some are amazingly seamless, like the chest appliance for the bar scene. Is it waxing romantic or did they just put more effort into FX back when they had to, and now they just throw money at ILM?
It's because they knew the limitations of the technology they were working with, and they knew just what they could make look good and what they couldn't. The same reason why Pixar's first movie (1995) was about plastic toys: their technology could make that look believable. T2's effects houses couldn't make a CG Robert Patrick look believable, but they didn't need to -- all they needed was to make shiny reflective liquid-metal T-1000 look great. The explosions were all real. When they portrayed a big rig truck falling into the drainage area when the terminator and the kid were fleeing on the motorcycle, they actually dropped a truck into there. Most of the best effects hold up because they were physical stunt-work, and the CG effects were specially crafted to hide the limitations of the craft.
Recently Beowulf was on the TV. For a good part of it I covered up the top half of the screen to obscure the faces. It still all looked like cartoon CG to me.
Ugh. For me the faces were the worst part. No section of Zemeckis's motion capture movies breaks the illusion more than the lifeless, robotic faces.
As an addendum to the above: cheap, quality effects give the production and the director a great degree of freedom, but freedom is not automatically better. Many people work better under limitations, it forces them to be more creative to get around obstacles. If there are few obstacles to get around besides "shot X will cost $100k, shot Y and Z will cost $100k together, which do you want?" then that creativity might never get developed or expressed.
Hey, I loved FF7 and thought the CG movies there were awesome, but there's no way they'd come close to "looking real." The characters are super-deformed, the animators at the time didn't have much idea how to portray movement, so the characters end up moving in a smooth, physically impossible way. The detail is low (partially because the bitrate of CD movies was so low) which in a way ended up helping the "realism" since everything was blocky anyway. Lighting was primitive (good at the time, though, for games work).
Games of the era did not have good CG -- the animators were still doing hand-drawn animation or working on movies/TV. Even Blizzard's CG work wasn't all that great at the time; the animation in Diablo II's cut-scenes is horrible. But now? Final Fantasy and Blizzard animation is pretty top notch.
Who gives a shit about the CGI in Forrest Gump? It was a fucking awful film anyway
Sure, but so are Michael Bay's movies, which have their moments of awe and beauty (ah, there can be beauty in a well-done explosion). In fact, special effects can often be the one redeeming feature of a bad movie.
I think the argument is that the effects of movies which used physical models instead of CG (movies that used them well, anyway) have held up better over time then CGI with a lot of flash. Return of the Jedi is a good example -- the physical effects actually look a hell of a lot better and believable than the CGI dancers and other characters that were added in 15 years later.
People in a lot of countries are getting a wakeup call on how the US really views them and their elected (or not elected) leaders, and while it has been 'known' by those in the know... Still to have it exposed to the public in such a manner means it's much harder to try hiding it from the people.
And do people in the US (and everywhere else in the world) get exactly the same level of detail on every other country's internal decisions, or is this all just an anti-US crusade?
If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to worry about...right? I mean, that's what they told us with the Patriot Act and warrentless wiretapping, so...
Bullshit, utter bullshit. Have you never said something about a friend in confidence that you didn't want that friend to hear about? Or a relative? Ever done anything that you didn't want published in a newspaper? I'm not talking about criminal activity. I'm not even talking about immoral activity. Our entire society is based on the notion that your opinions can be private, with there being differing levels of privacy. If every single thing you'd ever said was reported to those whom you mentioned, you'd have a lot of strained and tense relationships in your life. It's really just a grown-up version of girls in high school spreading rumors of what Jenny said about Sally.
And no, the government is not somehow "different" in that regard. Criminal activity? Sure, let's have that exposed to the light of day. But for every "whoops, we bombed a village" atrocity, there are 10 "that diplomat is difficult to deal with" or "X and Y are unreasonable demands, maybe Z will work" documents that strain relationships and damage the US. The former is whistleblowing, the latter is not.
so this is different from fox news, all the corporate news channels, how ?
I hold everyone to a far higher standard than fox news. Having Michael Moore's documentaries being the Fox News of the left is not flattering to Moore (even if it's an accurate comparison).
That's backwards. Granted, grandparent post is ambiguous. I'll be generous to him and state that what he means is not that all the people in jail are innocent, just that it's not hard to put an innocent man in jail.
Of course, you'll be in jail while waiting for your lawyer to arrive as well.
Dwayne Johnson's not George Clooney or Johnny Depp, but I wouldn't say he's a bad actor. He sure doesn't show good judgement in which movies to star in though.
Narnia books are similar. Re-reading them as an adult and the preaching and hatred of liberals and muslims is disturbing. He never really even explains why liberals are bad, just that they are. His representation of muslims are bad because they worship the devil. In the end they really start to lose it. As children's books, they're ok, because nobody really cares about plot holes and logic in a children's book.
The Last Battle gets bizarre. When I was going through my atheist phase in high school (I'm agnostic now), I remember being rather offended by C.S. Lewis's unsubtle attacks on the non-religious. I can understand it from a religious viewpoint, but Lewis went at it from a scientific argument. He spent many many pages talking about how the dwarves refused to believe in the existence of Aslan, despite Aslan being... you know, right there, physically, healing people, doing the things only Aslan could do. It was a heavyhanded way of Lewis to say "we have all this -proof- that the Christian God exists, and they're just stubborn fools compared to us faithful ones." Offensive to any non-believer, since we actually have no proof of God. Most Christians would argue that's the purpose of faith. Lewis's arrogance and frustration were apparent.
Then there was the whole Aslan = Jesus and Tash = Allah parable, and when Aslan mentioned that if you do good works in the name of Tash, you're actually worshiping Aslan, and evil deeds done in the name of Aslan are worshiping Tash. I'm sure that will be... "edited down" and smoothed out in the upcoming movie translation.
Having watched the original Yogi Bear, I think the movie will probably be pretty faithful. People today have some rose-colored glasses when it comes to remembering how great their childhood programs were.
There are a number of cartoons I liked as a kid that I watched decades later and realized "this was terrible. My memory is horrible, this wasn't good at all, even by kids' standards."
The movie told more of a story about great people doing great things and the hobbits were more of a side story. Their story was told only as it connected with Aragorn's story, or Legolas's story, or Gimli's story.
Legolas? Gimli? Since when did the movies go into their stories? The movies focused far more on the hobbits than it did them. I think the movies were all about Aragorn and the hobbits. And maybe Gandalf and Saruman. Everyone else, after Boromir died, became a side character.
The story of how the hobbits learned that they had to fight and when they first met real danger with the barrow wights wasn't important to Aragorn's story, so it wasn't told.
It wasn't told because the core story of the movies focuses on the ring and sauron's war to regain it. The Barrow Downs, like Tom Bombadil, is unnecessary background in a movie. It gives you a wonderful feeling for "the world" but has little bearing on the plot as a whole. You have the extended edition, I think Jackson mentions the Barrows were originally scripted, but the movies were still way too long, and they had to cut out most of the Fellowship that wasn't actually about the ring and its journey.
Yes, I know that the hobbits were central to the quest of the ring. Without the hobbits, there would be story to tell. Aragorn would still have the choice to become King of Gondor, but there would be no hobbits to help him choose what was more important to him. Still, the book presented many of the actions of the times only as they dealt with the hobbits. The movie was exactly backwards. It presented all the actions from a human perspective.
I found the second movie (though not the Frodo/Sam side) to be human centered, though the Return of the King had far more of a balance. A lot more of Pippin as a pawn, Merry and Pippin rescuing each other, etc. It would have been easy to leave them completely as side characters like Legolas and Gimli.
I think there are two reasons. One, they see a cash cow; fans of the game are going to see the movie no matter how bad it is, and with a few exceptions there aren't many games with a serious plot. "Chess -- The Motion Picture!"
That said, you could take DOOM and make a great thriller out of it.
What I can't understand is why so many games that are based on movies suck so badly.
You answered your own question. A big reason games based on movies usually suck, and the reason movies based on games usually suck are the same -- they're tie-ins. They're seen as marketing and merchandising, not an area where where you spend the real effort. It usually goes to not your best people (usually it goes to people unassociated with the original production, chosen for how cheaply they can bring the property to market). They don't have time to "get it right," especially when it comes to games tied-in to movies. Many times they have just enough time to throw something together and release it.
You can look at any movie based on a video game as an example. You can look at any of the games tied in with Pixar's movies as another.
I'm guessing executives think there's more money to be had by making half-assed versions of games/movies based on great movies/games then there is with spending a lot of resources to make a product the same quality and value as the original. I have the feeling that they're right.
Slashdot Mirror
That Buster Keaton was not run over by a train or fell off a cliff or got impaled by a spike or cut apart by glass in just his first movie is a miracle. He was a lucky lucky man. Oh sure, he had an excellent sense of timing, knew exactly how long he had to get out of a dangerous situation, and what he had to do to do it, but that he never got his foot caught on a railway tie or something similar that would have held him up for the few seconds needed to kill him is amazing.
In a series of films about an archaeologist who fights Nazis, Thuggee cultists, and Soviet psychics, and keeps unleashing vast supernatural powers stored in antiques, the monkeys are what struck you as implausible?
Amazingly enough, the monkeys (not to mention catching up to a speeding truck by swinging on vines) were what was most out of place and unbelievable. Indy swinging on a whip into the soviet car at the start of the movie? That looked good; but the big problem there was it broke suspension of disbelief again, since there was no way 68-year-old Harrison Ford could move like that. I'd say the biggest problem with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is that it just came 20 years too late. Hell, in Raiders of the Lost Ark (26 years earlier) Indy was grumbling that he was getting too old for action, that aches and pains lasted longer, and that basically he'd been through more in the previous decade then most people did their entire lives, and we believed that. Raiders was when Indy was winding down his active life, Last Crusade was pretty much at the very end.
I just recently got the chance to watch T2 on bluray, I'm still amazed at the CGI in the film. I'm not certain if it's because it's comparatively "simple" effects or if it was just more tasteful use of the tool but it stands up a hell of a lot better than many more expensive/elaborate CG used in recent films. Some of the traditional FX appliances look like appliances but they did back then, too. OTOH, some are amazingly seamless, like the chest appliance for the bar scene.
Is it waxing romantic or did they just put more effort into FX back when they had to, and now they just throw money at ILM?
It's because they knew the limitations of the technology they were working with, and they knew just what they could make look good and what they couldn't. The same reason why Pixar's first movie (1995) was about plastic toys: their technology could make that look believable. T2's effects houses couldn't make a CG Robert Patrick look believable, but they didn't need to -- all they needed was to make shiny reflective liquid-metal T-1000 look great. The explosions were all real. When they portrayed a big rig truck falling into the drainage area when the terminator and the kid were fleeing on the motorcycle, they actually dropped a truck into there. Most of the best effects hold up because they were physical stunt-work, and the CG effects were specially crafted to hide the limitations of the craft.
Well, The Simpsons is what I would classify as the bottom of the barrel of good cartoons
I think the older ones hold up pretty well.
The Simpsons is a series which had a very strong first five seasons, a steady decline for another five, and has been generally awful for the last 10.
Recently Beowulf was on the TV. For a good part of it I covered up the top half of the screen to obscure the faces. It still all looked like cartoon CG to me.
Ugh. For me the faces were the worst part. No section of Zemeckis's motion capture movies breaks the illusion more than the lifeless, robotic faces.
As an addendum to the above: cheap, quality effects give the production and the director a great degree of freedom, but freedom is not automatically better. Many people work better under limitations, it forces them to be more creative to get around obstacles. If there are few obstacles to get around besides "shot X will cost $100k, shot Y and Z will cost $100k together, which do you want?" then that creativity might never get developed or expressed.
Oh, and translated, the tagline reads "Don't let war affect the lives of children."
The spot was created in collaboration with the family of Smurf's creator Peyo.
Fern Gully with Smurfs
To be fair, Avatar was more like Fern Gully with Smurfs and violence.
So, more like this Smurfs Unicef spot?
Hey, I loved FF7 and thought the CG movies there were awesome, but there's no way they'd come close to "looking real." The characters are super-deformed, the animators at the time didn't have much idea how to portray movement, so the characters end up moving in a smooth, physically impossible way. The detail is low (partially because the bitrate of CD movies was so low) which in a way ended up helping the "realism" since everything was blocky anyway. Lighting was primitive (good at the time, though, for games work).
Games of the era did not have good CG -- the animators were still doing hand-drawn animation or working on movies/TV. Even Blizzard's CG work wasn't all that great at the time; the animation in Diablo II's cut-scenes is horrible. But now? Final Fantasy and Blizzard animation is pretty top notch.
Who gives a shit about the CGI in Forrest Gump? It was a fucking awful film anyway
Sure, but so are Michael Bay's movies, which have their moments of awe and beauty (ah, there can be beauty in a well-done explosion). In fact, special effects can often be the one redeeming feature of a bad movie.
I think the argument is that the effects of movies which used physical models instead of CG (movies that used them well, anyway) have held up better over time then CGI with a lot of flash. Return of the Jedi is a good example -- the physical effects actually look a hell of a lot better and believable than the CGI dancers and other characters that were added in 15 years later.
As I explained earlier in the thread, for me, it all comes down to Moore going "LOOKATME, I UNCOVERED THIS SLEAZE! ME ME ME ME ME ME ME!"
I'd actually be ok with that (annoyed, maybe) if all of his exposures were accurate or honest.
People in a lot of countries are getting a wakeup call on how the US really views them and their elected (or not elected) leaders, and while it has been 'known' by those in the know... Still to have it exposed to the public in such a manner means it's much harder to try hiding it from the people.
And do people in the US (and everywhere else in the world) get exactly the same level of detail on every other country's internal decisions, or is this all just an anti-US crusade?
If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to worry about...right? I mean, that's what they told us with the Patriot Act and warrentless wiretapping, so...
Bullshit, utter bullshit. Have you never said something about a friend in confidence that you didn't want that friend to hear about? Or a relative? Ever done anything that you didn't want published in a newspaper? I'm not talking about criminal activity. I'm not even talking about immoral activity. Our entire society is based on the notion that your opinions can be private, with there being differing levels of privacy. If every single thing you'd ever said was reported to those whom you mentioned, you'd have a lot of strained and tense relationships in your life. It's really just a grown-up version of girls in high school spreading rumors of what Jenny said about Sally.
And no, the government is not somehow "different" in that regard. Criminal activity? Sure, let's have that exposed to the light of day. But for every "whoops, we bombed a village" atrocity, there are 10 "that diplomat is difficult to deal with" or "X and Y are unreasonable demands, maybe Z will work" documents that strain relationships and damage the US. The former is whistleblowing, the latter is not.
so this is different from fox news, all the corporate news channels, how ?
I hold everyone to a far higher standard than fox news. Having Michael Moore's documentaries being the Fox News of the left is not flattering to Moore (even if it's an accurate comparison).
I don't know about that, I don't know a single person with a positive attitude towards either her or "octomom."
In UK, you pay taxes so that people can *always* afford legal representation.
It's another one of those little "socialist" provisions you'll complain about until you need it.
The same is true in the US. We pay taxes so that anyone accused of any crime can have a lawyer representing them.
So people in jail are all innocent ?
That's backwards. Granted, grandparent post is ambiguous. I'll be generous to him and state that what he means is not that all the people in jail are innocent, just that it's not hard to put an innocent man in jail.
Of course, you'll be in jail while waiting for your lawyer to arrive as well.
Dwayne Johnson's not George Clooney or Johnny Depp, but I wouldn't say he's a bad actor. He sure doesn't show good judgement in which movies to star in though.
Narnia books are similar. Re-reading them as an adult and the preaching and hatred of liberals and muslims is disturbing. He never really even explains why liberals are bad, just that they are. His representation of muslims are bad because they worship the devil. In the end they really start to lose it. As children's books, they're ok, because nobody really cares about plot holes and logic in a children's book.
The Last Battle gets bizarre. When I was going through my atheist phase in high school (I'm agnostic now), I remember being rather offended by C.S. Lewis's unsubtle attacks on the non-religious. I can understand it from a religious viewpoint, but Lewis went at it from a scientific argument. He spent many many pages talking about how the dwarves refused to believe in the existence of Aslan, despite Aslan being... you know, right there, physically, healing people, doing the things only Aslan could do. It was a heavyhanded way of Lewis to say "we have all this -proof- that the Christian God exists, and they're just stubborn fools compared to us faithful ones." Offensive to any non-believer, since we actually have no proof of God. Most Christians would argue that's the purpose of faith. Lewis's arrogance and frustration were apparent.
Then there was the whole Aslan = Jesus and Tash = Allah parable, and when Aslan mentioned that if you do good works in the name of Tash, you're actually worshiping Aslan, and evil deeds done in the name of Aslan are worshiping Tash. I'm sure that will be... "edited down" and smoothed out in the upcoming movie translation.
Having watched the original Yogi Bear, I think the movie will probably be pretty faithful. People today have some rose-colored glasses when it comes to remembering how great their childhood programs were.
There are a number of cartoons I liked as a kid that I watched decades later and realized "this was terrible. My memory is horrible, this wasn't good at all, even by kids' standards."
That's what the recent Bond movie Casino Royale felt like in the middle section.
The movie told more of a story about great people doing great things and the hobbits were more of a side story. Their story was told only as it connected with Aragorn's story, or Legolas's story, or Gimli's story.
Legolas? Gimli? Since when did the movies go into their stories? The movies focused far more on the hobbits than it did them. I think the movies were all about Aragorn and the hobbits. And maybe Gandalf and Saruman. Everyone else, after Boromir died, became a side character.
The story of how the hobbits learned that they had to fight and when they first met real danger with the barrow wights wasn't important to Aragorn's story, so it wasn't told.
It wasn't told because the core story of the movies focuses on the ring and sauron's war to regain it. The Barrow Downs, like Tom Bombadil, is unnecessary background in a movie. It gives you a wonderful feeling for "the world" but has little bearing on the plot as a whole. You have the extended edition, I think Jackson mentions the Barrows were originally scripted, but the movies were still way too long, and they had to cut out most of the Fellowship that wasn't actually about the ring and its journey.
Yes, I know that the hobbits were central to the quest of the ring. Without the hobbits, there would be story to tell. Aragorn would still have the choice to become King of Gondor, but there would be no hobbits to help him choose what was more important to him. Still, the book presented many of the actions of the times only as they dealt with the hobbits. The movie was exactly backwards. It presented all the actions from a human perspective.
I found the second movie (though not the Frodo/Sam side) to be human centered, though the Return of the King had far more of a balance. A lot more of Pippin as a pawn, Merry and Pippin rescuing each other, etc. It would have been easy to leave them completely as side characters like Legolas and Gimli.
It wasn't really unnecessary. In the context of the original work, the Scouring of the Shire represents the violability of the entire world.
It's also a point that had been hammered home many times already, both in the books and in the movies.
I think there are two reasons. One, they see a cash cow; fans of the game are going to see the movie no matter how bad it is, and with a few exceptions there aren't many games with a serious plot. "Chess -- The Motion Picture!"
That said, you could take DOOM and make a great thriller out of it.
What I can't understand is why so many games that are based on movies suck so badly.
You answered your own question. A big reason games based on movies usually suck, and the reason movies based on games usually suck are the same -- they're tie-ins. They're seen as marketing and merchandising, not an area where where you spend the real effort. It usually goes to not your best people (usually it goes to people unassociated with the original production, chosen for how cheaply they can bring the property to market). They don't have time to "get it right," especially when it comes to games tied-in to movies. Many times they have just enough time to throw something together and release it.
You can look at any movie based on a video game as an example. You can look at any of the games tied in with Pixar's movies as another.
I'm guessing executives think there's more money to be had by making half-assed versions of games/movies based on great movies/games then there is with spending a lot of resources to make a product the same quality and value as the original. I have the feeling that they're right.