The marketing machine you refer to did not come into play until after Star Wars was a major box-office hit. When it was released, LucasArts was a relatively small company, partly backed by 20th Century Fox, but mostly made and promoted outside the Hollywood system. The toys didn't come out until an entire year later (while the film was still running in theaters. Fox gave Lucas the toy exploitation rights for almost nothing, because nobody at the time realized what a gold-mine it was.
The heavy marketing didn't really come into play until Lucas started ramping up for Empire, and while a lot of hard-core fans call Empire their favorite of the original three, it was probably the least well-received by critics and general audiences at the time.
If sequels are what it takes for a film to have lasting power, than Casablanca would not have had the impact it did. Star Wars became "demi-mythology" and "ingrained in our culture" for the exact same reason that "Lord of the Rings" did. Specifically, it captured people's imaginations.
The "Police Academy" movies had just about as much marketing, and far more sequels, but you don't see nerds going to hotel conventions dressed up in Steve Gutenberg costumes.
For example, when Perot came into the picture and grabbed a large block of voters, the Republicans had to woo the voters back to the GOP.
Perot's main two issues were the budget deficit and jobs going overseas due to free trade. (He warned of a giant "sucking sound" of jobs being pulled to Mexico if NAFTA was signed.)
Both of these are talking points of the Kerry campaign at the moment, not the Bush campaign.
During Bush's 2000 run, he said that spending deficits would be tolerable during either a recession or a war. When asked about the current deficit, he likes to point out that both conditions cropped up.
Bush is also mostly a free-trade zealot (apart from a brief stint of protectionism over steel imports during his first year in office), and would never consider rolling back NAFTA or any other current trade agreement.
Kerry, on the other hand, has said that the run-away deficits have been a key failing of the Bush administration, and talks about jobs "lost" to overseas workers even more.
So, if anybody has adopted the Reform Party's agenda, it's the Democrats.
t. Statistically, average Quake players land fewer than 1 shot out of five. Good players get 1/3. Nobody hits more than misses. (Unless they were intentionally trying for a high accuracy score, by only firing when the target is certain to be hit. But that will lead to worse overall results)
Oh, how I would love to play Quake against you and your friends.
But I can't recall any anime to use a realistic conception of gunfighting.
Again, realism was not the goal with Noir. In fact, they were very careful to avoid realism, because even at midnight in Japan there are rules about how realistically you can depict violence. People don't look for realistic gunfights in action anime shows, any more than Superman comic-book readers look for realistic physics.
Anyway, it's too bad you couldn't get past the staircase scene, because the second half of the Noir series is definitely better than the first.
For senate/congress -- if we're going to have everyone campaigning on party platforms, how 'bout we just all select the party platforms we like best (with an oz-style system so the votes to rare entries can still count for something) and then later elect people to fill those positions? 35% republican? Fine, republicans get 35% of the available seats, and you get to pick which candidates you want for those. Greens get 5%? That's fine, they may just get one seat, but at least they get one. Yes, it's two-phase, and yes, I'm sure some of us will hate it. But it'd be nice for the little guys to get a little say, as opposed to no say at all.
The problem with that is, our current system is fairly good at drumming the real scoundrels out of office. As much as we all loathe attack ads, and as much as such attacks lead one to despair that Twain was right about good people in Congress being the exception, the truth is that a lot of people have been thrown out on their ear by the voters over the years, where a "party platform election" could slightly insulate these people from personal criticism.
I'm afriad that your idea would probably lead to more harmonious elections at the cost of a more corrupt government.
Okay, let me be crystal clear about this, since you seem to misunderstand me.
I don't mind if Lucas wants to make revisions to his film and sell them to people. I think they are awkward changes that weaken the film, but if that's what he wants to do and that's what most people want to buy, good for them.
All I'm saying is, I won't bother buying it, and if Lucas were to offer the original theatrical release in a format that looks good on modern wide-screen TV's, I would cheerfully pay a premium price to own them, because I consider Star Wars, as it was in 77, to be a landmark work of cinema art, and a rip-roaring fun time to watch.
It was well-known, long before the SE films were produced, that Lucas ran out of money when making the masks & costumes for the Cantina scene, and many people feel that, even though Lucas hated the outcome, the half-finished costumes added to "dingy" feel of Mos Eisley and the overall charm of the movie.
This is a film where outer-space is thuderously loud, where three-foot swords are crafted out of light beams that stop in mid-air, where lasers move slower than bullets. Suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite of watching these movies, and a few rubber maskes and puppets is not a hard pill for the audience to swallow. It certainly didn't stop it from breaking box-office records in 1977.
If what you were saying was at all true, there would be legions of 60-somethings who were convinced that "Hop-along Cassidy" and other oaters from 50s television were ground-breaking triumphs of story-telling, simply out of nostalgia for the entertainment from their youths.
The original Star Wars endures in popularity because it combined the fun of the Saturday Matinee with ground-breaking special effects, WWII-style dogfights, samurai ethics, and the scale of a big-budget saga. Joseph Campbell revisionism aside, the story and themes were Wagnerian in scope, and for all people's complaints about dialog and acting, the truth is that Sir Alec Guinness, Harrison Ford, James Earl Jones, and Carrie Fisher all put in masterful performances of their roles, delivering lines which people still quote to this day.
It was far from the best film of the 70s (that would be an honor shared by Godfather I & II), but it was perhaps the most important, from a film history perspective.
LD boasts a superior image over DVD, so a high-quality rip to DVD can look very, very good. Certainly good enough that I would rather watch it than the goofy re-invention which Lucas is currently peddling.
Asking a question like, "do you feel like you even have a chance of winning?" ammounts to pretty much the same thing as asking him, "are you a complete nut-job with no connection to reality?"
The question I want to ask is:
Most small third-parties usually set the bar at getting a 5% result or better in as many states as they can, because in most states that usually means "major party" status, which often comes with some public election finance money that will set them up with a better chance for future elections. Since the Libertarian Party officially rejects the concept of public financing of elections, what are your goals for this election, and what do you hope to gain by reaching them?
In different polls, I've seen CO being called as a close victory for each of them.
However, this bill pretty much means that both candidates could safely ignore Colorado entirely.
I mean, it's very unlikely for one or the other to get less than about 45% in this election, so the "winner" is only going to pick up 1 vote more than the "loser", meaning that the state flat-out doesn't matter anymore, in terms of electoral-vote importance.
If that's all they did, there would be no controversy.
But the CGI effects, the inserted additional characters, the extra (and totally redundant) scene with Jabba restored from the cutting room floor, the ruining of Han's big intro moment (he shot Greedo unprovoked to avoid being captured in the original), etc. These are the kinds things which whiny nerds like me are complaining about.
Fix up the scuffs on the 1977 version of Star Wars, and I'll be first in line to buy it. That's not what this is, though.
Plenty of movies from the 70s and early 80s have been released on perfectly acceptable DVDs.
The effects from the original print of Star Wars were remarkable. Everything was done with models, hand-drawn animation cels, and inserted footage for things like explosions. It was painstaking work done by an army of special effect technicians, and stands as an important moment in Hollywood film history. In fact, many would say it rivals Citizen Kane in terms of landmark technical achievement in cinematography.
Now we have the Very Special Edition version of Star Wars, in which many of these effects were masked over by what is, frankly, quite unremarkable CGI.
The original explosion of the Death Star may have been crude by today's standards, but in the context of what could be done with film at the time, it was thrilling to see, and it's still impressive to look back at it and know what it took to make that shot. The new CGI version of the same shot looks almost okay (ILM's digital effects pale in comparison to what WETA has been up to), but really nothing special, and it will probably look extremely dated in five years or so, assuming Lucas doesn't "re-do" it yet again with the technology of tomorrow.
What I really want is a good-quality DVD with restored video, remastered audio, and not a single addition to (or subtraction from) the original content. Lucas can make all the Special Editions and Director's Cuts he wants, as far as I'm concerned, but the only version I will ever buy is the original. Until he releases that, he doesn't get another dime from me. (Not that he needs it or anything, I'm just sayin'.)
He's not making a whole lot of money from me. I'm not buying this release. Nor am I likely to be the HD version of this release when it arrives.
I would gladly pay $200 for good digital transfers of the 1977, 1980, and 1983 versions of the original trilogy. Seriously. I loved those films, and would like to own DVDs of them in all their unvarnished glory.
Since Lucas is no longer interested in selling me the movies as they once were, I'll probably just have to by bootleg LD rips off eBay or something.
Also, if you are familiar with it from TV, you have probably only seen the crappy, edited-down English dubs of the show, so you are not really the best person to ask about the quality of it.
I would put it to you that the typical SF/fantasy villain is often far more nuanced than villains from the real world. If you put a character like Osama bin Laden in such a story, critics of the genre would not find it credible at all.
People who say that unambiguous evil does not exist in the real world need to get a clue. Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hussein, bin Laden, all evil. Nothing complicated, they are just evil.
If you tell me that unambiguous good does not exist in the real world, then maybe you are on to something. Heroes seldom live up to their billing.
Do you have something intelligent to say, or just mindless mockery?
Just mindless mockery. The very suggestion that Tip O'Niel or even Lloyd Benson ever let Republicans have any kind of "voice" in their Congresses, let alone less "voice" than Tom Daschale has today, does not really warrant anything more than mocking laughter, and only a partisan liberal could possibly manage to see it any differently. There's really no point in debating people who won't even look at the facts of what an iron grasp the Democtrats had on the Congress for over 50 consecutive years.
The scene you refer to was homage to John Woo's HK films, in which Chow Yun Fat would often "stand and deliver" while bullets fly everywhere.
There was a similar scene at the end of Unforgiven, when Clint Eastwood mowed down a room full of armed men.
As silly as it seems, the truth is that untrained fighters (such as bottom-of-the-barrel mafia goons) will often empty entire clips of pistols or automatic rifles in a point-blank gunfight and never hit a thing. A live gunfight is not like a Quake deathmatch, where you can expect to hit your target more often than not. Most folks, even criminals who have shot at people before, often just spray bullets everywhere, and people only get hit out of bad luck.
There was a real-live incident a couple weeks ago where somebody attempted "suicide by cop." In spite of getting multiple officers to completely empty their guns at him, he never took a single center-mass hit, and survived with minor injuries.
This is why most cops will tell you if you are going to buy a weapon for home defense, buy a shotgun and use buckshot instead of slugs.
It's too bad you didn't stick with the show longer. The mafia story gets really good in the second half.
As for Evangelion, I called if "overrated" because, while it addressed some interesting concepts of child abandonment, I don't think it lived up to its ambitions or pretenses. A lot of potential themes and stories were completely cast aside so we could be treated to Another After Yet Another "Shinji wants to quit NERV" filler episode.
Happy to. (Spoiler warning: See both films before reading any further.)
In "Perfect Blue", Mima agrees to be featured in a "rape scene" in a film which gets out of hand (and muddled up with her hallucinations), and she ends up feeling totally violated, almost as if she was really raped.
In the following scene, we see her naked in the bathtub, in a fetal position with her face in the water, motionless. For a while, you almost wonder if she's committed suicide, but then she opens her mouth, and screams as bubbles come flowing up the side of her face.
In "Requiem for a Dream", Marion gives a blow-job to a drug dealer in order to get her junk fix, and shortly afterwards we see her play out the same bathtub scene. It's almost identical, frame for frame.
Hmm, 10 years back is just when Evangelion was airing...
Right. And Evangelion, while an interesting step forward from what had come before, pales in comparison to Haibane Renmei, Kino's Journey, or Serial Experiments Lain in terms of depth of story & underlying philosophy, and can't possibly hold a candle to shows like Wolf's Rain, Cowboy Bebop, or FLCL in terms of production values.
Evangelion was an over-rated Fighting Robot drama with an under-rated and delightfully oddball ending, which the director revised twice without improving on it.
I got the distinct impression that the time-trial in Last Exile was not strictly a spectator sport the way the pod races in Phantom Menace were. It looked as if there were more pilots than audience members, and no sign of anybody buying tickets anywhere.
If the still images had been of a moving person, that might've been something.
The motionlessness perfectly mirrored the style of Sergio Leone westerns (which owed a lot to Japanese samurai films).
Remember the gunfight at the end of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly? Several minutes of three guys standing still, and it's still one of the most intense dramatic moments in film history.
That gunfight was probably inspired by the duel in Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa, in which the two swordfighters squared off in a similar manner. When the action finally started, it was one cut, and the fight was over.
Noir was never intended to play out the way real gunfights play out. It was made in homage to the great tradition of "morose assassin" dramas which came before, and on that level it was a fantastic success.
It's not a Swede/American thing. It's a Bergman/Hollywood contrast.
Most Hollywood films (and Hollywood-influenced films) rely on a "language" of cinematography which goes back to the techniques of D. W. Griffith.
Bergman used a language all his own, such as using hard-lit scenes to indicate dream sequences, which ended up influencing American film, but still to this day contrasts sharply with what people who don't go to "art theaters" are used to.
New Jersey? Well, I did say I could see it taking two hours if you live out in the sticks or a crowded urban center. New Jersey is unique in that it is a little bit of both. An expansive state-wide suburb of New York City.
From well-respected and famous reviewers like "Joshua Tyler of CINIMABLEND.COM"
And of those eight, one reviewer less than half of them liked it.
I'll tell you what. Let's wait until Wednesday and see what people like Roger Ebert have to say. If they pan it, I might be more inclined to worry about whether it's worth my eight bucks.
Until then, I'll give anything made by Oshii a shot, no matter what Peter Canavese from Groucho Reviews (or some poster on Slashdot who has not even seen it himself) has to say about it.
One of the reasons for all the "bandwagon jumping" is because Anime has actually gotten better... a lot better... over the last ten years or so.
Last Exile is pretty much what the Star Wars prequels could have been if Lucas still had any creative energy. The vanship time-trial from that show makes the Episode I "pod race" look, well, even more boring than it looked in the first place.
Perfect Blue contained one particular scene which director Darrin Aronofsky found so compelling, that he purchased the remake rights to the entire film just so he could steal that one 20-second scene and reshoot it with Jenifer Connoly in "Requiem for a Dream."
The light, pathos-driven humor of Azumanga Diaoh is resonating with teens and college kids today in almost the exact same way that Peanuts caught on with teens and young adults of the 60s.
Cowboy Bebop was arguably the very best science fiction TV series of the 90s, a decade that was positively stuffed with science fiction television shows.
I could go on and on.
Even the ways they sometimes cut corners to make the relatively cheaper TV shows (vs. the big-budget films) can sometimes creatively turn a negative into a virtue. For example, the still-image pans which you mentioned (which I also find annoying sometimes) actually enhanced the mood for "Noir" and gave the series a strong Sergio Leone type of feel.
More often than not, a still image in anime is used to serve two purposes. One is to reduce "cell count." The other is to emphasize the emotional drama of a particular moment. It looks jarring if you are not used to seeing it, but then so did the slow-motion fighting in "Kung Fu" when audiences first saw that show back in the 70s. Now we see variable-speed fight scenes all the time without even thinking about it.
Anime has a cinematic language of its own. Just like you have to watch several Felini or Bergman films before you can just enjoy the story without being partly distracted by the non-Hollywood cinematic choices.
Yep, and if you're really lucky it might even be playing at a theatre within 2 hours of your home/business.
How the hell did that get modded up as insightful!?
I live in the Midwest. Minnesota. Pure "fly-over land." There are two theaters in the Twin Cities that will be showing this movie on the 17th. Both are within a 20-minute drive from my suburban home. Did you even look at the listings?
The only way you are two hours away from a theater that will be showing this is if you live way out in the sticks, or an urban center so congested that it takes two hours to get anywhere.
I disagree. Lack of news concerning congressional politicians on either side is something I find deeply comforting.
When Congress acts, be concerned.
When Congress cooperates in a bipartisan way, watch your wallet.
Gridlock is good. I actually support the nomination of several of these judges, but time wasted on these filibusters is time not spent coming up with new ways to spend my money.
Slashdot Mirror
The marketing machine you refer to did not come into play until after Star Wars was a major box-office hit. When it was released, LucasArts was a relatively small company, partly backed by 20th Century Fox, but mostly made and promoted outside the Hollywood system. The toys didn't come out until an entire year later (while the film was still running in theaters. Fox gave Lucas the toy exploitation rights for almost nothing, because nobody at the time realized what a gold-mine it was.
The heavy marketing didn't really come into play until Lucas started ramping up for Empire, and while a lot of hard-core fans call Empire their favorite of the original three, it was probably the least well-received by critics and general audiences at the time.
If sequels are what it takes for a film to have lasting power, than Casablanca would not have had the impact it did. Star Wars became "demi-mythology" and "ingrained in our culture" for the exact same reason that "Lord of the Rings" did. Specifically, it captured people's imaginations.
The "Police Academy" movies had just about as much marketing, and far more sequels, but you don't see nerds going to hotel conventions dressed up in Steve Gutenberg costumes.
For example, when Perot came into the picture and grabbed a large block of voters, the Republicans had to woo the voters back to the GOP.
Perot's main two issues were the budget deficit and jobs going overseas due to free trade. (He warned of a giant "sucking sound" of jobs being pulled to Mexico if NAFTA was signed.)
Both of these are talking points of the Kerry campaign at the moment, not the Bush campaign.
During Bush's 2000 run, he said that spending deficits would be tolerable during either a recession or a war. When asked about the current deficit, he likes to point out that both conditions cropped up.
Bush is also mostly a free-trade zealot (apart from a brief stint of protectionism over steel imports during his first year in office), and would never consider rolling back NAFTA or any other current trade agreement.
Kerry, on the other hand, has said that the run-away deficits have been a key failing of the Bush administration, and talks about jobs "lost" to overseas workers even more.
So, if anybody has adopted the Reform Party's agenda, it's the Democrats.
So, you think it's "insanely overrated," yet you purchased the entire series?
How do you react to a series that you actually like!? Cosplay?
t. Statistically, average Quake players land fewer than 1 shot out of five. Good players get 1/3. Nobody hits more than misses. (Unless they were intentionally trying for a high accuracy score, by only firing when the target is certain to be hit. But that will lead to worse overall results)
Oh, how I would love to play Quake against you and your friends.
But I can't recall any anime to use a realistic conception of gunfighting.
Again, realism was not the goal with Noir. In fact, they were very careful to avoid realism, because even at midnight in Japan there are rules about how realistically you can depict violence. People don't look for realistic gunfights in action anime shows, any more than Superman comic-book readers look for realistic physics.
Anyway, it's too bad you couldn't get past the staircase scene, because the second half of the Noir series is definitely better than the first.
For senate/congress -- if we're going to have everyone campaigning on party platforms, how 'bout we just all select the party platforms we like best (with an oz-style system so the votes to rare entries can still count for something) and then later elect people to fill those positions? 35% republican? Fine, republicans get 35% of the available seats, and you get to pick which candidates you want for those. Greens get 5%? That's fine, they may just get one seat, but at least they get one. Yes, it's two-phase, and yes, I'm sure some of us will hate it. But it'd be nice for the little guys to get a little say, as opposed to no say at all.
The problem with that is, our current system is fairly good at drumming the real scoundrels out of office. As much as we all loathe attack ads, and as much as such attacks lead one to despair that Twain was right about good people in Congress being the exception, the truth is that a lot of people have been thrown out on their ear by the voters over the years, where a "party platform election" could slightly insulate these people from personal criticism.
I'm afriad that your idea would probably lead to more harmonious elections at the cost of a more corrupt government.
Okay, let me be crystal clear about this, since you seem to misunderstand me.
I don't mind if Lucas wants to make revisions to his film and sell them to people. I think they are awkward changes that weaken the film, but if that's what he wants to do and that's what most people want to buy, good for them.
All I'm saying is, I won't bother buying it, and if Lucas were to offer the original theatrical release in a format that looks good on modern wide-screen TV's, I would cheerfully pay a premium price to own them, because I consider Star Wars, as it was in 77, to be a landmark work of cinema art, and a rip-roaring fun time to watch.
It was well-known, long before the SE films were produced, that Lucas ran out of money when making the masks & costumes for the Cantina scene, and many people feel that, even though Lucas hated the outcome, the half-finished costumes added to "dingy" feel of Mos Eisley and the overall charm of the movie.
This is a film where outer-space is thuderously loud, where three-foot swords are crafted out of light beams that stop in mid-air, where lasers move slower than bullets. Suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite of watching these movies, and a few rubber maskes and puppets is not a hard pill for the audience to swallow. It certainly didn't stop it from breaking box-office records in 1977.
If what you were saying was at all true, there would be legions of 60-somethings who were convinced that "Hop-along Cassidy" and other oaters from 50s television were ground-breaking triumphs of story-telling, simply out of nostalgia for the entertainment from their youths.
The original Star Wars endures in popularity because it combined the fun of the Saturday Matinee with ground-breaking special effects, WWII-style dogfights, samurai ethics, and the scale of a big-budget saga. Joseph Campbell revisionism aside, the story and themes were Wagnerian in scope, and for all people's complaints about dialog and acting, the truth is that Sir Alec Guinness, Harrison Ford, James Earl Jones, and Carrie Fisher all put in masterful performances of their roles, delivering lines which people still quote to this day.
It was far from the best film of the 70s (that would be an honor shared by Godfather I & II), but it was perhaps the most important, from a film history perspective.
LD boasts a superior image over DVD, so a high-quality rip to DVD can look very, very good. Certainly good enough that I would rather watch it than the goofy re-invention which Lucas is currently peddling.
Asking a question like, "do you feel like you even have a chance of winning?" ammounts to pretty much the same thing as asking him, "are you a complete nut-job with no connection to reality?"
The question I want to ask is:
Most small third-parties usually set the bar at getting a 5% result or better in as many states as they can, because in most states that usually means "major party" status, which often comes with some public election finance money that will set them up with a better chance for future elections. Since the Libertarian Party officially rejects the concept of public financing of elections, what are your goals for this election, and what do you hope to gain by reaching them?
In different polls, I've seen CO being called as a close victory for each of them.
However, this bill pretty much means that both candidates could safely ignore Colorado entirely.
I mean, it's very unlikely for one or the other to get less than about 45% in this election, so the "winner" is only going to pick up 1 vote more than the "loser", meaning that the state flat-out doesn't matter anymore, in terms of electoral-vote importance.
If that's all they did, there would be no controversy.
But the CGI effects, the inserted additional characters, the extra (and totally redundant) scene with Jabba restored from the cutting room floor, the ruining of Han's big intro moment (he shot Greedo unprovoked to avoid being captured in the original), etc. These are the kinds things which whiny nerds like me are complaining about.
Fix up the scuffs on the 1977 version of Star Wars, and I'll be first in line to buy it. That's not what this is, though.
Plenty of movies from the 70s and early 80s have been released on perfectly acceptable DVDs.
The effects from the original print of Star Wars were remarkable. Everything was done with models, hand-drawn animation cels, and inserted footage for things like explosions. It was painstaking work done by an army of special effect technicians, and stands as an important moment in Hollywood film history. In fact, many would say it rivals Citizen Kane in terms of landmark technical achievement in cinematography.
Now we have the Very Special Edition version of Star Wars, in which many of these effects were masked over by what is, frankly, quite unremarkable CGI.
The original explosion of the Death Star may have been crude by today's standards, but in the context of what could be done with film at the time, it was thrilling to see, and it's still impressive to look back at it and know what it took to make that shot. The new CGI version of the same shot looks almost okay (ILM's digital effects pale in comparison to what WETA has been up to), but really nothing special, and it will probably look extremely dated in five years or so, assuming Lucas doesn't "re-do" it yet again with the technology of tomorrow.
What I really want is a good-quality DVD with restored video, remastered audio, and not a single addition to (or subtraction from) the original content. Lucas can make all the Special Editions and Director's Cuts he wants, as far as I'm concerned, but the only version I will ever buy is the original. Until he releases that, he doesn't get another dime from me. (Not that he needs it or anything, I'm just sayin'.)
He's not making a whole lot of money from me. I'm not buying this release. Nor am I likely to be the HD version of this release when it arrives.
I would gladly pay $200 for good digital transfers of the 1977, 1980, and 1983 versions of the original trilogy. Seriously. I loved those films, and would like to own DVDs of them in all their unvarnished glory.
Since Lucas is no longer interested in selling me the movies as they once were, I'll probably just have to by bootleg LD rips off eBay or something.
Being on TV a lot does not make a show overrated.
Also, if you are familiar with it from TV, you have probably only seen the crappy, edited-down English dubs of the show, so you are not really the best person to ask about the quality of it.
I would put it to you that the typical SF/fantasy villain is often far more nuanced than villains from the real world. If you put a character like Osama bin Laden in such a story, critics of the genre would not find it credible at all.
People who say that unambiguous evil does not exist in the real world need to get a clue. Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hussein, bin Laden, all evil. Nothing complicated, they are just evil.
If you tell me that unambiguous good does not exist in the real world, then maybe you are on to something. Heroes seldom live up to their billing.
Do you have something intelligent to say, or just mindless mockery?
Just mindless mockery. The very suggestion that Tip O'Niel or even Lloyd Benson ever let Republicans have any kind of "voice" in their Congresses, let alone less "voice" than Tom Daschale has today, does not really warrant anything more than mocking laughter, and only a partisan liberal could possibly manage to see it any differently. There's really no point in debating people who won't even look at the facts of what an iron grasp the Democtrats had on the Congress for over 50 consecutive years.
The scene you refer to was homage to John Woo's HK films, in which Chow Yun Fat would often "stand and deliver" while bullets fly everywhere.
There was a similar scene at the end of Unforgiven, when Clint Eastwood mowed down a room full of armed men.
As silly as it seems, the truth is that untrained fighters (such as bottom-of-the-barrel mafia goons) will often empty entire clips of pistols or automatic rifles in a point-blank gunfight and never hit a thing. A live gunfight is not like a Quake deathmatch, where you can expect to hit your target more often than not. Most folks, even criminals who have shot at people before, often just spray bullets everywhere, and people only get hit out of bad luck.
There was a real-live incident a couple weeks ago where somebody attempted "suicide by cop." In spite of getting multiple officers to completely empty their guns at him, he never took a single center-mass hit, and survived with minor injuries.
This is why most cops will tell you if you are going to buy a weapon for home defense, buy a shotgun and use buckshot instead of slugs.
It's too bad you didn't stick with the show longer. The mafia story gets really good in the second half.
As for Evangelion, I called if "overrated" because, while it addressed some interesting concepts of child abandonment, I don't think it lived up to its ambitions or pretenses. A lot of potential themes and stories were completely cast aside so we could be treated to Another After Yet Another "Shinji wants to quit NERV" filler episode.
Happy to. (Spoiler warning: See both films before reading any further.)
In "Perfect Blue", Mima agrees to be featured in a "rape scene" in a film which gets out of hand (and muddled up with her hallucinations), and she ends up feeling totally violated, almost as if she was really raped.
In the following scene, we see her naked in the bathtub, in a fetal position with her face in the water, motionless. For a while, you almost wonder if she's committed suicide, but then she opens her mouth, and screams as bubbles come flowing up the side of her face.
In "Requiem for a Dream", Marion gives a blow-job to a drug dealer in order to get her junk fix, and shortly afterwards we see her play out the same bathtub scene. It's almost identical, frame for frame.
Hmm, 10 years back is just when Evangelion was airing...
Right. And Evangelion, while an interesting step forward from what had come before, pales in comparison to Haibane Renmei, Kino's Journey, or Serial Experiments Lain in terms of depth of story & underlying philosophy, and can't possibly hold a candle to shows like Wolf's Rain, Cowboy Bebop, or FLCL in terms of production values.
Evangelion was an over-rated Fighting Robot drama with an under-rated and delightfully oddball ending, which the director revised twice without improving on it.
I got the distinct impression that the time-trial in Last Exile was not strictly a spectator sport the way the pod races in Phantom Menace were. It looked as if there were more pilots than audience members, and no sign of anybody buying tickets anywhere.
If the still images had been of a moving person, that might've been something.
The motionlessness perfectly mirrored the style of Sergio Leone westerns (which owed a lot to Japanese samurai films).
Remember the gunfight at the end of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly? Several minutes of three guys standing still, and it's still one of the most intense dramatic moments in film history.
That gunfight was probably inspired by the duel in Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa, in which the two swordfighters squared off in a similar manner. When the action finally started, it was one cut, and the fight was over.
Noir was never intended to play out the way real gunfights play out. It was made in homage to the great tradition of "morose assassin" dramas which came before, and on that level it was a fantastic success.
It's not a Swede/American thing. It's a Bergman/Hollywood contrast.
Most Hollywood films (and Hollywood-influenced films) rely on a "language" of cinematography which goes back to the techniques of D. W. Griffith.
Bergman used a language all his own, such as using hard-lit scenes to indicate dream sequences, which ended up influencing American film, but still to this day contrasts sharply with what people who don't go to "art theaters" are used to.
New Jersey? Well, I did say I could see it taking two hours if you live out in the sticks or a crowded urban center. New Jersey is unique in that it is a little bit of both. An expansive state-wide suburb of New York City.
Only kidding.
Mostly.
Total reviews: 8.
From well-respected and famous reviewers like "Joshua Tyler of CINIMABLEND.COM"
And of those eight, one reviewer less than half of them liked it.
I'll tell you what. Let's wait until Wednesday and see what people like Roger Ebert have to say. If they pan it, I might be more inclined to worry about whether it's worth my eight bucks.
Until then, I'll give anything made by Oshii a shot, no matter what Peter Canavese from Groucho Reviews (or some poster on Slashdot who has not even seen it himself) has to say about it.
One of the reasons for all the "bandwagon jumping" is because Anime has actually gotten better... a lot better... over the last ten years or so.
Last Exile is pretty much what the Star Wars prequels could have been if Lucas still had any creative energy. The vanship time-trial from that show makes the Episode I "pod race" look, well, even more boring than it looked in the first place.
Perfect Blue contained one particular scene which director Darrin Aronofsky found so compelling, that he purchased the remake rights to the entire film just so he could steal that one 20-second scene and reshoot it with Jenifer Connoly in "Requiem for a Dream."
The light, pathos-driven humor of Azumanga Diaoh is resonating with teens and college kids today in almost the exact same way that Peanuts caught on with teens and young adults of the 60s.
Cowboy Bebop was arguably the very best science fiction TV series of the 90s, a decade that was positively stuffed with science fiction television shows.
I could go on and on.
Even the ways they sometimes cut corners to make the relatively cheaper TV shows (vs. the big-budget films) can sometimes creatively turn a negative into a virtue. For example, the still-image pans which you mentioned (which I also find annoying sometimes) actually enhanced the mood for "Noir" and gave the series a strong Sergio Leone type of feel.
More often than not, a still image in anime is used to serve two purposes. One is to reduce "cell count." The other is to emphasize the emotional drama of a particular moment. It looks jarring if you are not used to seeing it, but then so did the slow-motion fighting in "Kung Fu" when audiences first saw that show back in the 70s. Now we see variable-speed fight scenes all the time without even thinking about it.
Anime has a cinematic language of its own. Just like you have to watch several Felini or Bergman films before you can just enjoy the story without being partly distracted by the non-Hollywood cinematic choices.
Yep, and if you're really lucky it might even be playing at a theatre within 2 hours of your home/business.
How the hell did that get modded up as insightful!?
I live in the Midwest. Minnesota. Pure "fly-over land." There are two theaters in the Twin Cities that will be showing this movie on the 17th. Both are within a 20-minute drive from my suburban home. Did you even look at the listings?
The only way you are two hours away from a theater that will be showing this is if you live way out in the sticks, or an urban center so congested that it takes two hours to get anywhere.
While there was partisanship when the Democrats were in power, they at least attempted to give the opposing party a voice...
. ..
HAHAHAhahahahahahahahahaha!!!!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Wooo!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Whew.
Heh heh.
Good one.
Oh man, I just read it again...
BWAHAHAhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
I disagree. Lack of news concerning congressional politicians on either side is something I find deeply comforting.
When Congress acts, be concerned.
When Congress cooperates in a bipartisan way, watch your wallet.
Gridlock is good. I actually support the nomination of several of these judges, but time wasted on these filibusters is time not spent coming up with new ways to spend my money.