The Ewoks were an obvious shout-out to the Zulu tribe which slaughtered the much-more-technically-advanced British army using nothing but spears, wicker shields, and a the kind of bravery that can only come from phychotic drug-induced haze.
I find it amusing that many critics and cinephiles consider the ending of "The Natural" to be one of the great Hollywood endings of all time.
In the original ending of the story, as I recall, Roy Hobbs strikes out and then dies of his wound at the plate.
In the final edit of the movie, they changed it so he hits a home run that knocks the lights out, showering sparks (sparks!? from broken glass?) which rain down in front of the VIP box full of eeeevil owners, as everything goes to slow-motion.
It was a stupid, hammy ending to an otherwise grim evaluation of the human condition... but the first rule of the entertainment business is "give the folks what they want."
And one which goes all the way up to the Commander in Chief, in my opinion. And I think you know that I have no particular axe to grind with the current president going into my formation of that opinion. Failure is the word I would use as well.
Still, his narrative style always felt to me like I was being told the story by a chain smoker who just ran up six flights of stairs and suddenly remembered he left his car lights on.
Agreed. I was willing to roll with the whole Jar-Jar thing for a while, but when they went on their little journy through the "planet core" (Which was aparently entirely water at a depth of about 50 feet), they get attacked by a big fish-dragon thing, only to be rescued when it's gobbled up by a bigger fish. Then shortly afterwards, they get attacked by another fish, and again rescued when it gets eaten by a bigger fish.
That second get-attacked-by-a-sea-monster-who-gets-attacked-by -a-bigger-sea-monster scene is when I started to realize that the film was completley coming off the rails.
At least it had a cool lightsaber fight at the end, and the battle droids were hilarious. Especially when their invasion force Pez dispensers started unloading them for the fight with the Gungans. The Battle Droids were the most entertaining characters of the entire prequel trilogy, IMHO.
Attack on the Clones, on the other hand, was like a visit to the dentist. I sat there for the entire film waiting for something entertaining to happen, only to leave wondering why it never did.
Worse is the fact that Jabba's reaction (in the theatrical remaster anyway) was actually kind of cute and funny. This is supposed to the badass mafia lord who Han is pissing himself over in the later scenes of Star Wars and early scenes of Empire... and now he's a freakin' muppet. It just doesn't work.
Also, I continue to be baffled why, when adding the Jabba scene back in, Lucas didn't either delete the Greedo scene or at least changed the dialog of one scene or the other. I mean, it's subtitles of made-up languages, after all! Why is it needed for Greedo and Jabba to recite the exact same lines to Han, word for word.
Yeah, it's great that Lucas could use all this technology to re-insert his "lost" Jabba scene... but the Greedo scene only existed because that scene was gone. Now that we have the (much more entertaining) Greedo scene, the Jabba scene is completely redundant.
I really wish Lucas would come to his senses and realize that fans of the original masterpiece desperately want a DVD of the original release, warts and all.
I don't think Alien3 is nearly as bad as some people do, but it did have the worst-filmed action sequences I ever saw... That is, until Tomb Raider came out.
I think Neuromancer is, all things considered, quite filmable.
Yeah, but how do you represent Gibson's terrible grammar on film?
Seems to almost delibertely avoid complete sentences. Often done by leaving subjects out. Sometimes no verb, either. Tiresome after a while. Then there's his quihirian use of made-up words for the sake of limdon obfuscation. No film likely to barst-narst that aspect of his writing, eh?
You're forgetting an obvious example, especially considering what day it is.
Some people have spouses, lovers, etc. Not you, obviously... but normal people sometimes have relationships with members of the opposite sex, and would prefer to keep their private conversations private. IM is a great way to do so.
Pfft! Counting tuition, those are the most expensive personal computers ever!
Since I'm not the youngest son of an aristocrat, I have little use for going to Harvard.
How about I take all the money I would spend on their tuition, put it in an IRA, and when I retire I can buy them a building or something and get an honorary degree? I'll get a much better education elsewhere, and I won't need to hang around with rich New England assholes to do so.
Cracked OSX environments can float around. They'll make almost no impact on sales, as they will be completley unsupported and a royal PITA to keep patched. Meanwhile, it will mean a lot of hackers out there who would otherwise not touch an Apple computer a close, personal look at what they are missing out on. If a tiny fraction of those people like what they see, more Macs get sold.
Meanwhile, Apple only needs to apply just enough security that non-hardcore hackers will consider OSx86 to be not worth the hassle, especially when the Intel-based Macs (so far) offer fairly similar ! for the $ to the other major brands.
Setting aside that more expreienced text message users can type "what takes 15 seconds to say" in about 15 seconds...
Perhaps you (or the person you are talking to, or both) are riding on a noisy subway.
Perhaps one or both of you are in a setting where you don't wish to share one half of the conversation with everybody near you.
Perhaps you are in a setting where gabbing on the phone would be rude, but to descretely deliver or receive a message would not.
Perhaps you know the other person is not there to pick up, and dropping a brief note is faster than calling, waiting for their voice mail to pick up, waiting for the beep, and then finally saying your message.
Use a little imagination, and I think you will come up with all kinds of situations where dropping an IM is a better option than calling somebody.
At first, probably not, but over a period of months or years when coupled with the lack of supervision
IIRC, most of the guards at Abu Grahab were relatively inexperienced Army contractors. They had only been in that environment for days and weeks, not months and years.
Let's get more specific about causes by narrowing the scope a little bit.
Bloomington Park Tavern was one of the busiest bars in the entire southern metro area of the Twin Cities. The place is huge, and it was packed pretty much every night.
Until the smoking ban. It was a very nice place to go after that, because not only was the air fresher, but it was a hell of a lot less crowded. They went out of business.
I wish I could say this was the only example.
Again, I'm not a smoker, and I hate being in smoke-filled environments. If it were up to me, everybody would quit smoking and, while they are at it, get a little excersize in a few times a week.
But I hold fast to the principle that how other people live their lives is not up to me. If a bar wants to host smokers, and smokers want to go to that bar, it's none of my goddamn business, and neither is it yours.
It's not jut performance it's low cost customiation option too that Windows leads in.
Umm... You do know we are discussing LAPTOPS here, right?
If you're doing a lot of customizations to upgrade the video performance, etc., of your windows laptop, then you are far better with a soldering gun than I.
eXistenZ was a fair-to-middling David Cronenberg sci-fi, with all his usual metaphorical references to kinky sex and schisms with reality (he also directed The Naked Lunch.)
The Matrix was a fun wire-fu movie which used bad sci-fi to stand in place of the eastern concepts of "chi" which Western audiences usually can't get past when people are jumping 20 feet in the air and running up walls. Putting the characters into a virtual environment made the suspension of disbelief a little easier than with a typical Jet Li chop socky flick.
Some people (who didn't really think it through very far) actually took the cheezy sci-fi elements of The Matrix seriously, but the next two films quickly cured them of that.
Well, whatever it is, I'm sure it will cost 10c/message or 500 messages for $40/mo or something absurd like that. Either way, they will find some way to make your bill go up 15% if you even think about using the service.
The sad thing is, I can talk more-or-less for free, because I never quite use up my minutes, but I get charged every time I send or receive a text message. So, the service which costs them more to provide costs me less. It's exactly backwards, yet in the world of "a la carte" services on mobile networks, it somehow makes sense.
Some day, some cell phone company is going to come up with a business model which quits treating every new data format as a network "feature" that adds cost to the plan and treats bandwidth as bandwidth. No, downloading a picture does not cost more than talking on the phone for three seconds. IM costs almost nothing. Thirty or forty bucks a month should cover the cost of damn near anything normal users do.
On that day, a lot of people will immediately drop their current plan (even if it means paying contract termination penalties to do it) and switch. I'll be first in line.
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The Ewoks were an obvious shout-out to the Zulu tribe which slaughtered the much-more-technically-advanced British army using nothing but spears, wicker shields, and a the kind of bravery that can only come from phychotic drug-induced haze.
I find it amusing that many critics and cinephiles consider the ending of "The Natural" to be one of the great Hollywood endings of all time.
In the original ending of the story, as I recall, Roy Hobbs strikes out and then dies of his wound at the plate.
In the final edit of the movie, they changed it so he hits a home run that knocks the lights out, showering sparks (sparks!? from broken glass?) which rain down in front of the VIP box full of eeeevil owners, as everything goes to slow-motion.
It was a stupid, hammy ending to an otherwise grim evaluation of the human condition... but the first rule of the entertainment business is "give the folks what they want."
And one which goes all the way up to the Commander in Chief, in my opinion. And I think you know that I have no particular axe to grind with the current president going into my formation of that opinion. Failure is the word I would use as well.
Still, his narrative style always felt to me like I was being told the story by a chain smoker who just ran up six flights of stairs and suddenly remembered he left his car lights on.
Agreed. I was willing to roll with the whole Jar-Jar thing for a while, but when they went on their little journy through the "planet core" (Which was aparently entirely water at a depth of about 50 feet), they get attacked by a big fish-dragon thing, only to be rescued when it's gobbled up by a bigger fish. Then shortly afterwards, they get attacked by another fish, and again rescued when it gets eaten by a bigger fish.
y -a-bigger-sea-monster scene is when I started to realize that the film was completley coming off the rails.
That second get-attacked-by-a-sea-monster-who-gets-attacked-b
At least it had a cool lightsaber fight at the end, and the battle droids were hilarious. Especially when their invasion force Pez dispensers started unloading them for the fight with the Gungans. The Battle Droids were the most entertaining characters of the entire prequel trilogy, IMHO.
Attack on the Clones, on the other hand, was like a visit to the dentist. I sat there for the entire film waiting for something entertaining to happen, only to leave wondering why it never did.
Worse is the fact that Jabba's reaction (in the theatrical remaster anyway) was actually kind of cute and funny. This is supposed to the badass mafia lord who Han is pissing himself over in the later scenes of Star Wars and early scenes of Empire... and now he's a freakin' muppet. It just doesn't work.
Also, I continue to be baffled why, when adding the Jabba scene back in, Lucas didn't either delete the Greedo scene or at least changed the dialog of one scene or the other. I mean, it's subtitles of made-up languages, after all! Why is it needed for Greedo and Jabba to recite the exact same lines to Han, word for word.
Yeah, it's great that Lucas could use all this technology to re-insert his "lost" Jabba scene... but the Greedo scene only existed because that scene was gone. Now that we have the (much more entertaining) Greedo scene, the Jabba scene is completely redundant.
I really wish Lucas would come to his senses and realize that fans of the original masterpiece desperately want a DVD of the original release, warts and all.
I don't think Alien3 is nearly as bad as some people do, but it did have the worst-filmed action sequences I ever saw... That is, until Tomb Raider came out.
I think Neuromancer is, all things considered, quite filmable.
Yeah, but how do you represent Gibson's terrible grammar on film?
Seems to almost delibertely avoid complete sentences. Often done by leaving subjects out. Sometimes no verb, either. Tiresome after a while. Then there's his quihirian use of made-up words for the sake of limdon obfuscation. No film likely to barst-narst that aspect of his writing, eh?
"Addiction" has been gradually re-defined over recent years to mean, "something other people think you are doing too much."
You're forgetting an obvious example, especially considering what day it is.
Some people have spouses, lovers, etc. Not you, obviously... but normal people sometimes have relationships with members of the opposite sex, and would prefer to keep their private conversations private. IM is a great way to do so.
Oh noes!!1!!!theloneliestnumberthatyou'lleverdo!!!
You make it sound like Malware writers had no access to Macs over the past 20 years. Behold my lack of worry.
Pfft! Counting tuition, those are the most expensive personal computers ever!
Since I'm not the youngest son of an aristocrat, I have little use for going to Harvard.
How about I take all the money I would spend on their tuition, put it in an IRA, and when I retire I can buy them a building or something and get an honorary degree? I'll get a much better education elsewhere, and I won't need to hang around with rich New England assholes to do so.
Cheers!
marketing.
Cracked OSX environments can float around. They'll make almost no impact on sales, as they will be completley unsupported and a royal PITA to keep patched. Meanwhile, it will mean a lot of hackers out there who would otherwise not touch an Apple computer a close, personal look at what they are missing out on. If a tiny fraction of those people like what they see, more Macs get sold.
Meanwhile, Apple only needs to apply just enough security that non-hardcore hackers will consider OSx86 to be not worth the hassle, especially when the Intel-based Macs (so far) offer fairly similar ! for the $ to the other major brands.
Setting aside that more expreienced text message users can type "what takes 15 seconds to say" in about 15 seconds...
Perhaps you (or the person you are talking to, or both) are riding on a noisy subway.
Perhaps one or both of you are in a setting where you don't wish to share one half of the conversation with everybody near you.
Perhaps you are in a setting where gabbing on the phone would be rude, but to descretely deliver or receive a message would not.
Perhaps you know the other person is not there to pick up, and dropping a brief note is faster than calling, waiting for their voice mail to pick up, waiting for the beep, and then finally saying your message.
Use a little imagination, and I think you will come up with all kinds of situations where dropping an IM is a better option than calling somebody.
Link, please?
Some people have a thing for seeing rocks thrown at tanks. Takes all kinds, eh?
The Dell 9300 is a single Centrino laptop. Not at all in the same class as the MacBook.
The e1705 has dual-core models available starting at $2221 ($1971 after rebate.)
So, for $20 less than the MacBook, you get a nearly identical-spec machine with a little bit more memory and... WOAH. Stop the press.
That $1971 Dell comes with "Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950", while the MacBook features a screamin' ATI Mobility Radeon X1600.
The closest the Dell can do to match that is add the NVIDA® GeForce(TM) Go 7800... For $300 more!
So, if you want a laptop that is suitable for gaming, you will pay $300 if you follow the "Dell Dude's" advice.
They used the same line in the Guy Richie movie, "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels." (Actually it was "Robert is your father's brother.")
If you're a fan of cockney rhyming slang and other thieves' cants, it's one of the best movies out there.
At first, probably not, but over a period of months or years when coupled with the lack of supervision
IIRC, most of the guards at Abu Grahab were relatively inexperienced Army contractors. They had only been in that environment for days and weeks, not months and years.
Let's get more specific about causes by narrowing the scope a little bit.
Bloomington Park Tavern was one of the busiest bars in the entire southern metro area of the Twin Cities. The place is huge, and it was packed pretty much every night.
Until the smoking ban. It was a very nice place to go after that, because not only was the air fresher, but it was a hell of a lot less crowded. They went out of business.
I wish I could say this was the only example.
Again, I'm not a smoker, and I hate being in smoke-filled environments. If it were up to me, everybody would quit smoking and, while they are at it, get a little excersize in a few times a week.
But I hold fast to the principle that how other people live their lives is not up to me. If a bar wants to host smokers, and smokers want to go to that bar, it's none of my goddamn business, and neither is it yours.
It's not jut performance it's low cost customiation option too that Windows leads in.
Umm... You do know we are discussing LAPTOPS here, right?
If you're doing a lot of customizations to upgrade the video performance, etc., of your windows laptop, then you are far better with a soldering gun than I.
So my question is, why should I switch?
My question is, why should we care?
If you're actually happy with your Windows box, good for you. Why even post in this thread?
They are two completely different movies.
eXistenZ was a fair-to-middling David Cronenberg sci-fi, with all his usual metaphorical references to kinky sex and schisms with reality (he also directed The Naked Lunch.)
The Matrix was a fun wire-fu movie which used bad sci-fi to stand in place of the eastern concepts of "chi" which Western audiences usually can't get past when people are jumping 20 feet in the air and running up walls. Putting the characters into a virtual environment made the suspension of disbelief a little easier than with a typical Jet Li chop socky flick.
Some people (who didn't really think it through very far) actually took the cheezy sci-fi elements of The Matrix seriously, but the next two films quickly cured them of that.
Well, whatever it is, I'm sure it will cost 10c/message or 500 messages for $40/mo or something absurd like that. Either way, they will find some way to make your bill go up 15% if you even think about using the service.
The sad thing is, I can talk more-or-less for free, because I never quite use up my minutes, but I get charged every time I send or receive a text message. So, the service which costs them more to provide costs me less. It's exactly backwards, yet in the world of "a la carte" services on mobile networks, it somehow makes sense.
Some day, some cell phone company is going to come up with a business model which quits treating every new data format as a network "feature" that adds cost to the plan and treats bandwidth as bandwidth. No, downloading a picture does not cost more than talking on the phone for three seconds. IM costs almost nothing. Thirty or forty bucks a month should cover the cost of damn near anything normal users do.
On that day, a lot of people will immediately drop their current plan (even if it means paying contract termination penalties to do it) and switch. I'll be first in line.
Very soon after the incidents occured Best Buy corporate stated ...
RTFA.