I meant it was interesting not that Ebert brought them up (since he picked neither Baldwin or Castle-Hughes) but that the Academy gave them nominations. Maybe I was expecting to see Sardis up there.
That should be 2002 as taken from this: "So true that City of God was No. 2 on my list for last year. The film played in every major festival in 2002 and was a candidate for year-end awards, and although it did not open in Chicago until January, I didn't see the point in waiting 12 months to put it on a best 10 list when putting it on the timelier list might do it some good."
You can compare the actual nominations to Roger Ebert's predictions. He was pretty on point for Best Picture, Actor, and Supporting Actress. Its surprising to see the well liked but little seen roles getting nods. Alec Baldwin in The Cooler for one. Likewise it's interesting to see Keisha Castle-Hughes for her work in Whale Rider. Many were predicitng Charlize Theron would run away with her work in Monster but Castle-Hughes could pull an Anna Panquin upset. That role was powerful AND beloved. Something that might worka gainst Theron.
Jude Law's nod is interesting since I don't remember anyone really talking about his performance (as compared to what Sean Penn, Bill Murray and Johnny Depp did this year). Ebert picked Russell Crowe's in Master and Commander which, likewise, didn't seem to have a big impact.
Strangest one is that City of God got three nominations... although it had its NY/LA debut in December 2003 (Ebert made specific mention of it in his Top of 2004 to explain its absence). But here its getting nods for Cinematography, Direction and Writing. It probably only has a chance in Cinematography where RotK is (strangely) absent.
RotK will probably run away with Makeup, Music(Song), Sound, Writing (Adapted), and Costume Design. Of course those are the second tier ones that end up as consolation prizes for a lot of folks. The interesting thing will see how it does in the big categories (which I guess Adapted Screenplay is one).
Well I guess this all comes down to what each of us see as "on the discussion". Truth be told the post that got you so heated was a fifth level response to another poster who had responded to a previous post. So it wasn't that I was bringing up a tangent, but responding to someone who said not knowing Kurosawa nullifies someone's opinion. Because that was the topic he brought up, I responded to it. I agreed because I saw an earlier post where someone had said that RotK was going to influence generations of filmmakers. That was their opinion. I didn't agree with it, so I shared mine.
Someone gave it a +1 Insightful and I guess that's how this all got started. It was a specific response and got modded up to the general topic. I can't control that.
I guess I could've said "hey, how I write up a journal entry and we go talk in that?" But that's a ridiculous amount of work for a dicussion that has already started.
I'm sorry but I gotta say we are just going to disagree on when/if to cut short a thread because it has strayed off topic. I guess that's what moderation is for. If a mod agreed with you, they could've just hit me with a few -1 Offtopics/Trolls and be done with it. They didn't (or haven't yet). So folks either agree with me, ran out of mod points, or are going to mod it down later. Or they can respond like you did.
Yes, the filmmakers and the studio are out there to do the Academy push. And there's a big corellary between the marketing by a studio and the eventual winners.
I think most people would agree that we'd hope the folks in the Academy would be pretty well versed in the year's movies. Not that have to see everything (I think it would be cruel and unusual to force everyone to sit through Gigli or House of the Dead) but you'd think they could watch like the top 30 regarded movies of the year, with or without studio hype.
And, no, I don't expect everyone to shell out the hundreds of bucks I spend a year on movies. I'm adult enough to know that such an idea is stupid.
I do however think people would really get a kick out of a lot of these movies they're missing out on. It's a shame when there's something good out there but its so low on the radar that it goes unnoticed. Also its compounded by the theaters demanding high first and second week returns on movies now. So the local AMC might have a screen set aside for art movies but whatever's showing might get cut to make up for additional screens for the next Big Blockbuster.
And that's the problem: popular opinion is cursed by the fact that it is directly catered to. The studio and theater systems don't/cant' waste time on films building word of mouth over months. So instead most movies drift through distribution unseen by the mainstream. It might be the Best Picture of the year, but who would know when three guys and the director saw the only screening in some Porno Theater in Queens?
In fact that's why I post crap like this whole thread. So people would be modivated to maybe seeing something that missed their district. Shit, Netflix is a revolution! Folks no longer are hampered by what the local chain or Blockbuster decides to show them. Folks reading this thread can queue up City of God and get it shipped to their house when it's finally released on DVD. They could be in BFN, Idaho and be exposed to a whole world of expression. I think that's pretty fucking sweet.
Sure, there is nothing wrong with them if they are completely uninterested in doing so. But it breaks my heart when folks aren't given the chance to experience all of this cool shit (or, even worse, assume that people like myself are just indicitive of indie and foreign movie fans, and the whole lot are a bunch of... what did that guy say? That I think I'm better than 99% of the people here with my condesending attitude).
Maybe I'm not the best advocate for art film. By the responses to this post I can see that I probably have come off as the same sort of Debian Linux uberzealot that gives/. a bad name (too bad since I'm one of those too). It sucks since there's some really cool stuff out there that I think people would be blown away by.
This comes from personal experience. In that I have been modded down as a "troll" and responded to as "Not staying on the fucking topic" because I decided to talk about other movies in a LotR post.
Like the original guy said, that's ancedotal. But, shit, its an opinion so that's what its gotta be.
How do I explain my condescending attitude? I guess because I'm a dick. Secondly because I bring up other movies and are generally told "I haven't fucking heard of it". So I guess it comes from the fact that I see, rent, own, and talk about a shitload of movies that are foreign or indie pieces of shit. I've taken courses on film and gone to several festivals.
I guess that's what they call "experience". And since that seems to be a-normal around these parts, I'd consider my opinion useful on this topic.
You know, what the big Linux, BSD, physics and developer heads use when they talk about those topics.
And you notice that this is a discussion about Movies? This isn't me going into the latest MER discussion and talking shit like "Well since I've seen the bulk of Akira Kurosawa's work, I know exactly why Spirit broke down, you clods!"
This is a topic I know something about. I like to think I know a lot about it. And my point is that instead of getting deeper interest akin to populous's interest of topics on Vi/Emacs, C++/Ada/Python/Perl I get replies that I'm fucking on the wrong site. That being a Film Nerd isn't a part of the/. Nerd culture.
And so heated conversation about the nuances of Linux 2.6 multiprocessing is kosher but talking about cinema (in a post about movies no less) is bullshit.
You know what? You are in fact right. My friend sebi started this discussion and I have had two of my posts modded up. So there must be other geeks here who must agree with me.
Shit, I'm sorry if I offended you. If I could fucking reedit my post I'd replace "standard" with "commonly experienced by me". But this isn't a technical paper. I wasn't submitting that post to the IEEE for a conference. If I thought that its value was based solely on its techical accuracy I'd have someone proof it. But I'm paying for/., not the other way around. So I guess shitty 30% truthful opinions are what we are going to have to live with.
(Do you really think RotK will vanish from the top 250 in the next few years? I sure don't.
Well you know what? I do. And Titanic was the #1 movie on IMDB about 3 years ago. Recently. But again it fell off.
And so you talk about popularity but then deny a sample the size of the IMDB? Where about 80,000 people have voted for each of the top 250 movies? The statistical error of such a ranking not reflecting common opinion is probably pretty low.
We are now going down a rabbithole of hypotheticals and approaching flame-land. Shit, all of this is anecdotal. Why trust IMDB as you said? Why trust RottenTomatos when it uses film critics which either only like "wierd foreign indie shit" or are "right on the money" depending on if the person likes/dislikes the movie? There are no absolutes. And you too fall into the same trap: They're easily better than the original Star Wars trilogy... it couldn't live up to its own hype. LotR has, IMHO.
Like the acronym says In My Humble Opinion.
My original point was that 90% of the population out there has not seen 90% of the movies released in the last year. Regardless they take the best movie they saw that year and mark it as such. When informed of all those other movies they then use post hoc logic to defend it... instead of actually seeing the movie.
You know what? I'd love it if some folks on this site would go see Owning Mahoney, City of God, American Splendor, Monster, etc. to see if they measure up to what they think of RotK. Shit, I'd love have people to enjoy the bredth and variety of movies instead of complaining that the only good thing Swanson's puts out is Mac & Cheese. Fuck, they could come in here and say "You know what, you prick, I saw City of God and I thought it was just a rehash of Goodfellas and that was just a secondgrade hack of Mellville's Le Samourai." Nothing would make me happier!
I'd like to see frontpage discussions about how much of Irreversible is regurgitated Memento-like technique and shockvalue or that Slamdance is the superior Park City festival.
Like one of the original responders said above, this is important to film geeks. And I think that falls under the dispora of "Nerds" and "Stuff that Matters" to them.
We expect such a level of discourse when talking about software, OSes, and intellectual rights. Why not movies?
And regardless of what/. is or isn't, who doesn't benefit from exposure to art; a thousand lifetimes of differing experience?
No where did I say that popularity wasn't a good metric. Just that to use it as the only one is foolish.
Take a look at IMDB's top 250 movies. This is the composed average of user ratings of all films in the database.
Now, by your logic, we should just be able to search down the list to find the top movie of 2003. According to the list it would be #4 RotK.
First, how does that seem. That this movie, less than two months in the theaters is now the 4th best movie of All-Time? Above Schindler's List, One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest, Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai?
Now although "best" is subjective, over a given period of time, there seems to be an exponential averaging effect that forces a piece of art's excepted quality to a pretty static point. Hindsight's 20/20. In time all things become clear.
Its when that initial excitement is gone and we can take this "thing" and put it into perspective.
And I think the best example is on that Top 250 list at #2, Shawshank Redemption. This movie spurted at the boxoffice (barely making back its small 25 million budget), even though it was loved by critics. In 1994, it wouldn't have even cracked the top 250.
So, by your logic, it shouldn't have been up for the Best Picture Academy Award (which it lost to Forrest Gump, along with Pulp Fiction).
But what happened? Well TBS and TNT playing the movie enough that it gained a cult following. In the following years word of mouth opened up this unsung movie to the point now that it is one of the most rented movies out there. Not only that but it means something to people. Esquire Magazine did a survey of their subscribers and they were shocked that Shawshank was the #4 movie among their "elitist" readership (a movie that they didn't even put on the list and was a written in ballot).
That is why I'm remiss to say "a lot of people liked it, so it must be good" because the operative part is "liked it then". What about in a decade (as with Shawshank) or 50 years from now (as with Seven Samurai?). I assume we agree that "Best Picture of 2003" means the Best, barnone. Not the one people liked most on the date December 31st, 2003.
It is the way we differentiate between fads and true phenomena of culture. Titanic was, at one point, the highest rated movie on IMDB. It was critically acclaimed, the king of the box office, and a big award winner. Now it isn't even in the top 250 just 7 years after its release.
Popularity is a tenuous thing. And although subjective, there are invariably standards in art that allow things like Mozart, Hemmingway, and da Vinci to inspire through the ages.
True, knowing Kurosawa is probably mandatory if one wants to be considered seriously for their cinema opinion. But I think that the 'film geek' ratio on/. is low. Where spending a lot of money on movies is somehow equivalent to seeing a lot of movies and thus being informed.
Granted, 90% of the folks on this site have probably heard of Kurosawa (that's actually why I brought him up. To point out how the roots of popular cinema is drawn from groundbreaking earlier works that one may have only heard of in passing). Of those you could say that maybe 9% then know of someone such as Beat Takeshi (even though more may watch Most Extreme Elimination Challenge and not realize who the main guy is). And that's before we get into the other masters such as Ozu or Mizoguchi. Or modern artisans such as Miike.
Popularity becomes the single measure of importance and therefore we end up with/. threads like this where earning the Oscar will just prove X is the best movie of the year. I know its the case since I've made the mistake of mentioning last year that City of God might be the best film of 2003... to which I was modded down as a troll.
I find it all funny since many of these same folks would battle endlessly if someone suggested that XP was the best desktop OS since it exists everywhere. In fact one could take these movie discussions, s/RotK/Windows/g and s/SomeLesserKnownMovie/YourFavoriteBSD*nixDistro/g and get an interesting duality. Not that there is anything inherently bad about RotK or Windows (or good about Linux or some other indie release). Just that the vehemence and interest attached to OS's seems to disappear when talking about something just as "geeky" as movies.
Or Monster with its ambitious turn by Ms Theron playing a serial killer... or Owning Mahoney with its excellent performances by P.S. Hoffman and James Caan. The documentary/pseudo-documentary/cartoon American Splendor... the Morris documentary/deconstruction of Robert McNammara Fog of War. All have cinematic elements that are being lauded even now (who can't love "interrocam"?).
Of course our opinions don't seem to mesh with the standard/. line of "If I haven't seen/heard of it, it must not be good." One could point them to Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress which lead the way for a little movie called Star Wars (which then helped finance two more Kurosawa movies: Ran and Kagemusha)...
but, eh, who wants to complicate things? RotK was a good movie, so it must have been the only good movie of the year. I mean, just look at the box office receipts!
And worst comes to worst, Opportunity should be landing Sunday evening. So even if Spirit gives up the ghost, her kin can carry on the flame (albeit in a less interesting location).
JPL engineers played Baha Men's "Who Let the Dogs Out" in the control room as they watched new images confirming that the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit successfully rolled off its lander platform early Thursday morning.
Oh for the love of... Really, we didn't need to hear this. I hope that didn't get caught on film because that's the sort of thing that resurfaces at retirement parties.;p
I gotta cosign you on this. The King's Castle was monstrous. My brother finally got it one Christmas and we did what we always did that time of year: take our multitude of castle sets, rebuild them into one giant complex on the dining room table and then blow them apart by shooting them with rubber bands.
I also thought the Black Knight's castle was so badass looking but then it just disappeared off of the shelf:(
The same could be said of acupuncture I guess. The rotten library had a great point: what is more disturbing? That acupuncture seems to work or that someone thought sticking pins into your body was a good idea in the first place;p
Don't you read the New York Times? One of their Best Inventions of 2003 was the Death of Critical Theory.
Of course theory has lost a lot of its bite as there have been Pomo deconstructions of the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog.
One problem is that no theory really dies. So Freud may be seen as an anachronism with no bearing on modern psychology... but he's still invoked as a rational critical view in the humanities. Its been a joke for a while in those fields (resulting in the above A&F stuff. I've also attended a presentation of a critque of poetry written on bathroom stall walls).
Its been dead. Finally the big heads of humanities are beginning to realize it. Dr. Cornel West of Harvard (he of Afro-american study and Matrix fame) said something to the effect "How I wish I was around decades ago when you all cared what theory meant."
Did anyone see the ad for Resident Evil Apocalypse where it looked like some sort of Jergens skin care commercial? The thing had me completely fooled (I guess I should've noticed the "T-cell formula" part).
And then it has the "possible sideeffects" where the woman turns into the zombie. Cool stuff.
Just wonder if it will blow as much ass as the first one (Milla beaver shot excluded).
Mmmm. I'd probably consider Hemmingway before Pynchon. E.H. is uniformly cited on both shores of the Pond and his modernism can be traced to most postmodern work. Basically the entire Minimalist genre (Didion, early Brett Easton Ellis, etc.) is just a slight pomo retinkering of his ideas. Probably less of a logical leap than Pynchon's work but more fundamental.
In terms of SF... I'd have to go with PKD just because his work has now escaped the genre. The similarities between Martin Amis' Time's Arrow and PKD's Counterclock World are myriad. I've read a paper comparing A Scanner Darkly with Nabakov's Despair. Even the theme of humanity finding the physical corpse of God in James Morrow's Towing Jehovah was first done in Our Friends from Frolix 8. Some of my favorite Dickean dialogue is from that: 'God is dead,' Nick said. 'They found his carcass in 2019. Floating out in space near Alpha.' 'They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are,' Charley said. 'And it evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God.' 'I think it was God.'
Of course if it's out of genre it's no longer SF. And a lot of True SF Geeks who evangelize repeatedly about Do Androids Dream? and Man in the High Castle are probably bored to tears by something like Valis or Divine Invasion. Such a shame. You also have to wonder if this Dick fixation Hollywood has will result in some backlash. Anyone here happy B.Fleck is staring in Paycheck?
Because they can't risk having such a honeypot inside the DMZ (heh, check out how the computer argot just got completely flipped back upon itself). You don't want those loyal Party North Koreans (who would run such a service) allowing even the chance of Southern/US propaganda entering the North.
Better to isolate it outside and communicate with it securely. Would any self-respecting BOFH run his tyrannical regime er network any other way (bad haircut optioal)?
Also note that a segement of Korean-Japanese (who are descendent from the bad ol' days when the Penninsula was a colony) still see the North Korean regime as the One True way (so getting help to run Il-Jong's isn't too hard). Interesting article on the subject can be found in this JE. It's about an American's vacation into the North. Fascinating.
for example the import tariffs imposed on steel imported to the US are going to be removed due to pressure brought by Europe.
Actually most of the pressure has come from primary swing vote states in the US where industries employing steel are prominant. There has been a huge backlash in the industrial Midwest (Michigan, Ohio) by small and large companies that have had to cut employees or fold because the price of metal has gone up. It seems Bush forgot the cardinal rule for global economy: penalize the local few (US steel makers) for the benefit of the majority (consumers, steel end users). Tariffs penalize everybody.
And since the economy is #1 on the Presidential circuit, this hasn't floated too well. The Democrats have rolled out ads pointing out the fact that GWB is the first president since Herbert Hoover to run a positive economy that has lost jobs.
Haven't seen it but let's recount some of this years movies: * American Splendor * City of God * Lost in Translation * Northfork * Mystic River * The Human Stain * Whale Rider
A wide swath of interesting, compelling, accessible and memorable movies. Hell, most aren't even obscure art films. Got names like Clint Eastwood, Nicole Kidman, and Sophia Coppola on there. Other than being a welldone adaptation of a good book, RotK probably won't add anything to the catalogue of movies. I'd suggest any of the above to anyone. Seriously, there's som good stuff out there that doesn't involve 2 hours of gynormous fight scenes and CG.
You know we have these things called Presidential Elections every four years, right? Heck, I think we got one of these there elections coming up in less than 365 days!
Well go out and vote for the Other Guy.
Remember that the DoJ and FBI all fall under the jurisdiction of El Presidente.
Browse the Technical Reports, Recommendations and Proposed Recommendations at W3C as there are a lot of DTDs and Schemas there. I found a DTD for generic simulation representation there. There's quite a bit if you take the time to look.
Anyone here, other than CleverNickName, catch that show (whatever the hell it was called)? The one on competive video gaming? Now I gotta give the guy credit, he was pretty damn entertaining running commentary.
Problem: he so overshadowed the game to illuminate the fact that watching people play video games is damn boring. And he ended up leaving once it was revealed the damn thing was fixed (I assume to make it no longer boring).
Ever go over to someone's house and they're 'just playing games' and its all single player so you have to sit there... and watch...
It is cute to think that an intellectual game of reflex and strategy could become mainstream... but I doubt it. Try turning on the Poker World Championships some time. Some folks go crazy for it and it's the highest grossing competitive sport in the world. But it isn't raking in the TV contracts is it?
I dunno. With enough luck I can get a headshot with a AWP in Counterstrike: I'll never punt a 40 yard kick, run a 4 hour marathon, or ski for 30 km and shoot little black dots the size of nipples at 75m. I think a lot of competitive sport taps into something inate in us, some hunter-gatherer instinct. The physicality of it.
Watching someone stare at a monitor blankly, sipping from a Mountain Dew just doesn't do that for me.
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I meant it was interesting not that Ebert brought them up (since he picked neither Baldwin or Castle-Hughes) but that the Academy gave them nominations. Maybe I was expecting to see Sardis up there.
Most definitely. But I was talking about those out here in /. land keeping score, though.
although it had its NY/LA debut in December 2003
That should be 2002 as taken from this: "So true that City of God was No. 2 on my list for last year. The film played in every major festival in 2002 and was a candidate for year-end awards, and although it did not open in Chicago until January, I didn't see the point in waiting 12 months to put it on a best 10 list when putting it on the timelier list might do it some good."
You can compare the actual nominations to Roger Ebert's predictions. He was pretty on point for Best Picture, Actor, and Supporting Actress. Its surprising to see the well liked but little seen roles getting nods. Alec Baldwin in The Cooler for one. Likewise it's interesting to see Keisha Castle-Hughes for her work in Whale Rider. Many were predicitng Charlize Theron would run away with her work in Monster but Castle-Hughes could pull an Anna Panquin upset. That role was powerful AND beloved. Something that might worka gainst Theron.
Jude Law's nod is interesting since I don't remember anyone really talking about his performance (as compared to what Sean Penn, Bill Murray and Johnny Depp did this year). Ebert picked Russell Crowe's in Master and Commander which, likewise, didn't seem to have a big impact.
Strangest one is that City of God got three nominations... although it had its NY/LA debut in December 2003 (Ebert made specific mention of it in his Top of 2004 to explain its absence). But here its getting nods for Cinematography, Direction and Writing. It probably only has a chance in Cinematography where RotK is (strangely) absent.
RotK will probably run away with Makeup, Music(Song), Sound, Writing (Adapted), and Costume Design. Of course those are the second tier ones that end up as consolation prizes for a lot of folks. The interesting thing will see how it does in the big categories (which I guess Adapted Screenplay is one).
Well I guess this all comes down to what each of us see as "on the discussion". Truth be told the post that got you so heated was a fifth level response to another poster who had responded to a previous post. So it wasn't that I was bringing up a tangent, but responding to someone who said not knowing Kurosawa nullifies someone's opinion. Because that was the topic he brought up, I responded to it. I agreed because I saw an earlier post where someone had said that RotK was going to influence generations of filmmakers. That was their opinion. I didn't agree with it, so I shared mine.
Someone gave it a +1 Insightful and I guess that's how this all got started. It was a specific response and got modded up to the general topic. I can't control that.
I guess I could've said "hey, how I write up a journal entry and we go talk in that?" But that's a ridiculous amount of work for a dicussion that has already started.
I'm sorry but I gotta say we are just going to disagree on when/if to cut short a thread because it has strayed off topic. I guess that's what moderation is for. If a mod agreed with you, they could've just hit me with a few -1 Offtopics/Trolls and be done with it. They didn't (or haven't yet). So folks either agree with me, ran out of mod points, or are going to mod it down later. Or they can respond like you did.
Yes, the filmmakers and the studio are out there to do the Academy push. And there's a big corellary between the marketing by a studio and the eventual winners.
/. a bad name (too bad since I'm one of those too). It sucks since there's some really cool stuff out there that I think people would be blown away by.
I think most people would agree that we'd hope the folks in the Academy would be pretty well versed in the year's movies. Not that have to see everything (I think it would be cruel and unusual to force everyone to sit through Gigli or House of the Dead) but you'd think they could watch like the top 30 regarded movies of the year, with or without studio hype.
And, no, I don't expect everyone to shell out the hundreds of bucks I spend a year on movies. I'm adult enough to know that such an idea is stupid.
I do however think people would really get a kick out of a lot of these movies they're missing out on. It's a shame when there's something good out there but its so low on the radar that it goes unnoticed. Also its compounded by the theaters demanding high first and second week returns on movies now. So the local AMC might have a screen set aside for art movies but whatever's showing might get cut to make up for additional screens for the next Big Blockbuster.
And that's the problem: popular opinion is cursed by the fact that it is directly catered to. The studio and theater systems don't/cant' waste time on films building word of mouth over months. So instead most movies drift through distribution unseen by the mainstream. It might be the Best Picture of the year, but who would know when three guys and the director saw the only screening in some Porno Theater in Queens?
In fact that's why I post crap like this whole thread. So people would be modivated to maybe seeing something that missed their district. Shit, Netflix is a revolution! Folks no longer are hampered by what the local chain or Blockbuster decides to show them. Folks reading this thread can queue up City of God and get it shipped to their house when it's finally released on DVD. They could be in BFN, Idaho and be exposed to a whole world of expression. I think that's pretty fucking sweet.
Sure, there is nothing wrong with them if they are completely uninterested in doing so. But it breaks my heart when folks aren't given the chance to experience all of this cool shit (or, even worse, assume that people like myself are just indicitive of indie and foreign movie fans, and the whole lot are a bunch of... what did that guy say? That I think I'm better than 99% of the people here with my condesending attitude).
Maybe I'm not the best advocate for art film. By the responses to this post I can see that I probably have come off as the same sort of Debian Linux uberzealot that gives
This comes from personal experience. In that I have been modded down as a "troll" and responded to as "Not staying on the fucking topic" because I decided to talk about other movies in a LotR post.
/. Nerd culture.
/., not the other way around. So I guess shitty 30% truthful opinions are what we are going to have to live with.
Like the original guy said, that's ancedotal. But, shit, its an opinion so that's what its gotta be.
How do I explain my condescending attitude? I guess because I'm a dick. Secondly because I bring up other movies and are generally told "I haven't fucking heard of it". So I guess it comes from the fact that I see, rent, own, and talk about a shitload of movies that are foreign or indie pieces of shit. I've taken courses on film and gone to several festivals.
I guess that's what they call "experience". And since that seems to be a-normal around these parts, I'd consider my opinion useful on this topic.
You know, what the big Linux, BSD, physics and developer heads use when they talk about those topics.
And you notice that this is a discussion about Movies? This isn't me going into the latest MER discussion and talking shit like "Well since I've seen the bulk of Akira Kurosawa's work, I know exactly why Spirit broke down, you clods!"
This is a topic I know something about. I like to think I know a lot about it. And my point is that instead of getting deeper interest akin to populous's interest of topics on Vi/Emacs, C++/Ada/Python/Perl I get replies that I'm fucking on the wrong site. That being a Film Nerd isn't a part of the
And so heated conversation about the nuances of Linux 2.6 multiprocessing is kosher but talking about cinema (in a post about movies no less) is bullshit.
You know what? You are in fact right. My friend sebi started this discussion and I have had two of my posts modded up. So there must be other geeks here who must agree with me.
Shit, I'm sorry if I offended you. If I could fucking reedit my post I'd replace "standard" with "commonly experienced by me". But this isn't a technical paper. I wasn't submitting that post to the IEEE for a conference. If I thought that its value was based solely on its techical accuracy I'd have someone proof it. But I'm paying for
(Do you really think RotK will vanish from the top 250 in the next few years? I sure don't.
/. is or isn't, who doesn't benefit from exposure to art; a thousand lifetimes of differing experience?
Well you know what? I do. And Titanic was the #1 movie on IMDB about 3 years ago. Recently. But again it fell off.
And so you talk about popularity but then deny a sample the size of the IMDB? Where about 80,000 people have voted for each of the top 250 movies? The statistical error of such a ranking not reflecting common opinion is probably pretty low.
We are now going down a rabbithole of hypotheticals and approaching flame-land. Shit, all of this is anecdotal. Why trust IMDB as you said? Why trust RottenTomatos when it uses film critics which either only like "wierd foreign indie shit" or are "right on the money" depending on if the person likes/dislikes the movie? There are no absolutes. And you too fall into the same trap: They're easily better than the original Star Wars trilogy... it couldn't live up to its own hype. LotR has, IMHO.
Like the acronym says In My Humble Opinion.
My original point was that 90% of the population out there has not seen 90% of the movies released in the last year. Regardless they take the best movie they saw that year and mark it as such. When informed of all those other movies they then use post hoc logic to defend it... instead of actually seeing the movie.
You know what? I'd love it if some folks on this site would go see Owning Mahoney, City of God, American Splendor, Monster, etc. to see if they measure up to what they think of RotK. Shit, I'd love have people to enjoy the bredth and variety of movies instead of complaining that the only good thing Swanson's puts out is Mac & Cheese. Fuck, they could come in here and say "You know what, you prick, I saw City of God and I thought it was just a rehash of Goodfellas and that was just a secondgrade hack of Mellville's Le Samourai." Nothing would make me happier!
I'd like to see frontpage discussions about how much of Irreversible is regurgitated Memento-like technique and shockvalue or that Slamdance is the superior Park City festival.
Like one of the original responders said above, this is important to film geeks. And I think that falls under the dispora of "Nerds" and "Stuff that Matters" to them.
We expect such a level of discourse when talking about software, OSes, and intellectual rights. Why not movies?
And regardless of what
No where did I say that popularity wasn't a good metric. Just that to use it as the only one is foolish.
Take a look at IMDB's top 250 movies. This is the composed average of user ratings of all films in the database.
Now, by your logic, we should just be able to search down the list to find the top movie of 2003. According to the list it would be #4 RotK.
First, how does that seem. That this movie, less than two months in the theaters is now the 4th best movie of All-Time? Above Schindler's List, One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest, Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai?
Now although "best" is subjective, over a given period of time, there seems to be an exponential averaging effect that forces a piece of art's excepted quality to a pretty static point. Hindsight's 20/20. In time all things become clear.
Its when that initial excitement is gone and we can take this "thing" and put it into perspective.
And I think the best example is on that Top 250 list at #2, Shawshank Redemption. This movie spurted at the boxoffice (barely making back its small 25 million budget), even though it was loved by critics. In 1994, it wouldn't have even cracked the top 250.
So, by your logic, it shouldn't have been up for the Best Picture Academy Award (which it lost to Forrest Gump, along with Pulp Fiction).
But what happened? Well TBS and TNT playing the movie enough that it gained a cult following. In the following years word of mouth opened up this unsung movie to the point now that it is one of the most rented movies out there. Not only that but it means something to people. Esquire Magazine did a survey of their subscribers and they were shocked that Shawshank was the #4 movie among their "elitist" readership (a movie that they didn't even put on the list and was a written in ballot).
That is why I'm remiss to say "a lot of people liked it, so it must be good" because the operative part is "liked it then". What about in a decade (as with Shawshank) or 50 years from now (as with Seven Samurai?). I assume we agree that "Best Picture of 2003" means the Best, barnone. Not the one people liked most on the date December 31st, 2003.
It is the way we differentiate between fads and true phenomena of culture. Titanic was, at one point, the highest rated movie on IMDB. It was critically acclaimed, the king of the box office, and a big award winner. Now it isn't even in the top 250 just 7 years after its release.
Popularity is a tenuous thing. And although subjective, there are invariably standards in art that allow things like Mozart, Hemmingway, and da Vinci to inspire through the ages.
True, knowing Kurosawa is probably mandatory if one wants to be considered seriously for their cinema opinion. But I think that the 'film geek' ratio on /. is low. Where spending a lot of money on movies is somehow equivalent to seeing a lot of movies and thus being informed.
/. threads like this where earning the Oscar will just prove X is the best movie of the year. I know its the case since I've made the mistake of mentioning last year that City of God might be the best film of 2003... to which I was modded down as a troll.
g
Granted, 90% of the folks on this site have probably heard of Kurosawa (that's actually why I brought him up. To point out how the roots of popular cinema is drawn from groundbreaking earlier works that one may have only heard of in passing). Of those you could say that maybe 9% then know of someone such as Beat Takeshi (even though more may watch Most Extreme Elimination Challenge and not realize who the main guy is). And that's before we get into the other masters such as Ozu or Mizoguchi. Or modern artisans such as Miike.
Popularity becomes the single measure of importance and therefore we end up with
I find it all funny since many of these same folks would battle endlessly if someone suggested that XP was the best desktop OS since it exists everywhere. In fact one could take these movie discussions, s/RotK/Windows/g and s/SomeLesserKnownMovie/YourFavoriteBSD*nixDistro/
and get an interesting duality. Not that there is anything inherently bad about RotK or Windows (or good about Linux or some other indie release). Just that the vehemence and interest attached to OS's seems to disappear when talking about something just as "geeky" as movies.
Or Monster with its ambitious turn by Ms Theron playing a serial killer... or Owning Mahoney with its excellent performances by P.S. Hoffman and James Caan. The documentary/pseudo-documentary/cartoon American Splendor... the Morris documentary/deconstruction of Robert McNammara Fog of War. All have cinematic elements that are being lauded even now (who can't love "interrocam"?).
/. line of "If I haven't seen/heard of it, it must not be good." One could point them to Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress which lead the way for a little movie called Star Wars (which then helped finance two more Kurosawa movies: Ran and Kagemusha)...
Of course our opinions don't seem to mesh with the standard
but, eh, who wants to complicate things? RotK was a good movie, so it must have been the only good movie of the year. I mean, just look at the box office receipts!
And worst comes to worst, Opportunity should be landing Sunday evening. So even if Spirit gives up the ghost, her kin can carry on the flame (albeit in a less interesting location).
JPL engineers played Baha Men's "Who Let the Dogs Out" in the control room as they watched new images confirming that the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit successfully rolled off its lander platform early Thursday morning.
;p
Oh for the love of... Really, we didn't need to hear this. I hope that didn't get caught on film because that's the sort of thing that resurfaces at retirement parties.
I gotta cosign you on this. The King's Castle was monstrous. My brother finally got it one Christmas and we did what we always did that time of year: take our multitude of castle sets, rebuild them into one giant complex on the dining room table and then blow them apart by shooting them with rubber bands.
:(
I also thought the Black Knight's castle was so badass looking but then it just disappeared off of the shelf
The same could be said of acupuncture I guess. The rotten library had a great point: what is more disturbing? That acupuncture seems to work or that someone thought sticking pins into your body was a good idea in the first place ;p
From dictionary.com:
2 entries found for derriere.
derriere also derriere ( P ) Pronunciation Key (dr-ar)
n.
The buttocks; the rear.
Also:
No entry found for dairy-aire.
It's like the difference between a segway and a segue. One is a normal word used in English, the other is an amalgam coined for some other purpose.
Don't you read the New York Times? One of their Best Inventions of 2003 was the Death of Critical Theory.
Of course theory has lost a lot of its bite as there have been Pomo deconstructions of the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog.
One problem is that no theory really dies. So Freud may be seen as an anachronism with no bearing on modern psychology... but he's still invoked as a rational critical view in the humanities. Its been a joke for a while in those fields (resulting in the above A&F stuff. I've also attended a presentation of a critque of poetry written on bathroom stall walls).
Its been dead. Finally the big heads of humanities are beginning to realize it. Dr. Cornel West of Harvard (he of Afro-american study and Matrix fame) said something to the effect "How I wish I was around decades ago when you all cared what theory meant."
Did anyone see the ad for Resident Evil Apocalypse where it looked like some sort of Jergens skin care commercial? The thing had me completely fooled (I guess I should've noticed the "T-cell formula" part).
And then it has the "possible sideeffects" where the woman turns into the zombie. Cool stuff.
Just wonder if it will blow as much ass as the first one (Milla beaver shot excluded).
Mmmm. I'd probably consider Hemmingway before Pynchon. E.H. is uniformly cited on both shores of the Pond and his modernism can be traced to most postmodern work. Basically the entire Minimalist genre (Didion, early Brett Easton Ellis, etc.) is just a slight pomo retinkering of his ideas. Probably less of a logical leap than Pynchon's work but more fundamental.
In terms of SF... I'd have to go with PKD just because his work has now escaped the genre. The similarities between Martin Amis' Time's Arrow and PKD's Counterclock World are myriad. I've read a paper comparing A Scanner Darkly with Nabakov's Despair. Even the theme of humanity finding the physical corpse of God in James Morrow's Towing Jehovah was first done in Our Friends from Frolix 8. Some of my favorite Dickean dialogue is from that: 'God is dead,' Nick said. 'They found his carcass in 2019. Floating out in space near Alpha.'
'They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are,' Charley said. 'And it evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God.'
'I think it was God.'
Of course if it's out of genre it's no longer SF. And a lot of True SF Geeks who evangelize repeatedly about Do Androids Dream? and Man in the High Castle are probably bored to tears by something like Valis or Divine Invasion. Such a shame. You also have to wonder if this Dick fixation Hollywood has will result in some backlash. Anyone here happy B.Fleck is staring in Paycheck?
Because they can't risk having such a honeypot inside the DMZ (heh, check out how the computer argot just got completely flipped back upon itself). You don't want those loyal Party North Koreans (who would run such a service) allowing even the chance of Southern/US propaganda entering the North.
Better to isolate it outside and communicate with it securely. Would any self-respecting BOFH run his tyrannical regime er network any other way (bad haircut optioal)?
Also note that a segement of Korean-Japanese (who are descendent from the bad ol' days when the Penninsula was a colony) still see the North Korean regime as the One True way (so getting help to run Il-Jong's isn't too hard). Interesting article on the subject can be found in this JE. It's about an American's vacation into the North. Fascinating.
for example the import tariffs imposed on steel imported to the US are going to be removed due to pressure brought by Europe.
Actually most of the pressure has come from primary swing vote states in the US where industries employing steel are prominant. There has been a huge backlash in the industrial Midwest (Michigan, Ohio) by small and large companies that have had to cut employees or fold because the price of metal has gone up. It seems Bush forgot the cardinal rule for global economy: penalize the local few (US steel makers) for the benefit of the majority (consumers, steel end users). Tariffs penalize everybody.
And since the economy is #1 on the Presidential circuit, this hasn't floated too well. The Democrats have rolled out ads pointing out the fact that GWB is the first president since Herbert Hoover to run a positive economy that has lost jobs.
Haven't seen it but let's recount some of this years movies:
* American Splendor
* City of God
* Lost in Translation
* Northfork
* Mystic River
* The Human Stain
* Whale Rider
A wide swath of interesting, compelling, accessible and memorable movies. Hell, most aren't even obscure art films. Got names like Clint Eastwood, Nicole Kidman, and Sophia Coppola on there. Other than being a welldone adaptation of a good book, RotK probably won't add anything to the catalogue of movies. I'd suggest any of the above to anyone. Seriously, there's som good stuff out there that doesn't involve 2 hours of gynormous fight scenes and CG.
You know we have these things called Presidential Elections every four years, right? Heck, I think we got one of these there elections coming up in less than 365 days!
Well go out and vote for the Other Guy.
Remember that the DoJ and FBI all fall under the jurisdiction of El Presidente.
Browse the Technical Reports, Recommendations and Proposed Recommendations at W3C as there are a lot of DTDs and Schemas there. I found a DTD for generic simulation representation there. There's quite a bit if you take the time to look.
Anyone here, other than CleverNickName, catch that show (whatever the hell it was called)? The one on competive video gaming? Now I gotta give the guy credit, he was pretty damn entertaining running commentary.
Problem: he so overshadowed the game to illuminate the fact that watching people play video games is damn boring. And he ended up leaving once it was revealed the damn thing was fixed (I assume to make it no longer boring).
Ever go over to someone's house and they're 'just playing games' and its all single player so you have to sit there... and watch...
It is cute to think that an intellectual game of reflex and strategy could become mainstream... but I doubt it. Try turning on the Poker World Championships some time. Some folks go crazy for it and it's the highest grossing competitive sport in the world. But it isn't raking in the TV contracts is it?
I dunno. With enough luck I can get a headshot with a AWP in Counterstrike: I'll never punt a 40 yard kick, run a 4 hour marathon, or ski for 30 km and shoot little black dots the size of nipples at 75m. I think a lot of competitive sport taps into something inate in us, some hunter-gatherer instinct. The physicality of it.
Watching someone stare at a monitor blankly, sipping from a Mountain Dew just doesn't do that for me.