Even today's best computer models still don't manage to get all the details of a "real" scene completely right. If you look closely, you can still almost always spot the CG models. But in the original Star Wars, every time they blew something up, they actually built something and blew it up.
You mean they actually built and blew up an entire planet? Or did they do it with scale models, and if you'd look closely, you could almost always spot the scale models?
I think SFX weren't better when you were younger, you just weren't as good at spotting them back then. Remember the transparent snowspeeders in Empire Strikes Back? Or that lovely outline around the stop-motion creatures?
whatever color the screen is [...] There are tons of stories about people with conflicting wardrobes and green screens. My favorite is of a weather lady with heavy blue eyeshadow
Any perticualr reason why you like it better than Safari?
I like safari better because I can close tabs without selecting them, they have a close-tabs (x) button each instead of one [x] button that only applies to the current tab. The use? When a tab fails to load, I don't have to go look at the "the page failed to load" message before getting rid of it.
Though I like Firefox's search bar with additional search engines. Looking stuff up on IMDB on the fly is great. Sigh, choices choices choices...
On the contrary, it has been pointed out that the trialer is in fact a month old
Arr, Really? I didn't check it out, I already want to see the movie, I therefore avoid all the latest trailers that show you as much of the movie's booty as they can.
But, I was replying to a scallywag arguing that this wasn't "for nerds", not that it wasn't news. Because, it might not be news, but its definatly for nerds. I guess this is a slow news day, matey.
With the exception of Shrek, Dreamworks has been playing copy cat to Pixar. Pixar develops a Bugs Life, and -- what a coincidence -- Dreamworks releases Antz a few months before Pixar. Pixar develops Finding Nemo, and Dreamworks comes out with a Shark's Tale.
Yeah, I was discussing this kind of behaviour last wednesday. That shark thing looks like a "mee too" movie, don't it?
I think its a culture thing though. Pixar is still new and it hasn't developped a thick crust of old timers who don't want to rock the boat, and Dreamworks is a relatively old company which has settled in its ways. They do what sells. I'm sure in 15 or 20 years Pixar will have lost its youthfull exhuberance.
New CGI superhero sci-fi movie trailers. Lets see, its new, so its news, and its CGI superhero sci-fi stuff, so its for nerds.
Yup, meets the criteria of "news" "for nerds".
Now go to the settings page and make some kind of arrangement that leads to you not having to see movie news on the front page and us not having to see your post complaining about them. Everyone wins.
I guess this started with Return of the Jedi, when, in order to keep the story ending secret to the last minute, he shot the actors doing really ambiguous stuff, to insure they could not figure it out.
I've turned very cynical about Lucas, I'm thinking he probably was shooting stuff until he figured it out;-)
Reminds me of Psycho though, all the actors had to sign strict NDAs so the secret punch wouldn't get out before the movie was released. Of course, society has done a very thourough job of spoiling that for the rest of eternity now, so the wisdom of the NDA about the shower scene was in retrospect quite undenyable.
Off-topicish rant: Planet of the apes, they released a version where the punch is ON THE FREAKING COVER. Jeez...
Sure, a lot of the stuff is CG or green-screened, but a lot of the stuff is done on sets with more than just a few props.
And my understanding is that most of the movie was done before they started shooting with the actors of Skycaptain, so they could show them ahead of filming what it was that they were supposed to pretend was there.
Whereas in Star Wars, Lucas is in love with his new found ability to change stuff at the last minute and not let any of this second-opinion peer-review stuff get in the way of his "vision" getting heaped in a big pile of pixels.
At least, that's the impression I got from the interviews of the stars of both flicks.
Tron only used sets for about... what 30 minutes, maybe, of a 90 minute movie?
There are styrofoam sets throughout the flick, with neato lighting added in post production. But even if they had sets for only 1/3 of the movie, that is simply very different from NO sets.
There is *no* hype - languague is a natural instinct for humans
Yeah, but people who aren't deaf use a rudimentary system of signs and gesture when communicating. So its not like they had to come up with the concept of sign language, which the blurb sorta implies. If you're part of human society, you have examples of languages presented to your language-absorbing brain every day.
Anyway, every generation of teenagers invents its own language variant. This is certainly interresting, but I do think there's some hyping going on.
No it's called Vagina Dentata and Freud's been out of fashion for quite some time.
Saw that in a japanese animé once, scared the shit out of me. From what it said on the box, I was looking forward to some standard demon-hunting sci-fi action. Boy did I not expect clashing cunt-fangs.
So its not a common fear, but its a very effective horror element.
there are already numerous digital rips of the original movies, so assuming they are well-preserved
Yeah, so long as Lucas doesn't start a pogrom, hunts down all copies and imprisons the owners for copyright infrigement and illegally disagreeing with Lord Lucas.;-)
There's way too much whining in this thread. I don't like the changes, but honestly its his movie, not yours. It doesn't matter if you had some life changing experience or epiphany when you saw it. You don't own the story.
No, but if things keep going the way they are, by the time we do own it (when its realeased in the public domain), Lucas will have destroyed it.
We are not challenging his ownership, we are challenging his mental health. I think all his money and power clearly went to his head.
Also, a lot of fat went to his neck.
If you are that desparate for DVD, find the best available source (laserdisc, old print) and pay for the transfer yourself. Why does he have to subsidize the transfer for you?
He's using a million macs and a gazillion petabytes of data to clean up the original, and then he goes ahead and damages that with a lot of nonsense. He *could* be selling us what we want, he's refusing to because he doesn't like what we liked. He's being a jerk about this and abusing the power he has thanks to copyrights.
He's an egomaniac who refuses to aknowledge the fact that the movies "he" made were in fact made by a bunch of people, and that art always include an element of random mistakes and technical limitations worked into the final result in a (hopefully) harmonious way.
In short: He's not making the movies better. He insists on changing them because he can, and we're all venting our frustration amongts ourselves. It helps us deal with this insanity to share with like minded people.
So it wasn't Iraq's invasion of Kuwait... interesting theory. And the coalition of fighting countries and countries that supported the coalition was huge, and, hey!!! it included Saudi Arabia!!!! Moreover, the action, at that time, was supported by the U.N., and all the subsequent "sporadic bombings" were enforcing U.N. regulations!!! 9/11 happened while the U.S. was enforcing U.N. regulations, please don't think we were there for anything else... we got no oil out of it, we got nothing but a lot of wasted lives, time, and money.
Are YOU serious? It was all about oil. Saddam invaded Kuwait because of oil, the coalition striked back to defend its oil supply. I guess you could find a way to think of it as not getting oil if you think of it as oil you already had. But Iraq had invaded a very important source of oil (and there's the whole slanted drilling issue), and that is why there was a big coalition of oil thirsty countries that beat them back from Kuwait.
it wasn't about U.S. imperialism, because, at the time, we weren't taking over or installing puppet regimes anywhere... in fact, you've probably only really started hearing that word - "imperialism", with respect to the current war.
Nope, been hearing that word long before. Since the 80's actually. And I'm not sure what you mean by "at the time", the states were installing puppet governments for a loooooong time. Augusto Pinochet in 73, the CIA keeps saying there's no evidence that they were the ones that gave him all those guns and that money to overthrow a democratically elected socialist. But they're good at not leaving evidence. Especially in a country where annoying witnesses tend to disapear, by the thousands. If by "at the time" you mean that the puppet goverment installation wasn't active that year, then I wonder how long you figure it takes for people to get over that.
Anyway, my point was, the U.S. wasn't an innocent attacked by evil freedom haters on 9/11, it was a manipulative superpower guilty of lots of nasty, nasty stuff that got a spectacular taste of its own medicine. I disaprove of that kind of behaviour no matter who does it, and wether its for money or for revenge or fame. The thing is, the best way to prevent terrorism is to stop motivating new people to become terrorists, a lesson the U.S. has clearly not learned.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. i.e. stop unilaterally using guns and bombs to effect regime changes if you don't want people to try the same shit on you. If what the U.S. really wanted was to help Iraq, the U.N. is the place for it. The United Nations is where international meddling should be decided. Not one country deciding that it is above all the rest and choosing to go in and replace governments by themselves. That's an imperialist move.
Not quite accurate. It's quite common that two movies get greenlighted around the same time that have the same basic premise or story; 3 movies at once is extremely rare.
I have demonstrated in another post that it is in fact quite common. You deny it based on your elusive definitions of "basic premise or story". That doesn't make it any less true.
This started with someone pointing out a portion of what I too have observed: "movie makers are RE-making the same movie at the same time". I told him that not only had I noticed the two pairs of movies he mentioned, but that I saw that as part of a bigger pattern.
buy each year, there's a significant change that
Since you like to point out typos, reread that sentence. Feel free to reply to yourself with belittling comments about your own typing. That sentence didn't inspire confidence in me the first time I read it, but it cracks me up now that you've claimed the typist's high road. Teeheehee!
It begins with studio A buying a script about, let's say, a giant asteroid smashing into the Earth. Let's assume studio B finds out the very same day that this script was bought, and decides (that day) to make its own giant asteroid movie. - Studio A has a huge lead-time because the screenplay has already been written;
Studio A does not have any sizeable lead time because stubio B just buys an available script with the same basic premise or story or uses one they had already bought.
So if it wants to beat studio A's film to theaters
You assume they want to beat it to theatres. They could use that strategy, or make a lesser movie with a smaller budget and ride the wave of interrest generated by the previous movie's promotional efforts once its theatre presence has died down.
Studio B STILL has to hope that, even if they do cut those corners, they finish their movie first.
Not really, they only need to be close enough. Within one year, according to my observations. Sometimes, like with Armageddon/Deep Impact, they come out head to head (within 2 weeks for these 2, if memory serves), but usually there is a bigger gap.
On the flipside, if B deliberately takes longer so that it comes out with its movie months after A, it has to hope that its movie ends up being better than A's, because otherwise it will just look like an also-ran. This is not trivial.
It is trivial if all they hope for is a reasonable return on their investment. Who cares if they made an "also ran", they care for revenue and profit.
Paramount is not going to see Universal buy a script about a volcano exploding and rush its own into production.
Depends on the timeframe. I think they start at about the same time with about the same amount of preparation. There's plenty of scripts floating around. Finding one filled under action/catastrophe/natural/ that has a volcano in it is a matter of hours. The rest is business as usual.
If they both happen to have bought the same story around the same time, and then one announces that it's going into production, the other might then rush its own into production -- but they've already got the script, so it's a more even race (and since they've already spent the money on buying the script, they don't want to waste that investment. Nevermind that 95% of the scripts they buy, they never make, but when there's suddenly a competitor to a particular script they bought, it makes them macho).
Exactly. They buy them, they sit on 'em. They are sitting there, just waiting for someone to find a reason to use them. Like, say, your rival is making one, and you want to one up them, or leech of their investments in promotion, etc.
That is part of the awnser to the question of "why is there a pattern of superficially similar movies repeating itself in subsequent fads". I saw the pattern, read around this post, others saw the pattern as well. Its there to those who look. You can deny it all you want, but to quote an Italian that died five hundred years ago "and yet, it turns".
Your repeated typographical and grammatical mistakes
W00T! You did it! You attacked the typos! Hahaha! That's rich, it had been a while since a troll pulled that one on me, the classics never die it seems. Wheee...mercy...
and you also act offended that I "subtlely" call you on your uninteligent
unintelligent.
Hihihi!
Calling it "ripping off" ONLY because of similar (or even identical) premises is incorrect.
Main Entry: rip-off Pronunciation: 'rip-"of Function: noun 1 : an act or instance of stealing : THEFT; also : a financial exploitation 2 : a usually cheap exploitive imitation
Main Entry: rip off Function: transitive verb 1 a : ROB; also : CHEAT, DEFRAUD b : STEAL 2 : to copy or imitate blatantly or unscrupulously 3 : to perform, achieve, or score quickly or easily
Is ID4 an exploitative money-grabbing movie that stole its premise from Childhood's End (or indirectly from V, again cheap and explotative)? Why yes, yes it is.
The specific argument I made there (rephrased) is: Calling it "ripping off" ONLY because of similar (or even identical) premises is incorrect. I never once disagreed that the similarities in premise existed.
I specifically said they were ripping off the premise. You say its not ripping off because only the premise is the same. I give you more similiraties, you're still sticking to your original troll. Ah well...
to call using a similar premise in order to go in a completely different direction "ripping off" is absurd.
I said they ripped off the premise, you say its not ripping off because its the premise. You make wild, erroneous claims, buddy boy. Is that because you're trolling or because you're too stupid to know any better?
There you claim explicitly that all rational persons will agree with you that it's a "clear case of ripping off." Therefore it would be impossible for someone to rationally disagree with you, since any rational person would agree with you. The subtle implication was that I am one of those people, and am therefore irrational and wrong.
Yup. My claim: It ripped off the premise. Your idiotic response: "It can't be a ripoff because only the premise is similar". Why is the premise immune to theft or imitation?
the intent is to edify
Again, wild claim that goes contrary to the facts. Your behaviour was not edifying in the least. You attacked, insulted, and tried to destroy using insane troll logic from the get go. Nice attempt at claiming the high road, but pointless.
You need to brush up your insulting skills. Use French whenever possible, it helps.
D'accord: Tu es un sale crétin. Un minable troll qui n'a rien de mieux à faire de son temps que d'attaquer les gens qui participent paisiblement à une discussion de cinéma en utilisant un vocabulaire cinématographique pour paraître honête et de bonne foi. Mais ta nature de sale enculé coprophage n'est pas éclipsée par tes mots sophistiqués. Tu es, et reste, un trou de cul.
I'm basing my logic on what you said
No. And when I repeat it using different words, its an attempt at helping you understand. But that is wasted effort on a troll, I would stop biting, but the typo argument just made me laugh. Hehehe...
'Course, you'll never believe that, because you're convinced I'm trying to troll/stalk you, but that's your problem. Believe it or don't.
I actually believe you started as a karma whore, replying early to posts that were getting positive attention from the moderators and contradicting the parent, using bi
Dude, I made an observation. I wonder what makes it happen like that.
You stubornly proclaim that if I don't know why its happening, then its not happening.
Also, you stupidly obsess about an unfortunate choice of word, and you go on and on about the fact that I used the word "premise" at some point to describe something that you admit "there's no specific name for that". Why don't you find a typo I made and go on claiming that it means I'm wrong while you're at it. Sheesh.
Yet he leaves the house. Repeatedly. Haunted house movies feature demonic (or faux-demonic) villains who are NOT the protagonists
Well, your thinking is very limited. There is aghost, there is a house, the ghost dwells in the house, does the classic manifestations of hauntings. So to you, the fact that he can leave the house means he's not haunting it. Great, you're an idiot. That solves it.
Main Entry: 1haunt Pronunciation: 'hont, 'hänt Function: verb Etymology: Middle English, from Old French hanter, probably from Old Norse heimta to lead home, pull, claim, from heimr home transitive senses 1 a : to visit often : FREQUENT b : to continually seek the company of 2 a : to have a disquieting or harmful effect on : TROUBLE b : to recur constantly and spontaneously to c : to reappear continually in 3 : to visit or inhabit as a ghost intransitive senses 1 : to stay around or persist : LINGER 2 : to appear habitually as a ghost
He's haunting it, jackass. You're too close minded to understand that, your loss.
It's stupid to point out why someone is incorrect about something?
Its stupid if the "why" is so obviously wrong. Your logic of "the phenomenon you observed does not occur because I disagree with your attempt at explaining its origin" is idiotic, at best.
You can regurgitate big words, I'm not impressed. You can support outrageous illogical reasonings, that is much more telling about the workings of your mind.
I'll repeat MY points again, and I won't go down the road of your insane interpretations of these points:
I have oberved that Hollywood release, within a one year lapse, the same basic movie repeatedly, under different names from different companies.
My observation is that there is a definate pattern to this.
I advanced a vague notion of why this might be happening.
You attacked the observation by explaining in great detail why the vague explanation can't be it. That's stupid, arrogant and insulting.
There, where were we?
I noticed that your post said nothing about the other point (why these multiple movies happen), so I'm going to assume you concede that point.
My obsevation is valid, the "why" is unknown to me.
Plot. Not premise.
Semantics. Unimportant.
Like I said, call it plot, premise, whatever. I call it "basic idea". Like "Alien invasion", or "Haunted House", or "Object from the sky". The house might be an appartment, the invasion might be time travelling borgs or society-infiltrating inverse-legged grey aliens. Its the concept. The thing that can be expressed in a trailer. The essence.
This one doesn't count because the danger comes from some kind of creature imprisoned inside the volcano, not from the volcano itself. The volcano is immaterial and incidental to the story; the creature could be imprisoned under a seabed or in a magic vault or inside a sandwich without changing the core of the story. In "Volcano" and "Dante's Peak," the volcanoes themselves are the threat. Replace the volcano in those stories with another threat (asteroid, earthquake, aliens) and the story fundamentally changes.
But it was a volcano. You're obtuse about this. It wasn't any of those other things. They had the same fad.
My point is about movie fads. Saying that they could have not followed the fad doesn't invalidate the fact that they did, it reinforces it. They took the fad and inserted it into their franchise movie (for which they had no concept initially besidse exploiting the franchise).
I wouldn't quite put ST: FC in with the others, because it was part of a franchise, and it had certain other elements that radically alter the plot (the aliens actually succeed in conquering Earth; the heroes use time travel to go back in time and stop them)
The fact that its a franchise doesn't mean their aren't using the same idea in the franchise. Its irrelevant to the point. They would have made the franchise movie anyway, they choose to go with the fad.
And the Borg used time travel to conquer the earth, so time travel had to be used to stop them. Duh. In the end, they didn't suceed.
The Sixth Sense is not a "haunted house" movie by any stretch--
WARNING!!! SPOILERS! IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN "THE SIXTH SENSE," I RECOMMEND YOU NOT READ FURTHER!! THAT IS ALL!!
--of the imagination. The ghost is the protagonist, rather than an adversary (or secondary character), he is not evil, there is no particular house that's haunted
Again, you fail to notice things, or you forget them, and then you say "what you noticed doesn't count because I, the Great Sayer Of What Counts, didn't notice it".
It is a haunted house movie, they just showed it from the perspective of the haunter for a change. The house that is haunted is his. The person suffering from his haunting is his ex wife. There are noises, opened doors, she suffers from his presence. He is not evil, but he does evil, as the kid explains to him in the end. And if you still don't like it, call it "ghosts" instead of "hanted house", different label, same meaning.
You've only demonstrated 2 movies each for three of the years you mentioned, and if you have noticed anything you will have noticed that almost five more years have elapsed since the last year you quote.
No, I've shown 3 or more, and I don't have to keep s
There are 16 year old slashdotters who might like to read a good book without having its ending spelled out to them by inconsiderate people. Its common courtesy. You fail to use, that irritates me.
its blindingly obvious I'm familiar with it.
I was pointing out the differences to illustrate why I thought you were wrong to call it "ripping off." Explicitly stating the nature of the endings was necessary because someone who was unfamiliar with "Childhood's End" would not necessarily understand why they were different [...] I certainly could have put in a "spoiler" tag, but then I think that the number of people who A) read my post, B) didn't know the ending of "Childhood's End," and C) became or will become upset about my revealing it, can probably be counted on the knuckles of one finger.
The fact that I need to point this out is why I think you are not intelligent: You felt the need of revealing the ending because you want to illustrate it to people unfamiliar with it. Your logic for not using the spoiler tag is that you don't think there is enough people who will read it that don't know the ending.
Do you see how this is contradictory, or do you need it spelled out for you even more?
I mean, problem-solving ability, learning capacity, ability to think abstractly; what are these when compared to the ability to refrain from revealing plot details from half-century-old fiction?
Again, you don't get it. Possibly deliberatly, you might be a clever troll. Inteligent and evil, it happens.
No, the considerate part refers to the revealing of plot details. And again, the age of the work in question is completely irrelevent to the possibility that someone might read your post before reading the book. The fact that you don't understand this is why I question your intelligence.
In essence, the amount of harm caused by my spoiler reveal is insignificant.
Tell me, what is the amount of harm that is your limit?
(quite possibly) a child molester
I do hope your willingness to casually inflict harm stops before that. Being a jackass that can't talk about a book or movie without stating the punch of the story is one thing, but raping innocents, that's an order of magnitude above the villany you have shown in this thread!
it is not useful in any way to characterize their usage as a "rip off," and thus implicitly deserving of scorn and derision, when the resolution of the stories differs from the original. (Especially when it differs so drastically, viz. peaceful transcendence vs. planetary domination
Well, in your rush to discuss the ending, you forget about the devellopment.
They achieve transcendence via planetary domination! Furthermore, all 3 races feel the need to disguise their true appearance to humanity. the similarities are numerous and pervasive, the fact that you did not notice them does not make them irrelevant.
Also, if what you disagree with is the label "rip off" then by all means, criticise the label, not the basis of my labelling. You attacked the validity of my observations of the similarities. You assumed that the similarities were limited to those I listed since you failed to notice them, and the many mores that are actually there. In this thread, and in another under the same article. You saw my comments modded up, and you trolled.
I'm curious if there is some objective standard by which one can determine if a premise is "ripped off," and not merely "similar." Is it due to the number of specific elements
Yes.
That sounds like a cool story. Would you refuse to see it just because they used the same premise as Spider-Man, regardless of whether it was good or bad on its own merits
I do not call things "rip offs" when they admit that they were inspired by the work in question. Then its an ho
Slashdot Mirror
Even today's best computer models still don't manage to get all the details of a "real" scene completely right. If you look closely, you can still almost always spot the CG models. But in the original Star Wars, every time they blew something up, they actually built something and blew it up.
You mean they actually built and blew up an entire planet?
Or did they do it with scale models, and if you'd look closely, you could almost always spot the scale models?
I think SFX weren't better when you were younger, you just weren't as good at spotting them back then. Remember the transparent snowspeeders in Empire Strikes Back? Or that lovely outline around the stop-motion creatures?
whatever color the screen is [...] There are tons of stories about people with conflicting wardrobes and green screens. My favorite is of a weather lady with heavy blue eyeshadow
: )
1 for my mac
Any perticualr reason why you like it better than Safari?
I like safari better because I can close tabs without selecting them, they have a close-tabs (x) button each instead of one [x] button that only applies to the current tab.
The use? When a tab fails to load, I don't have to go look at the "the page failed to load" message before getting rid of it.
Though I like Firefox's search bar with additional search engines. Looking stuff up on IMDB on the fly is great. Sigh, choices choices choices...
On the contrary, it has been pointed out that the trialer is in fact a month old
Arr, Really? I didn't check it out, I already want to see the movie, I therefore avoid all the latest trailers that show you as much of the movie's booty as they can.
But, I was replying to a scallywag arguing that this wasn't "for nerds", not that it wasn't news. Because, it might not be news, but its definatly for nerds. I guess this is a slow news day, matey.
With the exception of Shrek, Dreamworks has been playing copy cat to Pixar. Pixar develops a Bugs Life, and -- what a coincidence -- Dreamworks releases Antz a few months before Pixar. Pixar develops Finding Nemo, and Dreamworks comes out with a Shark's Tale.
Yeah, I was discussing this kind of behaviour last wednesday.
That shark thing looks like a "mee too" movie, don't it?
I think its a culture thing though. Pixar is still new and it hasn't developped a thick crust of old timers who don't want to rock the boat, and Dreamworks is a relatively old company which has settled in its ways. They do what sells. I'm sure in 15 or 20 years Pixar will have lost its youthfull exhuberance.
Is this news for nerds now? New movie trailers?
New CGI superhero sci-fi movie trailers.
Lets see, its new, so its news, and its CGI superhero sci-fi stuff, so its for nerds.
Yup, meets the criteria of "news" "for nerds".
Now go to the settings page and make some kind of arrangement that leads to you not having to see movie news on the front page and us not having to see your post complaining about them. Everyone wins.
I think the idea is implicitly sexually incendiary, although I suppose the same is true for a male elastic superhero.
;-)
Stop beating around the bush and just say it: You miss goatse man.
Ah DAMN, I grossed myself out...
Her superpower: altering her size, not stretching parts of her body
How about altering the size of parts of her body?
THAT is a super power I want to see! : )
I guess this started with Return of the Jedi, when, in order to keep the story ending secret to the last minute, he shot the actors doing really ambiguous stuff, to insure they could not figure it out.
;-)
I've turned very cynical about Lucas, I'm thinking he probably was shooting stuff until he figured it out
Reminds me of Psycho though, all the actors had to sign strict NDAs so the secret punch wouldn't get out before the movie was released. Of course, society has done a very thourough job of spoiling that for the rest of eternity now, so the wisdom of the NDA about the shower scene was in retrospect quite undenyable.
Off-topicish rant: Planet of the apes, they released a version where the punch is ON THE FREAKING COVER. Jeez...
Sure, a lot of the stuff is CG or green-screened, but a lot of the stuff is done on sets with more than just a few props.
And my understanding is that most of the movie was done before they started shooting with the actors of Skycaptain, so they could show them ahead of filming what it was that they were supposed to pretend was there.
Whereas in Star Wars, Lucas is in love with his new found ability to change stuff at the last minute and not let any of this second-opinion peer-review stuff get in the way of his "vision" getting heaped in a big pile of pixels.
At least, that's the impression I got from the interviews of the stars of both flicks.
Tron only used sets for about ... what 30 minutes, maybe, of a 90 minute movie?
There are styrofoam sets throughout the flick, with neato lighting added in post production.
But even if they had sets for only 1/3 of the movie, that is simply very different from NO sets.
There is *no* hype - languague is a natural instinct for humans
Yeah, but people who aren't deaf use a rudimentary system of signs and gesture when communicating. So its not like they had to come up with the concept of sign language, which the blurb sorta implies. If you're part of human society, you have examples of languages presented to your language-absorbing brain every day.
Anyway, every generation of teenagers invents its own language variant. This is certainly interresting, but I do think there's some hyping going on.
I am kind of puzzled by why Mozilla FireFox is hip. As a user of Mozilla
Firefox doesn't look and feel like Netscape, circa 1997.
There's a reason why I stopped using Netscape, I don't want to go back...
I think that sums it up.
No it's called Vagina Dentata and Freud's been out of fashion for quite some time.
Saw that in a japanese animé once, scared the shit out of me.
From what it said on the box, I was looking forward to some standard demon-hunting sci-fi action. Boy did I not expect clashing cunt-fangs.
So its not a common fear, but its a very effective horror element.
there are already numerous digital rips of the original movies, so assuming they are well-preserved
;-)
Yeah, so long as Lucas doesn't start a pogrom, hunts down all copies and imprisons the owners for copyright infrigement and illegally disagreeing with Lord Lucas.
There's way too much whining in this thread. I don't like the changes, but honestly its his movie, not yours. It doesn't matter if you had some life changing experience or epiphany when you saw it. You don't own the story.
No, but if things keep going the way they are, by the time we do own it (when its realeased in the public domain), Lucas will have destroyed it.
We are not challenging his ownership, we are challenging his mental health.
I think all his money and power clearly went to his head.
Also, a lot of fat went to his neck.
If you are that desparate for DVD, find the best available source (laserdisc, old print) and pay for the transfer yourself. Why does he have to subsidize the transfer for you?
He's using a million macs and a gazillion petabytes of data to clean up the original, and then he goes ahead and damages that with a lot of nonsense. He *could* be selling us what we want, he's refusing to because he doesn't like what we liked. He's being a jerk about this and abusing the power he has thanks to copyrights.
He's an egomaniac who refuses to aknowledge the fact that the movies "he" made were in fact made by a bunch of people, and that art always include an element of random mistakes and technical limitations worked into the final result in a (hopefully) harmonious way.
In short: He's not making the movies better. He insists on changing them because he can, and we're all venting our frustration amongts ourselves. It helps us deal with this insanity to share with like minded people.
the sand pit in Jedi did look way too much like a really nasty vagina until Lucas put in the appendage with the beak, so that's fixed.
You've just made the original much more sinister to my eyes...
So it wasn't Iraq's invasion of Kuwait... interesting theory. And the coalition of fighting countries and countries that supported the coalition was huge, and, hey!!! it included Saudi Arabia!!!! Moreover, the action, at that time, was supported by the U.N., and all the subsequent "sporadic bombings" were enforcing U.N. regulations!!! 9/11 happened while the U.S. was enforcing U.N. regulations, please don't think we were there for anything else... we got no oil out of it, we got nothing but a lot of wasted lives, time, and money.
Are YOU serious?
It was all about oil. Saddam invaded Kuwait because of oil, the coalition striked back to defend its oil supply.
I guess you could find a way to think of it as not getting oil if you think of it as oil you already had. But Iraq had invaded a very important source of oil (and there's the whole slanted drilling issue), and that is why there was a big coalition of oil thirsty countries that beat them back from Kuwait.
it wasn't about U.S. imperialism, because, at the time, we weren't taking over or installing puppet regimes anywhere... in fact, you've probably only really started hearing that word - "imperialism", with respect to the current war.
Nope, been hearing that word long before. Since the 80's actually.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "at the time", the states were installing puppet governments for a loooooong time. Augusto Pinochet in 73, the CIA keeps saying there's no evidence that they were the ones that gave him all those guns and that money to overthrow a democratically elected socialist. But they're good at not leaving evidence. Especially in a country where annoying witnesses tend to disapear, by the thousands.
If by "at the time" you mean that the puppet goverment installation wasn't active that year, then I wonder how long you figure it takes for people to get over that.
Anyway, my point was, the U.S. wasn't an innocent attacked by evil freedom haters on 9/11, it was a manipulative superpower guilty of lots of nasty, nasty stuff that got a spectacular taste of its own medicine. I disaprove of that kind of behaviour no matter who does it, and wether its for money or for revenge or fame. The thing is, the best way to prevent terrorism is to stop motivating new people to become terrorists, a lesson the U.S. has clearly not learned.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
i.e. stop unilaterally using guns and bombs to effect regime changes if you don't want people to try the same shit on you.
If what the U.S. really wanted was to help Iraq, the U.N. is the place for it. The United Nations is where international meddling should be decided. Not one country deciding that it is above all the rest and choosing to go in and replace governments by themselves. That's an imperialist move.
Not quite accurate. It's quite common that two movies get greenlighted around the same time that have the same basic premise or story; 3 movies at once is extremely rare.
I have demonstrated in another post that it is in fact quite common. You deny it based on your elusive definitions of "basic premise or story". That doesn't make it any less true.
This started with someone pointing out a portion of what I too have observed: "movie makers are RE-making the same movie at the same time". I told him that not only had I noticed the two pairs of movies he mentioned, but that I saw that as part of a bigger pattern.
buy each year, there's a significant change that
Since you like to point out typos, reread that sentence. Feel free to reply to yourself with belittling comments about your own typing.
That sentence didn't inspire confidence in me the first time I read it, but it cracks me up now that you've claimed the typist's high road. Teeheehee!
It begins with studio A buying a script about, let's say, a giant asteroid smashing into the Earth. Let's assume studio B finds out the very same day that this script was bought, and decides (that day) to make its own giant asteroid movie.
- Studio A has a huge lead-time because the screenplay has already been written;
Studio A does not have any sizeable lead time because stubio B just buys an available script with the same basic premise or story or uses one they had already bought.
So if it wants to beat studio A's film to theaters
You assume they want to beat it to theatres. They could use that strategy, or make a lesser movie with a smaller budget and ride the wave of interrest generated by the previous movie's promotional efforts once its theatre presence has died down.
Studio B STILL has to hope that, even if they do cut those corners, they finish their movie first.
Not really, they only need to be close enough. Within one year, according to my observations. Sometimes, like with Armageddon/Deep Impact, they come out head to head (within 2 weeks for these 2, if memory serves), but usually there is a bigger gap.
On the flipside, if B deliberately takes longer so that it comes out with its movie months after A, it has to hope that its movie ends up being better than A's, because otherwise it will just look like an also-ran. This is not trivial.
It is trivial if all they hope for is a reasonable return on their investment. Who cares if they made an "also ran", they care for revenue and profit.
Paramount is not going to see Universal buy a script about a volcano exploding and rush its own into production.
Depends on the timeframe. I think they start at about the same time with about the same amount of preparation. There's plenty of scripts floating around. Finding one filled under action/catastrophe/natural/ that has a volcano in it is a matter of hours. The rest is business as usual.
If they both happen to have bought the same story around the same time, and then one announces that it's going into production, the other might then rush its own into production -- but they've already got the script, so it's a more even race (and since they've already spent the money on buying the script, they don't want to waste that investment. Nevermind that 95% of the scripts they buy, they never make, but when there's suddenly a competitor to a particular script they bought, it makes them macho).
Exactly.
They buy them, they sit on 'em. They are sitting there, just waiting for someone to find a reason to use them. Like, say, your rival is making one, and you want to one up them, or leech of their investments in promotion, etc.
That is part of the awnser to the question of "why is there a pattern of superficially similar movies repeating itself in subsequent fads".
I saw the pattern, read around this post, others saw the pattern as well. Its there to those who look. You can deny it all you want, but to quote an Italian that died five hundred years ago "and yet, it turns".
W00T! You did it! You attacked the typos!
Hahaha! That's rich, it had been a while since a troll pulled that one on me, the classics never die it seems. Wheee...mercy...
unintelligent.
Hihihi!
Calling it "ripping off" ONLY because of similar (or even identical) premises is incorrect.
I said:
Main Entry: rip-off
Pronunciation: 'rip-"of
Function: noun
1 : an act or instance of stealing : THEFT; also : a financial exploitation
2 : a usually cheap exploitive imitation
Main Entry: rip off
Function: transitive verb
1 a : ROB; also : CHEAT, DEFRAUD b : STEAL
2 : to copy or imitate blatantly or unscrupulously
3 : to perform, achieve, or score quickly or easily
Is ID4 an exploitative money-grabbing movie that stole its premise from Childhood's End (or indirectly from V, again cheap and explotative)? Why yes, yes it is.
The specific argument I made there (rephrased) is: Calling it "ripping off" ONLY because of similar (or even identical) premises is incorrect. I never once disagreed that the similarities in premise existed.
I specifically said they were ripping off the premise. You say its not ripping off because only the premise is the same. I give you more similiraties, you're still sticking to your original troll. Ah well...
to call using a similar premise in order to go in a completely different direction "ripping off" is absurd.
I said they ripped off the premise, you say its not ripping off because its the premise. You make wild, erroneous claims, buddy boy. Is that because you're trolling or because you're too stupid to know any better?
There you claim explicitly that all rational persons will agree with you that it's a "clear case of ripping off." Therefore it would be impossible for someone to rationally disagree with you, since any rational person would agree with you. The subtle implication was that I am one of those people, and am therefore irrational and wrong.
Yup. My claim: It ripped off the premise. Your idiotic response: "It can't be a ripoff because only the premise is similar".
Why is the premise immune to theft or imitation?
the intent is to edify
Again, wild claim that goes contrary to the facts. Your behaviour was not edifying in the least. You attacked, insulted, and tried to destroy using insane troll logic from the get go. Nice attempt at claiming the high road, but pointless.
You need to brush up your insulting skills. Use French whenever possible, it helps.
D'accord: Tu es un sale crétin. Un minable troll qui n'a rien de mieux à faire de son temps que d'attaquer les gens qui participent paisiblement à une discussion de cinéma en utilisant un vocabulaire cinématographique pour paraître honête et de bonne foi. Mais ta nature de sale enculé coprophage n'est pas éclipsée par tes mots sophistiqués. Tu es, et reste, un trou de cul.
I'm basing my logic on what you said
No. And when I repeat it using different words, its an attempt at helping you understand. But that is wasted effort on a troll, I would stop biting, but the typo argument just made me laugh. Hehehe...
'Course, you'll never believe that, because you're convinced I'm trying to troll/stalk you, but that's your problem. Believe it or don't.
I actually believe you started as a karma whore, replying early to posts that were getting positive attention from the moderators and contradicting the parent, using bi
Dude, I made an observation. I wonder what makes it happen like that.
You stubornly proclaim that if I don't know why its happening, then its not happening.
Also, you stupidly obsess about an unfortunate choice of word, and you go on and on about the fact that I used the word "premise" at some point to describe something that you admit "there's no specific name for that". Why don't you find a typo I made and go on claiming that it means I'm wrong while you're at it. Sheesh.
Yet he leaves the house. Repeatedly. Haunted house movies feature demonic (or faux-demonic) villains who are NOT the protagonists
Well, your thinking is very limited. There is aghost, there is a house, the ghost dwells in the house, does the classic manifestations of hauntings. So to you, the fact that he can leave the house means he's not haunting it. Great, you're an idiot. That solves it.
Main Entry: 1haunt
Pronunciation: 'hont, 'hänt
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French hanter, probably from Old Norse heimta to lead home, pull, claim, from heimr home
transitive senses
1 a : to visit often : FREQUENT b : to continually seek the company of
2 a : to have a disquieting or harmful effect on : TROUBLE b : to recur constantly and spontaneously to c : to reappear continually in
3 : to visit or inhabit as a ghost
intransitive senses
1 : to stay around or persist : LINGER
2 : to appear habitually as a ghost
He's haunting it, jackass. You're too close minded to understand that, your loss.
It's stupid to point out why someone is incorrect about something?
Its stupid if the "why" is so obviously wrong.
Your logic of "the phenomenon you observed does not occur because I disagree with your attempt at explaining its origin" is idiotic, at best.
You can regurgitate big words, I'm not impressed. You can support outrageous illogical reasonings, that is much more telling about the workings of your mind.
I think you'll find that if you know anything about yoga, dissolves is the correct term.
I don't. Care to enlighten me?
there's a similar tale in (Australian) Aborgine folklore as well.
Oh? I've never heard of that one. Surprising, Australia isn't really known for its watery qualities...
I'll repeat MY points again, and I won't go down the road of your insane interpretations of these points:
I have oberved that Hollywood release, within a one year lapse, the same basic movie repeatedly, under different names from different companies.
My observation is that there is a definate pattern to this.
I advanced a vague notion of why this might be happening.
You attacked the observation by explaining in great detail why the vague explanation can't be it. That's stupid, arrogant and insulting.
There, where were we?
I noticed that your post said nothing about the other point (why these multiple movies happen), so I'm going to assume you concede that point.
My obsevation is valid, the "why" is unknown to me.
Plot. Not premise.
Semantics. Unimportant.
Like I said, call it plot, premise, whatever. I call it "basic idea". Like "Alien invasion", or "Haunted House", or "Object from the sky". The house might be an appartment, the invasion might be time travelling borgs or society-infiltrating inverse-legged grey aliens. Its the concept. The thing that can be expressed in a trailer. The essence.
This one doesn't count because the danger comes from some kind of creature imprisoned inside the volcano, not from the volcano itself. The volcano is immaterial and incidental to the story; the creature could be imprisoned under a seabed or in a magic vault or inside a sandwich without changing the core of the story. In "Volcano" and "Dante's Peak," the volcanoes themselves are the threat. Replace the volcano in those stories with another threat (asteroid, earthquake, aliens) and the story fundamentally changes.
But it was a volcano. You're obtuse about this.
It wasn't any of those other things. They had the same fad.
My point is about movie fads. Saying that they could have not followed the fad doesn't invalidate the fact that they did, it reinforces it. They took the fad and inserted it into their franchise movie (for which they had no concept initially besidse exploiting the franchise).
I wouldn't quite put ST: FC in with the others, because it was part of a franchise, and it had certain other elements that radically alter the plot (the aliens actually succeed in conquering Earth; the heroes use time travel to go back in time and stop them)
The fact that its a franchise doesn't mean their aren't using the same idea in the franchise. Its irrelevant to the point. They would have made the franchise movie anyway, they choose to go with the fad.
And the Borg used time travel to conquer the earth, so time travel had to be used to stop them. Duh.
In the end, they didn't suceed.
The Sixth Sense is not a "haunted house" movie by any stretch--
WARNING!!! SPOILERS! IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN "THE SIXTH SENSE," I RECOMMEND YOU NOT READ FURTHER!! THAT IS ALL!!
--of the imagination. The ghost is the protagonist, rather than an adversary (or secondary character), he is not evil, there is no particular house that's haunted
Again, you fail to notice things, or you forget them, and then you say "what you noticed doesn't count because I, the Great Sayer Of What Counts, didn't notice it".
It is a haunted house movie, they just showed it from the perspective of the haunter for a change. The house that is haunted is his. The person suffering from his haunting is his ex wife. There are noises, opened doors, she suffers from his presence. He is not evil, but he does evil, as the kid explains to him in the end.
And if you still don't like it, call it "ghosts" instead of "hanted house", different label, same meaning.
You've only demonstrated 2 movies each for three of the years you mentioned, and if you have noticed anything you will have noticed that almost five more years have elapsed since the last year you quote.
No, I've shown 3 or more, and I don't have to keep s
There are 16 year old slashdotters who might like to read a good book without having its ending spelled out to them by inconsiderate people.
Its common courtesy. You fail to use, that irritates me.
I was pointing out the differences to illustrate why I thought you were wrong to call it "ripping off." Explicitly stating the nature of the endings was necessary because someone who was unfamiliar with "Childhood's End" would not necessarily understand why they were different [...] I certainly could have put in a "spoiler" tag, but then I think that the number of people who A) read my post, B) didn't know the ending of "Childhood's End," and C) became or will become upset about my revealing it, can probably be counted on the knuckles of one finger.
The fact that I need to point this out is why I think you are not intelligent:
You felt the need of revealing the ending because you want to illustrate it to people unfamiliar with it.
Your logic for not using the spoiler tag is that you don't think there is enough people who will read it that don't know the ending.
Do you see how this is contradictory, or do you need it spelled out for you even more?
I mean, problem-solving ability, learning capacity, ability to think abstractly; what are these when compared to the ability to refrain from revealing plot details from half-century-old fiction?
Again, you don't get it. Possibly deliberatly, you might be a clever troll. Inteligent and evil, it happens.
No, the considerate part refers to the revealing of plot details. And again, the age of the work in question is completely irrelevent to the possibility that someone might read your post before reading the book. The fact that you don't understand this is why I question your intelligence.
In essence, the amount of harm caused by my spoiler reveal is insignificant.
Tell me, what is the amount of harm that is your limit?
(quite possibly) a child molester
I do hope your willingness to casually inflict harm stops before that. Being a jackass that can't talk about a book or movie without stating the punch of the story is one thing, but raping innocents, that's an order of magnitude above the villany you have shown in this thread!
it is not useful in any way to characterize their usage as a "rip off," and thus implicitly deserving of scorn and derision, when the resolution of the stories differs from the original. (Especially when it differs so drastically, viz. peaceful transcendence vs. planetary domination
Well, in your rush to discuss the ending, you forget about the devellopment.
They achieve transcendence via planetary domination!
Furthermore, all 3 races feel the need to disguise their true appearance to humanity. the similarities are numerous and pervasive, the fact that you did not notice them does not make them irrelevant.
Also, if what you disagree with is the label "rip off" then by all means, criticise the label, not the basis of my labelling.
You attacked the validity of my observations of the similarities. You assumed that the similarities were limited to those I listed since you failed to notice them, and the many mores that are actually there.
In this thread, and in another under the same article. You saw my comments modded up, and you trolled.
I'm curious if there is some objective standard by which one can determine if a premise is "ripped off," and not merely "similar." Is it due to the number of specific elements
Yes.
That sounds like a cool story. Would you refuse to see it just because they used the same premise as Spider-Man, regardless of whether it was good or bad on its own merits
I do not call things "rip offs" when they admit that they were inspired by the work in question. Then its an ho