I hope they can see me from way up there. It's been so lonely since Salo left. Take me back to Indiana you bastards!
(if you don't recognize my nick, never mind.)
Just out of curiosity (I'm guessing you're in texas from your domain) how do you get involved in that challenge? I edit a weekly show in Houston, but that can get tedious at times, I might be interested in working on a more fun project.
Re:AMATEUR PORN IS THE BEST PORN
on
Amateur Revolution?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Capture and encoding requires a dorky level of interest in learning how to use Virtualdub (or transcode, I suppose), do deinterlacing and muxing, etc.) to even work then. Too much time and effort, I guess.
I'd like to welcome you to the 21st century;)
Get an iMac and a MiniDV camera. Capturing involves plugging in the firewire cable. Then you cut it together in iMovie (which anyone can do) then you burn it to DVD in iDVD or export it to a quicktime movie.
I haven't used Microsoft's movie program, but it can't be that much harder.
Re:Corps will continue to rule, people are sheep..
on
Amateur Revolution?
·
· Score: 1
And it has now become the same money-hungry scheme that the rest of music is. Silver teeth, 80 gram bling, expensive cars, big houses, "hoes", problems with the law, etc. I don't see the difference between rap stars and more "traditional" music. I give this one 0/100.
I agree with most of what you say, but this is not quite true. I live in Houston and there are many, many small time labels and artists. There are enough that we can do a show featuring about 20 labels a year.
They aren't kids with tape recorders, they have good equipment, but LOTS of small time amateur rappers can make albums in these studios for an affordable price. Once in a while a small timer gains local fame and sometimes gets picked up by a major label where they often get swallowed into the same momey machine as most music, but the vast majority stay ammateurs.
I think the point is that if you have a small amount of money anyone can get a record produced and there are lots of amateurs who do this.
An executive producer is the one who controls story direction, etc. in most tv series.
"Executive Producer" is generally a Hands-off position. Jerry Bruckheimer "executive produces" CSI: and Steven Speilberg "executive produced" Tiny Toons. In music videos the EP is generally the money man, or the studio contact. EPs of television series' generally have no creative input except for the initial pilot and tone of the series.
You know, I'm rather surprised that so many people seem to think the retro feel is some kind of handicap to this movie. It's the whole point of the movie.
You might as well say "Yeah, I like 2001 but why'd they have to put it in space?".
I've always liked the 30's vision of the future: dirigibles, flying fortresses, giant steel robots. And the old serials had a certain charm, you know that crawl at the beginning of star wars? Lucas got that idea from serials, which would use it to catch everyone up on the last episodes. Longtime fans of MST3K will remember "The Phantom Creeps" serials and especially "Radar Men From The Moon".
Sky Captain is a direct homage to these serials. I imagine that this movie would be the dream of any kid who watched those.
I guess it's a very different genre of movie from anything that's been produced in the last 70 years. Sky Captain isn't the best movie ever, but it's a lot of fun to watch the "we-make-it-up-as-we-go-along" style of storytelling. He crashes his plane into the ocean? No problem, Dax fitted it with submersible gear. Who cares if that's ridiculous. It's supposed to be, but it's still exciting.
I mean, how can you hate a beautiful movie like this, a british commander on a hovering air field saying things like "Alert the amphibious squadron!".
I haven't seen anyone spell this out yet so here goes:
The visual style of this movie is based on sci-fi visuals of the late 20's and 30's. Probably largely based on illustrations from the pulp magazine "Amazing Stories" which was started by none other than Hugo Gernsback (as in the "Hugo" award for science fiction). Check out these covers by Frank R. Paul for an idea of the style.
They were called "pulp" magazines because they were printed on cheap paper. It carried reprinted stories by H. G. Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, etc. as well as new sci-fi.
No offense, really, (because I felt the same way after I saw the movie) but have you read the book?
After I read the book I realized that Paul Verhoeven had completely perverted the story so he could critique it. He's seems to love making movies about a utopia that really isn't (i.e. Robocop, Total Recall), and he seems to love to show intense gore, real blood and guts.
For instance, in Heinlein's book you can serve without being a soldier, in fact soldiers are a chosen few; well trained and given advenced eqitment so that a dozen of them can disable a city.
Heinlein goes into great detail to explain why only service can guarantee citizenship, it's a sense of "you have to participate before you can have a voice". I'm not saying it'd be a good idea, but it is a thought-provoking idea, and it was at the center of the book.
Now look at Verhoeven's movie. It's not critiquing the book, but rather advancing Paul Verhoeven's dislike of dis-utopias. That's doesn't make a bad movie, but it makes a maddening adaption.
Before I saw the movie I had never read Heinlein. I thought the movie was very clever. Then I read the book and realized that Verhoeven was satirizing something that wasn't in the book. Most movie adaptions have to simplify the plot, but Starship Troopers was a total distortion of the source material.
Same thing goes for plane crashes. Yes, plane crashes happen, but the odds of it happening to you are so exremely remote that you can practically ignore it. Same is true for car crashes.
How many guys do you think are surfing for porn while wardriving? How many of them do you think are into kiddie porn? What are the odds of that person accessing it though your connection? Then what are the odds that a fed monitors that download?
So, the threat is real. If someone choses to open their wireless LAN to outsiders, then he should know the risks.
Yeah, then he should realize they're practically non-existant.
Same thing applies if you run a message board or web site then it becomes a mouth piece for hate speech or terrorism or whatever. If you know the risks and chose to do this regardless, then be prepared for the consequences.
bzzt. A hate speech message board is accessible to the whole WWW, a WiFi is accessibile a small area around your house.
I think copyright is WAAAAY to excessive, but your solution has a fatal flaw.
Any kind of media created by you has an automatic copyright. You don't need to register with anyone or pay anything.
So, imagine an indie band who just likes making music. Are you saying that they should have to pay to prevent their 100 copies of their CD they recorded in their garage from being duplicated and sold by someone who keeps all the profit? I bought an old No Doubt CD that was made before they made it big*. If they were selling the CD for, say $5 when it came out should they have to pay $1000 per year to keep it from the public domain?
Clearly they wouldn't do this, so when they had recieved more exposure and people wanted to hear their early stuff they wouldn't get any money for it.
You can bet there would be people who did nothing but monitor what went into the public domain and make money selling it for redistribution, sampling, etc.
In addition to this no large creator of any kind of media could afford to keep all their work in copyright. You would either have to set the price for the "property tax" so low that the studios would just copyright everything and it would only be a burden on small artists, or high enough that no independent artist could possibly afford it, and only coporate owned media would be copyrighted.
LISTER: Look, Rimmer, death isn't the handicap it used to be in the olden days. It doesn't screw your career up like it used to.
RIMMER: That's what they say, Lister. But if you had two people coming for a job, and one of them was dead, which one would you pick?
LISTER: {pause} It depends which is better qualified.
Re:I saw this last night, some interesting points.
on
The Way the Music Died
·
· Score: 1
Sorry to reply to my own post, but the discussion on Fontline's site sees a lot of people as unimpressed with this episode as I was.
Re:I saw this last night, some interesting points.
on
The Way the Music Died
·
· Score: 0
I saw the whole show last night and I was very dissapointed with it. In the whole hour there was about 10 minutes that really talked about what's going on nowadays.
I was expecting a great follow-up to "Merchants of Cool", which was excellent. What I got was lots of footage of what's-her-name Hudson and Velvet Revolver talking about their careers and occasional cuts of people really talking about the subject at hand. The only people who knew what they were talking about were David Crosby, Toure (writer for Rolling Stone), and Michael "Blue" Williams (manager for OutKast).
Why didn't they talk to Tom Petty? His last album was all about the current music industry. Toure spoke briefly about how hip-hop was co-opted so quickly, but where's the rest of the story? Hip-hop is the poster child for the current system of 1.Make an artist, 2.Hire producers 3.Crank out an album, 4.Abandon the artist. Why didn't they talk to the Beastie Boys and other hip-hop artists who are trying to keep their integrity intact?
They spent WAY too much time on the "case studies" of Velvet Revolver and what's-her-name Hudson. They were certainly relevant, but not worth half the show.
P2P was mentioned briefly with the record exec blaming it for dropped sales, then Toure telling the truth about how kids are sick of paying $18 for one song and a bunch of filler, but there was no more discussion about it.
The whole thing left me very frustrated. Frontline is usually great at getting to the heart if the matter, but they dropped the ball on this one. The whole time I was watching it I had a strong urge to get a hold of their raw footage and re-edit the whole thing.
I'm a huge Vonnegut fan (note the nick) and I enjoyed the Harrisonn Bergeron movie, but it got me thinking.
Sci-fi in general and short stories in particular were a very different medium at the time he wrote that. It had a sort of formal, removed point of view that doesn't translate at all well to a modern movie version. It's the same problem I see with trying to make a Heinlein story into a movie, at least his earlier stuff. These stories were written to explore Big Ideas and generally paid little attention to character. What was Harrison really like in the story? He was just a symbol really, he had no personality, and you can't make a movie with a character like that.
And like the Sound of Thunder you can tell the whole story in about a minute, so if you're going to make a movie of it you have to make it out of whole cloth, and while you're at it create personalities for all the characters. In the end there's almost nothing of the original story left.
Aldiss' "Supertoys" story bears almost no resemblance to A.I. 2001 bears little resemblance to The Sentinal, but in that case you had the original author turning it into a movie and it turned out great. I don't understand why these moviemakers are trying to turn two page stories into full length movies, unless it's just the name recognition, or perhaps they just buy the rights and use the title to avoid lawsuits, since the original story is where they got the idea for the movie from.
I'd rather they hacked parts out of a novel rather than write a whole story "based" on a short story. Or just use the short story, don't worry about sticking to it and use a different title.
What it does NOT mean, despite what everybody seems to think it means, is that you are not required to prove your innocence. You most certainly are.
Well, no. You don't have to prove you are innocent, you have to prove you are NOT GUILTY. That's why a verdict is either guilty or NOT guilty, instead of guilty or INNOCENT. And no, that's not just a semantic point. It's rather surprising (with the popularity of crime dramas, and the basic rules of law you can learn from them) that a comment like this gets modded up.
The prosecution has to prove that you did the deed. You don't have to prove you DID NOT do it. An alibi certainly helps, so does proving a spyware app did it. If you can make enough people in a jury (or the judge) doubt that you are guilty you win.
Imagine if you really did have to prove your innocence. I accuse you of killing my brother on September 5, 1999. There's no body, but he's missing. There's no weapon and we don't know how or if he died. Now, prove to me you didn't do it. Do you have a rock-solid alibi? You don't remember? Can you prove to me that you never met my brother? He traveled a lot, maybe you met him in an airport, or in a bar, or in a Wal-mart, or at a gas station and decided to kill him. Prove you didn't do it.
Not that I want to defend the History channel, I agree that many of their shows are superficial and needlessly flashy, but they are basically a documentary channel. I don't think there are any foreign stations that need to fill 24 hours with documentaries. They're not spending two years researching and finding footage, they are churning these things out for quick entertainment value. If you watch a proper american documentary you'll generally see the same quality of foreign documentaries.
I made a comment similar to this on an old topic, but I can't find it so I'll repeat it here.
Somewhere on the INSULTINGLY STUPID MOVIE PHYSICS site there was a quote that said basically, "You can expect your audience to believe the impossible, but not the extremely improbable."
This means that it's okay to have time travel from the future to steal some documents, but it's NOT okay to have them guess the safe combination on their first try. Now to someone who knew nothing about safes, this might be okay, cause they don't know any better so it doesn't bother them. But someone with even a basic knowledge of safes will think this is stupid and it will annoy them.
The grandparent post was correct in saying that if you have flying pigs in your movie you'd better explain them somehow. Maybe the movie takes place in a fantasy world or maybe there's a mad scientist who created them, but you have to offer SOME kind of explaination. If halfway through Casablanca Bogart sent a message by flying pig it would be a glaring sore spot for everyone and would detract from the whole movie.
Nowadays I'm so used to people saying "enhance" and having pixellated computer images suddenly become hi-res that when a movie doesn't pull this I'm impressed and suddenly have more respect for the movie makers.
Jeff Goldblum's magic Mac in Independence Day is the classic example. We're willing to accept that aliens have come to destroy earth cause that's what the movie is about, but connecting to an alien computer system and infecting them with a virus? Come on! Arthur C. Clarke used this same basic idea in 3001: The Final Odessey, but he gave a very reasoned explaination of how this worked. You can't just dump something like that in a movie and expect anyone with even a basic knowledge of computers to buy it without explaination.
It's not that we're "pedantic whiny-asses", it's that we know it's stupid. Suspension of disbelief doesn't mean throwing your brain out the window, it means accepting certain basic concepts as necessary for the director to tell his story.
I haven't seen Battle Royale, but there's a good american take on this general idea called Series 7. It's about a government sanctioned gameshow where random people are given a gun and told that they are on the show. After that they have to kill the other contestants or be killed. The last survivor gets to continue to the next series.
It's a very shocking movie, the violence is very realistic, it's shot on video and looks like any other reality show. It reminded me of Man Bites Dog for it's disturbing depictions of murder. Not exactly a date movie.
For many of these people, BTW, the penalties they will have to pay their babysitters for picking up late (which can be as high as $1/minute, DOUBLING every minute)
Who in their right mind would agree to pay their babysitters this amount? That would be $1023 for being 10 minutes late! To quote the famous legend:
There is an ancient story of a king in India who, being very pleased with a man, told him to ask for any gift. The man asked him to place a gold coin on one of the squares of a chess board and then merely double the amount on each subsequent square. That is, put two on the next square and four on the next square and so on.
"Oh, that's not enough, ask for more," the king said in his generosity. The man insisted that was all he wanted.
The king could not realize that by the time could not realize that by the time he got to the 32nd square, the cumulative number of gold coins would total amazing 2,147,483,648
I understand about wanting a fair share of the pie, but where does it cross over into greed?
This is how I felt about sports celebrities and movie actors until I thought about it. They still may be greedy bastards, but maybe not.
The increase would raise each actor's pay to $US8 million a series. The actors work an average of six to seven hours each episode. However, the cartoon is thought to be worth $US1 billion to its owner, Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox.
So the cartoon is worth $1 Billion and the actors want $48 Million a season, that's about 21% of the "worth" of the cartoon. That leaves 79% for the writing, production, profit, and all the other costs.
I don't know if they're asking too much, but they don't sound so much like jerks when you see how much the executives at Fox are making off their talent.
Not sure if this is the same story (this was about ADM fixing the price of feed additives), but the radio show "This American Life" did a long story about how the companies got together and actually agreed to fix prices, and how the feds busted it up (a senior ADM manager taped the meetings and met with the feds).
Anyway you can listen to the whole thing here. It's really an interesting story.
Slashdot Mirror
When I finally get some peace and quit out here on Titan you bastards send probes to look at me.
Go look for Mr. Rumfoord! Leave me alone!
(If you don't recognize my nick ignore me.)
I hope they can see me from way up there. It's been so lonely since Salo left. Take me back to Indiana you bastards! (if you don't recognize my nick, never mind.)
Just out of curiosity (I'm guessing you're in texas from your domain) how do you get involved in that challenge? I edit a weekly show in Houston, but that can get tedious at times, I might be interested in working on a more fun project.
I'd like to welcome you to the 21st century ;)
Get an iMac and a MiniDV camera. Capturing involves plugging in the firewire cable. Then you cut it together in iMovie (which anyone can do) then you burn it to DVD in iDVD or export it to a quicktime movie.
I haven't used Microsoft's movie program, but it can't be that much harder.
I agree with most of what you say, but this is not quite true. I live in Houston and there are many, many small time labels and artists. There are enough that we can do a show featuring about 20 labels a year.
They aren't kids with tape recorders, they have good equipment, but LOTS of small time amateur rappers can make albums in these studios for an affordable price. Once in a while a small timer gains local fame and sometimes gets picked up by a major label where they often get swallowed into the same momey machine as most music, but the vast majority stay ammateurs.
I think the point is that if you have a small amount of money anyone can get a record produced and there are lots of amateurs who do this.
"Executive Producer" is generally a Hands-off position. Jerry Bruckheimer "executive produces" CSI: and Steven Speilberg "executive produced" Tiny Toons. In music videos the EP is generally the money man, or the studio contact. EPs of television series' generally have no creative input except for the initial pilot and tone of the series.
You might as well say "Yeah, I like 2001 but why'd they have to put it in space?".
I've always liked the 30's vision of the future: dirigibles, flying fortresses, giant steel robots. And the old serials had a certain charm, you know that crawl at the beginning of star wars? Lucas got that idea from serials, which would use it to catch everyone up on the last episodes. Longtime fans of MST3K will remember "The Phantom Creeps" serials and especially "Radar Men From The Moon".
Sky Captain is a direct homage to these serials. I imagine that this movie would be the dream of any kid who watched those.
I guess it's a very different genre of movie from anything that's been produced in the last 70 years. Sky Captain isn't the best movie ever, but it's a lot of fun to watch the "we-make-it-up-as-we-go-along" style of storytelling. He crashes his plane into the ocean? No problem, Dax fitted it with submersible gear. Who cares if that's ridiculous. It's supposed to be, but it's still exciting.
I mean, how can you hate a beautiful movie like this, a british commander on a hovering air field saying things like "Alert the amphibious squadron!".
The visual style of this movie is based on sci-fi visuals of the late 20's and 30's. Probably largely based on illustrations from the pulp magazine "Amazing Stories" which was started by none other than Hugo Gernsback (as in the "Hugo" award for science fiction). Check out these covers by Frank R. Paul for an idea of the style.
They were called "pulp" magazines because they were printed on cheap paper. It carried reprinted stories by H. G. Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, etc. as well as new sci-fi.
After I read the book I realized that Paul Verhoeven had completely perverted the story so he could critique it. He's seems to love making movies about a utopia that really isn't (i.e. Robocop, Total Recall), and he seems to love to show intense gore, real blood and guts.
For instance, in Heinlein's book you can serve without being a soldier, in fact soldiers are a chosen few; well trained and given advenced eqitment so that a dozen of them can disable a city.
Heinlein goes into great detail to explain why only service can guarantee citizenship, it's a sense of "you have to participate before you can have a voice". I'm not saying it'd be a good idea, but it is a thought-provoking idea, and it was at the center of the book.
Now look at Verhoeven's movie. It's not critiquing the book, but rather advancing Paul Verhoeven's dislike of dis-utopias. That's doesn't make a bad movie, but it makes a maddening adaption.
Before I saw the movie I had never read Heinlein. I thought the movie was very clever. Then I read the book and realized that Verhoeven was satirizing something that wasn't in the book. Most movie adaptions have to simplify the plot, but Starship Troopers was a total distortion of the source material.
How many guys do you think are surfing for porn while wardriving? How many of them do you think are into kiddie porn? What are the odds of that person accessing it though your connection? Then what are the odds that a fed monitors that download?
So, the threat is real. If someone choses to open their wireless LAN to outsiders, then he should know the risks.
Yeah, then he should realize they're practically non-existant.
Same thing applies if you run a message board or web site then it becomes a mouth piece for hate speech or terrorism or whatever. If you know the risks and chose to do this regardless, then be prepared for the consequences.
bzzt. A hate speech message board is accessible to the whole WWW, a WiFi is accessibile a small area around your house.
Any kind of media created by you has an automatic copyright. You don't need to register with anyone or pay anything.
So, imagine an indie band who just likes making music. Are you saying that they should have to pay to prevent their 100 copies of their CD they recorded in their garage from being duplicated and sold by someone who keeps all the profit? I bought an old No Doubt CD that was made before they made it big*. If they were selling the CD for, say $5 when it came out should they have to pay $1000 per year to keep it from the public domain?
Clearly they wouldn't do this, so when they had recieved more exposure and people wanted to hear their early stuff they wouldn't get any money for it.
You can bet there would be people who did nothing but monitor what went into the public domain and make money selling it for redistribution, sampling, etc.
In addition to this no large creator of any kind of media could afford to keep all their work in copyright. You would either have to set the price for the "property tax" so low that the studios would just copyright everything and it would only be a burden on small artists, or high enough that no independent artist could possibly afford it, and only coporate owned media would be copyrighted.
See your inbox for ways to fix this problem.
LISTER: Look, Rimmer, death isn't the handicap it used to be in the olden days. It doesn't screw your career up like it used to.
RIMMER: That's what they say, Lister. But if you had two people coming for a job, and one of them was dead, which one would you pick?
LISTER: {pause} It depends which is better qualified.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but the discussion on Fontline's site sees a lot of people as unimpressed with this episode as I was.
I was expecting a great follow-up to "Merchants of Cool", which was excellent. What I got was lots of footage of what's-her-name Hudson and Velvet Revolver talking about their careers and occasional cuts of people really talking about the subject at hand. The only people who knew what they were talking about were David Crosby, Toure (writer for Rolling Stone), and Michael "Blue" Williams (manager for OutKast).
Why didn't they talk to Tom Petty? His last album was all about the current music industry. Toure spoke briefly about how hip-hop was co-opted so quickly, but where's the rest of the story? Hip-hop is the poster child for the current system of 1.Make an artist, 2.Hire producers 3.Crank out an album, 4.Abandon the artist. Why didn't they talk to the Beastie Boys and other hip-hop artists who are trying to keep their integrity intact?
They spent WAY too much time on the "case studies" of Velvet Revolver and what's-her-name Hudson. They were certainly relevant, but not worth half the show.
P2P was mentioned briefly with the record exec blaming it for dropped sales, then Toure telling the truth about how kids are sick of paying $18 for one song and a bunch of filler, but there was no more discussion about it.
The whole thing left me very frustrated. Frontline is usually great at getting to the heart if the matter, but they dropped the ball on this one. The whole time I was watching it I had a strong urge to get a hold of their raw footage and re-edit the whole thing.
Sci-fi in general and short stories in particular were a very different medium at the time he wrote that. It had a sort of formal, removed point of view that doesn't translate at all well to a modern movie version. It's the same problem I see with trying to make a Heinlein story into a movie, at least his earlier stuff. These stories were written to explore Big Ideas and generally paid little attention to character. What was Harrison really like in the story? He was just a symbol really, he had no personality, and you can't make a movie with a character like that.
And like the Sound of Thunder you can tell the whole story in about a minute, so if you're going to make a movie of it you have to make it out of whole cloth, and while you're at it create personalities for all the characters. In the end there's almost nothing of the original story left.
Aldiss' "Supertoys" story bears almost no resemblance to A.I. 2001 bears little resemblance to The Sentinal, but in that case you had the original author turning it into a movie and it turned out great. I don't understand why these moviemakers are trying to turn two page stories into full length movies, unless it's just the name recognition, or perhaps they just buy the rights and use the title to avoid lawsuits, since the original story is where they got the idea for the movie from.
I'd rather they hacked parts out of a novel rather than write a whole story "based" on a short story. Or just use the short story, don't worry about sticking to it and use a different title.
Well, there's a big scene on a volcano, so I'd vote "Rock Climbing".
Well, no. You don't have to prove you are innocent, you have to prove you are NOT GUILTY. That's why a verdict is either guilty or NOT guilty, instead of guilty or INNOCENT. And no, that's not just a semantic point. It's rather surprising (with the popularity of crime dramas, and the basic rules of law you can learn from them) that a comment like this gets modded up.
The prosecution has to prove that you did the deed. You don't have to prove you DID NOT do it. An alibi certainly helps, so does proving a spyware app did it. If you can make enough people in a jury (or the judge) doubt that you are guilty you win.
Imagine if you really did have to prove your innocence. I accuse you of killing my brother on September 5, 1999. There's no body, but he's missing. There's no weapon and we don't know how or if he died. Now, prove to me you didn't do it. Do you have a rock-solid alibi? You don't remember? Can you prove to me that you never met my brother? He traveled a lot, maybe you met him in an airport, or in a bar, or in a Wal-mart, or at a gas station and decided to kill him. Prove you didn't do it.
Not that I want to defend the History channel, I agree that many of their shows are superficial and needlessly flashy, but they are basically a documentary channel. I don't think there are any foreign stations that need to fill 24 hours with documentaries. They're not spending two years researching and finding footage, they are churning these things out for quick entertainment value. If you watch a proper american documentary you'll generally see the same quality of foreign documentaries.
Somewhere on the INSULTINGLY STUPID MOVIE PHYSICS site there was a quote that said basically, "You can expect your audience to believe the impossible, but not the extremely improbable."
This means that it's okay to have time travel from the future to steal some documents, but it's NOT okay to have them guess the safe combination on their first try. Now to someone who knew nothing about safes, this might be okay, cause they don't know any better so it doesn't bother them. But someone with even a basic knowledge of safes will think this is stupid and it will annoy them.
The grandparent post was correct in saying that if you have flying pigs in your movie you'd better explain them somehow. Maybe the movie takes place in a fantasy world or maybe there's a mad scientist who created them, but you have to offer SOME kind of explaination. If halfway through Casablanca Bogart sent a message by flying pig it would be a glaring sore spot for everyone and would detract from the whole movie.
Nowadays I'm so used to people saying "enhance" and having pixellated computer images suddenly become hi-res that when a movie doesn't pull this I'm impressed and suddenly have more respect for the movie makers.
Jeff Goldblum's magic Mac in Independence Day is the classic example. We're willing to accept that aliens have come to destroy earth cause that's what the movie is about, but connecting to an alien computer system and infecting them with a virus? Come on! Arthur C. Clarke used this same basic idea in 3001: The Final Odessey, but he gave a very reasoned explaination of how this worked. You can't just dump something like that in a movie and expect anyone with even a basic knowledge of computers to buy it without explaination.
It's not that we're "pedantic whiny-asses", it's that we know it's stupid. Suspension of disbelief doesn't mean throwing your brain out the window, it means accepting certain basic concepts as necessary for the director to tell his story.
It's a very shocking movie, the violence is very realistic, it's shot on video and looks like any other reality show. It reminded me of Man Bites Dog for it's disturbing depictions of murder. Not exactly a date movie.
Who in their right mind would agree to pay their babysitters this amount? That would be $1023 for being 10 minutes late! To quote the famous legend:
There is an ancient story of a king in India who, being very pleased with a man, told him to ask for any gift. The man asked him to place a gold coin on one of the squares of a chess board and then merely double the amount on each subsequent square. That is, put two on the next square and four on the next square and so on.
"Oh, that's not enough, ask for more," the king said in his generosity. The man insisted that was all he wanted.
The king could not realize that by the time could not realize that by the time he got to the 32nd square, the cumulative number of gold coins would total amazing 2,147,483,648
This is how I felt about sports celebrities and movie actors until I thought about it. They still may be greedy bastards, but maybe not.
The increase would raise each actor's pay to $US8 million a series. The actors work an average of six to seven hours each episode. However, the cartoon is thought to be worth $US1 billion to its owner, Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox.
So the cartoon is worth $1 Billion and the actors want $48 Million a season, that's about 21% of the "worth" of the cartoon. That leaves 79% for the writing, production, profit, and all the other costs.
I don't know if they're asking too much, but they don't sound so much like jerks when you see how much the executives at Fox are making off their talent.
At Rap-A-Lot Records world headquarters a pasty white geek tries to solve a networking problem...
Geek: So which operating system do you use? Windows 98? Windows XP? NT?
Scarface: Word.
Geek (looking uncomfortable): Yes...uh, word up, man! But what operating system do your systems run?
Scarface: Word, man.
Geek: Haha! Yes...well...I'm hip to it! Do you have a Linux server? What's your website hosted on?
Jay-Z: Didn't you hear him, man? He said Word.
Geek: To your mother!
(Rappers share a confused look)
Geek: Word!
Scarface: I told you. Word, man.
Geek: Oh god, please don't hurt me. (runs away)
Anyway you can listen to the whole thing here. It's really an interesting story.