Let's get something clear: John Carter didn't flop because of the source material. John Carter flopped because it was a terrible movie. From the music choices, the casting, the horribly stilted dialog, the mishmash story, unimpressive sets, this film was Doomed. It pissed off the source material's fan base and left everyone else going "wait, what?" Disney knew ahead of time that they had a stinker, so they didn't waste much money promoting it, adding to its demise at the box office. (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing -- it let the film disappear relatively quietly.) Yeah, that was a really unpleasant experience.
TFA implies something that we all know will happen -- when Disney has a hit, they milk it until we're all highly sick of it. (Except, for some bizarre reason, The Incredibles, but that's another story.) The Golden Age of a Disney franchise is the first few entries, (sometimes only the first entry -cough-liloandstitch-cough- ) before the Calculated Excess kicks in.
ok, so, if I'm understanding this right, Netflix plans to keep the more profitable titles reasonably compressed, and the less profitable titles will have the living crap compressed out of them. Oh, they'll say you will hardly notice, but you know they'll do it. There's too much money at stake.
Just sayin', this is why we gave up on DirecTV. Stuff like football games (which I don't watch) were relatively uncompressed and very sharp. Stuff like the Disney channel and Nick, the reception of which was the primary use of the equipment, (having a young child and not watching much tv myself) were compressed to big splotches of color. It was so bad that even my grade school kid noticed that the video quality was crap. In the early thousands, we dumped DirecTV and switched to Netflix. Now some 12 years later, daughter still watches Netflix. Hopefully the stuff she watches won't be unpopular enough to be compressed to incomprehensibility. I guess the advantage is that Netflix doesn't do live sports, which was apparently the largest per-program usage of available bandwidth on DirecTV.
What I'm reading from this is that Edge Animate, Adobe's HTML 5 tool, will be renamed Adobe Animate CC, and will gain some (probably funky) backwards compatibility to Flash.
While Daniel Craig hasnt been as bad for James Bond as Lucas was for Star Wars I tell you as a good bit of a Bond fan since childhood that I cant wait to see him go as he's been one of the worst at playing Bond. Bond is supposed to be suave and charismatic while Craig's Bond has all the charisma of a rock. The new Bond movies are just Mission Impossible movies (or any other big Holiwood action brand) which is fine if you like that sort of thing (and i do sometimes) but they certainly dont watch like any of the movies before Craig.
I understand what you're saying (Sean Connery is still everyone's favorite Bond) I'm not sure I agree. I guess I got so tired of the camp (Connery starting with Diamonds Are Forever, *all* of the Roger Moore Bonds, a short break from the silliness with Dalton and then baaaaack to campycampycamp with Brosnan) that the serious tone of Casino Royale (and other than the game changing to Texas Hold-whatever, not a complete travesty re: the book) that I was able to overlook Craig's... ears. That's it really, isn't it?
It helps to remember that in the novels Bond is a stone killer. He occasionally does the right thing just because, but in general he can be pretty callous, at least up to the death of his wife. (Most people don't know the novels all follow a story arc, and specifically OHMSS-YOLT-TMWTGG is one complete story.) Craig fit that mindset pretty well, in my opinion.
I think the Craig movies did a good job of capturing the spirit of the novels without rehashing the story elements that had already been done (Casino being the obvious exception). I especially loved the call-backs to both the earlier films and the novels, even stories that had never been filmed. Did you catch the reference to The Hildebrand Rarity in Specter?
Well, if Disney does well enough with 7-9, maybe they will go back and remake eps 1-3. I'd like to see the look on Lucas's face...
I haven't used this phrase in a long time, but That Would Be So Cool. Just make the prequels non-canon, completely forget they ever existed, and just do new prequels.
Disney didn't want Lucas's stories because Lucas can't write well.
He came up with some good ideas (regardless of how much he borrowed from Kurosawa) but (a) he couldn't write dialog to save his life, and (b) success led to excess.
There used to be laserdisc rips of the original trilogy on bittorrent. That is about as close as you'll get.
I'm told that there are "the despecialized editions", which were attempts by fans with mad skills to recreate the original films from the "special editions". Improved quality and effects where appropriate, without all the squirmy additions.
"and just to complete it" -- I know the feeling. Lucas was starting to go off the rails with RotJ. Then with TPM he went off the bridge, tumbled down the mountain, careened into the chasm and plunged into the magma.
The character of Dr. Smith was added after everyone involved realized there wasn't enough dramatic tension to carry it more than a few episodes.
In the first episode with Dr. Smith, he is quite malevolent, later his character was reduced to just lazy coward.
I think it was specifically the lazy coward and how nearly every episode revolved around him that made me (as a kid) tire of the show the first time around. To this day I have issues with characters who are basically a waste of skin. (I wasn't a big fan of Gilligan's Island for the same reason, despite Mary Jane. (Mmmm. Mary Jane...))
In the movie, Smith was a foreign operative, and much more convincing as a bitter sociopath than Harris' lazy coward. (Sorry, I have nothing against Harris.) I also liked that the technology, although modernized, had many callbacks to the original series. It's too bad the movie went off the rails after the spider attack, it could have been good.
The first season was adventure, the rest mostly painful camp. The big question is whether they'd do one or the other. Or make it like every other scifi/adventure/superhero series in recent history, a soap opera set in environment (a) with set of characters (b). Approach cautiously, maybe see the first episode, be prepared to jettison, because life is too damned short for banal TV.
Time for NASA to start a line of "Mars or Bust!" merchandises; anytime a federally funded agency work to pay its own way is a Good Thing (tm) I am sure the both houses of current congress agrees...
I personally think that's why the original moon shot succeeded -- it captured the imagination of the American people. It was something we wanted to see happen. Without that, you don't have much.
I suspect that part of "NASA is doomed" is that without clear, consistent goals, NASA just seems like a money pit. Funding Constellation would arguably have put NASA more in the "moon shot" category. Defunding it after the money already spent, pushed NASA more to the "money pit" side.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's get something clear: John Carter didn't flop because of the source material. John Carter flopped because it was a terrible movie. From the music choices, the casting, the horribly stilted dialog, the mishmash story, unimpressive sets, this film was Doomed. It pissed off the source material's fan base and left everyone else going "wait, what?" Disney knew ahead of time that they had a stinker, so they didn't waste much money promoting it, adding to its demise at the box office. (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing -- it let the film disappear relatively quietly.) Yeah, that was a really unpleasant experience.
TFA implies something that we all know will happen -- when Disney has a hit, they milk it until we're all highly sick of it. (Except, for some bizarre reason, The Incredibles, but that's another story.) The Golden Age of a Disney franchise is the first few entries, (sometimes only the first entry -cough-liloandstitch-cough- ) before the Calculated Excess kicks in.
What are you whining about? This is just another example of private industry doing it better than the government.
You think the government wouldn't just outsource to Comcast?
ok, so, if I'm understanding this right, Netflix plans to keep the more profitable titles reasonably compressed, and the less profitable titles will have the living crap compressed out of them. Oh, they'll say you will hardly notice, but you know they'll do it. There's too much money at stake.
Just sayin', this is why we gave up on DirecTV. Stuff like football games (which I don't watch) were relatively uncompressed and very sharp. Stuff like the Disney channel and Nick, the reception of which was the primary use of the equipment, (having a young child and not watching much tv myself) were compressed to big splotches of color. It was so bad that even my grade school kid noticed that the video quality was crap. In the early thousands, we dumped DirecTV and switched to Netflix. Now some 12 years later, daughter still watches Netflix. Hopefully the stuff she watches won't be unpopular enough to be compressed to incomprehensibility. I guess the advantage is that Netflix doesn't do live sports, which was apparently the largest per-program usage of available bandwidth on DirecTV.
Mars. ...good life... ... Mars... Good Life... MARS. ...LIVING THE GOOD LIFE. On FREAKING MARS.
Isn't Mars a WASTELAND?
Is this a really unusual definition of "good life"? Or maybe a complete misunderstanding of what Mars is like?
What I'm reading from this is that Edge Animate, Adobe's HTML 5 tool, will be renamed Adobe Animate CC, and will gain some (probably funky) backwards compatibility to Flash.
But it's not as sexy when you put it that way.
p
who'd a thunk it.
Hm. I wonder if Anonymous takes cases like this.
> On Halloween 2013, Comcast shut off their cable and Internet service.
Right, because that never happens...
Sorry, I'm not into camp. Shrug. Some people are.
> Hayden Christensen was more wooden than a stack of 2x4s, but it isn't clear to me if that is just him or it was Lucas' direction (or both).
Hayden is wooden in other acting roles, and Lucas managed to tease wooden performances from good actors, so I'm thinking, it was both.
But what would we do without a whiny Anakin?
Perhaps, enjoy our movie-going experiences? Not have our childhood memories destroyed?
I was ok with the windows in cloud city and removing that painfully eighties song at the end of Jedi. The rest were very needed un-changes.
While Daniel Craig hasnt been as bad for James Bond as Lucas was for Star Wars I tell you as a good bit of a Bond fan since childhood that I cant wait to see him go as he's been one of the worst at playing Bond. Bond is supposed to be suave and charismatic while Craig's Bond has all the charisma of a rock. The new Bond movies are just Mission Impossible movies (or any other big Holiwood action brand) which is fine if you like that sort of thing (and i do sometimes) but they certainly dont watch like any of the movies before Craig.
I understand what you're saying (Sean Connery is still everyone's favorite Bond) I'm not sure I agree. I guess I got so tired of the camp (Connery starting with Diamonds Are Forever, *all* of the Roger Moore Bonds, a short break from the silliness with Dalton and then baaaaack to campycampycamp with Brosnan) that the serious tone of Casino Royale (and other than the game changing to Texas Hold-whatever, not a complete travesty re: the book) that I was able to overlook Craig's ... ears. That's it really, isn't it?
It helps to remember that in the novels Bond is a stone killer. He occasionally does the right thing just because, but in general he can be pretty callous, at least up to the death of his wife. (Most people don't know the novels all follow a story arc, and specifically OHMSS-YOLT-TMWTGG is one complete story.) Craig fit that mindset pretty well, in my opinion.
I think the Craig movies did a good job of capturing the spirit of the novels without rehashing the story elements that had already been done (Casino being the obvious exception). I especially loved the call-backs to both the earlier films and the novels, even stories that had never been filmed. Did you catch the reference to The Hildebrand Rarity in Specter?
Well, if Disney does well enough with 7-9, maybe they will go back and remake eps 1-3. I'd like to see the look on Lucas's face...
I haven't used this phrase in a long time, but That Would Be So Cool. Just make the prequels non-canon, completely forget they ever existed, and just do new prequels.
George Lucas: "I'm Done With Star Wars"
That's what Daniel Craig said about Bond after 007 Spectre.
The difference is, with Lucas we hope it's true.
Disney didn't want Lucas's stories because Lucas can't write well.
He came up with some good ideas (regardless of how much he borrowed from Kurosawa) but (a) he couldn't write dialog to save his life, and (b) success led to excess.
Just more Cheez-wiz American cinema. Lucas ruined the first three movies when made the last three.
It helps to assume that the last three never existed. Kinda like "wow The Matrix was good. Too bad they never made any sequels".
> No he didn't, the problem was after Empire he began to lose people who would tell him no which is the kiss of death to a guy like Lucas.
I agree, he always had JarJar potential without talented people to hold him in check. That doesn't necessarily invalidate what I said.
There used to be laserdisc rips of the original trilogy on bittorrent. That is about as close as you'll get.
I'm told that there are "the despecialized editions", which were attempts by fans with mad skills to recreate the original films from the "special editions". Improved quality and effects where appropriate, without all the squirmy additions.
"and just to complete it" -- I know the feeling. Lucas was starting to go off the rails with RotJ. Then with TPM he went off the bridge, tumbled down the mountain, careened into the chasm and plunged into the magma.
I think he was referring to Gary Oldman since he had already played Dr. Smith in the 1998 movie.
There was a movie?
In 1998. It was decent, if you ignore the second half.
The character of Dr. Smith was added after everyone involved realized there wasn't enough dramatic tension to carry it more than a few episodes.
In the first episode with Dr. Smith, he is quite malevolent, later his character was reduced to just lazy coward.
I think it was specifically the lazy coward and how nearly every episode revolved around him that made me (as a kid) tire of the show the first time around. To this day I have issues with characters who are basically a waste of skin. (I wasn't a big fan of Gilligan's Island for the same reason, despite Mary Jane. (Mmmm. Mary Jane...))
In the movie, Smith was a foreign operative, and much more convincing as a bitter sociopath than Harris' lazy coward. (Sorry, I have nothing against Harris.) I also liked that the technology, although modernized, had many callbacks to the original series. It's too bad the movie went off the rails after the spider attack, it could have been good.
The first season was adventure, the rest mostly painful camp. The big question is whether they'd do one or the other. Or make it like every other scifi/adventure/superhero series in recent history, a soap opera set in environment (a) with set of characters (b). Approach cautiously, maybe see the first episode, be prepared to jettison, because life is too damned short for banal TV.
It'll come to you too. So far they've only pretended to force you to "upgrade". :P
That may be true. By then there may be enough "staggering updates", and inevitable fixes-to-fixes that it'll be in some way usable.
Staggering update. Just staggering. I saw so m... wait, I'm still on Windows 7. Never mind.
Time for NASA to start a line of "Mars or Bust!" merchandises; anytime a federally funded agency work to pay its own way is a Good Thing (tm) I am sure the both houses of current congress agrees...
I personally think that's why the original moon shot succeeded -- it captured the imagination of the American people. It was something we wanted to see happen. Without that, you don't have much.
I suspect that part of "NASA is doomed" is that without clear, consistent goals, NASA just seems like a money pit. Funding Constellation would arguably have put NASA more in the "moon shot" category. Defunding it after the money already spent, pushed NASA more to the "money pit" side.