art is judged by sales figures, sales figures is the only opinion that matters
Art and sales figures have absolutely fuck all to do with each other. How many times has the Mona Lisa - one of the most recognisable, most celebrated, most admired works of art in existence - been sold?
everything else is subjective
Welcome to the world of art.
therefore, how do you judge movie quality objectively?
I don't, I happily apply subjective measures. I certainly don't use sales figures to measure artistic merit because sales are fuck all to do with artistry. There is no objective link.
Lets not argue about this. You go and watch the highest grossing films and I'll go and watch the good ones. Sometimes we may even see the same film but you'll miss out on some of the best cinema ever made.
the story was as good as cameron's other efforts like titanic and terminator.
The story sucked large overweight donkeys. Whether it was better or worse than other Cameron films doesn't alter the fact that it was pathetically formulaic and had shite dialogue.
who says? not me. sales figures say so
Pirates of the Carribean had massive sales figures. So did its sequels. All of them are shit films. Sales figures are not an indicator of quality. Particularly in the film industry.
Avatar had some great effects and portrayed a fantastic world. For those reasons it was quite a good film. If it had been better acted and had a remotely good script it could have been a great film, but it didn't, even if lots of people did buy into the hype and go and see it.
I do however struggle mightily to believe that - accelerator is jammed 'on' - brakes are disabled - putting car into neutral is disabled - ignition 'off' switch fails to work
All at the same time? Due to a software error? If the entire computing system crashed/hung/infinite looped, and had default 'no signal' behaviour of 'accelerate' then sure, but if Toyota designed their system to work like that I'll let you fly me to Japan to punch their chief software engineer in the head myself.
In this country people have pay to learn to drive. Forcing them to successfully pass a "oh shit it's gone wrong" test in a sim would very easily be self-funding. A million new drivers a year * £10 per driver means you've covered the software costs in the first couple of months, and the hardware in a couple of years.
Of course, it wouldn't be £10, it'd be an additional tenner on top of the £91+ people already spend on their driving tests.
Traction control and stability control are intended, basically, to modify control input when the driver does something that puts the vehicle outside the envelope of safe control.
Sadly the intention is difficult to put into practice. I have to disable stability control to safely control my car when driving on snow.
I also have to disable traction control when I want to have fun but I'm more open to suggestion that I'm pushing the envelope of 'safe' control on that one.
Top Gear (reputable BBC television programme that assesses and reviews cars) stated a couple of years ago that the arseholes all now drive Audis not BMWs.
More to the point, just wtf is wrong with putting the car in Neutral?
I've never owned a car - manual or automatic - that couldn't be put into neutral in a fifth of a second (usually much less) by the driver, at any speed, and in so doing disable the drive train.
There's justice, and there's abuse. Someone going to jail because of how they treat someone is (presumably) justice. Libellous captioning of photographs is harassment and thus abuse.
Hedwards clearly doesn't feel poor treatment warrants revenge abuse. That doesn't mean he's ok with it, just that he's balanced enough not to overreact.
Rivalz and Zynga both sell an artificial currency (i.e. not 'legal tender' in any country) for 'real' money. Both have been the victims of a theft. If the thief in the Zynga case has been convicted then the implication is that there's now a precedent.
Rivalz' insight is that taking that precedent to its logical extreme, his sister's about to be forced to turn lesbian.
I think they're a bunch of lying pretentious twats too. They were using an iPhone as their ground based tracking device. That's their £350 budget blown immediately and they should've gone android.
Not to mention launching from Derbyshire. I hate Derby supporters. They're all twats:(
Interesting. I'm in the UK and have Al Jazeera via my UK TV subscription.
Although, comically, I turned in and lost my satellite feed - switched to another channel and it's back. Switched back to Al Jazeera and it's gone again. Hmm. Time to reboot the decoder box.
Ok. I lied. I'm meant to have Al Jazeera but its coming through so slow and fragmented that it's unwatchable. Its headline banner is "The battle for Egypt. Fresh clashes at Liberation Square" but I get that as a still picture (with the square in the background) and then lose signal again.
I'll check again in the morning, then ring my TV provider and yell at them..
No, he's not getting more votes than you. Two ways of looking at it:
1 - You both have as many votes as each other - the same number as there are candidates. You vote (by ommission) 'no' for all but one candidate, he votes 'yes' for some and 'no' for the others. This does match 'up to as many votes as there are candidates' but everybody gets the same number of votes
2 - You both have one vote. You place your vote against one candidate. He places his one vote as 'any of those several' candidates.
Whether the reality is 1 or 2 depends on the precise voting system involved, but either way there is no disparity in voting power.
160 km/h is fast enough to get not chased by the "Luftwaffe" of BMX, Audi + Porsche.
Aww, c'mon - even in Germany they aren't that fast on a BMX. I'm not knocking the commitment or the muscle power but the gearing would need thighs like a Russian weightlifter to get one near 100mph.
Even flat out it takes over 7 seconds just to get to 60 mph
You do realise that most cars sold in Europe are far far slower than that? Over 10s for 0-60 is common, possibly even normal.
It's also largely irrelevant. You tend to enter a slip road doing somewhere between 20 and 60, you get between 10 and 60 seconds to accelerate and vehicles in the slow lanes are likely to only be doing 60 or so. So worse case you have 10s to gain 40mph.
Fast acceleration is very useful, particularly for overtaking on single-carriageway roads, but it's not a massive factor in highway safety.
Several of Lars von Trier's films have been universally panned as terrible movies.
A lot of people hate his entire body of work, but Breaking the Waves is excellent, Dancer in the Dark horrifyingly brilliant and Dogville was inventive, brave and viscious.
He does cock it up at times, but he's pushing boundaries and creating films to challenge his audience, not to draw a big box office. I respect that, and that's why I'll always pick one of his films ahead of Nolan.
Haneka has a similar challenging approach, and creates very watchable films; his peaks just aren't as high.
I've never seen a Chan Woo Park film. I can't really comment.
I greatly enjoyed his Vengeance trilogy - maybe start in the middle with Old Boy, it has a very unpredictably convoluted plot but surrounds it with beautifully nuanced scenes, some extremely dark humour and several good acting performances.
Nolan's LOWEST rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes (an aggregate of all reviews) is The Prestige at 75%.
I have friends that consider The Prestige one of his better ones and consistently rate his films very highly. I just disagree.
I didn't state whether I understood the film on first viewing or not. I didn't state whether understanding or not was an indicator of intelligence.
I merely pointed out that people assume that a film they can't understand must be good because everyone's talking about it to try and understand it.
There are films that are good that aren't easily understood - Donnie Darko is one of my favourites - but incomprehensibility is not an automatic indicator of quality.
Wow. Anyone who must have liked it must have been so stupid as to not comprehend the movie?
Your sarcasm is unwarranted and implies a degree of defensiveness - what's the matter, failed to understand the movie and feel inferior?
I heavily doubt that anyone could state TS3 worthy of an Oscar were it not for...
A well respected film critic in the UK rates TS3 as the best of the trilogy, and indeed rates the trilogy as the best trilogy in cinema.
Note that he also rated Inception as his film of the year, so he'd probably back it ahead of TS3 for the Best Picture award, but I suspect he'd also support TS3 for the Oscar nomination and for the Best Animated Feature award.
Me, I'm nearer to your position: TS3 was frankly shite.
Hmm, no. There are many directors I'd rather watch than Nolan.
Scorcese, Scott (Ridley _and_ Tony), Aronofsky, Eastwood, Cameron, Gilliam, Fincher, Rodrigues, von Trier, Park, even Spielberg and Tarantino. And those are just the directors I look out for, I've seen films I've enjoyed far more than any Nolan films by other directors that aren't as consistently good.
He has a technical mastery of his art but never lets the technical get in the way of the story.
I accept this - he's clearly talented. So are the Coen Brothers, and I've yet to enjoy a movie by them either. I'm clearly just strange.
Eastwood has a fantastic sensitivity and humour in his direction. The Outlaw Josey Wales and A Perfect World both mix sad humour in amongst their action, and Unforgiven is a masterpiece.
Inception was good, but I found it a little bit overrated - much of the buzz is from people who thought that because they couldn't understand it first time it must be special.
It is good, but it's not special. It's great that it's a commercial success, and that it's broken the trend of braindead blockbusters, but it's still a blockbuster.
I'll concede though that I'm not a great fan of Nolan. He's professional and competent and clearly highly successful, I'm just not drawn to his films the way many people are.
Aronofsky on the other hand knows how to reach inside me and twist. I saw Black Swan tonight (it's only just opened here in the UK) and although I left the cinema three hours ago I'm still reeling. The plot is trivial - particularly in comparison to Inception - but the acting, the direction, the pacing, the tension and the music are just stunning. By far the best film I've seen at the cinema for years.
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art is judged by sales figures, sales figures is the only opinion that matters
Art and sales figures have absolutely fuck all to do with each other. How many times has the Mona Lisa - one of the most recognisable, most celebrated, most admired works of art in existence - been sold?
everything else is subjective
Welcome to the world of art.
therefore, how do you judge movie quality objectively?
I don't, I happily apply subjective measures. I certainly don't use sales figures to measure artistic merit because sales are fuck all to do with artistry. There is no objective link.
Lets not argue about this. You go and watch the highest grossing films and I'll go and watch the good ones. Sometimes we may even see the same film but you'll miss out on some of the best cinema ever made.
the story was as good as cameron's other efforts like titanic and terminator.
The story sucked large overweight donkeys. Whether it was better or worse than other Cameron films doesn't alter the fact that it was pathetically formulaic and had shite dialogue.
who says? not me. sales figures say so
Pirates of the Carribean had massive sales figures. So did its sequels. All of them are shit films.
Sales figures are not an indicator of quality. Particularly in the film industry.
Avatar had some great effects and portrayed a fantastic world. For those reasons it was quite a good film. If it had been better acted and had a remotely good script it could have been a great film, but it didn't, even if lots of people did buy into the hype and go and see it.
I do however struggle mightily to believe that
- accelerator is jammed 'on'
- brakes are disabled
- putting car into neutral is disabled
- ignition 'off' switch fails to work
All at the same time? Due to a software error? If the entire computing system crashed/hung/infinite looped, and had default 'no signal' behaviour of 'accelerate' then sure, but if Toyota designed their system to work like that I'll let you fly me to Japan to punch their chief software engineer in the head myself.
In this country people have pay to learn to drive. Forcing them to successfully pass a "oh shit it's gone wrong" test in a sim would very easily be self-funding. A million new drivers a year * £10 per driver means you've covered the software costs in the first couple of months, and the hardware in a couple of years.
Of course, it wouldn't be £10, it'd be an additional tenner on top of the £91+ people already spend on their driving tests.
Traction control and stability control are intended, basically, to modify control input when the driver does something that puts the vehicle outside the envelope of safe control.
Sadly the intention is difficult to put into practice. I have to disable stability control to safely control my car when driving on snow.
I also have to disable traction control when I want to have fun but I'm more open to suggestion that I'm pushing the envelope of 'safe' control on that one.
on the way home from church.
Ok, so you've just given us some strong evidence that he is in fact an idiot. Suddenly the rest of the story makes more sense.
Top Gear (reputable BBC television programme that assesses and reviews cars) stated a couple of years ago that the arseholes all now drive Audis not BMWs.
More to the point, just wtf is wrong with putting the car in Neutral?
I've never owned a car - manual or automatic - that couldn't be put into neutral in a fifth of a second (usually much less) by the driver, at any speed, and in so doing disable the drive train.
There's justice, and there's abuse. Someone going to jail because of how they treat someone is (presumably) justice. Libellous captioning of photographs is harassment and thus abuse.
Hedwards clearly doesn't feel poor treatment warrants revenge abuse. That doesn't mean he's ok with it, just that he's balanced enough not to overreact.
Rivalz and Zynga both sell an artificial currency (i.e. not 'legal tender' in any country) for 'real' money. Both have been the victims of a theft. If the thief in the Zynga case has been convicted then the implication is that there's now a precedent.
Rivalz' insight is that taking that precedent to its logical extreme, his sister's about to be forced to turn lesbian.
I think they're a bunch of lying pretentious twats too. They were using an iPhone as their ground based tracking device. That's their £350 budget blown immediately and they should've gone android.
Not to mention launching from Derbyshire. I hate Derby supporters. They're all twats :(
Interesting. I'm in the UK and have Al Jazeera via my UK TV subscription.
Although, comically, I turned in and lost my satellite feed - switched to another channel and it's back. Switched back to Al Jazeera and it's gone again. Hmm. Time to reboot the decoder box.
Ok. I lied. I'm meant to have Al Jazeera but its coming through so slow and fragmented that it's unwatchable. Its headline banner is "The battle for Egypt. Fresh clashes at Liberation Square" but I get that as a still picture (with the square in the background) and then lose signal again.
I'll check again in the morning, then ring my TV provider and yell at them..
Okay, first off why is a "Muslim" government necessarily a bad one?
Because all theocracies are implicitly corrupt and evil, and a muslim one would also be disciminatory.
Second, why can a "Muslim" government inherently not be Democratic?
Because it's a theocracy.
Third, how is the rest of the world worse off if Egyptians choose a Muslim government for their country?
Because Islamic theocracies cause trouble. See Afghanistan and Iran.
Note that it's possible to have a democratic government whose members happen to be Muslim. That's not the same as a Muslim government.
No, he's not getting more votes than you. Two ways of looking at it:
1 - You both have as many votes as each other - the same number as there are candidates. You vote (by ommission) 'no' for all but one candidate, he votes 'yes' for some and 'no' for the others. This does match 'up to as many votes as there are candidates' but everybody gets the same number of votes
2 - You both have one vote. You place your vote against one candidate. He places his one vote as 'any of those several' candidates.
Whether the reality is 1 or 2 depends on the precise voting system involved, but either way there is no disparity in voting power.
160 km/h is fast enough to get not chased by the "Luftwaffe" of BMX, Audi + Porsche.
Aww, c'mon - even in Germany they aren't that fast on a BMX. I'm not knocking the commitment or the muscle power but the gearing would need thighs like a Russian weightlifter to get one near 100mph.
Illegal in the UK too. The roads suffer enough damage in cold weather already, without idiots chewing them up with knobbly tires.
Even flat out it takes over 7 seconds just to get to 60 mph
You do realise that most cars sold in Europe are far far slower than that? Over 10s for 0-60 is common, possibly even normal.
It's also largely irrelevant. You tend to enter a slip road doing somewhere between 20 and 60, you get between 10 and 60 seconds to accelerate and vehicles in the slow lanes are likely to only be doing 60 or so. So worse case you have 10s to gain 40mph.
Fast acceleration is very useful, particularly for overtaking on single-carriageway roads, but it's not a massive factor in highway safety.
Several of Lars von Trier's films have been universally panned as terrible movies.
A lot of people hate his entire body of work, but Breaking the Waves is excellent, Dancer in the Dark horrifyingly brilliant and Dogville was inventive, brave and viscious.
He does cock it up at times, but he's pushing boundaries and creating films to challenge his audience, not to draw a big box office. I respect that, and that's why I'll always pick one of his films ahead of Nolan.
Haneka has a similar challenging approach, and creates very watchable films; his peaks just aren't as high.
I've never seen a Chan Woo Park film. I can't really comment.
I greatly enjoyed his Vengeance trilogy - maybe start in the middle with Old Boy, it has a very unpredictably convoluted plot but surrounds it with beautifully nuanced scenes, some extremely dark humour and several good acting performances.
Nolan's LOWEST rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes (an aggregate of all reviews) is The Prestige at 75%.
I have friends that consider The Prestige one of his better ones and consistently rate his films very highly. I just disagree.
I didn't state whether I understood the film on first viewing or not. I didn't state whether understanding or not was an indicator of intelligence.
I merely pointed out that people assume that a film they can't understand must be good because everyone's talking about it to try and understand it.
There are films that are good that aren't easily understood - Donnie Darko is one of my favourites - but incomprehensibility is not an automatic indicator of quality.
Wow. Anyone who must have liked it must have been so stupid as to not comprehend the movie?
Your sarcasm is unwarranted and implies a degree of defensiveness - what's the matter, failed to understand the movie and feel inferior?
I heavily doubt that anyone could state TS3 worthy of an Oscar were it not for ...
A well respected film critic in the UK rates TS3 as the best of the trilogy, and indeed rates the trilogy as the best trilogy in cinema.
Note that he also rated Inception as his film of the year, so he'd probably back it ahead of TS3 for the Best Picture award, but I suspect he'd also support TS3 for the Oscar nomination and for the Best Animated Feature award.
Me, I'm nearer to your position: TS3 was frankly shite.
Maybe I'm a few decades too old, but that wasn't a good film.
Call me sad, but I enjoyed Shakespeare in Love. As trashy plagiarised romances go it was professionally made :)
Hmm, no. There are many directors I'd rather watch than Nolan.
Scorcese, Scott (Ridley _and_ Tony), Aronofsky, Eastwood, Cameron, Gilliam, Fincher, Rodrigues, von Trier, Park, even Spielberg and Tarantino. And those are just the directors I look out for, I've seen films I've enjoyed far more than any Nolan films by other directors that aren't as consistently good.
He has a technical mastery of his art but never lets the technical get in the way of the story.
I accept this - he's clearly talented. So are the Coen Brothers, and I've yet to enjoy a movie by them either. I'm clearly just strange.
Eastwood has a fantastic sensitivity and humour in his direction. The Outlaw Josey Wales and A Perfect World both mix sad humour in amongst their action, and Unforgiven is a masterpiece.
Inception was good, but I found it a little bit overrated - much of the buzz is from people who thought that because they couldn't understand it first time it must be special.
It is good, but it's not special. It's great that it's a commercial success, and that it's broken the trend of braindead blockbusters, but it's still a blockbuster.
I'll concede though that I'm not a great fan of Nolan. He's professional and competent and clearly highly successful, I'm just not drawn to his films the way many people are.
Aronofsky on the other hand knows how to reach inside me and twist. I saw Black Swan tonight (it's only just opened here in the UK) and although I left the cinema three hours ago I'm still reeling. The plot is trivial - particularly in comparison to Inception - but the acting, the direction, the pacing, the tension and the music are just stunning. By far the best film I've seen at the cinema for years.