Re: Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Deadwood)
Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2020 2:13 pm
You're talking to a guy that started this year by watching nearly 800 hours of a table-top RPG streaming show. ;)Raxivace wrote:I think its a very engaging show but man there is a lot of it if you start now. They just wrapped up airing their 40th season a couple of months ago, and you have to commit for that much of something.Eva Yojimbo wrote:Interesting stuff. Makes me wish I'd watched it more growing up. I remember when the first season was a big deal, and I think I caught an episode or two but that was back before I had a DVR so if I wanted to watch a show weekly I had to program the VCR, which was a PITA.
I saw the Millionaire one to, but I never got around to the PYL one.Raxivace wrote:I've seen both of these documentaries, but its been a very long time since the Press Your Luck one. The WWTBAM one is interesting because the first hour is just a typical documentary about the guy, how they cheated, the consequences etc., and then the last 20 minutes or whatever are just his segment of the WWTBAM episode he was on played uninterrupted. You go into that footage now knowing how he was cheating though (IIRC it was a friend of his in the audience that would cough when the host would read the correct answer to a question), allowing you to "spot" the methods and such being used in real time- it becomes almost a game in its own right. Good stuff.I heard about that Press Your Luck guy. I know they did a documentary on that, as well as the guy that cheated on UK's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
I think both Doc and Farnum represent missed opportunities to an extent. I mean, I like what they did with both characters for the most part but I feel like there was more that could've done in later seasons, or perhaps even in earlier seasons if they'd spread the attention around a little more.Raxivace wrote:There's the whole war veteran angle with Doc too that was interesting.Would've been cool to have a Doc-centered storyline that didn't solely revolve around a plague or someone else's illness. Definitely would've been funny too if Farnum was the one to burn everything down because of his petty bruised ego, lol.
I think it honestly could have worked with Farnum. Like seeing a guy that was nominally the mayor just turning like that could have been good.
That's fair enough. I generally don't get upset about the directions characters go in as long as there's some justification for it and it doesn't seem to come completely out of nowhere, so I doubt seriously if a character not ending up being a hero would bother me. If anything, it sounds quite interesting. From your description I'm also getting Shinji-esque vibes from it: setting a character up to be the hero, but then subverting those expectations.Raxivace wrote:I'll try and dance around spoilers here, but with GoT its more that a character many people projected hard onto ended up not being the hero they thought they were going to be despite the character doing plenty of questionable shit throughtout the entire series and them doing something awful at the end of it that they had been saying they were going to do that entire show anyways...All good points here. Yeah, Tarantino gets away with it because he's very self-aware and Basters is very open about being historical fantasy. Deadwood very much wasn't that, or wasn't that until the film at least. Dead on about people disliking uncertainty and ambiguity, especially when it comes to endings. I'd also say it's even more true when it comes to TV because people invest so much time into TV I think they feel like they deserve to end on some kind of conclusive note. Sopranos received a lot of hate for its ending for similar reasons (its ambiguity). I haven't seen GOT but I've wondered if the hate around its final season/ending isn't for similar reasons.
Yikes. Well, I know they've come a long way in treating Alzheimer's since I was a kid. My great grandmother had it from the time I was little and in her late years she didn't remember anyone or anything. It was pretty sad, especially for my grandmother who'd taken care of her for decades, and she didn't even remember her.Raxivace wrote:Supposedly Milch had Alzheimer's already while writing the movie too, and well I don't make light of that but I have to imagine that affected the quality of his writing.Yeah, I agree with all of this. I can understand fan reactions being positive because fans root for the good guys and want the bad guys to get their comeuppances; but it is weird how critics have accepted it so, errr, uncritically. I'm sure Milch wanted to make the film to have an appropriate end of the series, but I do wonder how much pressure he felt to please fans and wrote it with that in mind.
LOL, sorry. Dirac is a Room Correction algorithm similar to Audyssey. If you've ever had an AVR that gave you a microphone and told you to set it up at various points in your room and then it made all the speakers do frequency sweeps, that's the basic idea. These programs measure how your room responds to sound and then adjusts accordingly for an even frequency response and also sets the frequency crossover between the speakers and subwoofer. Different programs do this differently. Dirac is almost universally recognized as the best when it comes to music as it was made by the company (Harmon) on the forefront of audio engineering science. Audyssey is fine for movies, but people have always complained it sounded crappy on music. A big reason for that is that there's an industry standard for mixing movies, but not for music, and Audyssey is tuned for the former.Raxivace wrote:Dirac...as in, Dirac sea. That's that thing from Eva. I understand these words you're saying and what they mean.TBH, the thing that's taken me so long with my system is that I'd really love to invest in a full 4K system, but 4K AVRs are still kind of a mess and I also need to serve as a music system (which means an AVR with Dirac) as well as a home theater, and it's tough finding an AVR and player that can do everything I need. I keep thinking that if I wait long enough the ideal products will come along, but every time I check AVS forums people are complaining about the newest players/AVRs not being stable and tons of features having bugs. The good AVRs with Dirac are also still stupidly expensive ($4k is on the cheap side. :( ).
I wasn't crazy about Eternal Sunshine, but if you see Je t'aime, je t'aime there's no missing the influence.Raxivace wrote:Tbh I've never quite seen Eternal Sunshine before. A teacher in high school put it on at the end of the year once, but the sound quality was basically inaudible and I had no idea what was happening. I dunno if that was also because of the Dirac sea but it sucked.Resnais was definitely the filmmaker most obsessed with memory. Muriel and Providence are about memory too, and Je t'aime, je t'aime is even a sci-fi film where a guy takes part in an experiment that backfires and he ends up reliving his past at random (that film was a huge influence on Eternal Sunshine too).
Even with that, though, it's an extremely odd way to make any kind of sequel, tenuously connected or not. I can't think of an analog in film history.Raxivace wrote:That the connection is only tenuous honestly works in 10CL's favor, because the characters themselves don't actually know what's going on because they're locked in a bunker the whole movie, and its like you're trying to figure out alongside the characters if its actually a Cloverfield sequel or just a thematic connection a la Twilight Zone or something.TBH, I always thought Cloverfield was an odd film to make into a franchise, maybe because the initial film just works so well as a standalone entity, and, from what I've heard, 10CL is pretty tenuously connected to the events in the first film.
Even without that though, John Goodman of Pyst fame is just awesome in the movie.
I also wrote a long review for Red Desert that was on Cinelogue, and I'm pretty sure I still have it in my emails. I loved that film too. It felt like the most personal/emotional of all Antonioni's films.Raxivace wrote:I'll have to keep this in mind when I was L'Eclisse. I ordered the Red Desert blu-ray too btw.
Perhaps I should try that, though I'm not sure if that search would "see through" the spoiler tags either.Raxivace wrote:You might have more success if you use EGF's internal search function.As my reviews got longer I started hiding them under spoiler tags to take up less room on the forums, but the downside is that now I can't find them with a Google search.