Oh, and Command and Conquer: The First Decade keeps fucking freezing, and Yuri's Revenge won't play at all.
OK, so back to the first part ;)...
Also, I picked up Disney's World of Wonder disc, how long will calibrating my cheap HDTV take? A half hour? An hour? The blues and reds keep bleeding, for starters. It's an inexpensive LED, I'd love a plasma, but don't have the money, and won't have the chance come the end of the year. It also has a bajillion subsettings in addition to the regular controls, and I don't know what the hell they do. And that's not even counting the SRS sound, which much be useful if I was actually in the center of the room. Anyhow? Anyone done this before? How long did it take?
iCloud? After this fiasco in the news? None of those pictures are offensive or incriminating, but I still don't know.... But if it's the only way. I will respond to your post more fully when I am I have a physical computer, but in Firefox, I have set the settings to clear history when it leaves except for active logins, but for some reason, even though it saves the passwords, it doesn't keep me logged in. Previously, when I had Firefox, I was able to close Firefox and clear all of the history but keep everything out which I was logged into. Also, is there anyway to put the iPhone backups I have saved on the external hard drive back into iTunes? Just for precautionary purposes. I like having them around. Incidentally, I bought the Command and Conquer First Decade DVD, and it keeps freezing on me. It's probably because it's only designed to run with a version of Windows which is much lower than the one which I can we have, Windows 8, but is there anything to be done about it? I also have to transfer my old Firefox favorites.
And yes, Apple's podcasts app is terrible! Trying to delete something off of the phones hard drive causes it to get to leave it in the computer, and vice versa, then I have to re-download it again. I don't get why can't be like my old iPod, simply download everything on the computer, transferred to the MP3 device, and then uncheck the selection and re-sync, and it goes away. It's irritating as hell, I don't know what Apple were thinking, or perhaps they simply weren't.
Have a new computer. Don't want to sync iPhone because it has a bunch of old photos synced from old compromised computer which was hacked. I'd have SWORN I backed up my pictures on the external hard drive I used to keep most of my iTunes music, but can find it there. Outside of sending these hundreds of pictures via e-mail and then saving them onto the PC hard drive out of order since they'd all dated from when I took them and of like to keep it that way, can I do anything else? Having trouble with the Podcasts too. Why does Apple no longer have a download all option?! I keep trying to put them in from the hard drive, and the computer gets scrambled and can't seem to find the source files for them. I've tried asking about the stuff on Apple's forums, and I can't find any information from them, because apparently no on feels like answering.
I realize this is an incredibly stupid question, but as I still live with my parents, it is technically their computer. As they paid for, I have no right to complain or ask for specific features, but I want to know if the computer is capable of handling HD, and if there was any method of connecting the DVR to it to preserve some recordings I have which are not available on video. How would I tell this?
On another note, the fact that Netflix advertises super HD, I have so far been unable to get my Blu-ray player or my father Smart TV to buffer up to 1080 P, even though they are both advertised as being capable of doing it. Is it possible to get the Wi-Fi to do it without anything that cable connected to the device? It's possible to do without a VPN (which I do not want to pay for). I have heard that most ISPs will not admit it, but they throttle streaming services. When I used Vudu, sometimes it is full 1080p, but it frequently blurs. How can I tell how fast the Wi-Fi is going? When I contacted AT&T via their customer chat, they sent me to a website, and told me that the speed at which my modem was running and my wife I wore it was running more optimal, but I do not remember what that number was, or if they were simply telling me when I should get better. I'm a major digital skeptic (RIP Kodak :(), but if they want me to adopt did you want to see you soon and streaming over physical media, one of the first steps would be figuring out how the hell to solve problems like this one the data loads are so heavy.
TheBoost said:
DUCK SOUP
My five year old laughed HYSTERICALLY at Harpo. Good times.
Five Grouchos out of Five.
"He's has a change of heart."
"Yes, but unfortunately his face is still the same."
I'm remaining skeptical until I hear any official line, this sounds like the same rumors which have been flying since the Disney buyout. Even if true, there are still a half-dozen ways to mess it up and questions to answer: condition of the source elements, resolution of the master, sound mixes, color timing, and God knows what else. Still sounds strictly rumor mill until hear anything official. Just too good to be true. It's amazing how many releases omit mono mixes, and unlike screwy color timing or cropping, not nearly a big enough deal is made about them: <I>North by Northwest, Evil Dead, An American Werewolf in London, Meet Me in St. Louis, Evil Dead 2,The Terminator, <I> Leone's whole body of work, the list goes on and on. When did SW ever have mono? There have probably been at least half a dozen mixes for each movie, I assume?
FanFiltration said:
I was so happy today to find a film that I have been searching for for many many years. Close to 18 years ago, I saw the last hour on T.V., but never knew the name. Every time I would ask people if they knew what it was, they would say "Quest for Fire". That was incredibly frustrating. Well after all this time, someone replied with the film's title to a Google post describing the basic plot as I had remembered it.
Missing Link (1988)
The movie is set in Africa roughly one million years ago, at a time when one species of "man-apes" was being displaced by the ancestors of modern humans.
After experiencing a hallucination brought on by ingesting a hallucinogenic plant (possibly a reference to the stoned ape theory), he realizes the stone ax that he has been carrying after finding it at the site where his tribe was killed is a weapon. When he comes across a human footprint at the ocean shore, he sniffs it and then starts hitting it, wanting revenge against the humans.
Missing Link is an unusual film in that it blends elements of drama, documentary, and avant-garde cinema. There is no dialogue, though there is narration (by Michael Gambon). There is also very little action. Instead, the film is filled with extended, picturesque sequences reminiscent of the style often used in nature documentaries. Perhaps due to its unconventionality, the movie was not a commercial success.
This film remains out of print, and hard to find. A very poor copy is on YouTube. It's mistitled as "Missing Link - 2013 Full Movie HD". It's not from 2013, and it most certainly is not presented in HD. Worth checking out if you are a fellow psychedelic warrior.
8 Magic Mushrooms out of 10
Whatever else the Internet has done, it's certainly made it sometime barely possible to see things which were completely impossible to find once upon a time.
Anyway....
Dazed and Confused- What a difference a decade makes. First saw this on TV almost ten years ago during my own high school years. At the time, I found it a little bit nostalgic, a sort of look at what I was presumably supposed to going through during my own rigorous high school education. Now, quite apart from looking back on what I've missed, I noticed the aching streak of sad melancholia which runs through, a tale of existential emptiness and purgatorial suburban existence which though bound by its setting, is curiously forward-looking too. That's not to say that there isn't lots of humor and stoner jokes, but bubbling underneath is a much darker story, youth viewed with experience, not nostalgic, but melancholic and almost sad and existentially empty. Though there's joy in discovery, there's a darker underpinning of unrest and even sadism in the little small town setting. Committing a felony is a hell of a lot more exciting than graduating. Even the film grain now seems like a reminder of something soon-to-be-gone. Linklater's sitcom setting exists at the corner of Sartre and Camu's hell, the director's look back to the 70s defined the 90s in ways I couldn't even realize. A cast of future stars and a killer soundtrack too. Tuesday's gone, but it's what she's taken with her that you can only see in your rear-view mirror.
"It Is What It Is" by Kacey Musgraves. The closing track to her terrific new album, the first pop record I've bought in a while, a melancholy, almost detached, blunt but non-judgemental tale about a casual sex fling (Gasp!). This girl is showing me that there may he glimmers of hope for pop music.
"Too dumb to give up, to stubborn to change."
My fuckin' life story ;).
Fuji are dead and Kodak will be by the end of the year.
DrCrowTStarwars said:
darth_ender said:
I enjoyed your pretentious reviews. Don't stop. I think it's fun. We're all aspiring for something greater. No harm in getting some practice :)
Yeah well said. You can't get better at something without doing it badly.
To really get good you have to dare to be stupid,that means you can't be afraid of looking foolish.
I for example make riffed videos on Youtube and write fanfiction that mostly sucks and I know it makes me look silly and most people don't care for it but I don't care because I am also getting practice and feedback on these things so little by little I am getting better.
I think internet critic SF Debris put it best when he said "The first thing you do in any creative field is going to suck" but that is no reason to stop doing it.
I have found your reviews interesting and I think they are getting better so please don't give up.
If anyone would publish my ass, I'd be there in a heartbeat, but print magazines are all dead, and the Internet is vast.
Believe it or not, a relative of mine was involved with the making if Detropia. I've lived in the suburbs outside my whole life. Sad story, that once-great city :(. Haven't seen the film yet though.
Caché (Hidden)- My first Michael Haneke film, an unusual, icy drama shot on cool, detached digital video with a camera that rarely moves. It's nominally a thriller, but it certainly doesn't play anything like a thriller would in the US. Very European, slow, and deliberate, but with a deeply creepy atmosphere and some moments of explosive shock. Answers very few of its questions, it's one of those cryptic art films which wants to be analyzed and dissected more than liked. Fascinating movie.
Spirit of the Beehive- Fascinating, frustrating, slow, but often hypotonic Spanish art film about a little girl under the fascist Franco regime who loses her innocence to the heavy weight of the monstrous regime. It's a quiet, subtle film, and though director Victor Erice cites Ozu as a big influence, it feels like Malick with a bit of Haneke. Though acknowledged as a major influence on Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, and though it shares a number of similarities, it's a subtler, more melancholy film without any of del Toro's uplift. I was reminded of Haneke in the film's depiction of fascism's suffocating banality, characters going about their lives mechanically as creativity and reasons for living are bled away. Though the film shies away from any real violence, the atmosphere is genuinely oppressive, and highlights evil's way of taking away hope and innocence. A bit slow, but I'm not convinced I'd say "dull." I don't feel I fully acclimated to the film's pace, somehow waiting for it to "get going" as though it were a regular film. I think a second viewing is in order after some reading. As a quick side note, there's a wonderful scene where a group of children away cans of 35mm at a traveling cinema, whisked off into the world of movies through the clicking projector. Sadly, with the recent announcement of film's final death knell, it's a reminder of a vanished magic in more ways than one, and adds another sad layer to a film about loss 
.
Can we PLEASE get new forum software? Posting on this motherfucker on an iPhone is psychotically difficult!
The Third Man- A pulp writer goes to bombed-out post-war Vienna in search of a friend and finds a dark glimpse of evil. Extraordinary film noir about the darkness of humanity, set against a hellish real backdrop that no production designer could ever conceive. If you've seen this in 35mm, I envy you. You've truly gotten to see magic. A brilliant masterpiece that represents the best that filmmaking has to offer. Brilliant performances, rich atmosphere, a compelling story, noir fatalism which hasn't been darkened by our age of nihilism, a smart script, and some of the most amazing cinematography you'll ever see, bleak beauty tinged with dark and fatalistic Romanticism. Truly one of the greats.
I Know What You Did Last Summer- A post-modern slasher flick from screenwriter Kevin Williamson hot on the heels of his success with Scream. Unfortunately, director Jim Gillespie doesn't have the wit that Craven had, and characters talking about how you shouldn't do something doesn't excuse their stupidity when they do it. A cast of once hot stars who're now largely faded, it has a few pleasures, but not enough to differentiate from the endless slasher films which it attempts to imitate. Followed by a sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and a direct-to-video followup called I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer. Another installment is evidently in the works, evidently simply titled I Know. I was holding out for The Knowledge of What You Did Last Summer Remains With Me Still.
Identity- Fun and twisty thriller from director James Magnold, the ever-watchable John Cusack head up a good cast who have fun in a post-modern riff on Agatha Christie. Doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense when you stop and think about it, but rattles along a great pace while it does with some nice atmosphere. Enjoyable enough, certainly a better variation on a theme than the above.
Sherlock Jr.- Fun two-reeler from Buster Keaton. Tons of funny gags and great stunts, it holds ups surprisingly well, though of course its brief length means that it won't be that substantial, Keaton knows it and takes the chance to make something lean and mean that you don't see much of in today's age of excess.
Sholay- My first Bollywood flick, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Western with musical numbers, martial arts, and all kinds of things. Actually pretty fun in strange way.
Lagaan- Once Upon A Time India- Another Bollywood flick. I don't know anything about Cricket, and wow is it long, but it's the kind of thing Arthur Freed would've loved-lavishly colorful with fun musical numbers and old Hollywood glamor.
Django- Spaghetti Western Yojimbo knockoff with a nice muddy setting and some brutal exploitation violence. Slight, but lean, mean, and effective at what it does.
A Fistful of Dollars- Micro-budgeted Spaghetti Western that launched the careers of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood. A hugely iconic cultural touchstone, a post-modern comic book of a movie which was pretty innovative once upon a time. Though its often been imitated and has dated and lost some of its bite, Leone's grandly operatic style makes it good fun and a precursor to the more ambitious films to come later in his career.
Lately, I'm beginning to come to the uncomfortable revelation that maybe it's success...
moviefreakedmind said:
I saw someone post this on hometheaterforums.com today. Not sure if this is completely accurate but I thought i'd post this here since it sounded interesting and has to do with the 4K restoration. I personally don't know what to believe because Wielage said that they wouldn't do a 4K release, but RMW did have on their website (not anymore) that they worked on 4K, so there's no way RMW would lie about that, which begs the question of when Mr. Wielage actually wrote this.
"I thought I would pass this information along.
Marc Wielage, who worked on the 2004 Star Wars masters, and has 35 years of video mastering experience within the industry (also having worked for Technicolor and Kodak), recently commented on AVS to my question of whether he had any knowledge of any 4K Star Wars work. I won't post the link as I am not sure if that is allowed here, but he replied to me.
To my knowledge, no -- it was all 2K. Note that Episodes 2 and 3 were all shot on HD with 2K visual effects, and none of the VFX in any of the Star Wars films were more than 2K. Some of the early digital stuff in the 1990s wasn't even HD.
It's an interesting thought as to whether they'd consider rescanning 100% of the live-action film footage in Star Wars and recomping all the VFX in 4K. That would be a monstrous expense -- I'm guessing as much as $20M -- so my gut feeling is it's not gonna happen.
People get very wrapped up in 4K, but I'm not convinced it's the be-all / end-all. I think 4K can look great, and I'm all for people shooting in this format, but the post process for 4K is so torturous and expensive, I'm not sure if the world is ready for it yet. I think it can work, but when you're looking at a project with upwards of 1200 visual effects, and each one takes 2 or 3 days to bounce around to different facilities (in 2K)... multiply that times 4 and tell me what it does to the schedule.
Having said that: there are more and more TV shows shooting in 4K. Sony showed some 4K demos of The Blacklistback in April at NAB, and I thought it looked fantastic. But that's not a show with 200 effects per episode."
In other words, so not happening. We'll probably get 2K scans of the SEs at best.
I think whatever its faults, we can safely say that QOS will be the last Bong flick ever shot on 35mm :(.
Baronlando said:
Unfortunately I'm sure the disney guys are looking at the numbers for copies sold when it comes to non-new release movies and they're pretty brutal
(http://www.the-numbers.com/home-market/bluray-sales/2014 )
I'm sure Star Wars '77 would be a cut above most catalog titles and do fine, but when deciding what kind of money to spend on it: a pricey full restoration vs. a basic catalog treatment, which would be almost all gravy, it's easy to see which path they'd rather chose. I would love to be wrong.
The physical media market is as dead disco. Just further evidence that we're likely to get the short end of the stick.
It does deserve a 4K restoration, but I think Richard Dawkins will covert to Christianity before it happens. I think that the above-mentioned is probably the best-case scenario. It would certainly be better than what we've gotten previously, but in terms of film history, it probably wouldn't be the preservation it deserved of look good in the post-Blu-ray generation. And with Kodak going under by the end of the year, 4K would be a best-case for an restoration. But I suppose we'll have to take what we can get. And it's still all speculation at this point, I'm still reticent to believe even partial good news.
Harmy said:
moviefreakedmind said:
For everyone wondering whether or not the OUT will EVER be released, we'll know once they release their next blu ray release of the OT. If the OUT is not included, then they're surely going to be asked in interviews, and if they say something like, "those aren't the original vision for the films," or, "those aren't the official versions," then we'll know for sure that we'll never see them released again. If they say, "We're exploring restoration options," or, "the project could take a while," then that means they'll consider it and probably release it eventually. Finally, if it is included (which I honestly think it will be), then there's nothing to worry about.
Even if it was included, there'd still be plenty to worry about. For one, there is the issue of the transfer - there may be plenty of things to ruin that. Then there's also the possibility, of a fake OOT, where only the most obvious changes are removed from the 4K transfer of the SE they apparently already have. Disney doesn't really have a great track record in this area - lots of Disney movies are DVNRed to death and many are not available in their original theatrical form.
This. There has been so much damage done to the OOT over the years, so many different versions, they even if they were working on it, there's still plenty tobe apprehensive about.
DominicCobb said:
Don't you think using quotes at the start of your reviews feels a little trite? And why are you writing these long reviews? Is that just how you naturally express your feelings or are you trying to get published?
I'm genuinely curious.
I'm a pretentious asshole. It's supposed to sound grandiose, not trite. So goes to show how unsuccessful I was :p. I'd love to get published (I need to find a new job and fixed my messed-up life), but even if I can't, I might as well put it down in writing. Even if no one reads them, I suppose it makes me feel a little better that it's down.
I'd love a "Long live 35mm" or "Save Kodak" or some such T-shirt. Go down swinging you guys :(.
I still say it sounds too good to be true, and if it's happening, it's happening to the SEs, since those are not only easier to restore, but probably less costly. This sounds way too good to be true.
TV's Frink said:
Mike O said:
Tobar said:
I believe he wants photographic evidence of you at your keyboard whilst you were composing your review.
Nope. That could be anyone's hands.
I give up.
X-Men: Days of Future Past
"Stick with me, baby. Stick with me anyhow. Things should start to get interesting right about now."
Bob Dylan
"You'd best be careful what you wish for friend, 'cause I've been to hell and now I'm back again."
Steve Earle
"Keep what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is uniquely your own."
Bruce Lee Sing-Lung
Buckle up fanboys. Summer is here at at last, with a blast of a blockbuster to set the bar remarkable high. It's hard to believe that it's been almost 15 years since Bryan Singer first kicked off the still-strong wave of superhero films with 2000's X-Men. With top-shelf thespians and sleek direction, Singer followed in the footsteps of Donner and Burton in developing a way to depict comic-book superheroes with seriousness and a degree of intelligence. X2 was even better, a bigger and more complex sequel that set up many possibilities with its finale which unfortunately never came to fruition. Sadly, the X-Men franchise was left floundering directionless with the director's departure, devolving in a serious increasingly poor sequels. Elsewhere, Singer's career disappointed frequently, with the misconstrued Superman Returns and the amicable but unimpressive Jack the Giant Slayer. Finally regaining a degree of sanity with the the Singer-produced First Class, the man who started it all is back in the director's chair to attempt to untangle the franchise's increasingly unwieldy mythology, massive cast, and increasingly irrelevance against Marvel Studios excellent lineup. And he succeeds wildly, with easily the best superhero outing since at least Joss Whedon's The Avengers, juggling the film's ensemble cast, pop gravitas, twisty time-travel narrative, and slick, James Cameron-style action sequences, in adapting one of the comics' most celebrated storylines. It took ten years, but this is finally the sequel X-fans deserved, and more.
The story opens in the not too distant future, when the X-Men are being hunted by massive robots known as Sentinels, designed by eugenicist Bolivar Trask in an attempt to wipe out mutant-kind. Liquid metal monsters to rival the T-1000, they're adaptable and all-but invincible, and outnumber the ragtag mutants by thousands. In a horrifying holocaust in a post-apocalyptic world, the surviving mutants, hunted to near extinction, have discovered a method to travel in time and avoid their pursuers, at least in the short term, allowing the temporary avoid the ever-more powerful hunters. The whole future was instigated my Mystique's murder of Trask in the 1970s, and the time-travel just might offer a solution.But there's a catch: going back any further than a few weeks is too rigorous for anyone to survive. Except maybe a certain iconic adamantium-clawed mutant with healing powers. Going back to 1973 to stop Mystique from assassinating Trask and starting the anti-mutant mayhem, Wolverine finds Xavier a bitter and broken man from the events of First Class, and desperately tries to convince him to and his only remaining pupil, the Beast, to try to change the course of the future with the reluctant help of Magneto, who's slippery personal agenda could prove their undoing at any moment.
Wisely discarding most of the irritating "X-kids" from Vaughn's overrated X-Men: First Class while retaining the effective cast members-Mcavoy, Fassbender, Hoult, and Lawrence-and throwing in a delightful bonanza of cameos from the original cast, giving them a proper send-off after Brett Ratner's hideous X-Men: The Last Stand, Singer swings for the fences. Though the future cast is disappointingly underused as they aren't the meat of the narrative, seeing McKellen and Stewart back is simply wonderful, their chemistry and repartee remaining as delightful as ever and adding gravity to the proceedings even when delivering occasionally clunky expositon, though the majority of the narrative takes place within the past, with Hugh Jackman returning to the role he was born to play in Wolverine. Jackman remains the most perfect bit of superhero casting since Christopher Reeve donned the Man of Tomorrow's cape, Fassbender and McAvoy, especially with Stewart and McKellen alongside them (McAvoy and Stewart meet in one of the film's most inspired passages) as counterpoints, and Lawrence continues to justify her superstar status, blending sexy femme-fatale action chops with surprising vulnerability, even under layers of makeup.
Finally free of the gaudy excesses of Ratner, Vaughn, and Hood, Singer's sleek style, reminiscent of James Cameron at his peak, lends pop-gravity to the proceedings, succeeding in precisely what Vaughn attempted in First Class-tying the films historical setting with social upheavals like the original comics did. Whereas Vaughn felt like he was simply connecting the dots though, Singer properly shakes things up as much as you can in a comic-book world where nothing ever really changes, making full use of his massive budget and getting every cent up on the screen. Though the underutilized future cast feels a bit disappointing, it allows Singer to thin the ever-growing cast to allow for stronger narrative focus. The central fulcrum-the relationship between Mystique, Xavier, and Magneto-allows for an actual character-based narrative with understandable motivations on all sides. As a result, it approaches that obvious but all-too-rare point in blockbuster FX-fests of giving actual weight to the proceedings and reasons to care among the fireworks.
Elsewhere, the jokes are all zingers, particularly some lines for the fans, without spoiling too much, the resolution is wholly satisfying both on its own and a retcon to hideous previous finale, and the set pieces are all rollicking good fun. Singer's action sequences actually make spatial sense, the Sentinels are inspired in design and execution, both as futuristic hunters and clunky 70s tech, the many set pieces executed with the clean choreography of the best pop cinema, reminiscent of James Cameron at his peak, full of clean lines and a clearly delineated sense of who's doing what to whom, ending with an action climax that's both visually spectacular and emotionally satisfying. Singer cites many of his favorites as pop cinema's very best-Nicholas Meyer's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Spielberg's Jaws-and if he's not quite in their company, he's certainly on the right track. Qucksilver is an inspired creation, his bullet-time style FX as a particular highlight. Signer's use of silence, tension, judicious slow-motion, impressive choreography (some of it courtesy of ace second-unit director Greg Smrz, a John Woo alum who's clearly learned his lessons well), and the stylish cinematography and punchy editing of his top lieutenants- superb DP Thomas Newton Seigel and and editor and composer John Ottman, who lend the film a gorgeous, slightly expressionistic color palette (shot in rich digital with some period footage shot gloriously on celluloid, and occasionally hiding some rather claustrophobic sound-stages) and strong rhythm. For once, bloat isn't a problem as the film's outward expansion actually suggests a larger universe (rumored deleted scenes hint at future treats as Blu-Ray extras) and the film's running time flies by.
Setting the bar impressively high for the rest of the summer, X-Men finally earn some of their glory back, suggesting that this franchise, once on life support, might still have some life left in it yet. Sleek, smart, stylish, funny, and thoroughly entertaining, the gang's all here, and they're better than ever. Though this proves a satisfying denouement, a post-credits stinger nonetheless hints at a new villain and future adventures. But if the world is in peril again, we needn't worry. With Singer back at the helm, we're in good hands. It's great to have him back at last. To me, my X-Men. The bar is high for Avengers: Age of Ultron. Finally, the X franchise is as good as it deserves to be again at long last.
Tobar said:
I believe he wants photographic evidence of you at your keyboard whilst you were composing your review.
