It’s funny how they put love last, like it was some sort of startling revelation and the tagline was supposed to be clever.
It could have been clever if the movie convinced us of the reasoning behind such a Jedi rule, and sold us on the romance that abrogated it.
Made myself some spaghetti for supper since no one wanted to cook and I wasn’t in the mood for leftover turkey.
The sauce was bitter.
Adding a spoonful of sugar makes the spaghetti sauce go down.
Yep 😃
I’ve noticed that the 1997 changes are often the most degraded shots in the film, which is strange because, as they are much more recent than the 1977 film, they should be in better shape. But more often than not I’m having to repair the color. I guess these additions were even more shoddily preserved than the original elements.
Emperor: "Now, young Skywalker…you will die."
Vader: "I don’t think so. No one can kill a Jedi."
Luke (Writhing in pain): “I wish that were so.”
https://www.wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36082
This John Podesta email has been verified as authentic. As it reads, it may be the reason the murder of Seth Rich is being looked at more closely than before. Not to mention, Seth Rich’s computer has gone missing. The FBI and DC Police keep referring the investigator back and forth between each other and no answers are ever provided.
Seth Rich and his family deserve justice.
Is murder really the first thing people jump to when they read this email chain? Because the first thing I assumed was that the Hillary campaign would consider firing someone whom they suspected of leaking info. That would be the next step up from ‘internal discipline’, I assume.
Also, from the NYT concerning the detective and Fox News commentator Wheeler:
The Rich family regrets hiring Mr. Wheeler and has objected to his many public comments.
Mr. Bauman, a communications professional who often represents Democratic causes and has worked as a pro bono spokesman for the family since last summer, said Wednesday afternoon that the family was asking that Fox News and the Fox affiliate retract their reports and apologize for damaging their sons legacy.
Mr. Bauman said that the Riches had retained Mr. Wheeler on the advice of Ed Butowsky, a Dallas businessman and conservative commentator who offered to pay for the investigator’s services.
Aaron Rich, Mr. Rich’s brother, said in an email Wednesday that Mr. Wheeler had “discredited himself as an objective investigator” and had lost the confidence of the family. He said that the politicization of his brother’s death had been “painful” and “debilitating.”
“Why everyone feels the need to use his death for their own motives is beyond us,” he wrote. “We simply want to find his killers and grieve. Instead, we are stuck having to constantly fight against non-facts, baseless allegations, and general stupidity to defend my brother’s name and legacy.”
He continued, “This only prevents us from moving forward in our grieving and distracts from answering the only question that matters — Who murdered my brother and my parents’ son, Seth?”
This transition gave me some headaches:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/210167
Status Update:
Reel 1: Preliminary Grade 100% - Finalized 100%
Reel 2: Preliminary Grade 90% - Finalized 60%
Reel 3: Preliminary Grade 100% - Finalized 90%
Reel 4: Preliminary Grade 100% - Finalized 100%
Reel 5: Preliminary Grade 100% - Finalized 93%
Reel 6: Preliminary Grade 85% - Finalized 85%
Total Preliminary: 95.8% - Finalized 88%
I had been getting burned out on this lately, so I worked on other projects for a while. But it’s inching closer, and I’m determined to finish soon. 😃
-R2 will continue hiding behind rocks for the entirety of the Saga.
I really disagree with that analysis. During Watergate, 2/3 of the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee voted against all impeachment charges. And that’s after there was an actual audio recording of the President committing the crimes he was charged with. Direct evidence like that is very rare, even in normal criminal cases–usually convictions hinge upon a pile-up of circumstantial evidence that can’t be explained away by any other plausible scenario (i.e. “beyond reasonable doubt”). That’s much more likely to be the case here.
So if the case against Trump never gets as bulletproof as the case against Nixon, I’d say well over 2/3 of the Republican members of the relevant committees will avoid taking any action at all. Which is more than enough to ensure nothing happens. And Republicans won’t see any blowback regardless of how big the scandal becomes. As long as Trump’s approval stays above ~32%, they keep the Senate–with no real risk of losing it until 2022. The House is theirs until 2022 even if voters overwhelmingly prefer Democrats–and it’ll likely remain theirs after 2022 if they keep control of the redistricting process. What other changes may happen to our election system before 2022 is also worth considering.
If the scandals keep going at their current rate (major scandal every 12 hours or so, no actual video footage of Trump eating the puppy, just twelve witnesses), I think we’re looking at a second Trump term. That’s not doomed.
I think there are some additional factors to take into consideration here. One of them is that Trump has already made quite a few enemies in Congress, and he’s proving to be an embarrassment in terms of policy. Nixon was at least a savvy politician. There is also the matter of the crime. The Russia collusion has the potential to be much bigger than Watergate, if any hard evidence surfaces. Of course, there has been an erosion of values in Congress leading them to look the other way even when faced with wrongdoing, so perhaps these factors cancel out. But I don’t think that he is in a better position than Nixon at this point in his presidency.
Although ‘a mixed bag’ sometimes refers to a plastic bag that has been stirred in a bowl, more often it is used to describe a situation that has both good parts and bad parts. For example, if a promotional image for a television show starred Michelle Yeoh but also looks like it was greenscreened despite being apparently shot on location.
-Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator
Seriously? Sequel in name only, or is anyone from the first one involved? And what movies did they steal footage and music from this time?
It’s an official sequel, but they had a budget this time, so they didn’t have to pilfer better movies for SFX and music. Yet in spire of that, it’s actually worse than the original.
Sometimes a bigger budget elevates a so-bad-it’s-good movie to the level of it’s-just-bad. That happened with the latest movie I made with my friends.
I think subtlety is a valiant expectation for the posters on this thread.
The sequels went more heavily into the ‘cool’ greens than the first film, so it was a deliberate creative decision going forward (and seemingly, going back). http://www.dvdactive.com/editorial/articles/the-matrix-visual-comparison.html
The way I interpret the color shift from the first to the second film is that in the first one, the Matrix seems real from Neo’s point of view up until the end where he sees the green code running through the walls. The later films would then be heavily green because Neo sees that world as a computer simulation and his worldview has biased itself towards Zion and away from the Matrix.
Looking at the 35mm scan, there are many scenes that are still too yellow, and in particular the skin tones tend towards yellow even in the Nebuchadnezzar. Some scenes in the Matrix have a subtle green tint particularly in later scenes, but it’s far more subtle than even the DVD. I think this is accurate despite the uneven grading of this particular print, since I don’t see much evidence of the greenish-brown tint so prevalent in the DVD. “Deliberate Creative Decisions” were made for both the DVD and Blu-ray.
Indeed, the attempt to remove all the green was really just for fun, but there is some purpose in that all indications are that the green tint in the original Matrix film was more subtle than later installments, and the Blu-ray absolutely overdid this. So the actual look would be between this and the Blu-ray.
I just used online screencaps for this comparison, so hopefully the blu-ray will have more shadow detail.
The Oracle scene, and really any scene that was supposed to have strong greens in the original photography, was unduly affected.
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/209795
I’ve managed to refine the grade somewhat, so the Oracle scene isn’t quite so red. here is what it looks like throughout:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/209792
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/209793
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/209794
JEDIT: Further tweaking gets it closer to the source image:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/209827
The issue was that when I applied it to almost any other scenes, it was too much. The second one looks more natural for more scenes.
My mother and grandmother both saw a UFO in West Virginia when my mother was very small, and they both still remember it. They were walking down the street one afternoon and a bright light seemed to follow them, and when they stopped at the corner and turned onto another street the light did a 90 degree turn as well. They started to get scared and run, and the light followed them, apparently disappearing before they reached home. Neither of them has any idea what it could have been.
That sounds a bit like ball lightning, which is pretty freaky and rare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
It could have been that, though they are specific in that it did a 90 degree turn and followed them up the road. Perhaps it was following the power lines.
In my Star Wars project I was able to use some of the color (chroma) of 35mm sources overlaid on the blu-ray, but this requires almost frame by frame image registration to prevent misalignment due to the natural gate weave of the film. I would not recommend mixing and matching luma between sources because humans can much more easily detect luma than they can chroma, and the alignment would have to be perfect.
The channel mixer is a powerful tool, and I used that in conjunction with a curves adjustment to remove the green tint in the Blu-ray: (from the Matrix 53mm thread) http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/209768
My guidelines for channel mixer use are to leave the ‘constant’ values at 0, and make sure that each of the 3 channels equals 100.
Here’s a version with just a hint of the green remaining:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/209768
Just something I mocked up for fun from a previous image:
http://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/209738/picture:1
This is using the same settings:
However, the scenes not set in the matrix don’t fare so well. This is probably what the film looked like before the green tint.
There are two opposing narratives concerning the firing of Comey. The Democrats claim that he fired him because he was worried that the investigation would find evidence of his collusion with Russia. The Republicans claim that he fired Comey because of various and changing reasons concerning Comey’s job performance.
I don’t find either narrative to be convincing, for several reasons.
With regards to the Democratic narrative, Trump seems all too calm (for someone who is usually animated) to be fearful of impeachment. His interviews show a man as casual with the truth as he ever was on the campaign trail, a man who should surely be more guarded in his answers if he thought that he was guilty. His tweet, that Comey should be fearful of ‘tapes’ existing of their meetings in the White House, would be childish and thuggish intimidation if it was meant in all seriousness. However, Trump may be continuing some form of personal joke in the vein of Obama wiretapping Trump Tower. In other words, ‘you’d better hope that Obama didn’t wiretap us both, or your previous boss may be in a lot of trouble’ (JEDIT: What Catbus said). This seems like the type of moronic trolling that Trump is accustomed to, and the fact that he doesn’t spell this out is potential evidence that he is slyly pushing the Democrats’ buttons at the same time as he is speaking to Comey and his base.
With regards to the Republican narrative, this was too abrupt a firing to be merely a further ‘draining of the swamp’. His attempts to spin this as such are transparent. He is clearly acting to put the chill on the Russia investigation, and he is genuinely surprised that the Democratic establishment would be angry at this, since he so blindly assumes that he is innocent. How could it be problematic to fire the man in charge of the Russia investigation if he isn’t under suspicion? He wants Russia as a friend and so he doesn’t consider that this investigation is relevant to his administration at all. This is why he abruptly fired Comey. He’s the decider, and to have an independent lawman who won’t kiss his ring is beyond offensive. I believe that Trump was acting very much as his role on The Apprentice in firing Comey, and didn’t care that it may be seen as improper.
This is an unprecedented event in our nation’s history, and a foreboding one. Trump clearly doesn’t care about democratic norms or even pretending to act like anything other than a glorified mob-boss. He thinks that he’s fabulously smart and politically savvy, and though he is neither of these things, he does have the lizardlike sense of how to manipulate large groups of people. Case in point, he did little to erode his previous support (the polls are basically unchanged in this regard), and he also made the Democratic establishment and media overreact by acting in ways that looked from their perspective like he was guilty as sin. Taking the cynical approach - and I hope I’m wrong about this - this looks like a win for him. Of course, it’s devastating for norms, democracy, bipartisanship, and anything other than Donald J Trump.
I absolutely wouldn’t want to see Porkins go either but I like where sansuni is coming from.
Behind?
Sounds like someone needs to pick up their visual scanning.
