Only ran into one page in the ESB that it couldn't read properly for whatever reason, but I was able to get all the subs in one evening.
The Backstroke dub turned my friend into a Star Wars fan. It was beautiful.
^ Same thing goes for the Prequels. Oh hey, look at that, back on topic!
Seriously, though, there are scriptwriting classes and seminars even at community colleges. It's not like it's this lost art, some sort of deep magic that was only known to the druids who used it to build Stonehenge. Learning how to write a decent script is totally possible, even for Lucas and Shyamalan.
OH GOD DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION
That was the most unintentionally hilarious movie I'd seen in a long time. It's right up there with Dragonball: The Magic Begins in terms of badness (but without the cheesy Chinese knockoff charm.)
Backstroke of the West. Hands down, my favorite thing about the Prequels.
On a more relevant note, I've always been an Obi-Wan fangirl, which is what kept me coming back to the theaters to see the prequels.
M. Night approached Michael and Bryan and said 'I want to make a live-action film version of your show--my entire family loves it'. Then they proceeded to allow M. Night to also write the film, instead of doing the screenplay themselves.
Devil seemed more like his usual stuff.
No, I get it, and I agree--in fact, they both seem to have begun their downward spirals at about the same time...
Perhaps the trees in Hollywood were doing something particularly funky.
Tack said:
Lucas to me is like the successful version of M. Night Shyamalan.
Lucas' early films like SW, American Graffiti, or Indiana Jones, are essentially his The Sixth Sense and Unbreakables.
Lucas has not had his The Last Airbender or After Earth.
The prequels were Lucas' Signs and Lady in the Water, and Red Tails was his The Happening.
^ Implying that Shyamalamadingdong isn't (inexplicably) successful.
And I can't think of anyone who continues kissing Shyamalan's ass and insists that TLA is brilliant no matter how much CGI is used in it, and in fact, it has more real people and miniatures and models than the original animated series, therefore it's BETTER (and don't forget The Great Divide; QED).
I discovered that yes, Stellarium will simulate eclipses, as long as you've got your GPS coordinates set right.
I'm gonna bet $5 that the Japanese OCR that this program does is a modification of their Traditional Chinese OCR--because it's AWESOME at reading kanji, it's pretty good at hiragana, and runs into a lot of the problems that first and second-semester Japanese students have with katakana. I ran a quick test, and it performed really well; every single error I found was in kana, lol.
This program would work really well for the transcribing portion, at least in my language. Correcting the mistakes that it does make is no big deal, and the rest of the work is just the other tedious portions--double-checking, formatting and putting in time codes, lol.
Pretty much the hardest part of transcribing the Japanese is, like, the first 100-200 lines--most of the important terms in the movie will have been said by then ('Rebel army secret base', 'Battle station', etc.), so fewer and fewer terms have to be looked up in order to get readings for them. After that, it's just a matter of finding enough motivation to crank out the lines, lol.
Since every line of OCR'd text would have to be checked anyway, I'm not sure how much time it would actually save over just doing it by hand. But I'm definitely intrigued. If it works well, then I might be able to help proof Traditional Chinese, if no one else actually, y'know, knows Mandarin (I know Classical Chinese, and I know my way around Traditional hanzi, but I don't actually speak Chinese, and I'm hopeless with Simplified).
That conflict with his heritage was one of the things I really liked about Worf's relationship with K'Ehleyr, and then his relationship with Alexander.
Yeah, Pen Pals and Homeward are episodes where the PD is basically just thrown in to create conflict (kind of like that Season 1 episode where the racist stereotype kidnapped Tasha to be his bride--about halfway through they were like 'This is a Prime Directive episode now!', and it was stupid).
Homeward seemed like a REALLY weak PD justification--I get that it's basically a rough draft of Dear Doctor, and it tries to raise a question (too bad that question is so easily answered). But the fact that, if the society had been more advanced, they would have happily tried to save the planet (like in Deja Q, where they try to stop the moon from crashing, and all of the other gajillion episodes where they intercede because the society is advanced enough to have radio) rubs me the wrong way.
On the other hand, why isn't Journey's End a Prime Directive episode? Why isn't every interaction with the Crystalline Entity a Prime Directive episode? Why isn't The Masterpiece Society a Prime Directive episode until, like, the last 30 seconds? (And at that point, why bother? The episode already asked a big enough question.) And what about 'Suddenly Human', where they decide to disrupt things because it's a human kid (as if they would have happily turned over a teenage Worf if the Klingons showed up one day and said 'He's one of our species, give him back to us')?
And this is why I have a Prime Directive Day, lol.
(Just wish I could have found a good way to work in a 'Good Troi Episode' day, and showed Face of the Enemy.)
Seems like those sort of mix-ups happen a lot...
Finally wrapped up everything that needed doing and broke out the Navajo dub. Man, Han and Leia's dub actors NAILED it, Luke sounded the opposite of whiny, and I'm digging the female Threepio.
Yeah, I remember when Voyager first came on air. I was in, like, kindergarten, and I was really excited to see a woman in the big chair...but I still wanted to be Data when I grew up. (Now that I'm older, I feel physical pain when I watch Janeway's command style.)
Enterprise is a guilty pleasure half the time. The other half of the time, I think it's punishing me for enjoying any part of it.
Yup. Should provide plenty of 'WTF' discussion!
I included episodes from all 5 series, though I'm a die-hard TNG fan. It was a bit difficult, since episodes which ask interesting questions are rather unusual (and far outnumbered by 'What if they got stuck on the Holodeck again?'-type episodes, which are admittedly fun but don't really fit the angle I was trying to sell the class on). And sometimes, it was a bit of a stretch, but this class is mostly an excuse to watch Star Trek every week anyway, so I'm not beating myself up too much over whether or not Space Seed is actually a good counterpart to the questions raised in Duet. But at the beginning of each class, I'll put the class to a vote to see which of the two episodes we'll watch--and then I'll cross my fingers and hope they choose the better of the two.
Here's the episode list and the themes I was stretching to the point of breaking to get them on the episode list. I freely admit that I just picked some of my favorite episodes from all five series and then tried to pair them up with similar episodes:
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1. Do 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few'? In these episodes, captains must decide if it is worth it to kill one to save millions. TOS 01x29 The City on the Edge of Forever/TNG 03x26 The Best of Both Worlds |
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2. Where does personhood lie? In these episodes, captains must deal with the ethics surrounding personhood. VOY 02x24 Tuvix/ENT 03x10 Similitude (Bonus: TNG 02x09 Measure of a Man touches on similar themes regarding Data and personhood rather than cloning and personhood, and doesn't put the captain in the position of executioner, so everyone goes home happy.) |
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3. Is The Prime Directive a good thing? In these episodes, captains must wrestle with Starfleet Directive #1: Starfleet may not interfere in the social order of any planet. TNG 03x04 Who Watches the Watchers/ENT 01x13 Dear Doctor (Bonus: The opening segment of Star Trek Into Darkness deals directly with the question of the Prime Directive, and more to the point, it emphasizes the gravity that the Federation and Starfleet gives to it's Directive #1 by actually punishing someone for violating it.) |
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4. What responsibility does society have to war criminals? In these episodes, crews must deal with heinous figures from past wars. TOS 01x23 Space Seed/DS9 01x19 Duet |
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5. Is victory worth it if you must sacrifice all that your side stands for? In these episodes, captains must wrestle with the problem of personal integrity in times of war. DS9 06x19 In the Pale Moonlight/ENT 03x14 Stratagem |
The other requirement for episodes was 'All of the options that I give them have to be episodes I'm okay with watching for the umpteenth time', so you'll notice the lack of Wesley Crusher-centric episodes. (And yes, that was me admitting that I kinda-sorta like Enterprise.)
My local community college just approved my course on 'Ethics and Star Trek'.
The class is basically this: Every Thursday night, we watch an episode of Star Trek, then we talk about how that episode featured a terrible justification for the Prime Directive.
Imasu. Sumimasen. Osoku narimashita.
Episode VII: An Unexpected Journey
Episode VIII: Fifty Shades of Gray Jedi
Episode IX: Twelve Years a Sith
The weather is nice today. I KNEW THAT GOAT I SACRIFICED WOULD BE WORTH IT!
Bingowings said:
Sadako said:
The total lack of physical clone troopers was obvious in close-ups, but the mo-cap of their movements in combat was exquisite (in ROTS, at least). I'll give them that much...
...but the CGI in close-ups gets so distracting. Kind of like CGI Threepio in AOTC. (Though the '64 box of crayons' comment was apt.)
Even some of the close ups weren't that bad to be honest.
CGI is good at doing shiny plastic. Throwing in a few real suits during close up scenes would have tricked the eye into believing the illusion more.
The bottom line is the script sucked. If that worked few people would have cared if some of the FX looked a bit weird.
^ This, 110%.
In wide shots, the CGI shiny plastic looks fine, but the shot of the Troopers' feet when they're about to shoot Ki-Adi-Mundi always stood out to me as extremely obvious CGI. They're boots. Why are they so clean? And why would you need to CG boots, anyway? (That was the point where I understood that ALL of the clone troopers were CGI, and had always been CGI. And no one was surprised that day.)
<p>The total lack of physical clone troopers was obvious in close-ups, but the mo-cap of their movements in combat was exquisite (in ROTS, at least). I'll give them that much...</p>
<p>...but the CGI in close-ups gets so distracting. Kind of like CGI Threepio in AOTC. (Though the '64 box of crayons' comment was apt.)</p>
I've been grinding through Clone Wars, too, and I've found that going in with VERY low expectations has greatly improved my viewing experience.