xhonzi

darth_ender said:

My italicized "obviously" in the above quote was intended to convey sarcasm. Not sure that it worked now :(

For my part, I took your sarcasm well, but I did first think you wrote Hobbit when you meant Star Wars.  Then I realized you had already changed subjects to Tolkien somewhat stealthily midsentence.  It amused me, so I reposted it.  :)

darth_ender said:
I encourage you to read the books, xhonzi. You might enjoy the differences and the resulting approaches Jackson and Co. took to the different films.

I don't know when I gave off the impression that I had not read the books.  I have read them.  I have read the 4 'standard works' as it was, and read some of the Silmarillion and Christopher's works.  I've read the Hobbit the most since I read it at 8 or 9 and 3 or 4 times since.  I read the first 30 pages of Fellowship almost as many times, but as a kid it never hooked me the way that Hobbit did.  I've read LotR as an adult, when the movies reminded me that I needed to go back and do just that.

As I said before, Hobbit holds a special place in my childhood that LotR doesn't, but as the adult that I am today, I would rather sit through a version of The Hobbit that is "the version that happened" rather than "the way ol' liar Bilbo told it".

I think Jackson & Co. made some great edits in LotR (some not so great, as well).  I think Tolkien was a very fallible story teller and didn't always have the reader's best interest in mind.  PJ & Co. went so far in their adaptation of The Hobbit, and for my money I wish they had gone further.

Yes, but the level of my posting and the comparative level of my posting seem to be in balance.  (in both 2012 and 2013, by the way)

Have you not noticed that the level of C3PX/CP3S posting and the number of threads/threats he starts is way out of balance!?!?  Of all the 'regulars', he almost never creates threads/threats, despite what he claims here.

I think he's afraid of the New Thread Thread.

CP3S said:

...the universe of the LOTR films by feeling in the blanks...

 Eh?

darth_ender said:

Unlike George Lucas, who obviously had things planned out from the very beginning, when the Hobbit was written

Erm...?

Akwat Kbrana said:

Insofar as the written works are concerned, there is a massive tonal difference between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Jackson didn't dissolve that tonal difference entirely (which would've been disrespectful to the novel), but neither did he preserve it entirely (which would've created significant tonal "whiplash" between the two film trilogies). Instead, he "split the difference," which IMO is probably the best approach he could've taken.

I don't know.  I didn't know until yesterday that Tolkien was actually rewriting the entire book of The Hobbit to match The Lord of the Rings when he wrote that new chapter for The Hobbit.  So Tolkien agreed that the story needed to be aggressively rewritten to match, and that didn't seem to him to be disrespectful to the original book.  But apparently he never finished the rewrite because he had a hard time reconcilling the two and recognizing the new bits as "The Hobbit". 

So whilst he wanted to rewrite it, the challenge was enough to make him give up.

Part of the rumour I heard was that Jackson & Co. had access to the partial rewrite (as far as I know, it's not publicly available) when formulating the new movies.  It makes me wonder what parts of the movie come from there, especially Bilbo's reasoning with the trolls.  But if he were rewriting it, why would he leave the silliness in?

At the end of the day, most of you seem to be satisfied with where the needle between 'Faithful to the 1937 book' and 'Faithful to Everything Else (LotR Books and Movies, etc.)' landed.  I am not.  As Awkat said, he split the difference... and I wish the difference had been split a little more to the one side.  As it is, I find it frustrating.

*Note- quoted typos and oddly formed sentences posted for amusement only.

Ripplin said:

But nobody knows anything about Frink!

He's terrible at Halo.

And here's where I call down the fires of heaven upon my poor little head...

The last move I saw was: Journey 2 the Mysterious Island, and it was really fun.  More importantly, it wasn't disappointing or frustrating at all.  Just fun.

Maybe I'm getting senile, but I think at this point in time I'd rather watch a "try nothing" pile of silliness like Journey 2, or Battleship and not have any expectations and not be disappointed than walk out of Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus, Skyfall, The Hobbit, and Les Miserables (all films that try for something grand) with a mixed bag of disappointments and frustrations.

I feel a bit like Winston Smith deciding to stop fighting and just embrace that Freedom is Slavery afterall.  Movies that don't try to be good don't have to be good to be good.

The problem is that my favourite movies are the kind that reach high and succeed.  So I will probably continue to look for excellence in movies that attempt to offer it, and rejoice in the few that do whilst I find myself disappointed in the many that don't. 

I feel obligated to point out that C3PX made a thread in 2012.  It's true.

Tobar said:

Basically you hate J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit and wanted a prequel to Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy.

xhonzi said (in ink!):

Not terrible.  Fun, but not the experience I was hoping for.  

I still think I overall liked it, but here are the reasons I'm not over the moon.

10/14 party members

Hey now... is 10/14 (~7/10) equivalent to hate these days?  I didn't hate the smoothie (this term doesn't seem to be taking off the way I hoped) but I didn't love it.  Nor do I hate the book.  I have fond memories of reading it as a child, but as a thinkining man, I struggle to reconcile it with LotR...

I think Tolkien changed his mind as to what Middle Earth was betwixt the writing of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  The Goblin king, in the novel and all adaptations I've seen, seems to have just finished taking his afternoon tea when the party bursts in.

I don't think any goblins in LotR take tea.

Since The Hobbit already exists in its current form as a book and a cartoon, I was hoping that the Jackson team was going to bring the story more in harmony with the adjusted world of the Lord of the Rings.  They did somewhat- the Elves that appear in the 2012 film are definitely the elves from LotR books/films and not from the 1937 novel.  I just wish that the Trolls and the Goblin king were given more of the same treatment, though that would have had a more destructive/reconstructive effect than the changing of the elves.

Hobbit-

Not terrible.  Fun, but not the experience I was hoping for.  It's pretty tough, because most of the stuff I have to complain about comes straight from the book, but I was still hoping the Jackson team could have pulled something better off.

I still think I overall liked it, but here are the reasons I'm not over the moon.

I posted my rambling about the HFR in the 48fps thread, so this review is just about the movie part.

SPOILERS FOLLOW throughout:

Talking creatures.  Trolls, Goblin Kings, etc... are all extremely verbose.  Yes, I realize this is exactly the same in the book.  But it's such a tonal shift from LotR where the beasts are beasts.  And a troll named Tom, really?  I realize that they couldn't have removed the talking without totally rewriting the scene and that probably wouldn't have ended well...  But talking trolls?  Maybe the whole story should have been told by Bilbo to Frodo and Pippin, and when the trolls talked to Bilbo, who believes all good stories should be exaggerated, it cuts back to some doubting younger hobbits and Bilbo saying "it's my story, let me tell it" or something like that.  Maybe not that exactly, but I guess I think the disconnect between the Hobbit and LotR can be explained by Bilbo being an unreliable narrator.  

The "Gimli is funny and short" bits are some of my least favourite of LotR, so I figured 12 Gimlis would only increase the dwarven humour.  I was prepared for it, but I still don't really care for it.  Some of it was legitimately funny, but it's not the droid I'm looking for.

Bilbo gets himself in trouble, and the dwarves heroically run in from the right side of the frame to save him.  Seems like I saw this once more than I needed to.

Radagast.  This sequence seemed longer than it should have been.  The whole time I thought, "I'm gonna fan-edit this whole scene out of the movie".  Unfortunately, at least parts of it become necessary once he runs into the party.  But still, it was too long and too weird for my tastes.

The "MY NAME IS ROBIN.  YOU KNOW, LIKE BATMAN AND ROBIN.  GET IT?" (or Moneypenny) scene in this movie for me was instead at the start.

FRODO: Well... see you later, Bilbo.
BILBO: Where are you going, my lad?
F: Well, it's the morning of your birthday party, so even the casual viewer probably knows that I'm going to go sit under a tree and wait for Gandalf to come at the start of Fellowship.
B: I don't know.  You can't trust an audience to get these things unless they're YELLED AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS.  I SAY, WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
F: TO WAIT FOR GANDALF.  YOU KNOW, *WINK, WINK*.
B: OKAY, TRY TO NOT HAVE ANY ADVENTURES!  (giggle)

I have seen the Gollum act before, and I was prepared to not be amazed.  But so help me it was amazing.  Best part of the show.

Unfortunately, I felt like every possible cameo had already been shoehorned into the movie before then, so I wasn't sure if Gollum wasn't deflated a bit by that.  Again, I'm struggling with this...  I know a lot of Jackson's goal was to show the seeds of LotR during The Hobbit, so the mini-council' scene was just that and there's no reason to think all of those characters couldn't have been there... but I was still thinking young Chewbacca might have shown up at any instant.

The stone giant scene could have been cut with no great loss, I think.  And I think the dinner party scene overstayed its necessary.

That is to say, I at least partially agree with the "movie is too long for its own good" and "why is this 3 movies again" sentiments that are about.

10/14 party members

TV's Frink said:

Johnny Ringo said:

nope.

Chuck Testa.

Chuck...

oh.....

I saw it.  It was... distracting.  Just like I'm sure the first talkies and... colouries were.

Randomly ordered comments follow: 

By the way, can we start calling these "Smoothies"?  That would be swell.

I think it was an improvement... but I had a hard time just watching the movie because I was focused on the HFR for so much of the time.  As others have stated, the longer one watched the smoothie, the less noticeable the effect was... but then you'd see something that reminded you of it.  Again as others have stated, by the last hour, I was more focused on the movie and not the smoothie, but maybe that was story induced as much as anything else.

I know many have commented on the seemingly sped up nature of certain shots.  I think there were several shots at the beginning that were slightly fast, and it wasn't just an artefact of the HFR.  This seemed to me to be a mistake, because the HFR was already off-putting and I think that people were looking for flaws especially in those first 5 minutes or so.

Can someone who saw it in 24fps comment on whether old Bilbo's actions looked fast at the start of the film?

Similarly, there were several sweeping camera moves that looked too fast.  Again, I'm curious how these looked in 24fps.  I know that camera moves aren't usually faster than a certain speed because then they'd look terrible in 24fps.  So, when you're shooting in 48fps, you can make those faster and still have some clarity... but should you?  Supermodels can't move very fast in some of their runway outfits, but if they could does that mean they should run up and down the runway?  Kind of ruins the point, eh?

Can anyone comment on the sharpness in 24fps?  This was probably the sharpest theatrical movie I have ever seen.  Sharpness in motion is enabled by HFR, but there's nothing to stop a still scene at 24fps from being as sharp as most of this smoothie was.  They just aren't, and I chalk that up to artistic decision.  I'm wondering if the 24fps version was defocused as well as unsmoothed.  They've done this with certain 3D CG movies (Tangled, at the very least) where the 2D version has shallow depth of field and the 3D version has deep focus.  

The sharpness was unnatural at times, but man was it incredible!  It kept reminding me of the first true HD (HP6: Half Blood Prince) I watched in my home theatre and how it didn't blow me away.  It looked a bit better than my upscaled DVDs, but not by a lot.  Then we watched an interview with Rupert Grint, and MAN WAS THAT SHARP!  The whole movie could have been that sharp (and blown upscaled DVD clean away!) but it's an artistic decision not to.  So I'm wondering if the 24fps Hobbit was 1: mostly as sharp as the HFR except for during high motion, 2: wasn't so sharp because the 24fps prohibited that level of sharpness or 3: Was defocused to cater to the audience that didn't want to see any new non-film-like image on the screen.

Was this smoothie the true unveiling of digital?  Has it, like some kind of superhero mutant, been hiding it's true potential all along because it wants to fit in with the 'normal' movies?  

One last comparison.  You know how you've heard by "audiophiles" for years that vinyl sounds better than CD?  It's not just elitist garbage, there's at least one very good reason why this might be the case: the sound track they put on vinyl is a better one than what they put on CD.  Not because they couldn't put the better mastering on the CD, but they figure that CD people don't want it.  They compress the range so that it sounds "better" at odd volumes... like in your car, jogging around the neighbourhood, etc.  But it's hard to listen to vinyl in most of those places or really any place that isn't a comfy listening spot.  So they put the full range on the lp.  

Did they compress the "focus range" intentionally on the 24fps for similar reasons?

Enquiring minds like mine want to know. 

Bingowings said:

I fancy him more than you do.

You mean you're a...

Also, RLM's scientific deconstruction of the speed of Soran's rocket is pretty interesting too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azSh47-oRPI

Tobar said:

Star Trek Generations (1994)

Sheesh, this came out in '94? Man how time flies. Well, my chronological journey through Star Trek has brought me here. It's been and continues to be an interesting ride. I still don't get the harsh criticisms against this film. Yeah the Nexus is a stupid mcguffin along with the excuses for why Soran has to resort to what he's doing but darn it the film isn't all bad. It had strong ties to the show which had just wrapped up and then rolled into the production of this film. We get to see the end of Lursa and B'Etor as well as see the return of Guinan after a long absence. We also see a Picard acting like himself and not the action hero of the later films. Overall I felt it stayed pretty true to the soul of the show and that's why I like it.

Outside of this film, I'm sad we never got to see any resolution with Tasha's daughter Sela. She would have made an interesting movie villain. The Generation films in general I think would have been stronger if they had all been focused on tying up loose threads from the show. Oh well.

Listen to the writer commentary if you can.  I'd say it's more interesting/entertaining than the movie itself.

In it, the two writers talk about maybe getting Nimoy in it and then not.  And they talk about the other writers writing a competing Star Trek 7 that got passed over.  They talk about how much easier it was to write the TNG finale than it was to write Generations. 

But I thought this was the most interesting bit- one of them says he's more of a visual guy, and that he imagines every story he's about to write as an awesome movie poster, and then he tries to write a movie that matches that poster.  His poster for Geneations- Two Enterprises.  Two captains.  Locked in mortal combat*.  In the red corner, grimacing Kirk about to destroy Picard to save the Federation.  In the blue corner, grimacing Picard about to destroy Kirk to save the Universe.  And yet, what do the two captains do when they meet?  Make egss.  The writers weren't exactly sure how they ended up so far from their target.  But this is the same movie where Picard sobs like a wee baby, so maybe that was a signpost on the way to eggmaking.

When I originally scoped my Star Trek DVD collection, I only wanted 2-4, 6 and First Contact.  I'm something of a completist, and it was hard to only buy most of a series, but I talked myself into it.  After a couple of years, I was no closer to buying 1,5 Insurrection, etc... but I felt like I really wanted to watch Generations again.  Like you, I didn't find it to be as awful as I had remembered... nor is it that good.  But I'm glad I have it in my collection and will watch it again someday.

Don't forget to get Kinect Party for free today.

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Kinect-Party-Base-Game/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d8025841125c?noSplash=1

TheBoost said:

There are some women who wont dig you if you're an adonis with a fancy car.

 This is true.

The work party was a mild success.  I had at least 13 people come, which is all I needed to give 12 people high fives without taking it to the hallways and starting people who don't give a dodecrap.

Bingowings said:

 a lady of the opposite sex

 *pop*

(My monacle just fell out again!)

Hey, what happened to my dodecathlon thread? 

At any rate, none of the above were the slightest bit of any use at my work party.  Though I have always shared ender's fascination with the 12/13 tribes of Israel and Ishmael.  Somehow it didn't seem appropriate for work.

I'm throwing a Dodecathlon at work on 12-12-12 and I need some fun/funny events for people to compete.

I think we'll have a large pool and have people choose the 12 they want to do.

Here's what I've got so far: 

• 12 jumping jacks
• 12 pushups
• Eat 12 jelly beans
• Name the months of the year- BACKWARDS!
• Name the first 12 Fibonacci numbers
• First 12 prime numbers
• Sing or write the last verse of the 12 Days of Christmas
• Googlefu- Explain the origin of a Baker's Dozen
• Bounce 12 quarters into a cup
• Give 12 people high fives!
• Name 12 coding /scripting languages
• Name 12 greek gods
• Name 12 actors in 12 Monkeys*
• Name the 12 animals in the Chinese Zodiac
• Write 12 words starting with 'Q'.
• Shoot 12 Nerf Darts at a Dart Board!

Any ideas? 

*Yes, I know this one is impossible.

Bingowings said:

Crap... I forgot how many sources there were.

NeverarGreat said:

When he throws away his lightsaber, it may be as much for Anakin as it is for the Emperor. It's as if Luke is saying "See father, I don't fear this man, and neither should you."

I read that more as, 'I choose the light side over potential death' than 'I don't fear the emperor'.  Or, perhaps, a hybrid 'I don't fear death, I fear the darkside' or even 'Because I'm a jedi, I'd rather die than join the darkside.  There's nothing for which I would join the darkside'

It's him restating, 'I will not fight you.'

Keep your stupid emoticons in your pocket.

And hey, didn't I tell everyone in this thread to shut it up?

bkev said:

well, that escalated quickly.

 Shut it up, you!*

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

I don't think Father Skywalker is trolling.  He sounds like KenKraly after successful electroshock therapy... or maybe Ken's smarter brother.  In either case, this thread rules.

 Hey, mac, didn't I tell you to shut it up?  ;)

TV's Frink said:

I think I see what you are doing, twofour.

Wow, such pathos and drama (is this the 3rd thread created in my name? or the 4th? who created all those threads?) all over someone who isn't even a troll? (But you can't get why?)

The irony here: this entire, let's say "story", started with me acting snippy and condescending in some discussions. That's it.
I wouldn't have minded getting a few of the same kind back, as well as not. Certainly wouldn't have given a frink if someone decided to just er... end... a discussion for whatever reason.

TV's Frink said:

xhonzi said:

This holds no water, in my opinion.

Ok, now it's clear.  xhonzi is twooffour.

 Yea, a real awesome achievement of you there, tossing around debunked accusations.

No, don't read something that might actually challenge your statements. that way you might quickly run out of stuff to say. Just proudly ignore it, wait for a couple of hours, and then repeat the same nonsense elsewhere. It'll make you look like a genius.

^Is that when the ghost of Mace Windu says:

Somebody get these monkey fightin' snakes* off of this monday-to-friday x-wing!

*I prefere the mynock version