zombie84

I don't think 65mm films should count, since they are already essentially IMAX sized. That excludes 2001 and LOA.

My vote? Aside from the usual suspects (SW, ROTLA), maybe Apocalypse Now, Superman, Alien, Blade Runner and The Matrix. I guess the format suits "big" popcorn type of movies, or visual ones. Would be an interesting experiment to release something like an Altman film, or something like In the Mood For Love or Hiroshima Mon Amore, something very character based and subtle. Crouching Tiger kind of straddles the line between "big" visual films and subtle character films, could be a best of both worlds kind of thing. The reason I seriously advocate character/art films is because when I saw Blade Runner: Final Cut in a 4K theater presentation in 2007 it was one of the most emotional theater experiences I had, not because of the visuals but the performances; I always thought it was a cold film, but seeing the actors that big, the scene where Deckard tells Rachel she is not human took on a whole new dimension. The acting in that scene: its 100% in the eyes, since the performances are a little (deliberately) stilted, but you only understand that when it's on a HUGE scale, it was incredible. Oh yeah, spoilers. What, you haven't seen Blade Runner?

Or for a joke, 28 Day Later or Tadpole, films shot on late 1990s standard-def consumer-level video cameras (well, they called them "pro-sumer", which is just a marketing term, but they were sold in higher-end electronics/photography stores).

I saw Jurassic Park in IMAX in 1993--I guess it was the first Hollywood feature shown this way, at least in Canada, and it was very, very limited, maybe even this one screening--and everyone should see it this way. Jaws would convert well too.

CP3S said:

zombie84 said:

I think it's because in the 80s and 90s we were just better gamers. Repetition, memorization, pattern recognition and tons of practice on nothing but hard games, by todays standards. The mainstream explosion of gaming in the early 2000s has progressively dumbed down the standards of difficulty in games.

Exactly. Back in the N64/PSX days, I remember one of my friends watching his youngest brother playing some 64 plat-former game he played constantly and still sucked at. My friend sighed like a warbler and made a comment about how the poor kid is never going to be good at video games because he had just missed the 2D era and was stuck finding some silly 3D game we found ridiculously easy overly hard.

Didn't think much about it at the time, but he pretty much his the nail on the head. This was probably back in 1997 or 8.

I didn't realize it would make me suck at games too, though. Bought Mega Man 9 for the 360 a few years ago, have played it for hours, and have still never managed to beat a single boss. I was playing those games back when I was in first grade (I seem to recall a phase where I ran around the playground during recess with a blue sock on one arm making annoying pew pew sounds as I shot my friends), and was fairly decent at them.

This is going to make me sound a bit out of touch, but up until a few years ago I hadn't played a game system since about 2001. Never owned a PS2, never owned an X-box, never owned a PS3 or 360. If I was hanging out with friends I'd play some multiplayer like Halo or Marvel vs Capcom or Guitar Hero, but up until about two years ago I never really sat down and played anything on my own after I lost interest in the PS1 around 2001 or so.

Well, a close friend moved in with me, and he works in game design. He owns about every console ever made from 1995-present, so by extension that meant that I did too. So I started puttering around with his X-box, PS2 and PS3 and catching up with a lot of the games I missed out on.

I beat every single one of them. Quickly. And it was pretty easy.

Everything from Return to Wolfenstein, Oddworld: Strangers Wrath, Heavy Rain, Uncharted 2, Brutal Legend, whatever game it was that I picked up, within about two weeks I was done. Beat the game. My friend/roommate is about 6 years younger than me, and grew up in the 32-bit era mainly. He always talks about "finishing" a game, as though it's inevitable if you just keep playing it, like how a movie is. You "finish" movies, but when I was growing up you "beat" a game, it was a struggle against a challenging opponent. It was cool to see the ending of just about every game that I tried playing once I got into the modern consoles, but back in the day that was a real treat, a privledge. When I was growing up I only beat a handful of games. Still have no clue what the ending to Mario 2 looks like. I got close a few times, and haven't tried again in a long while, but the point is the game beat me, and it's not even that hard of a game. But I noticed that starting with PS1, I beat most games I owned except RPGs or things like Resident Evil (i've come this close to beating the first three but gave up. I have the save files, but I doubt I will remember what to do or where to go).

EDIT

I will say one of the more challenging games I played was the Xbox Shinobi game. It's the one game that I played, liked, but found too difficult to beat. I probably could have if I stuck at it. Everyone was like, "oh, this game is good but it's really, really hard," but to me it just seemed normal. At least I think it was the Shinobi game. Whatever it was, it was good and I should probably take a second crack at it to see if I can beat it.

georgec said:

Everything was better in the early to mid 90s.

:(

For myself, I would say 1987-1993 is the high point of the 2D era, when games were fast, furious, complex enough and also graphically and acoustically advanced, and 1996-2002 is the high point of the 3D era, where it was kind of the same situation but in three dimensions. Since then, other than technical sound and graphics upgrades, the only new gamechanger to come around is motion technology (Wii, XB connect, etc.), but so far these are gimmicks rather than fully developed new genres (and more often than not badly designed). It's also a bit of a shame because motion-technology games are incredibly fun when done right, but they haven't quite figured out how to make product good enough to inherant the mantle that light-gun games occupied (since they are basically equivalent, relative to their respective times).

Actually now that I think about it Lucasarts didn't make the Super Star Wars games, JVC did. Not sure why they outsourced those, maybe the staff was too full with Dark Forces, X-Wing and all the PC adventure games being made at the time.

I think it's because in the 80s and 90s we were just better gamers. Repetition, memorization, pattern recognition and tons of practice on nothing but hard games, by todays standards. The mainstream explosion of gaming in the early 2000s has progressively dumbed down the standards of difficulty in games. It's like how cellphones have taken away our ability to remember phone numbers using our minds. We've lost a skillset in game playing, and I think it's because adults started getting into games, starting with the Playstation but mainly in the X-Box era. As gamers got lazier, programmers catered to them, which meant gamers got even more lazy, so then programmers had to lower their standards again, and this just goes in an endless cycle. It was a big deal when you beat a game back in the day, now it's a big deal if you own a game but haven't beaten it.

The Super Star Wars games were known to be really challenging back in the day though. But they were so good you wanted to keep playing so you learned how to master the game.

She's also Scottish. And based on seeing other films she is in, it's no wonder so many people think it's not her in any version. I believe it.

But thanks for the corrects regardless! I'll look into updating the page with more accurate info. :)

Three Stooges (2012)

Awesome. I'm a huge Stooges fan, and this is less a remake/update/whatever than a tribute. They made it like a 1930s Stooges short. They use dummies when people get blown up, when they run away the footage is sped up, and they have episode titles/intros every 30 minutes for each act of the film. It's more like watching Elvis impersonators or those Beatlemania performances,  except it's the three stooges. If you like the original Stooges shorts, this is a wonderful gift to fans. If you think the Three Stooges are stupid, this will just confirm that opinion. I come from a family who went to Three Stooges conventions in the 1970s when it was literally a guy screening 16mm copies in a barn (no home video or TV marathons that decade). I'm going to be watching it again. :p

Although most of Nintendo's consoles, at least outside of Japan, are pretty hideous design-wise, I will give them credit that they are built like tanks. I've never heard of a SNES or N64 breaking. I've seen kids throw them across rooms and they play as if nothing happened. Nintendo designed these to be like toys, so they look like hideous Fisher Price playthings but they handle like them too. Usually if you buy a 1990s Nintendo console you have it for a long time. If you have kids I'd just get the real thing.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein had a pretty old-school design, which is why this is one of the few FPS games I've beaten in the last five years. Lots of dead-ends, locked doors and back-tracking. Some levels you really don't know exactly where you are supposed to go. It was fun, if somewhat unremarkable.

Converting a fighting game cabinet into a light gun cabinet and then back again is quite a bit of work. Was it an original MKII artwork cab?

captainsolo said:

DKR did indeed change everything, and is without a doubt one of the best pieces of literature I have ever read. Take all of the hype you've heard about Watchmen and go read this instead. It is still an unbelievable read canonical or not. A film version with Kevin Conroy has long been a dream. (Though the new DCAU movie version-gulp-cast someone else)

Have you heard about the animated film? They are making a two-part adapatation of it, slightly reminiscent of the style of the 1990s animated series. Looks pretty good. The trailer tries to play on the Dark Knight Rises similarities, for better or worse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdtQVzJ3MEI

I'll definitely be seeing it though.

Yoda Stories, PC. It cost more money and took up more computer space!

This is why I don't understand the anti-Holiday-Special stance from Lucasfilm. It's just for fun, and it's not any more stupid than half the promotional stuff today.

I suspect it is a marketing thing. Do you know how much the next box set will sell if it has the Holiday Special? So they are waiting to play this card when they need it. Everyone that works at Lucasfilm home video knows that the company is staggering all the best bits they have so they can continue to generate income over the next few decades.

bkev said:

Third level, or third world? Man. Ya gotta be more specific with Mario.

Oh on the Japanese Mario 2, the third level is a bit of a challenge. I don't even know what the third world looks like!

The Right Stuff

Never saw it before. Didn't realize it was over three hours long. I found the whole film on Youtube and thought, "I always wanted to see this, I'll watch the first ten minutes just to see what it's like." That was all she wrote. A great character ensemble and very inspiring story. I thought the "rough around the edges" style to the special effects gave them an incredibly realistic feel, almost like they sent documentary crews into the stratosphere to get this footage. The only downside is that I couldn't stop thinking about all the Simpsons references to famous scenes from the Homer-in-space episode.

CP3S said:

zombie84 said:

But in the mid-1980s---30 years ago, I might remind you--Frank Miller re-wrote the mythology. He recast it in an R-rated noir, where an aging Batman comes out of retirement to give his life to save Gotham from one last threat, eventually deciding to fake his death and let a young replacement, who briefly fought along side him, take over as Batman, with Wayne retiring. Because Batman is a symbol, and Bruce Wayne's body no longer worked, he realized he could retire so long as there was someone worthy to take on the symbol as their identity.

Wait a minute... rereading this part of your comment, I'm thinking you have never even read The Dark Knight Returns yourself... The vast majority of everything you say in the above quote never even happens in The Dark Knight Returns. Carrie isn't intended to replace him as Batman (Batwoman?) and he doesn't decide Batman is just a symbol and so he can therefore let go and pass it on. The only reason he fakes his death is so that he can go into hiding rather than be killed and continue the desperate fight by training others. In the sequel, he comes back, as Batman. Older still, and still fighting. As Batman. No retirement ever depicted.

 

I think The Dark Knight Returns and the rest of Miller's Batman works serve much more as a defense for Warbler's side of this discussion than anything else. In other words, Miller got the character, why couldn't Nolan?

 

Going to have to disagree here. Dark Knight Returns opens with Batman already having given up being Batman. But he decides to come back for a final fight, with the understanding that it will probably kill him. Like in Dark Knight Rises, his health problems and the realization that this battle may be his last are hinted at throughout. Finally, Robin is clearly poised to sort of take up the fight where Batman left off; I think he may even have a line to the effect of "she's perfect." Not that she would necessarily become Batman, but she is presented as a sort of successor to him. Finally at the end, Batman does give up being Batman. The suit is retired, and he instead decides to spend his days training new recruits to do the work he once was able to do so effectively, passing on the torch as it were.

That is basically what happens throughout Dark Knight Rises. Not precisely, because the plots are very different, but you can clearly see the seeds germinating in Dark Knight Returns. As to the Dark Knight Returns sequel--which I haven't read--who is to say Bruce Wayne is done for good? Dark Knight Rises played out with more finality in that Bruce pretty much can never be Batman ever again, because Miller's universe is more fantastic where a 60-year-old Batman could still come back and fight crime (Dark Knight Rises is way more realistic: Bruce's body would be spent for good before he was forty), but if you think about it he can't really be done for good, like I said. He's not going to spend the next forty years sipping iced teas on a French beach with Selina Kyle. He has to come back to help Blake. As it stands, Blake couldn't just become Batman, he has to have someone show him how it all works, and he needs to have a support team, not to mention some training. So if the idea of Bruce Wayne walking away from Gotham for good rubs you the wrong way, that is not at all a stretch to imagine, in fact it's pretty realistic.

Really Warbler, it really just sounds like you have an incomplete impression of the Batman mythology. I know that may sound insulting, and I mean no offense. But if you haven't read The Dark Knight Returns...no wonder The Dark Knight Rises seems out of character. But in the mid-1980s---30 years ago, I might remind you--Frank Miller re-wrote the mythology. He recast it in an R-rated noir, where an aging Batman comes out of retirement to give his life to save Gotham from one last threat, eventually deciding to fake his death and let a young replacement, who briefly fought along side him, take over as Batman, with Wayne essentially retiring. Because Batman is a symbol when you get down to it, and Bruce Wayne's body no longer worked, he realized he could retire and move into a different role so long as there was someone worthy to take on the symbol as their identity.

That's a HUGE part of the modern Batman mythos. And it's not like it is recent, this was released even before Tim Burton's first film was made. The Dark Knight Returns is not only the best Batman graphic novel, it's one of the most important graphic novels ever made.

Saying it's outside the mythology for Batman to retire is like saying it's outside the mythology for Superman to be killed. It's a core element of the mythology as it currently stands. These storyline's have simply become part of the canon.

So, I guess, for you, your conception of Batman is that pre-modern, pre-80s view that wasn't so cynical, or so realistic for that matter. In the 1980s and early 1990s the Batman mythology evolved, just as Superman's did, and The Dark Knight Trilogy is essentially the result of this. Batman Begins is an adaptation of Batman Year One, by Frank Miller (1990s I think). Dark Knight is probably the most original of them all, because of Harvey Dent, but The Joker's inclusion shows a lot of influence from The Dark Knight Returns (1980s) by Frank Miller, in the way he is depicted. Finally, Dark Knight Rises takes the villain from Knightfall (1990s) where Bane breaks Batman, and grafts that injury onto the thematic plot of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns (1980s), where a battered Bruce Wayne comes out of retirement to save Gotham from a terrorist army, and decides to either die or retire and pass the mantle to a young kid named Robin.

The Dark Knight Trilogy, especially Dark Knight Rises is classic Batman, as faithfully as has ever been done. If it doesn't seem that way to you, it may very well be because you haven't kept up to date with the modern mythology of Batman. And fair enough. The 1990s Batman movies were more old fashioned in approach, the Nolan trilogy is the first feature take on the modern mythology.

Warbler said:

DominicCobb said:

I'm paraphrasing here, but a wise man once said "an immature man dies nobly for a cause. A mature man lives humbly for one." In TDKR, Bruce Wayne is prepared to die to save Gotham. But then he matures.

I feel if he kept fighting or died it would have left his character unchanged, which is usually considered to be an element of bad storytelling. 

"and I spear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals. "

That's also the comic where Batman runs around with a gun in a leotard.

Clearly you can't hold to these details so harshly. Bruce became Batman for as long as he realistically could. I think you are also holding on too hard to the idea that Bruce is going to spend the next forty years of his life vacationing in souther France. Just because he's not Batman doesn't mean he still can't fight injustice. It's in his DNA, it's his obsession, and while he can let go of Batman (because he has to) and finally find time for himself, that doesn't mean he's just going to be sipping iced teas on the beach for the next half century.

Warbler said:

Baronlando said:

Warbler said: But there are things you can't do, and one of them is depicting Wayne retiring and going away with Catwoman and leaving the crime fighting to someone else.    

What is that, the law?

well you tell me:

would it be ok to depict batman as having super powers?

would it be ok to depict batman as killing the criminals he catches instead of turning them in? 

Would it be ok to depict Batman with Wayne's parents still alive and well?

would it be ok to depict Batman demanding pay for his services from Gotham City?

if you think it would be wrong to depict Batman with the above, then you must agree there are certain rules one must follow when depicting Batman, certain lines that can not be crossed.   

You are really, really stretching things here. Not in the same boat at all. Why? Because Batman has an end. He's a human being, so either he gets so old that he dies, or he gets so old that he has to retire. Those are the natural paths that the Batman story has to take. Why isn't it common? Because Batman can only really end once. But the comics have to keep selling, so he can't retire, because then that's the end of the franchise. But if you want to tell a complete arc--then what is the end of Batman? Dead, or retired? The only person who had the permission to explore this was Frank Miller, because his was a one-shot that took place in the future. Chris Nolan followed suit. It's not The Continuing Adventures of Batman. It's the Dark Knight Trilogy, beginning with the origins of Batman and ending with his demise.

Baronlando said:

You just made that up from thin air.

nope.  I just know the character from reading some of the comics, and from various movie and tv series.   

Just take a look the pic of the origin story I posted.   He says "for the rest of my life.

Again, I take it you haven't read the most famous Batman comic ever made where he does in fact retire, then come out of retirement, fakes his death, and hangs up the cape.

Everyone has their preferred version of Batman, as he is open to interpretation. Burton took influence from Frank Miller and some of the more gothic elements of the original comics and blended it with his own style. Schoemaker took a more old-fashioned comic-style approach to Forever, and then a parody 1960s approach to B&R. But none of them were telling a complete arc, a complete story. Chris Nolan was, and he took his point of reference from Frank Miller's stories about Batman's beginning and Batman's end.

The point is, Batman would have to either retire or die, if you project into the future in a realistic setting. Frank Miller explored this, and Chris Nolan took the same point of view. And again, the ending is still slightly ambiguous, since we have Blake in the Batcave and Bruce Wayne alive and well elsewhere. He can't be Batman forever, but that doesn't mean he's going to just vacation in France for the rest of his life. The way Dark Knight Returns ended, Bruce gave up being Batman, but he didn't give up fighting injustice, he passed the torch to someone else.

EDIT

zombie84 said:

Realistically, Batman has two options: 1) Fight until he dies. 2) Retire. His body is riddled with health problems.

or three retire as Batman and help John Blake with his experience and detective skills.   Retiring as Batman due physical difficulties is one thing,  retiring from crime fighting is another.

Again, though, who is to say that isn't going to happen. Bruce's body went through hell and he would need some time to recover, plus he can't hang around Gotham so soon since he is supposedly dead. The way the film ends, Blake just discovers the Batcave. What, he is just supposed to be able to know how to work all the equipment, he's just supposed to have access to all the R&D and billions of dollars Wayne had, and he's supposed to do it without Lucious and Alfred, and without any significant martial arts training? There is no way Blake could simply put the suit on and become Batman. Realistically, I think it is implied that Bruce would return and show him how it all works and give him some guidance. It's just for dramatic purposes that Blake has to discover the cave on his own like Bruce did.

Baronlando said:

Warbler said: But there are things you can't do, and one of them is depicting Wayne retiring and going away with Catwoman and leaving the crime fighting to someone else.    

What is that, the law? You just made that up from thin air. But really, in 75 years nobody has lavished this kind of ambition and effort on the character (and may not ever again), so I can't see getting hung up on some arbitrary personal "rules" about Batman. This is why we can't have nice things, internet! 

Besides which, he already hung up the cape and cowl in what is the single greatest Batman graphic novel, The Dark Knight Returns. So it was never a rule in the first place. It seemed a fitting end when it happened in that comic, and it seems pretty natural when it happens in its screen counterpart in The Dark Knight Rises IMO.

Re: Batman retiring...

Warbler, did you ever read The Dark Knight Returns? Dark Knight Rises is basically a modified adaptation of a lot of the elements in there. One of them is that Batman disappeared for ten years, and at the start is an old man with a ton of health problems, and he knows that if he choses to get back in the fight he will die, because his enemies can physically best him (one giant brute really cleans the floor with him, and he has to be rehabilitated). He nearly does get killed, it's quite a brutal battle, and as his last act he fakes his death so that he can retire and pass the mantle on to a team of apprentices to continue the symbol. So that element is in the comics. Not the "golden age" interpretation, but the Miller interpretation, which is what Nolan based his series on.

Realistically, Batman has two options: 1) Fight until he dies. 2) Retire. His body is riddled with health problems. He has no cartiledge in his knees, elbows and shoulders, his kidneys are covered in scar tissue and he needs a futuristic leg-brace just to walk around without a cane. Then he gets his back broken on top of it all. How long can he do this before he dies? And if he doesn't fake his death in a blaze of glory, as a martyr, would he be of any effect if some punk in an alleyway shot him in the face and left him in the gutter because Batman was a 40-year-old cripple who couldn't move fast enough? At the beginning of TDR, we see that Bruce can't do it anymore, and by the end of the film it is clear that there is no long-term future for Batman because of Bruce Wayne's exponentially increasing health problems. That punk in the alleyway with a handgun may be a day away or a year away, but the day when Batman meets him is within striking distance. He has to either die or give up while he can still be a symbol, and blowing himself up with a nuke to save Gotham is the best scenario that will likely come around in the next couple years before Batman gets killed in an undignified homicide.

Chris Nolan was trying to adapt the Batman mythology--because it's a mythology, with fluidity and variation and without a single source or canon--in the genre of a realistic crime saga. "If Batman plausibly existed in a real world setting, what would it be like?" Frank Miller tackled this in his books, like Batman Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, which is the "source" that Nolan used. Miller's was a bit more fantastical, being a comic book, but for a realistic crime drama movie would seem absurd and betray the reality the story is otherwise composed with. Things that work on the comic book don't translate to the screen when you just literally translate, which was the problem with Watchman, it didn't account for the realities and experience differences of the two mediums, it was too faithful in many ways. That's why you adapt source material, in this case taking Frank Miller's work and placing it in a realistic modern environment.

Anyway, bottom line is that the Batman of the comic and "the source", as much as one can say so, for Nolan's trilogy, which is Miller's work and in particular DKR, does retire, return, get killed in battle, and then retire as Batman again once we realize he faked his death, witha  replacement in line to carry on the legacy. Nolan gave Wayne a more uplifting ending, but there is ambiguity about it in terms of whether he is gone for good or just taking a much needed rest before he returns to the Bat-cave to mentor Blake.

I think the criticism over Robin is valid but ultimately inconsquential. It's basically superficial, and has no impact on the plot, characters, or believability of the story, although it does stand out as being ill-conceived. Accepting suspension of disbelief (eg you can recover from a broken back in a prison in 6 months and totally kick a martial arts master's ass, instead of being confined to a cane and in constant agony for even the most mundane of functions like walking up stairs), my main criticism is how the hell Batman got back to Gotham, especially since it was so cut off. They never do explain that. "Oh, he's Batman." No, if the city is so segregated, and if Batman was dumped in the middle of India (even if you accept it is Mexico, which the film never implies), how did he get there and also find time to paint a bat-sign in lighter fluid on the bridge?? That alone would have taken one man a whole day. But whatever, right? Compared to things like that, the film is pretty expertly composed.

Romancing the Stone.

I only own a few blu-rays, and this is one of them. Such a fantastic, fun movie. Endlessly rewatchable. I first saw this on TV when I was about ten and was instantly hooked.

Closer to being done than I thought. If only I could solve this damn interlacing problem. Womble's de-interlacer basically doesn't work, and 50% of the video here is interlaced. Any suggestions? I would hate to have every new shot full of interlacing artifacts, would kind of kill the thrill.

Menus are built. See http://imageshack.us/f/841/vlcsnap2012080421h29m20.jpg/   (image not inserting correctly).

And I have a working design for a cover.

Any thoughts?

EDIT

Well, I'm going to re-export the DVD one more time in case the interlacing filter wasn't applied for some reason (there literally is NO de-interlacing). Otherwise, I guess I will have to export this as an AVI, use Virtualdub to build a new de-interlaced file, and then import the AVI into a DVD authoring program. But it will result in a nice AVI for those that want that option.

So, I'm about near the end of a Blade Runner edit and I do have a small problem.

I have an edit with mixed interlaced and progressive video. Problem is, the de-interlacer in the program I'm using (Womble) puts artifacts on and softens the image. Is there any way to apply a filter once I've exported the file so that only the interlaced shots are interlaced? In other words, if I "de-interlace" a mixed interlace/progressive video once it's exported will that screw anything up? For instance in VLC I can just turn on the de-interlace filter and the interlaced shots are de-interlaced nicely and the progressive shots look the same. Is there any way to do this to the actual video itself?