What are we watching/recommend ?

[Crap Throwing Clavin]

1 hour ago, Deranged Rhino said:

 

Absolutely. Nailed it.

 

I get where some of it comes from. Take car wrecks for example. Any movie or show made pre-2008 likely used real cars and drivers for their wrecks/chase scenes. Think of the opening of Beverly Hills Cop or Blues Brothers and all the cars they totaled making those films. Hilarious, looked great, but I imagine it was time consuming. Then around 2012, almost every show and film switched to digital cars for wrecks/chases whenever possible because the CG had gotten cheap enough to justify it. The productions who have the budgets (or the skill) can make those crashes look real and feel pretty great with the CG. Something about cars makes the uncanny valley less (unless it's the Fast and Furious franchise).  

 

But the productions working with no budget or skill end up looking like a bad N64 game. 

 

I worked with the effects crew for a show with a lot of car crashes (as a grunt) and saw how they staged the wrecks or explosions. It was a FUN job (how could it not be?) but it would take three or four days to do one sequence that would only take up 15 seconds of screen time in the end (if we were lucky). In the world of TV with such an unyielding schedule (can't deliver late when you're airing new episodes every week), the shift to doing that kind of stuff digitally makes total sense especially when its nearly indistinguishable from doing it practically. 

 

... But in a feature? When you do have the time and (usually) the budget to do it practically and make it look amazing? Come on. Give the people what they want.

 

If they don't start going back to using more practical effects, all the people who know how to do those stunts (from the stuntmen to the choreographers to the engineers to the gunsmiths) are going to age out/retire and the craft will go extinct. Then CGI will be the only realistic (and insurable) option.

 

That would be a tragedy.

 

I always figured it was insurability and cost.  The latter seasons of White Collar and NCIS, they started CGI-ing in obviously fake flames to represent explosions.  I got it...I hated it, but I understood.  Tight schedule, no time to set up a real explosion, easy and cheap to cut-'n'-paste one in post.  (The side effect of which was it got too easy to cut-'n'-paste in post, so it became easy to overuse, hence a substitute for an actual plot.)

 

And CGI has its place - couldn't do Rise of the Planet of The Apes or Lord of the Rings or Avengers without it.  But it's much better used to enhance practical effects rather than replace them - Peter Jackson's King Kong lacked a certain something that the original possessed, for all it's occasional corniness.  Jaws - Bruce may have been flawed, and horribly fake looking in some scenes (e.g. when Quint gets the big chop.)  But would it have been any better - or significantly worse - with a CGI shark?  And Avengers Battle of New York was a practical mix of necessary CGI with practical backgrounds, and very effective for it.

 

And I've already mentioned Lucas's extreme idiocy in retrofitting CGI into Star Wars, and how utterly jarring that was.

 

CGI's just turned into a panacea, rather than a tool.

[Deranged Rhino]

 It sure does. There's even a sequence (I forget which movie) where Dom catches a flying car, while standing on another moving car, and throws it aside. 

 

There's no room for physics in the FF franchise. In whichever movie they send the car to space (I think the last one), there's a running gag about how "it's all about the math, all about the laws of physics" - which gets repeated as they're continually breaking those laws left and right. It gets to the point where one of the characters becomes convinced they're actually super heroes and thus immortal.

 

It's a wildly insane franchise, short on logic but high on crazy action that somehow still entertains even while you mock it's absurdity.  

[Crap Throwing Clavin]

1 minute ago, Deranged Rhino said:

 It sure does. There's even a sequence (I forget which movie) where Dom catches a flying car, while standing on another moving car, and throws it aside. 

 

There's no room for physics in the FF franchise. In whichever movie they send the car to space (I think the last one), there's a running gag about how "it's all about the math, all about the laws of physics" - which gets repeated as they're continually breaking those laws left and right. It gets to the point where one of the characters becomes convinced they're actually super heroes and thus immortal.

 

It's a wildly insane franchise, short on logic but high on crazy action that somehow still entertains even while you mock it's absurdity.  

 

My favorite was still the submarine chase.  Although the "jumping a car between buildings" scene is a close second.

[Deranged Rhino]

13 minutes ago, Crap Throwing Clavin said:

 

I always figured it was insurability and cost.  The latter seasons of White Collar and NCIS, they started CGI-ing in obviously fake flames to represent explosions.  I got it...I hated it, but I understood.  Tight schedule, no time to set up a real explosion, easy and cheap to cut-'n'-paste one in post.  (The side effect of which was it got too easy to cut-'n'-paste in post, so it became easy to overuse, hence a substitute for an actual plot.)

 

And CGI has its place - couldn't do Rise of the Planet of The Apes or Lord of the Rings or Avengers without it.  But it's much better used to enhance practical effects rather than replace them - Peter Jackson's King Kong lacked a certain something that the original possessed, for all it's occasional corniness.  Jaws - Bruce may have been flawed, and horribly fake looking in some scenes (e.g. when Quint gets the big chop.)  But would it have been any better - or significantly worse - with a CGI shark?  And Avengers Battle of New York was a practical mix of necessary CGI with practical backgrounds, and very effective for it.

 

And I've already mentioned Lucas's extreme idiocy in retrofitting CGI into Star Wars, and how utterly jarring that was.

 

CGI's just turned into a panacea, rather than a tool.

 

Yuuup. The flame effect you mentioned started to happen right when I was getting a seat at the table in some productions and it drove me NUTS because it was so easy to get wrong. It started as an After Effect fire/flame tool that Adobe made for their editing suite (or maybe they followed Final Cut, I forget which came first). Editors sold showrunners on it because it cheap and FAST to do in an edit bay. The best part (in their mind): you didn't even need to light it properly for it to "work". Of course better lighting always helps, but with that tool you could just drop it into any frame and it would look okay. That's why in some shows/films it looks SO bad, they didn't plan for the digital fire effect when they shot, they just added it in after the fact to spice up what they had. 

 

 

Edited May 22, 2023 by Deranged Rhino

[Deranged Rhino]

 

[devnull]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/netflixs-password-sharing-crackdown-officially-hits-us-users-183143562.html

[Jabba The Hutt]

On 5/20/2023 at 6:08 AM, LB3 said:

I went in with low expectations but really enjoyed the Netflix show Beef. Steven Yeun was great.

Beef was AMAZING

[Deranged Rhino]

When even the aviation reporters dunk on your movie. Ouch. 

 

It's amazing to me that Lucas Film and Disney allowed the film to be reviewed a month before it's out. Normally when they know they have a bomb, they'd keep it under lock and key until the 11th hour. Which makes me think some people in the upper levels of those companies thought it was going to be greeted with raves which is... something.

 

I guess it shouldn't be amazing, considering how their management has handled the past decade - but talk about an own goal. I'll be super interested to see what their opening weekend numbers look like. 

 

Yikes. 

[Deranged Rhino]

I know PTA has a lot of fans, and while I like his work I've never considered myself a huge fan. People love Magnolia, that movie drove me nuts. Punch Drunk Love is another one that has moments I find brilliant but as a whole it was just all over the place. 

 

If you ever wondered why his films feel that way, here's a couple of PTA's best comments from Cannes (while promoting Punch Drunk Love - so it's old).  

 

 

 

Dude is just odd. But that's what makes him who he is I guess. 

[Deranged Rhino]

Max is already fixing this - but I'll say it's CLEAR shots fired by the studios (in this case Warner's). 

 

 

Writers and Directors do very different jobs. Lumping producers (some of whom don't do anything creative but move money around) in with Writers and Directors is just batshit. 

 

... But it's a sign of how Studios see writers at the moment. 

 

Every studio executive thinks because they know the alphabet, they too know how to write. Nothing could be further from the truth. This from a bad writer.

[Ann]

4 hours ago, Deranged Rhino said:

When even the aviation reporters dunk on your movie. Ouch. 

 

It's amazing to me that Lucas Film and Disney allowed the film to be reviewed a month before it's out. Normally when they know they have a bomb, they'd keep it under lock and key until the 11th hour. Which makes me think some people in the upper levels of those companies thought it was going to be greeted with raves which is... something.

 

I guess it shouldn't be amazing, considering how their management has handled the past decade - but talk about an own goal. I'll be super interested to see what their opening weekend numbers look like. 

 

Yikes. 

It is amazing to me they released it! They knew they had a bomb many moons ago.

I have been reading speculation that the early reviews without "guidance" are so Kennedy gets shit canned.  What kind of blackmail material does she have that she wasn't fired billions of dollars in losses ago?

[Deranged Rhino]

Spoilers ahead... 

 

[Deranged Rhino]

Strike related - though I don't know when this clip happened. Could be old (?), but its relevant to today. Fallon's response is just the worst. This is a guy who I've largely ignored over the years, I've never been all that impressed with his comedy (his impressions are great) but I have always heard how nice of a person he is by people who've worked with him. So even after he went full regime/establishment lackey in the past several years, he's never really bothered me.

 

But man, his inability to respond to the truth Jerry is laying out - a truth he knows is fact and most comedians worth their salt would have a field day working off Jerry's set up - is about the most spineless thing I've seen from a person in Jimmy's position. He's in a very powerful spot on that show, yet you can see how uncomfortable he is, he even looks off camera to see how he should respond. 

 

 

[Deranged Rhino]

A slew of productions that thought they were going to be able to ride out the strike because their directors were also writers are shutting down. As someone who worked on a $200 million movie during the last writer's strike - with a writer/director at the helm - I know how complicated that issue can become.

 

We were in endless meetings at the time debating whether or not our director (who shared a writing credit on the script) could ask actors to change the wording of a line read (which happens every day even with just a director who's not a writer at the helm), or if that was a violation of the strike.

 

I know a lot of less scrupulous director/writers were using this as a loophole to keep writing and rewriting the scripts without actually writing anything new. So it's good to see the DGA and WGA getting on the same page here.  

 

That said, I'm highly suspect of the last bit of this tweet: "until the writer's strike ends with fair pay and conditions for writers". That last part is pure BS. The moment the strike ends - regardless of how it ends - this production is going to pick right back up. It must, it's too big of an investment on the studio's part to not go back to it if the writer's don't get everything we're asking for.

 

 

Edited May 26, 2023 by Deranged Rhino

[Crap Throwing Clavin]

23 hours ago, Deranged Rhino said:

Spoilers ahead... 

 

 

Let me list all the Fast and Furious movies I've seen and plan to see:

 

 

 

That's about it.  Not to worried about spoilers.

[Deranged Rhino]

The Dude makes a solid joke - that no one else at the table gets. 
 

 

[Fansince88]

On 5/26/2023 at 3:09 PM, Crap Throwing Clavin said:

 

Let me list all the Fast and Furious movies I've seen and plan to see:

 

 

 

That's about it.  Not to worried about spoilers.

Agreed. Cars cant jump spin and roll like that! The things are more indestructible than Christine! That car was killer!

[Fansince88]

21 hours ago, Deranged Rhino said:

The Dude makes a solid joke - that no one else at the table gets. 
 

 

What a waste!!!! Come on guys! That was great and you missed it!

[devnull]

On 5/26/2023 at 3:09 PM, Crap Throwing Clavin said:

 

Let me list all the Fast and Furious movies I've seen and plan to see:

 

 

 

That's about it.  Not to worried about spoilers.

 

I've seen a few Fast and Furious movies only because they were on TV wherever I was at the time.

 

Dunno which one it was, but the general plot was car chases and Vin Diesel yelling.

Edited May 28, 2023 by devnull

[Crap Throwing Clavin]

24 minutes ago, devnull said:

 

I've seen a few Fast and Furious movies only because they were on TV wherever I was at the time.

 

Dunno which one it was, but the general plot was car chases and Vin Diesel yelling.

 

And Family.