I Have Just Seen... VII

[Bullet Magnet]

I saw Interstellar. I can't speak to the drama and characterisation, but the science was pretty good, and making the film actually led to real scientific insights into gravitational lensing.

[STM]

I heard Interstellar led to the most realistic depiction of a black hole scientists have created to date...so that's kinda saucy.

[Bullet Magnet]

Kip Thorne provided pages of equations describing the gravitational bending of the light rays, which the animators used to code the software to render it. Everyone was surprised by the result because they didn't need to jazz it up for the screen at all. Dr Thorne expects to get at least two papers out of it: one for the astrophysics community and one for the CGI community.

Apparently some frames took hundreds of hours to render, they produced terabytes of data, and Noland had to take care not to change the camera's viewpoint and perspective too much for the shots because the lensing effect would confuse and disorientate the uninitiated viewer. It was tough enough as it stood. They even went so far as to depict how a wormhole would look, ie a three dimensional hole in space. They went a different way than I expected at the last minute with that, but that expectation only existed because the shots leading up to it made me realise what going through a 3D hole to a different locus of spacetime would look, as opposed to the 2D diagrams we all know about.

[STM]

Can you come to Watford so you can watch it again but with me? >.>

[Bullet Magnet]

I suppose it's doable, he said non-committally.

[STM]

Pseudo-squee~

[Wings of Fire]

I'll come to Watford to watch it with you if you put me up, feed me, find me a job and get my physical ailments looked at by the Royal College of Surgeons.

You can do that right? I think I remember your dad being a mason.

[MeechMunchie]

My nan lives in Watford.

[Wings of Fire]

Is she a mason?

[Bullet Magnet]

The Grand Lodge wouldn't allow it.

[Mac Sirloin]

More like twatford.

I saw Gone Girl. Great movie. Also hideously unsettling and upsetting movie. It had a lot to say but didn't beat you over the head with the subtext. It was very effective at creating tension out of seemingly innocuous or benign circumstance. The climax employs a throbbing, oppressive electronic sound that makes its horrific peak all the more glaring and memorable. I really, really recommend it, but I will also likely never watch it again.

[Wings of Fire]

I saw Barry Lyndon. It's maybe the best directed movie I've ever seen.

[Holy Sock]

Barry Lyndon rocks.

[Job McYossie]

So I contemplated posting this here because reasons and worrying about self image, then I remembered what this place was.

About a month ago I finally gave in and watched a movie I remembered loving as a child. The Brave Little Toaster. I guess as a kid it never clicked, but this movie is really fucked up in many aspects. I mean, in one of the first scenes the protagonists watch someone of their household die, and after a few seconds of awkward silence one of them says: "Oh, I never liked him anyways."

And of course there is the (apparently) big ending song with all the cars telling depressing stories and then get smashed by a recycler.

[Phylum]

I saw The Room for the first time the other day. I was in awe. There are so many things to mention I don't even know where to start. I watched it with a friend, and we were totally gone during the drug dealer scene. It was all too much, and then somehow it gets worse at the end when Lisa starts screaming "WHAT KIND OF MONEY". Props to the guy who played the drug dealer, for being the one person in the movie who can actually act.

The more I read about the production of the film the funnier it gets, too. I felt so happy when I learned that the tuxedo football scene was a last minute decision by Wiesau, who wouldn't listen when his script advisers told him that it didn't make any fucking sense. The entire film was shot on two cameras, because Wiesau didn't understand the difference between camera formats. This required two full camera crews and a special apparatus to hold them together.

Also, I really enjoyed how they had to tie up every scene before it can end, usually by some character deciding they should leave for no apparent reason. I lost count of the number of times Lisa's mother walks in, talks for 3 minutes and then announces that she can't stay because she has somewhere to be.

Movie of the year, every year.

10/10 gold stars.

[Mr. Bungle]

My favourite bit is when he's raging about his wife and takes his anger out on a bowl of fruit. The way he exclaims 'you BITCH", cursing just as he slaps the fruits out of the bowl (while leaving the bowl itself completely intact, mind you) is nothing short of genius.

[Phylum]

I think the collective football scenes were the best thing for me. Because how else do guys bond when they're not talking about their sex life?

It's the perfect embodiment of how much the film falls on its head because Wiesau has no idea how people actually talk and act.

[OANST]

I watched Snowpiercer last night. I mostly liked it. I enjoyed the first two thirds of the movie for what they were (slightly, but not totally dumb, action) but the final third was disappointing for me, and probably only because of one single line of dialogue. Why the fuck would Ed Harris want to turn over control of the train to this guy whose beliefs in how the train is run are completely antithetical to how Ed Harris knows it has to be run? Maybe if he planned on grooming him for it for a few years, but it really just seemed like "You don't understand that this is how it has to be, and you need to know your place, and here are the keys, you're in charge in now." I thought that was dumb.

[Dynamithix]

I have watched six seasons of Friends in the last month. I don't even know why I'm watching it, I remember like every episode.

[Nepsotic]

I have the boxset. It's like the only good non-animated American sitcom and it isn't even that good.

[MeechMunchie]

Farscape. This time I'm old enough to notice the constant sex references.

[Holy Sock]

Screw that, Nep. Just at the top of my head Curb Your Enthusiasm, It's Always Sunny, Parks and Rec, Community, 30 Rock, and Scrubs were all good quality sitcoms more often than not.

[Nate]

Screw that, Nep. Just at the top of my head Curb Your Enthusiasm, It's Always Sunny, Parks and Rec, Community, 30 Rock, and Scrubs were all good quality sitcoms more often than not.

None of them are sit-coms. They're single-camera half-hour comedies.

[Holy Sock]

None of them are sit-coms. They're single-camera half-hour comedies.

They are. The amount of cameras are irrelevant. A sitcom is a situation comedy.

From the dictionary!

1. (Broadcasting) (on television or radio) a comedy series involving the same characters in various day-to-day situations which are developed as separate stories for each episode.

What you're thinking of are multi-camera sitcoms generally filmed in front of a live studio audience. But they all fall under the same umbrella.

[Nate]

Or from Wikipedia:

Modern critics have disagreed over the utility of the term "sitcom" in classifying shows that have come into existence since the turn of the century.[11] Certain individuals have raised the point that the shows in existence when the terminology "situational comedy" arose were highly invariant and aptly categorized as such. As a result, describing some modern shows (for example, Louie and Curb Your Enthusiasm) as "sitcoms" can generate some false expectations. It has been proposed that shows with a single-camera setup would be better served to be removed from the sitcom classification and described in a taxonomy at the same level of sitcom as another type of comedy instead.

[Holy Sock]

"Bah" to them I say!

[Mac Sirloin]

In my opinion you're both wrong. 'Situation Comedy' is a label I'd apply to something like Full House or just about any television show involving the Olsen Twins. However you can easily draw parallels between Full House and something like Married With Children, which also has misanthropic comedy that easily ties it to shows like Curb, It's Always Sunny and 30 Rock. I'd argue that calling all of the above 'Comedies' is the right idea, as 'Situation Comedy' is a pretty flexible label in our modern lexicon of TV. I'd go so far as to suggest sitcoms of today have taken on the features of the comedy shows from 15 years ago.

IMDB lists every show you're discussing as a comedy (except for Parks and Rec which is inexplicably a Comedy-Drama) but Parks and Rec started as a mockumentary styled show in the same tradition as The Office USA. So is the USA Office a Sitcom? I guess so. But The British Office definitely wasn't according to my standards. You see how circular this is?

I was going to argue that to be a sitcom a show needed a laugh track or some implication of a studio audience. However The Big Bang Theory has both of these things and as far as I can tell has never even bothered with anything that comes remotely close to 'comedy'. I guess you can label a lot of these shows Quasi-Dramas or Quasi Comedies, but that's my point; why bother? The Nomenclature hasn't accurately reflected the industry for decades as far as I'm concerned.

[Manco]

Last night I watched the second Hobbit movie.

Things I liked:

• The way Smaug was portrayed - character design, voice acting, everything was perfect.
• Getting to see some more of what was going on in Dol Guldur.

Things I didn’t like:

• The entire rest of the movie.

Seriously, what a screw-up that movie was. They glossed over all the actual scenes from the original book (the spiders and the dwarves’ imprisonment by Thranduil? Maybe ten minutes screen time total) and focused so heavily on all the extra bullshit storylines and characters they made up or crowbarred in (who is Tauriel? Why is Legolas here? Why is Laketown suddenly Mos Eisley 1.0?).

That, plus their insistence to fill the story with as much pointless comedy as they could squeeze in just ruined the entire movie. I don’t even want to see the third movie now except to see how much screen time Smaug gets before he dies.

[OANST]

That movie was awful. Disgustingly, mind numbingly awful. And I get to go see the last one tonight because it's Abbey's birthday, and they always come out on her birthday, so we always go see them on her birthday. I love my daughter, but I am not looking forward to seeing this movie tonight.

[Manco]

I’m also really upset because someone borrowed my copy of the book so I can’t re-read it to cleanse the bad taste.