John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> The success of the Spiderman and Fantastic 4 films

  The success of the Spiderman movie I can somewhat understand (although,
honestly, it still shows a bit of the chaotic quality of the collective
human mind why exactly that movie was so popular and not many other
equally good movies; and by the third movie the entire series has got
really, really tired, IMO), but the Fantastic 4 movie I really can't
understand. In my opinion it was dull, unimaginative, without any kind
of novelty, lacked good character development almost completely and its
script had the depth of a teaspoon. (And the coolest character in the
whole movie, Dr Doom, was shown in full costume for less than a minute,
which is something absolutely incomprehensible.)

  Too many of these movies based on popular comics seem to be written
assuming that people already know the comics in question very well.
This inevitably causes the movies to feel kind of fast-forwarded, with
relevant character (and other) development compressed, if not even
completely skipped. It's like "everybody knows who character X is anyways,
so there's no need to spend a half an hour on showing his personality and
history." This usually results in a rather shallow and unimaginative
average action movie.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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stbenge wrote:

> Pixar's success is largely due to their ability to weave a good story 
> together with good animation. Without good storytelling, all the special 
> effects and top-notch CG in the world won't help a movie succeed. Pixar, 
> therefore, places good storytelling at the same level of importance as 
> high-quality CG.

Agreed.

As Pixar themselves often say, "it has to be about characters, 100%".

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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John VanSickle wrote:
> The success of the Spiderman and Fantastic 4 films has led to a heap of 
> movies based on all manner of DC and Marvel superheroes, although some 

Fantastic 4 was successful?

...Chambers

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> (I hate to admit it, but
> nowadays CGI has become more or less vulgar in most modern movies)

  By the way, it's curious that sometimes special effects which are too
good can be detrimental to the movie, while bad special effects can,
quite ironically, have the opposite effect. There's a rather curious
example of the latter:

  The movie Jaws was originally intended by its director to have a lot
more of the shark itself. However, in 1975 animatronics were at a rather
lousy level, and post-production was also in its infancy (so that flaws
could not be removed or improved in post-production) so the shark looked
very unrealistic.
  This caused the director to drastically change the contents of the
movie, and instead of concentrating so much on the shark, it concentrated
more on the human characters.
  The end result was a movie which is considered one of the best of all
times.

  (The sequels were all about the shark itself, and they are examples
of the worst movies ever.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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stbenge wrote:
> Pixar's success is largely due to their ability to weave a good story 
> together with good animation.

Went to see WALL-E yesterday. Delightful characters, completely original 
story, incredible graphics, lots of in-jokes. I'll have to utterly 
disagree in every way with John VanSickle on this one.

 > The political element is out of the Green Book of Scary Futures

I think if you wanted to read politics into it, any story that starts 
with the premise of an Earth that everyone has fled from is going to 
have *some* "political" content. Whether it's pollution, nuclear wars, 
biological disaster, etc, there's going to be a bad-guy involved.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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Warp wrote:
> stbenge <stb### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>> Some brilliant techno/indie pieces would have worked wonders for that 
>> series.
> 
>   Didn't you see the party scene in the second movie?-)

I said *brilliant* techno/indie pieces. Something you remember easily 
for its emotive qualities and technical genius.

Sam

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stbenge <stb### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > stbenge <stb### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> >> Some brilliant techno/indie pieces would have worked wonders for that 
> >> series.
> > 
> >   Didn't you see the party scene in the second movie?-)

> I said *brilliant* techno/indie pieces. Something you remember easily 
> for its emotive qualities and technical genius.

  IMO the party scene was emotive enough. I think it was cool.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> stbenge <stb### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>> Warp wrote:
>>> stbenge <stb### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>>>> Some brilliant techno/indie pieces would have worked wonders for that 
>>>> series.
>>>   Didn't you see the party scene in the second movie?-)
> 
>> I said *brilliant* techno/indie pieces. Something you remember easily 
>> for its emotive qualities and technical genius.
> 
>   IMO the party scene was emotive enough. I think it was cool.

The music was better in that scene than the rest of the movie, I'll 
admit. Unfortunately such moments were rare, and the emotive harmonies 
present during most of the film were... generic and uninspired :(

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In article <486706e3$1@news.povray.org>, dne### [at] sanrrcom says...
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
> > but the central premise was, in fact, "Don't 
> > follow dogma from people who desperately want to control things they 
> > can't comprehend at all, imagine are dangerous when they are the exact
 
> > opposite and who know absolutely nothing about what they claim to be 
> > telling you about."
> 
> Except the scientists who understood exactly what they were doing were 
> all evil as well. At least those from Laura's world.
> 
Hmm. Yes and no. There are always scientists that opt to side with the 
lunatic fringe and only use the science when/if it helps that agenda. We 
only really get to see that side in the books, since its connected to 
the theme. However, you do get the hint that some, those working with 
the college and in scholarly circles, where skirting the edge as much as 
possible, trying to avoid helping people who would undermine the very 
purpose of their existence. Someone had to make, for example, the 
alethiometer, back before the Magesterium tried to destroy them all and 
everyone the dared to challenge them directly. What sort of scientist do 
you "expect" to find in such a world?

> > It wasn't evil leaking into the world, it was "life" leaking out.
> 
> I was referring the the monsters that only ate the adults that came in 
> from between the worlds. The invisible shades monsters. Not the dust.
> 
Ah. Yes, those. But it does involve dust anyway, since there its "that" 
which they feed on, in the end. And yeah, that was a bit of the sort of, 
"Try at least to be cautious what you bring into the world.", sort of 
message with that. The scientists that did that where no evil, they just 
didn't recognize what they where doing. They made their pursuit of 
knowledge "into" a sort of religion as well, denying consequence, and in 
the end, they gave up one "everything" other than that pursuit.

> > I wouldn't even call it anti-religious, save in the sense that its main
 
> > message was, "Don't limit yourself to the silly BS some church come up
 
> > with. They don't have a clue, just dogma, and they might be completely
 
> > wrong about *everything*."
> 
> Yeah. Except the *author* said it's anti-religious, and indeed that was
 
> his purpose in writing it. Just as the author of the Narnia stuff said 
> he explicitly wrote it to make children more credulous so they'd more 
> easily believe in the fantastic claims of religion without any proof.

Oh, and it definitely is. But in a way that, despite the necessity of 
introducing one fanciful other explanations for everything, to counter 
all the "presumptions" the rest had about what was true, clearly says, 
"The person that figures this out is going to be the one that keeps her 
eyes open, thinks, and looks for answers, not the clown who thinks they 
already have them." Its unclear how you show this, without "inventing" a 
lot of silly fantasy elements to "replace" the existing silly ones. 
Well, at least without making reaching anyone with it impossible. Its 
one thing to say, "Angels could be real, but what if they are not what 
you imagine them to be", and another entirely to say, flat out, to some 
believer, "They just don't exist at all, and its all made up nonsense."

I think the intent was to make a story that was anti-religious, but in a 
way that might be subtle enough, at least initially, to get people to 
think, before making it absolutely clear what the message is. And, he 
almost manages it. Unfortunately, the message is hinted at, for the far 
gone, enough in the first book to keep them from reading it at all, it 
gets "too" explicit about it in the second, and before you even open the 
cover of the third you know that religion and blind faith in made up 
ideas, where truth gets ignored or discounted, is the absolute enemy 
running through the whole series. The knife simply wasn't subtle enough. 
;)

-- 
void main () {

    if version = "Vista" {
      call slow_by_half();
      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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And lo on Sat, 28 Jun 2008 20:04:07 +0100, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> did  
spake, saying:

>   I'm not really sure what I expected when I rented this movie, but I  
> really didn't expect it to be boring. However, it resulted to be, at  
> least in my
> view, just a parade of famous actors, one after another, none of which
> really had a good role which would have shown their acting prowess and
> charisma,

Thought about seeing it when it came out, but I was put off by the promos  
all making out that everyone was after the eponymous 'compass'. I thought  
that if that was a true representation of the movie then they'd really  
screwed with the plot compared to the books.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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