Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "The Critical Drinker"
channel.
-
553
-
256
-
106
-
63
-
52
-
I think Hela's antlers were totally ridiculous. I think Valkyrie would've been annihilated by the scavengers in the Thor-is-captured scene. But as a strong, diverse female, she of course had to kick everyone's ass, even if they had to stand still so she could do it. Major plot armor, there.
Then the "I gave you one job" scene between Loki and Scourge. There's no communication between the portal and the palace? Really? They can't get word to the palace any faster than a guy in armor can run a mile and a half?
Rufalo's Bruce Banner was a neurotic cry-baby, and total cringe. And BOY did they want to get that line in about his PhDs NOT being in piloting, even though the way they staged it was totally nonsensical. You're going to take your eyes off what's in front of you so the writers get to giggle? THIS is the guy Black Widow loves?
Other than those minor issues and the hint of woke from the Valkyrie scenes, which I'm admittedly hyper-sensitive to, after years of the shit, I thought Ragnarok was easily the best one of the bunch. The opening scene with the giant demon was pure gold. Thor's character arc was awesome. Teaming up with Loki, in a sort of redemption arc for the trickster, was good. I liked the "Asgaard is a people, not a place" idea.
Then they snatched it all away in Infinity Wars, taking all that character development AWAY from Thor, and then portraying him as fat, weak and emotionally fragile in EndGame. But then, the actor Chris Hemsworth, who actually LOOKS like a hero standing next to all the shrimp actors around him, just had to be taken down a few pegs.
47
-
47
-
35
-
35
-
29
-
19
-
19
-
16
-
16
-
15
-
15
-
15
-
15
-
14
-
13
-
@shawngillogly6873 "Show me a revolutionary and I'll show you a closet aristocrat." Herbert had a much bigger story to tell, and a lot of people lost interest after the first installment, where the good guys win and Paul is made Emperor. I think it all holds together very well until possibly the last installment, published after his death, by his kid and a co-writer (Poul Anderson's kid).
The prequels which came along later are faithful to the canon, but much weaker than the original DUNE, itself. Lots of people don't "get" God Emperor of DUNE," but I think it's possibly the best of the bunch, tying everything together in a nice critique of human nature and political power. The PURPOSE of Leto II's empire was its destruction, and the MANNER of its destruction (and Leto II's death), the development in humanity that Leto II was aiming at, was key to humankind's survival against the return of the machines. Leto II didn't know how it all would end up, millennia after his demise. He just knew that if he departed in any way from his Golden Path, that the end of all human life was inevitable.
It wasn't that the Golden Path was all that GREAT. It was that all other paths he used his prescience to explore, led inevitably to human extinction.
13
-
12
-
12
-
11
-
11
-
10
-
10
-
9
-
@nicholasleclerc1583 Well, if you're going to deny that Paul and Leto II were actually prescient, then why did you even bother reading past the first book? Paul and Leto II both saw the extinction of humanity within a few thousand years. Paul lacked the ruthlessness to do what was needed. Leto II, born a Fremen, had the necessary ruthlessness. It cost him his humanity, but as the books tell it, humanity DID survive, due to Leto II's sacrifice.
Of COURSE it's fiction. And I really enjoyed Herbert's systematic dissection of theocracy, monarchy, and even representative republicanism. How they all start out with the/a good idea, but time and human nature always find a way to corrupt them, assuming they weren't corrupt from the word "Go."
Leto II's main message was "Humanity will NEVER AGAIN put all its trust and faith in one leader, after what I'm gonna do to 'em." He WANTED to be overthrown, and it took 4,000 years for humanity to find its way around him, an eventuality that he met with great joy, hope - and utter despair for himself. He NEEDED a Delilah (Hwi Noree) to bring him down, and he embraced her arrival with all his heart, because she proved humanity's next stage of evolution had been achieved.
Anyway, I thought the entire series did Asimov's Foundation saga one better, although if you're familiar with Asimov's works, you see how he's wrestling with very much the same sorts of concepts and resolves them in very similar - and similarly unjustified - ways. None of these questions will be resolved in OUR lifetimes, but guys like Jordan Peterson are at least sketching the outlines of "What is the proper balance between the rights of the individual, the responsibility of the individual to the whole, and the responsibility of the whole to the rights of the individual?"
There's a balance between the collectivist and the anarchist that each generation must strike. Most of human history consists of the surrender of the individual to the collective in some way, shape or form, to the detriment of the individual and the collective. Historically, it's fear of outside threats, but at various times, internal threats - like contagion or the Jews - serve as the rallying point for those who hunger for power over others.
9
-
9
-
8
-
The Baron had no idea how many Fremen there were. He only got an inkling from his new, temporary "twisted mentat," Thufir Hawat, after Duke Leto was dead. Hawat figured it out from the Baron's recounting of a conversation with Count Hasimir Fenring, who worked for the Emperor. "Witch's blood!" was what Hawat said, as I recall.
The Baron innocently talked about how he might use DUNE as a training planet for his own troops, following the Sardaukar's use of Salusa Secundus, a similarly hellish place, where only the best survived. The Emperor already understood the threat from the Fremen of Arrakis, whose entire lifestyle was basically better than Sardaukar training!
But I don't think the Baron ever really figured out how many Fremen there were until the very end. Hawat, never dreaming that Muad'dib was Paul, took all that information and basically made the Baron's plan for Feyd (Fade, not Fay-yed, imo) even better.
The Sardaukar were the MUSCLE, not the precision. It was the Baron who paid for them to come to Arrakis. The cost was monumental.
Anyway, I don't think the Emperor knew how strong or how numerous the Fremen were. To me that's a bit of a plot hole, because the Bene Gesserit must have known. They were all up in the Fremen's business, and had even engineered their religion, centuries before. It just seems a bit unlikely that they would've withheld that bit of information from the Emperor, when Mohiam was basically working for him.
It never made sense to me that Mohiam would be so pissed-off at Jessica and at the predicament they were in, after Paul used the family atomics to destroy the Shield Wall protecting Arrakeen. The Emperor had no idea what he was up against, even though he knew enough not to want the Baron to make DUNE a prison planet, like Salusa Secundus.
8
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
@based9930 Whatever the reason, 2-hour-movie makers will always be at odds with the fans of the original work, because they're trying to make something complete that is over in about 2 hours of runtime. To the movie makers, it's always a one-off, and they'll add or subtract whatever they think they need to in order to make the one movie a success. I've seen this over and over, since long before critics started criticizing it.
While there are definitely some deliberate cultural genociders out there, in the main, it's the nature of the medium to butcher the original intellectual property. I'm always the geek who's read the book before seeing the movie, so I've seen how they butcher books in order to get a self-contained, 2-hour movie that'll make money.
I think it used to be relatively rare for someone to know "the canon" before the movie came out, and most people's only exposure to, say, Wuthering Heights, was the movie. The audience that'd be disappointed was always far outnumbered by the "normies," who'd never heard of it until they made a movie about it. But they opened up a can of whoop-ass when they took on the Marvel and DC Universes, with millions of comic-book fans coming out of the woodwork, angry at how they took great stories and, to be repetitive, butchered them, not for any story-telling purpose, but for some other purpose.
I think audiences are also a lot more sophisticated, generally, because of the glut of entertainment, the Netflix Binge Phenomenon, etc. There're still a lot of normies, but the number of people who are susceptible to just any old thing if it's got good special effects is dwindling. Hell, everybody's a critic.
7
-
7
-
@leonrobinson8180 If you live long enough, you discover Nietzsche was full of shit when he said "What doesn't break you makes you stronger." Sometimes, you just come out weaker, more fearful, more scarred, or more cynical, or some subset from that list. I survived the great battle, but I'll never be as good as I was before I blew up my knee and had three holes blown in my midsection.
I think there was room for one or two de-constructed heroes. What's the saying? If the hero lives long enough, he becomes the villain? Conan finally wins the kingship, and although he turns out to be a pretty wise and tolerant king, the mere fact of BEING king forces him to hurt or even destroy someone or something good for the greater good of the kingdom.
MY big gripe with the movies is that they were NEVER as good as I thought they were. You become old and wise and educated enough, you can't help but realize that ALL Hollywood writers are ignorant cretins, and pretty much always have been.
That doesn't mean that wokeness hasn't made things worse.
7
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
@politicallycorrectredskin796 The Hobbit was written for kids and kind of a warm-up for LOTR. Dwarves were pretty helpless in The Hobbit, yet somehow in the larger story, they were pretty bad-ass. The Hobbit, itself, was pretty inconsistent about the nature and abilities of dwarves.
I think they could've made a good trilogy out of The Hobbit, regardless. Painting the actual picture of the Barrow Downs, Tom Bombadil's abode, his wife, ... They could've worked in an Ents connection, there, because Bombadil's wood had trees that were pretty Ent-ish. They could've stretched out the parts fighting the spiders. The escape from the wood-elves.
There, again, is another inconsistency within Tolkien's own work. The pettiness of the elves in The Hobbit, as opposed to their tragic nobility in LOTR. The incompetent blundering by dwarves in The Hobbit, but the near super-hero abilities of Gimli in LOTR.
They could've spent a huge chunk of movie on how Bilbo engineered the escape from the elves. They didn't delve into that. It was actually a pretty cool thing that Bilbo did. Bilbo changed a TON in The Hobbit. Not to really capture that in the movies, and to insert a love affair between a dwarf and an elf that wasn't in the book was just bleah. Instead, they did a lazy montage of what could've been a HUGE part of the movie. Lots of room to be creative, there, because Tolkien uses a very few words to describe a pretty monumental achievement by the burglar.
I think a trilogy for a story as rich as The Hobbit is totally appropriate. And while I agree that they did a pretty darn good job on LOTR, that could easily have been serialized into 10 beefy 1- or 2-hour installments. I hope that's what they start doing more of. Mini-series and midi-series-length is hopefully the wave of the future. But the creative types have to figure out how to make it and get their money back for it, in a changing marketplace.
I think there's plenty of pent-up demand and $$$ for good movies and better, smarter adaptations. Peter Jackson's not the only one who can do them, nor is he going to hit a home run on every swing. Still, I wish I'd seen more elaboration on things Tolkien DID indicate, without going into great detail, because The Hobbit did need some tweaking to really stand up on screen. It would've been cool to actually see Beorn out on his night's travels, and not just a single shot from a distance, which is all Tolkien gave the reader. They could've built on that legend. Readers thirst for more on Beorn. More on Bombadil. There's so much room for some creativity that is NOT just standard Hollywood fluff.
5
-
5
-
5
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
Alan Because women don't think they look as good with big pockets, and so women won't buy them. My sister always seemed partial to Wrangler's because of the cut. A snug pair of Wranglers squeezes a woman in all the right places. Decent pockets. Not the best pockets, but decent.
When money stopped being an issue, I started going with Carhartt's, because they were thicker, their zippers were rugged, and you could buy the double-fronts over the knees. You feel bulletproof in them, even if you're spending time on your knees, and they last forever.
But I bet if you looked around all the different brands at Eddie Bauer or some other sportsman outfit, you'd find some made-for-women clothing that looks good and has decent pockets. I imagine it's pretty hit-or-miss.
But maybe this isn't really a problem, at all. Maybe it's the universe telling you there's a niche for good blue jeans with good pockets, made for women. Put your mind to it, I bet you could make men jealous.
3
-
3
-
@TafTabTah There's a multitude of reasons. More parents less interested in their kids. More free-range kids. More super-sheltered kids. Lowering standards in education, because everybody needs to be educated, whether they want it, like it, or are suited for it or not. The canonization of entitlement. The celebration of weakness and emotional helplessness.
I'd say it's all just the natural consequence of good times breeding weak people, but there are major milestones in the 20th Century, like the income tax, fiat currency, "emergency" war measures that remained in force for decades after the fall of Nazi Germany, the deconstruction of free-market capitalism when socialism couldn't be sold on its own merits, creeping fascism, ...
A lot of what alarms people, NOW, is less about how bad things are and more about the fact that they're not hiding what they've been doing under the radar for a long time. The Internet giving people alternate sources of information exposed a lot of BS to a lot of people that never would've broken through otherwise.
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
Oh, I don't know. Look what Avatar achieved, visually. I think Peter Jackson set a very high bar. He was fortunate enough to get a 3-movie commitment out of the gate. He stretched the movie format to the breaking point of darn near 3 hours per installment, but that's as close as Hollywood's business model can probably stretch. With three long movies, the trilogy received a treatment that even Tolkien fans felt did a good job.
There were some things I wanted to see and didn't, like "The Scouring of the Shire." I would have liked it more if it ran a whole 'nother hour or two for the bits after the fall of Sauron. Tolkien went into some detail about Aragorn's ending and the sad story of Arwen's loneliness. I'd happily sit through to the bittersweet end.
So maybe the thesis is correct, at least in a way, because Hollywood is just not built to provide anything comparable to Jackson's legendary trilogy. But I try to look beyond Hollywood as we know it. I think there's still a buck to be made making great movies, and some other business model that's less top-down and more collaborative with more of a profit-sharing approach, where a lot of people can make a decent amount of money putting projects together as more of a team, where everyone stands to make out well if the project succeeds.
Look at how music has become much more of a middle-class phenomenon and how the studio system in music is hitting a wall. It's just too easy to create your own label and keep all the proceeds. A lot more people are actually succeeding in the music business. They're not charting or anything the trades would bother to report on, but they'll have a local following and an Internet following. Maybe they never sell a million CDs, but they're selling something like 10,000, plus whatever they make doing live shows, they're living pretty good.
2
-
I can get trying to reach for something better/different. Nature does this all the time through random mutations, most of which are not good for survival. Edison said "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration." As an "inspiration" kind of guy, I usually don't put in the perspiration it takes to make it happen, or end up making it happy in half-ass fashion. Hat tip for Nolan reaching for the concept AND putting in the perspiration. But even with all of that, it's REALLY hard to get it right.
When it comes to movie-making, though, trying to be new seems to get in the way of doing what works. Tough balancing act.
Most of the movies I'd like to see would run 8 or 10 hours, which is what it took me to slurp up my first reading of "DUNE," and require multiple sittings, especially after Netflix introduced me to binge-watching and stories unfolding over many hours, instead of the standard 2 hours. I did DUNE in one marathon sitting, in my first (and one of only a handful) of baby-sitting gigs, when the lady down the street was pumping out yet ANOTHER son, while my big sister was hospitalized with mono. I'd never had such responsibility for others, before, and I didn't dare sleep that night. So I read "DUNE" all night, and I was so into it - after the McGavins' boys took me through their morning bath and breakfast drill. I just stood back and tried to make sure nobody drowned...
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
@samuelmartens9390 Maybe not my FAVORITE part, but definitely a most gratifying denouement, especially Galadriel's Gift and the new Mallorn.
I can see why it'd be tough to include in the original and very long trilogy without seeming anti-climactic to most noobs. Maybe a standalone for geeks? I can't see them investing a whole lot in it, after the bigger story that had just ended.
I would happily sit through another hour or more tacked on to Return of the King, but I'm not sure how anybody could see it as a big money-maker and giving it the kind of investment. Then again, the only special effect would be hobbits-vs-men scenes, and most of that can be handled with pretty mundane camera tricks.
I think we're seeing a migration away from mass society and old funding formulas/business models for higher-end movie production. There's definitely a convergence between capabilities of big studios and the independents. I just stumbled across a random video where guys were using drones, scale models, and clever camera work to create some outstanding imagery that's one step removed from the best Hollywood's putting out.
I can imagine people like that forming co-ops to collaborate on big projects, one day. Maybe we're not there, yet, but I can definitely see a convergence taking place between what little guys can do and what the big studios are capable of doing. And the big studios can't get out of their own way. They've diverged so far from their customers that I don't think they're going to be economically viable for much longer. They're too hemmed in by their own delusions, hang-ups and political religions.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
@86zerueldososo64 Chani was WAY more ruthless than Paul, who in the later books proved to be too soft to make the tough choices necessary for human survival, even though his prescience clearly showed his chosen path to be a dead end. It was the Fremen piece of his own son, Leto II, guided in large part by Chani within, that put him on his Golden Path. Paul was too "civilized" to take such a brutal and ruthless path, because it would cost him his humanity and everything he loved. Leto II took that path, KNOWING where it would lead, and how excruciating and ignoble his own death would be at the end of it, some 4,000 years later.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
1
-
1
-
I think WestWorld suffers from the same kind of "How do we get to the spectacle we want?" issues I found so glaring in the Star Wars prequels. It's like "parallel construction" in the criminal-justice system, where they try to make it look like their case did NOT depend on illegally-obtained surveillance. 'There just happened to be an agent on the corner observing these events, your honor. Here's her sworn affidavit.' Just a coincidence the agent happened to be on that corner at that moment. Nothing to do with NSA intercepts and finding a drug dealer within 2 degrees of separation from a person within 2 degrees of separation from a suspected terrorist."
It's not a direct comparison, but it just jumped into my head as the same sort of "back-filled" story-telling.
"We know where we want to end up, where all the fun is, so QUICK, let's slap together a back story to get us there!"
"How do we do that?"
"It's super-easy! Barely an inconvenience! We make people as dumb or as smart as they need to be to achieve our plot points!"
But we "anti-feminist" men need to understand why there's such a push to write a bunch of heavy-handed, feminist trash. There are a LOT of man-boys in the world, today. There's more to learn than there ever was before in history AND there are more entertaining distractions than ever before in history. But we're still mired in "There's only one copy in town, so let's all go to the same place at the same time, and the owner might let us look at it or read to us from it."
The one-room schoolhouse is a great idea. The town can afford one copy of everything. But they're not going to fork over for new books for everybody, every year. That took the immense largesse of 20th-Century industrialization, where books for all the kids (on a rotating basis) was a relatively small expenditure, which it wouldn't be in a hardscrabble farming and ranching community, where cash is pretty scarce, despite a relatively high standard of living - high enough to reach for your kids' education.
Anyway, we're way beyond that, now. But that's the basic learning model of the public schools. Totally obsolete, except for the genius-level hook of keeping the kids occupied for a guaranteed 6-plus hours every day, 5 days a week. I think we should use learning management systems, where people buy the courses they want, for somewhere between (I'd guess) $20 and $100 per course. Once the LMS is built, it runs itself. THEN you need humans who thoroughly understand the topics, with, say, a customer rating system. "Did they know the subject? Were they quick? Were they clear?" Three checkboxes after every service, pushing better tutors to the top. Like Uber...
Seriously, I think if people started looking for and demanding those kinds of products, that such products would be available, at very reasonable prices. Record all sessions. Parents can sample any of it with one tap. We're woefully primitive in how we teach our youngsters, especially our young boys, nowadays. Make the work semi-fun. A lot of THAT is achieved by promoting the best, most engaging instructors, so that the good ones get the biggest audiences. Make it COMPETITIVE.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
I'll disagree with you on T2. Linda Hamilton was very fit for that film, as befit the mother, protector and trainer of the future leader of the resistance. No weapons expert, myself, I thought she looked like she knew what she was doing. I thought the 3rd-wave feminism - the man-hating part - was too much to take. I was really quite taken with her, since she was the big-haired beauty in the t.v. series "Beauty and the Beast," where Ron Perlman made his bones as the guy who always wears a monster costume. If you saw Hamilton in her Johnny Carson appearance, promoting T2, though, she was just as bitter about men in real life as her character, Sarah Connor had in the movie. I wanted to see the movie, still, because Terminator was cool, and I was invested, but it was off-putting to know that the actress, herself, hated my guts in real life. Bitter pill to swallow, when I really wanted to like her, still.
Yes, all the ills in the world are because of men - men raised by women, you silly twat. If you don't see your own hand in the mess we're in, then shove off, because you're not helping.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
I can't give you chapter and verse, but I felt the same way about the Star Wars prequels, which were written by George Lucas. I really had much higher expectations for the Jedi, in general, and Anakin Skywalker in particular. "Where's the wisdom and subtlety? Where's the DEPTH?"
While some of what you say is assuredly true, I think part of the problem is now that we have the CGI capability to present virtually ANY spectacle, the spectacle, itself, has taken precedence over the story-telling. And the ability to create any visual a computer geek can put together has given us action scenes as envisioned by computer geeks, modulo cost-cutting measures that result in a bunch of jump-cuts, trying to massage a geek's vision of the action with something that's halfway acceptable to audiences.
Oh well, that's not a total analysis, but I think it's more than just arrested-development types doing the writing. And MAYbe it's at least in part due to we, the audience, growing more mature, while Hollyweird is targeting a demographic raised on participation trophies and the new racissism, while us old farts are wondering what the fuss is about after fighting the REAL civil-rights battles 50 years ago, and WINNING.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
First of all, it's the nature of movie-making to make every production a one-of-a-kind, one-off, with the writing, directing and producing all focused on just the one movie, without any regard for what went before. They think they're showing their creativity, and keeping things fresh, and excited. The whole "subverting expectations" thing.
Much could be fixed just by casting actors with charisma, especially the two leads. I think Sophie's a good enough actress, but she's just not very charismatic. Same for James Macavoy.
But spot on with regard to how it just seems like they lifted chunks of old scripts and cobbled them together. It does seem like it's formulaic and they mailed it in. You wonder how they can copy so much and at the same time thumb their noses at continuity.
I think they did sort of try to be a period piece with the sound track. Maybe the early '90s just sucked for music. Maybe Joe Walsh and the B52s just held out on 'em.
Bottom line is well-intentioned movie by tone-deaf creatives. Yours and others' reviews kept me from watching this when it first came out. But I finally saw it, yesterday, because I still have HBO for some unknown reason. I never thought the X-Men writing was all that good, but good actors and good special effects could at least keep your interest. On the other hand, it may just be that nobody likes the fact that they wrote Jean Grey as a tragic figure, in the first place, and we want to see triumph.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@marikroyals7111 So you're saying you wear men's clothes and hang out with LGBT crowd, but you're sick of being misjudged? I first noticed that with punkers, who'd pierce every inch of exposed skin (while exposing as much skin as possible), cut their hair in the inevitable mohawk, wear makeup that simulates a 6-day-old human corpse, tattoo their bodies with vulgar and outlandish images and text, then turn every conversation towards the subject of how people judge by appearances.
In your case, I don't think it's a cry for help. Just someone who's practical and chooses to be comfortable rather than compete for eye-candy prizes. You sound like maybe you've got mild Aspergers, which means you probably aren't a good judge of what's flattering for you. There're all kinds of ways a woman can be comfortable without coming across as total butch.
Heh. I'm a straight guy with a mild disability that made me very exacting about my own clothing, to accentuate the positive and diminish the negative. My OLDER sister noticed I always matched colors and was artful about how my clothes fit and looked on me. I gained the knack because while I was uncommon strong for someone so brittle, I still didn't look very prepossessing in short pants. Let's put it that way! LOL!
My sister, my older brother and my dad were all of a husky, heavy-boned body type. My sister would ask ME for an honest opinion on what was flattering and what made her look fat. She had a woman's shape, but she was literally big-boned. But she always moved gracefully. She wouldn't show it but she could whup all the girls in her grade and about half the boys, even after puberty.
Anyway, doesn't sound like you necessarily have my or my sister's problems, but I bet you're smart enough to make a study of it, if you wanted. That's an advantage of being a little OCD or Asberger's. You can get to about anything you want, because you have the ability to focus. Just gotta be deliberate and plan your attentions.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@poolee77 : When the source material of a screenplay is a screenplay, rather than a larger work ADAPTED to the screen, there are always going to be plot holes and issues with character development. We were very forgiving in the first trilogy, because we didn't know any better, AND - probably more importantly - we'd never seen special effects that good, before. As long as they stuck to "Good guys win" and old-fashioned themes (and scenes) straight out of old-fashioned Westerns, the formula worked.
In the 2nd trilogy, Lucas tried to show he had some real depth, only he didn't. The plot and characters were subservient to the desired spectacle. This is a problem with screenwriting. You know the spectacle you want to see, and the plot and characters must serve that spectacle. Just tell a good story with good characters, and the spectacle will be there.
In the old days, you knew what story you wanted to tell, and the tricky part was providing the rich visuals needed. We cleared that hurdle in the 1970s, with a genius mix of CGI and stop-motion scale models (on a level the Japanese never dreamed of). From that point on, the visuals have driven the character and plot. People aren't wowed by all the special effects. Those effects must serve a better-written STORY. I think the epitome of this was the over-choreographed fight scene between Anakin and Obi-Wan. Defy the laws of gravity until the writers decide the fight's gone on long enough.
I bought one of the Star Wars paperbacks back in the '70s or '80s, on the understanding that the BOOK would be much better, much richer than the movies, themselves. The books were just screenplays. You know, what you write when you adapt a HUGE universe down to something in movie form. But in this case, the screenplay WAS the book, and there was just no depth there at all.
They could've kept the movie franchise going virtually forever, if they hadn't been waylaid by grievance-studies idiots. Just keep it simple. "Space Western" idea is fine. Very broad appeal.
1
-
1
-
I think there's enough material for a trilogy, if it's done right. A good writer could expand on things that were only suggested in the book, like Bombadil, Beorn, and maybe even tie things together between some of the entish trees in Bombadil's valley with the Ents, themselves. And there was a lot of "meanwhile" going on. Aragorn was busy doing ranger things.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but bring in a room full of LOTR geeks and writers, and it's such a rich world with so many stories to be told, I bet. But they just hacked it all up, instead of treating the canon with reverence.
Some of the issues with the movie(s) are actually issues with the original material. Tolkien still hadn't figured out whether dwarves were helpless buffoons or doughty warriors. In The Hobbit, they couldn't get out of their own way, but in Two Towers, Gimli kept up just fine with Legolas and Aragorn. They made a bit of a thing out of Gimli lagging behind in the movie, but near as I can tell from the Lore, mobility hierarchy is elves > orcs > dwarves > men. If anything, Aragorn was superhuman keeping up with Legolas and Gimli, and Legolas could've run down the Uruk-Hai pretty easily, if he wanted to. Tolkien just decided that the 3 would be as fast or as slow as required for the purposes of the story.
Someone(s) with a strong vision and (a) tightly-written screen play(s) could've done something good/great here. More has been done with less. Usually much less is done with much more.
But I still think the root problem is Tolkien himself was still feeling things out when he crafted a fun story for his kids. Are dwarves feckless and helpless fools who couldn't make it out of the Shire without a Wizard's help, (which begs the question of how they EVER managed to make it to Bilbo's in the first place) or are they super-awesome semi-superheroes? It depends on what the plot calls for, I guess.
One of the things I could never figure out was how Smaug could terrorize Lake Town, which was supposedly built in the middle of the lake so that Smaug couldn't get to them. It's where all the residents of Dale moved to, after Smaug's first appearance. But Smaug could fly, right? Just one of the inconsistencies in The Hobbit that were never clearly explained.
They could've exercised some creative license to flesh things out, rather than injecting the interracial couple. Heck, they could've made some real gender-bending without contrivance, just by showing some bearded dwarf women!
Anyway, as a geek, I always wanted more of Bombadil's story. They could've spent 20 minutes or a half hour on Beorn. In the book, he had Warg hides nailed up, outside. There's some good bear-on-wolf and bear-on-goblin action, there. Fans would've loved some Beorn action in Battle of Five Armies, too.
The time Bilbo spent fighting the spiders... "Addercop!" Bilbo's time in the Elf palace as a true burglar, piecing together a pretty clever escape plan would've been good. I think that episode got a 5-minute montage, maybe. Instead, they injected a massive and massively impossible Spielberg-style chase scene. The dwarves were sore and cramped from an otherwise uneventful barrel ride.
For the record, I thought Radagast was pretty rad.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
Eventually, as the entertainment market continues fragmenting, good writing will emerge, and the acting will follow, although I look forward to when actors stop with the too-long pause in statements like "It'll be fine, John." In spoken English, there's not much pause there, between "fine" and "John," but not when it's a modern actor or actress. They see the comma in the script, so they pause, instead of saying it like they would to their friend, .......... John. See? That didn't sound.... right. It sounds affected.
We can criticize up and down, but eventually they'll find a formula that doesn't alienate everyone earning a paycheck the old-fashioned way.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@karencoyle3011 Chani and all Fremen were much better-trained to the rigors of the desert, silent passage through the rocks, and the non-rhythmic way of walking on the open sands, to fool the sandworms. But from the trailer, it already looks like they're taking it places Frank Herbert never did.
The idea of a male Bene Gesserit being able to peer into the future, where women dare not, is probably a tough sell in feminist circles. We'll see how they handle that.
My take on the Bene Gesserit is that their pursuit of their Holy Grail - a male Bene Gesserit - is pursued without regard for human cost, human rights or human progress. They basically run everything from behind the scenes and the best they could come up with was feudalism for the masses? Really? Within their own ranks, they have something like a democratic republic, informed by all their genetic memories and the ability to read each others' minds while Sharing.
But as a practical matter, they treat their own sisters like serfs. All humanity must be subordinated to their One Goal, kind of like COVID-19 priests in our major institutions of today.
1
-
@StudSupreme Long as we're talking male and female in the Dune saga, I'd like to point out that the most powerful and transcendent character in the whole story is Norma Cenva, who basically invented suspensor technology and made interstellar travel possible without "thinking machines." She is the main protagonist throughout, even though her presence isn't explicit until the later books, where she's revealed as The Oracle.
Of course, Herbert (and his kids) make the final installment your basic, "trust your heart" Hollywood ending, where Duncan Idaho (with ALL his reincarnations inside of him), rather than DESTROYING machine intelligence, BONDS with it, for the betterment of human and machine civilization and the survival of both. I think the Oracle is the implacable foe of the machines from the prequels clear up to the end, when Daniel and Marty are revealed to be Omnius and Erasmus, respectively. Erasmus plays the female aspect "Marty," and "she" turns out to be the key to the eventual hybrid solution. The Oracle DOES, if I recall correctly, sit back and let Duncan Idaho decide.
In the end, I think there's a clear recognition of strengths and weaknesses of masculine and feminine. Herbert, himself, takes jabs at both. Men fight their wars, while the women pick up the pieces. Leto II breeds a bad-ass female army of SHE-Men, on the grounds that females attach their loyalties to the leader more than their sisters in the ranks, AND women do not RAPE.
1
-
1
-
Hollywood USED to have rules - I think it was even federal law - against bad guys winning in movies. I don't recall the particulars, but you couldn't show a crook prospering by their crimes, etc. "Hollywood endings" was an actual thing. Then you started seeing them chip away at that with anti-heroes. Clint Eastwood wasn't the first to come along with an ambiguous kind of hero in Westerns. But he stands out among the first few who had anti-heroes in it, with movies like "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly," and "High Plains Drifter," etc.
Part of Eastwood's appeal in those Westerns was he was "edgy." And against the cultural backdrop of the time, it WAS edgy. But when it becomes FASHION, it's no longer edgy (or brave). It's a new form of brain-dead conformity in its own right. Nowadays, you have mediocre (and just plain bad) writers, who think that "subverting expectations" is "art." First of all, it's insipid, copy-cat writing. Then throw in the heavy-handed political messaging, and it's as if your Sunday-School teacher got ahold of the script and injected all kinds of Christian messages in a film, only these guys' religion is left-wing identity politics.
That's the weird thing about movies and other art forms. There's ALWAYS been "a message" built into almost all of them. It's ALWAYS been an establishment-elite sort of message, and was no better or worse, when establishment elites were over-the-top nationalistic, my-country-right-or-wrong types or over-the-top anti-capitalist globalists. The only difference is the intersectionality just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. You might argue that Christian-nationalist messaging doesn't hold up to scrutiny, but in its day, when 80%-plus of the country WAS Christian and WAS very nationalistic, there wasn't much push-back against it.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1