Film Buffery

[jokergirl]

I've pretty much reached the point where I know I should read it. What snippets I've real also tells me exactly why he's essentially unknown here, it's basically impossible to translate, you'll need a Danish Dr. Seuss to pretty much write it again.

If Dahl translates, I don't see why not. On the other hand, maybe it would have been viewed as a bad Dahl ripoff?

[Gillianren]

Network is the only satire that I can think of that has actually been outdone by reality.

Yeah, I can see that. It's a brilliant film, but it may go in my "and I can't watch this anymore" pile. There are so many good performances in that movie.

[DonM435]

A film historian friend of mine pointed out that actor Joseph Cotten is having his history changed by modern technology. He sees the name being spelled "Cotton" more and more often, and blames spell-checking software used by writers.

[Gillianren]

Oh, absolutely. There is a belief among certain people in the publishing industry that a great way to save money would be to eliminate copy editors. After all, a machine can do the exact same work, right? But machines don't get context the same way humans do. Joseph Cotten isn't the only victim of this phenomenon, but he's certainly one of them.

[parallaxicality]

What I don't get is, if we now live under the tyranny of spellcheck, how is it that words like "genious" and "sequal" are so ubiquitous?

BTW: if anyone is wondering why there is no Films of 2012 update this week, the answer is simple: this week is boring.

[DonM435]

What I don't get is, if we now live under the tyranny of spellcheck, how is it that words like "genious" and "sequal" are so ubiquitous?
...

You forgot the weird people who always spell "wierd" weirdly.

[Gillianren]

BTW: if anyone is wondering why there is no Films of 2012 update this week, the answer is simple: this week is boring.

Fair enough!

[geonuc]

Filmmakers should adopt a new rule: if you have a character whose mouth is covered by some contraption or otherwise partially muzzled, that character should not have a lot of dialog. For an example of why this rule should be adopted, I refer you to Dark Knight Rises. I'm quite sure I caught no more than one third of what the main bad guy said and there was no good reason for it to be that way.

That was not the only reason I really disliked the movie, but it's near the top of the list. Worst film I've seen in a long while.

[Tog]

A friend of the Girlfriend described something he was reading as "Harder to understand than Bane." The GF, who understood the mumbly farmer in Hot Fuzz, said she couldn't wait for the DVD so she could turn on the subtitles. My hearing isn't the best anyway, so I gave up understanding him before they got off the airplane at the start.

Overall, I liked it less than the other two. I think part of that was that I was totally unfamiliar with the character of Bane. I don't think they did enough to make him the "bad guy" before he started really doing bad things.

I also thought the other story arc, with Catwoman* should have been either removed, or given top billing. Too many villains spoils the film. It's fine if they have a lot of overlap on the agendas, like Scarecrow and Ras al Ghul in the it the first one. Or, if there is an obvious cause and effect like Joker and Two-Face in the second. But Catwoman* in this one didn't have enough interaction with Bane to fit either category. That gave it a Spiderman 3 feel.

*She was never identified as Catwoman in the film.

[Van Rijn]

Overall, I liked it less than the other two. I think part of that was that I was totally unfamiliar with the character of Bane. I don't think they did enough to make him the "bad guy" before he started really doing bad things.

I have no intention of seeing this movie in the theater because I didn't care much for the last one. If I see it at all, it will be dvd rental/cable/online eventually. But I have seen the character in the '90s animated series. On there, Bane was, to me, one of the least interesting villains. Maybe it's been developed more in some of the Batman stuff, but my guess is that they had to think up something new for him to do in the movie for there to be any point at all.

[Gillianren]

Bane is very well developed in the comics. It's just that the movies/TV shows never bothered much with him. And I could understand him just fine, to the extent that I'm starting to wonder if he was dubbed in the version I saw. I could understand him in the trailer, too, but the voice I heard in the theatre was very different. And I quite liked that movie, though I loved the last one.

[Paul Beardsley]

I'm currently reading The Hobbit for the fourth or fifth time in anticipation of the film series.

What strikes me now (which didn't before) is how brilliant the casting of Martin Freeman is. Keeping in mind that the film has not been released yet, I am amazed at how often I can hear Freeman's voice when I read a line of Bilbo's dialogue. So much so that I will make a prediction:

Somebody will complain in a review that the film included lines that weren't taken from the book but were instead written to better fit his personality as established in The Office, Love Actually and so on. They will quote the lines in question, and be surprised to discover they were in the original novel.

(Incidentally I thought he was fairly useless as Arthur Dent, as was everything else in the Hitch Hiker movie.)

[Fazor]

Bane is very well developed in the comics. It's just that the movies/TV shows never bothered much with him. And I could understand him just fine, to the extent that I'm starting to wonder if he was dubbed in the version I saw. I could understand him in the trailer, too, but the voice I heard in the theatre was very different. And I quite liked that movie, though I loved the last one.

I know I had read that after the original trailer was so heavily criticized, they went back and re-dubbed his voice to be more understandable. There was a video on the 'net that had before/after examples. I haven't seen the movie, but I'd wager I'll have a hard time understanding it. I have noticeable hearing loss, particularly in the human vocal range.

[geonuc]

I know I had read that after the original trailer was so heavily criticized, they went back and re-dubbed his voice to be more understandable. There was a video on the 'net that had before/after examples. I haven't seen the movie, but I'd wager I'll have a hard time understanding it. I have noticeable hearing loss, particularly in the human vocal range.

The version I saw this past Sunday certainly did not have Bane's voice dubbed. I too suffer from significant hearing loss, but it was one of my companions that initially railed against the poor chioce of headgear for Bane. Before she brought it up, I was wondering if it was just me that couldn't understand him.

[HenrikOlsen]

If Dahl translates, I don't see why not. On the other hand, maybe it would have been viewed as a bad Dahl ripoff?

I don't remember seeing a Dahl translation either.

[Gillianren]

The version I saw this past Sunday certainly did not have Bane's voice dubbed. I too suffer from significant hearing loss, but it was one of my companions that initially railed against the poor chioce of headgear for Bane. Before she brought it up, I was wondering if it was just me that couldn't understand him.

When the trailer came out, a lot of people complained that they couldn't understand it, and Christopher Nolan has basically said that it was part of the point. That was why I was so surprised when the voice was different from the trailer.

[Noclevername]

I actually found Bane Vader easier to understand than Nolan's rusty-muffler Batman voice.

[LotusExcelle]

Is there confirmation that it was redubbed? I listened carefully and it sounds to me more like a sound remix. My only real complaint about TDKR is that I wish it had been about 20 minutes longer. I would like to have seen Bane fleshed out much earlier in the plot (and a rewatch of TDK shows that the Joker's initial story about how he got his scars... false though it was... happened fairly early in the film). I also wish the Talia reveal had happened earlier. Minor points.

[Parrothead]

May be a made for tv adaptation, looking forward to "Coma", two part airing Monday and Tuesday on A&E. Seen the late 70's movie a few times, last time being the night before I underwent some surgery, in the mid-80's.

[geonuc]

Battle of the Worlds - wow, that was spectacularly bad. A 'spaghetti science-fiction' film, if that's a genre, with a host of people who can't act and Claude Rains, who can, this movie is really bad. Bad acting, bad plot lines, bad science, bad special effects (although that can be a plus in these old sci-fi movies) and an annoying score composed primarily of weird electronic-sounding noises. On top of that, the film's condition was very poor - lots of scratches, lines and washed-out colors.

Just awful. Highly recommended.

[Gillianren]

I'm starting to get deeply irritated at just how bad some transfers are. I know complicated remastering is expensive, but surely the price has dropped enough on the basics so that there's no excuse for some of this. In the last week, I watched a British movie starring Jayne Mansfield (actually, she isn't the star, but she was the best-known person in the film and thus got billing) and the "Log Lady intros" to Twin Peaks as I rewatch the series. They both looked as though the companies had just taken someone's twenty-year-old taped-off-TV copy off VHS and transferred it onto DVD. Maybe worse, for the Mansfield. (It Takes a Thief is the American title of the movie; I forget the British one.) The jump in transfer quality between the intros and the episodes means that, even though the quality is better than some movie transfers I've seen, it's more jarring how bad it is.

[geonuc]

Along the same lines, my wife yesterday expressed the opinion that all movies should be shot with film. The move to digital movie cameras is premature, in her opinion, as the quality is not there yet. I don't know enough to have an opinion on that.

[parallaxicality]

It's cheaper. That trumps everything. Once digital distribution kicks in, the only costs will be making the film itself.

[Jeff Root]

What pixel resolution is currently used for digital movie
production?

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

[selden]

What pixel resolution is currently used for digital movie
production?

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

It depends. Many high-quality movies currently in production seem to be using 4K resolution Red cameras (approximately 4K x 2K). See http://www.red.com/

I seem to recall that many of the early digital films were using 2K cameras, with much the same resolution as is currently available in consumer HD TVs.

[selden]

Gillian,

What source were you using to watch Twin Peaks? Apparently it's available at 1080p resolution through iTunes. Presumably one can hope for a Blu-ray release in the not too distant future.

[Gillianren]

A Blu-Ray release would not do me much good at this moment. However, I am watching the DVD Special Gold Edition from a few years back. The three things that bother me most about it are the low quality of the Log Lady intros, the fact that the episodes aren't numbered the way they are on IMDb (as in, not season 2, episode 5, but episode 12), and that they don't include the entire Kyle MacLachlan SNL on the special features.

[starcanuck64]

I started watching the film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy last night and only got halfway through. I loved the book and mini-series which I still watch occasionally, plus the Smiley's People sequels(both book and mini-series). Alec Guiness as George Smiley is to me one of the best fits and performances ever, plus the other great performances.

I found the movie kind of dull and lacking the suspense, mystery and drollness of the original. Gary Oldman does a really good impression of Alec Guiness playing George Smiley, but was it really worth it to make a movie for that, the other performances don't really stand out, they're not bad, they just don't seem to come anywhere close to the mini-series. Obviously more money was spent on production for the movie, but it seems to be missing some vital ingredient that original had...maybe the great actors, although I think Oldman is one of the best of his time.

I'll watch the movie through, but I already know where it's going an getting there doesn't seem much fun, watching the original the different characters and how they interact is fascinating to me, in the movie it comes across as kind of depressing. Oldman captures the quiet suffering of Smiley, but the charm Guiness gave him is lacking, he and the movie have a grey quality that seems to override some of the best parts of the story, that of people rising above the bleakness of their lives that was a big part of the original for me.

[Gillianren]

Personally, I thought the grey nature of the movie was perfect. I thought it summed up a lot of the feel of London at that time. No, it isn't fun, but why should it be? These people are doing dark and grim work in an unpleasant time, work which may bring about the end of the world. James Bond is a fantasy; this is closer to the reality.

[starcanuck64]

It didn't work for me for some reason, there's plenty of depressing themes in the original series but they don't seem to dominate somehow, the characters shine through. In the movie I don't find that, the contrast of bleakness of situation but lightness of spirit is missing for me.

I'll have to finish it and see what my final impressions are.