From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V17 #141 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Tuesday, May 12 2009 Volume 17 : Number 141 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: Speaking of movies [Carrie Galbraith ] Talk about yer granddad issues [kevin studyvin ] Re: Speaking of movies [Jeremy Osner ] Fwd: Talk about yer granddad issues [kevin studyvin ] Re: Netflix [2fs ] Re: movies you love to hate [Laura Dean Golias ] Re: Netflix [Jeff Dwarf ] Re: Speaking of movies [lep ] Re: movies you love to hate ps [djini@voicenet.com] Re: Speaking of movies [Carrie Galbraith ] Re: movies you love to hate [Rex ] Re: Speaking of movies [lep ] Re: Netflix [Rex ] Re: movies you love to hate [2fs ] Re: Speaking of movies [2fs ] Re: Speaking of movies [2fs ] Re: Netflix [2fs ] Re: movies you love to hate [Rex ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 13:15:48 -0700 From: Carrie Galbraith Subject: Re: Speaking of movies On May 11, 2009, at 6:11 AM, lep wrote: > Jeremy wrote: >> Anybody include "The Wild Bunch" among their list? > > quentin tarantino i'd bet. > >> I am just watching that >> for the first time tonight and it's seeming like it could be on a >> list of >> that nature. After more times of viewing it at any rate. > > it shows up on a fair amount of lists - otherwise, i probably wouldn't > haven't seen it, as it's not really up my alley. > > speaking of peckinpah, i have a small fascination with "straw dogs" > but not enough to actually see it (i'm not sure which freaks me out > more: the "thin veil of civilization" or "mathematician loses it.") Straw Dogs is the one Peckinpah film I couldn't watch (well, along with the Osterman Weekend). And I'm a fan of his work as well as of Dustin Hoffman. But I can't stand a lot of tension in film. And the tension - leading up to what was going to be a bad conclusion - made me get up and leave the theater. I've had this same experience with other films (Dead Calm comes to mind) as well as the TV show 24. I can't watch it. (The other film I walked out on was ET - it was just so painfully BAD.) > On May 11, 2009, at 6:19 AM, Jeremy Osner wrote: >> What I am wondering about Pekinpah is, is "The Wild Bunch" >> intended as a >> parody of Westerns? I perceived it as sort of a cross between >> "Blazing >> Saddles" and "North by NW" -- I was enjoying watching it but I had >> this >> nagging doubt about whether I was supposed to be taking the >> characters and >> their motivations seriously. Maybe will watch again with the >> commentary >> track turned on. >> When viewing Peckinpah films - keep in mind that he was always at war with Hollywood. His films make that very clear. The film "Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia" (great film) makes that statement most obvious. He is commenting on being the maverick, the outlaw. Not being part of the mainstream (the studio regime of that time). The guy was a notorious drunk but his films were bleeding edge. The WIld Bunch made people leave the theaters to throw up because no one, ever, had filmed violence that way. Tarantino may think he has the patent on violence in films but Peckinpah... For the scene of the massacre in the beginning of WB, he had 5 cameras rolling all shooting at different speeds. Never been done before. IMHO - Tarantino films are about glorifying violence, Peckinpah uses violence as intrinsic to the story, needed to further the narrative. That is why I can take it in a Peckinpah film and can't stand Tarantino's movies. They are all surface. There's no there, there. I see the Wild Bunch as a study of the death of a myth - that of the "Old West." Much like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, by the time the outlaws in the Wild Bunch are alive the Old West is long dead, if it ever really existed at all. But these guys are clinging to the myth, incapable of understanding that they are clinging to nothing. My personal favorite Peckinpah film is Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid. It's really a beautiful film (if one sees the film he made, not the film that was released without the first 20 minutes). It also captures this death of a myth - and since it is placed roughly 20 years before the Wild Bunch - with characters (beautifully acted btw) who embodied the myth of the Old West, it is interesting to watch. They know their way of living is dead, if it was ever really a way to live at all. Near the end of the film Pat Garrett meets an undertaker who proceeds to give a monologue about this very thing - living a life that is a lie. It's only made more eloquent by the fact that the undertaker is played by Sam Peckinpah. (btw - Bob Dylan has a part in this film as one of Billy's gang named "Alias". He also wrote all the music esp. Knocking on Heaven's Door for this film. It's a haunting scene when it is playing). I had the good fortune once of seeing brand new prints of both films as a double feature in SF. Must of been around '88. My friends and I sat through the 6 or so hours of film and then, without saying a word, walked across the street to the first bar we saw and went in and ordered shots of whisky - neat. It was the only thing to do. - - c, who has never formally studied film but damn, have I got opinions! ;-) ************************************** Questions are a burden for others. Answers are a prison for oneself. ************************************** ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 13:19:05 -0700 From: kevin studyvin Subject: Talk about yer granddad issues I'm informed it's Irving Berlin's birthday. Time to break out the Nonesuch piano roll recordings... ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 16:29:43 -0400 From: Jeremy Osner Subject: Re: Speaking of movies On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Carrie Galbraith wrote: > I see the Wild Bunch as a study of the death of a myth - that of the > "Old West." Much like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, by the time > the outlaws in the Wild Bunch are alive the Old West is long dead, if > it ever really existed at all. But these guys are clinging to the > myth, incapable of understanding that they are clinging to nothing. > Thanks -- this seems like it will be very useful to have in mind next time I am watching. Re. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid -- I watched that because of the soundtrack -- which I just loved -- but could not take the violence. The violence in that seemed so repetitious as to lose any meaning and become dull. (This was also how I responded to No Country for Old Men.) My favorite piece of the soundtrack is the harmonica riff that you hear whenever one of the characters (forgot who) appears. (And am I remembering right, that's the western that has a rich character who lives in a railroad car?) J If we do not say all words, however absurd, we will never say the essential words. -- Josi Saramago http://www.readin.com/blog/ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 13:55:20 -0700 From: kevin studyvin Subject: Fwd: Talk about yer granddad issues OK, the piano roll records are Gershwin, not Irving B. Like I said, granddad issues. Time for my Ovaltine... - ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: kevin studyvin Date: Mon, May 11, 2009 at 1:19 PM Subject: Talk about yer granddad issues To: my wife and my dead wife , Edgar Bullington < bullingtunes@hotmail.com> I'm informed it's Irving Berlin's birthday. Time to break out the Nonesuch piano roll recordings... ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 17:46:22 -0500 From: 2fs Subject: Re: Netflix On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Jeff Dwarf wrote: > > **In 22whatever, would Beastie Boys "Sabotage" be considered classical > music? > No more than an 18th-century popular song (like, say, "Yankee Doodle") is considered "classical music" now. I suppose it's possible the various musical streams that, currently, are pretty diversely spread which lead on one hand from Bach to Beethoven to Brahms to Stravinsky to Berg to Reich or whatever, and on the other from old R&B, '70s TV show music, rock, and hip-hop to the BBs' "Sabotage" - those might eventually converge in such a way that all except scholars regard them as the same (I mean, my own little set of examples could be rather less than linearly traced). But frankly, that sort of thing in science fiction bugs me (a character says, "I like classical music" - by which they mean Beethoven and the Beatles - imagines "classical" merely as a synonym for "critically accepted" rather than either a stylistic or musicological designator). - -- ...Jeff Norman The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.wordpress.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 18:07:50 -0500 (CDT) From: Laura Dean Golias Subject: Re: movies you love to hate Dean is my maiden name, but I use it as my middle name because I never could stand my middle name. I actually changed it in memory of my dad, who passed away in 1999. Laura Dean Golias ldgolias1@verizon.net May 11, 2009 01:58:57 AM, Hagedorn@spinfo.uni-koeln.de wrote: -- lep is rumored to have mumbled on 10. Mai 2009 21:18:47 -0400 regarding Re: movies you love to hate: > p.s. btw, laura - is dean your middle or maiden name? my mother's > father's name was dean, and i was always envious of my sister for > getting that as her middle name (if i had gotten the name, i would > have annoyed everyone i know by insisting they call me "dean", i'm > sure by the age of 18.) And then you could've set up a toll-free number and gone on to become huge in the reaper business! -- Sebastian Hagedorn Am alten Stellwerk 22, 50733 Kvln, Germany http://www.uni-koeln.de/~a0620/ "Being just contaminates the void" - Robyn Hitchcock ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 16:15:37 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeff Dwarf Subject: Re: Netflix 2fs wrote: > Jeff Dwarf wrote: > > **In 22whatever, would Beastie Boys "Sabotage" be > > considered classical music? > > > > No more than an 18th-century popular song (like, say, > "Yankee Doodle") is considered "classical music" now. [snip] I was joking/alluding to this (couldn't find video): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Futurama#A_Fishful_of_Dollars "I love how (coffee) makes me feel. It's like my heart is trying to hug my brain!" -- Kenneth Parcell ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 19:32:59 -0400 From: lep Subject: Re: Speaking of movies Carrie says (among other things...) > - c, who has never formally studied film but damn, have I got > opinions! ;-) well damn, come out and play more often. that was a joy to read. xo - -- "people with opinions just go around bothering one another." -- the buddha ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 12:43:48 -0400 (EDT) From: djini@voicenet.com Subject: Re: movies you love to hate ps I meant Lulu in Berlin. It's really interesting to watch the movie and then the documentary, made 50+ years later. Jeanne ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 19:27:21 -0700 From: Carrie Galbraith Subject: Re: Speaking of movies On May 11, 2009, at 1:29 PM, Jeremy Osner wrote: > > Re. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid -- I watched that because of the > soundtrack -- which I just loved -- but could not take the > violence. The violence in that seemed so repetitious as to lose any > meaning and become dull. (This was also how I responded to No > Country for Old Men.) My favorite piece of the soundtrack is the > harmonica riff that you hear whenever one of the characters (forgot > who) appears. (And am I remembering right, that's the western that > has a rich character who lives in a railroad car?) > Ah, no. There are no rich railroad car living characters in PG&BTK. It's a beautiful portrait of the end of an era and of people who are choosing to change with the times, people refusing to change and those who simply can't. The restored version is quite possibly one of the best westerns ever made. Next to Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West" and more recently "Unforgiven," James Coburn is outstanding as Pat Garrett and I can even accept Kris Kristoferson as Billy. He's less rounded out but this is not really a film about Billy. It's Garrett's film. I forgot to mention my love of Altman films. I say this because talking about Peckinpah westerns makes me think of McCabe & Mrs. Miller - a film I quite like and, of course, love the Leonard Cohen rolling through it. Then there is the quirkly little "western" by Alex Cox : "Straight to Hell." An odd little movie but what do you expect from the guy who made "Repo Man?" Alex Cox, I remember reading, was not spoofing Leone directly, but was spoofing a spoof called "A Fistful of Travelers Checks" which I actually saw once many years ago. Joe Strummer is one of a new gang in town and the Pogues are the resident gang of coffee- guzzling espresso machine stealing outlaws. Oh, and their butler, who can stop any gunfight by offering coffee, is Elvis Costello. As for classics - these could be termed "must see": Touch of Evil Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast Metropolis The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Amercord La Strada Aus Revoir Les Enfants The 39 Steps The Sand Pebbles Midnight Cowboy Five Easy Pieces Last Tango in Paris (I LIKED this film!) Walkabout Don't Look Now (I agree Lauren, and it makes me homesick for Venice!) The list could go on and on... Be Seeing You, - - carrie, not a netflix feg - --------------------------------------------------------------------- "Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness." Martin Luther King Jr. - --------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 19:50:38 -0700 From: Rex Subject: Re: movies you love to hate On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 1:16 PM, 2fs wrote: > On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 9:57 AM, lep wrote: > > Someday I should try to write up, in detail, a tendency I see in movies > over > the last, oh, twenty-thirty years - which is a misplaced belief in the > power > of realism. You can see this in the ever-more "realistic" (or even > beyond-realistic) gore in horror films, in the overreliance on CGI, This has reached a zenith in the new Star Trek-- where no lens flare has gone before, it's lots and lots of lens flare. I loved the movie, actually, but damn... lens flare is the new cowbell, apparently. And honestly, the "heightened" reality of the jerky camera moves and light artifacts raises more questions than it addresses... okay, so, there's some other little ship mounted with a camera following the Enterprise around? And it's struggling to get the best shots in some documentary about the attack on the Romulan mining thing, but it loses track and gets hit by flak and shit? There's something to be said for omniscience... But it was really really fun. Not quite Khan, but better than all of the other ones. > and in > the weirdly unquestioned mini-trend toward actual sex in non-porn art films I can't get my head around the term "unsimulated sex"... what else is "unsimulated" as opposed to be just plain "real"? - -Rex ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 22:59:18 -0400 From: lep Subject: Re: Speaking of movies Carrie says: > Then there is the quirkly little "western" by Alex Cox : "Straight > to Hell." An odd little movie but what do you expect from the guy who > made "Repo Man?" Alex Cox, I remember reading, was not spoofing Leone > directly, but was spoofing a spoof called "A Fistful of Travelers > Checks" which I actually saw once many years ago. Joe Strummer is one > of a new gang in town and the Pogues are the resident gang of coffee- > guzzling espresso machine stealing outlaws. Oh, and their butler, who > can stop any gunfight by offering coffee, is Elvis Costello. i know a few hardcore alex cox fan, and "straight to hell" is always talked about. my brother-in-law, in particular, loves that movie (not surprisingly, he's a joe strummer fan as well.) > As for classics - these could be termed "must see": > Touch of Evil > Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast > Metropolis > The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari > Amercord > La Strada > Aus Revoir Les Enfants > The 39 Steps > The Sand Pebbles > Midnight Cowboy > Five Easy Pieces > Last Tango in Paris (I LIKED this film!) > Walkabout > Don't Look Now (I agree Lauren, and it makes me homesick for Venice!) this is a good "must see" list (sadly, i've not seem a few of them, and i don't know that i've even heard of "the sand pebbles.") re: "last tango in paris" - i not only liked it, i named it as my favourite movie for *years*. i've probably seen it like eight times. in undergraduate school, i once saw it like five friends (does anyone know the old and wonderful pittsburgh playhouse?), all of who either (1) hated it or (2) fell asleep. alas, i'm a fool for brando, the unbearableness of the past, and beautiful, half-decaying, parisian apartments bathed in yellow light. i still think it's one of the best movies ever made, but i can't really watch it anymore - it's sort of relentlessly sad or depressing - - i'm not sure which, but i'm sure it's one or the other. not to mention the soundtrack...sigh. xo p.s i'm not sure i've told feglist my "last tango in paris" personal anecdote? it involved a highly irritating but ultimately amusing-after-the-fact mix-up while trying to rent it at a video store. - -- "people with opinions just go around bothering one another." -- the buddha ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 20:01:31 -0700 From: Rex Subject: Re: Netflix On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Jeff Dwarf wrote: > 2fs wrote: > > Just don't talk about the new Star Trek film - lest he blow > > a gasket... (This refers to a Facebook conversation...) > > The guy playing Chekhov is beyond terrible (and I seem to see that guy cast > in things fairly often and he's always terrible -- whose dicks is he > sucking*), I liked him, and don't assume he's sucking any cocks for any reason than his own pleasure. The kids liked him a lot. > John Cho and Simon Pegg are both underutilized and probably too old given > the rest of the cast, Scotty FTW, underutilized only in that he shows up late. The secondary Trek cast is *always* underutilized in the movies, though. This one did better than usual, I thought... most of the character business was pretty well motivated. > **In 22whatever, would Beastie Boys "Sabotage" be considered classical > music? Naw, just cliche driving fast music. A small slow step up from "Born to Be Wild", but these things by definition evolve very, very slowly. - -Rex ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 22:54:55 -0500 From: 2fs Subject: Re: movies you love to hate On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Rex wrote: > > > On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 1:16 PM, 2fs wrote: > >> On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 9:57 AM, lep wrote: >> >> Someday I should try to write up, in detail, a tendency I see in movies >> over >> the last, oh, twenty-thirty years - which is a misplaced belief in the >> power >> of realism. You can see this in the ever-more "realistic" (or even >> beyond-realistic) gore in horror films, in the overreliance on CGI, >> > > This has reached a zenith in the new Star Trek-- where no lens flare has > gone before, it's lots and lots of lens flare. I loved the movie, actually, > but damn... lens flare is the new cowbell, apparently. And honestly, the > "heightened" reality of the jerky camera moves and light artifacts raises > more questions than it addresses... okay, so, there's some other little ship > mounted with a camera following the Enterprise around? And it's struggling > to get the best shots in some documentary about the attack on the Romulan > mining thing, but it loses track and gets hit by flak and shit? There's > something to be said for omniscience... > Yeah, that's always kind of amused me. BTW, I think the "jerky camera in space" is a total, uh, borrowing from BSG... But in fact, the reason we (where "we" = most of us anyway) accept this is our immersion in the filmic language established over decades of common usage - in other words, we know that visual language, so its (technical) unreality doesn't read to us. Sometimes, yeah, this can be annoying: noisy explosions in space from the POV of someone in a vacuum, squealing tires on gravel - but a lot of conventions work because they're shorthand grammar that conveys info much more efficiently than a strictly considered "realism." I should state that there are definitely times when you want to question those conventions, and use realism as a tool to do it, so I'm definitely not saying conventional film grammar's the only way to do something, or that it's always wrong to try to be realistic. And carefully chosen realism can trump convention quite thoroughly: I mean, movie convention is that someone can get tossed off a building and, if they're not dead, not only get up and walk around but the next day (hell: the next *hour* if it's _24_) with no ill effects, no apparent pain, etc. This is, of course, not at all true: even falling from standing height onto one's side to a marble floor (real experience) can be very painful, and with effects lasting for weeks. (I saw Wire in 2000 days after that...and damn, that was a painful show...solely because of me, and I wouldn't have missed it!) I think it was some Hitchcock movie where there was a fatal fight, and Hitchcock intentionally prolonged it to th epoint that audiences became restless...his point being how hard it was to kill a person (obviously, we're talking sans machine guns here). > > I can't get my head around the term "unsimulated sex"... what else is > "unsimulated" as opposed to be just plain "real"? > That's actually an interesting distinction...I suppose you'd say that "real sex" is what real people have when they're not doing it for a movie, or in character. - -- ...Jeff Norman The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.wordpress.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 22:58:23 -0500 From: 2fs Subject: Re: Speaking of movies On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Carrie Galbraith wrote: > > IMHO - Tarantino films are about glorifying violence It seems to me they're about glorifying the filming of violence. That is, I think Tarantino is (excessively, at times) aware of the artifice of the situation. That can be fun...but at his worst, it can be just plain off-putting or, indeed, veering into glorifying violence for its own sake. It occurs to me that I do not believe I've ever seen a Sam Peckinpah film. (And that typing his name, I realize it's a very odd one.) - -- ...Jeff Norman The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.wordpress.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 23:01:59 -0500 From: 2fs Subject: Re: Speaking of movies On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Carrie Galbraith wrote: > > > Then there is the quirkly little "western" by Alex Cox : "Straight > to Hell." An odd little movie but what do you expect from the guy who > made "Repo Man?" Alex Cox, I remember reading, was not spoofing Leone > directly, but was spoofing a spoof called "A Fistful of Travelers > Checks" which I actually saw once many years ago. Joe Strummer is one > of a new gang in town and the Pogues are the resident gang of coffee- > guzzling espresso machine stealing outlaws. Oh, and their butler, who > can stop any gunfight by offering coffee, is Elvis Costello. I *love* this movie. It was (seemingly, at least) unavailable for years...and then I found a set of 4 DVDs (at, of all places, Best Buy) with this, Repo Man, and a handful of later things that varied from pretty interesting (his version of a Borges story) to...interesting. The problem with me and film is that, uh, they take time. You can't watch them faster. And I just don't have that much of it. Perhaps I should resolve that when I retire, I will watch many more films. Except it's not as if either of us is likely to be able to truly "retire" in the old-school sense, back when people had actual pensions and the like. - -- ...Jeff Norman The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.wordpress.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 23:07:09 -0500 From: 2fs Subject: Re: Netflix On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 10:01 PM, Rex wrote: > On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Jeff Dwarf wrote: > > > 2fs wrote: > > > Just don't talk about the new Star Trek film - lest he blow > > > a gasket... (This refers to a Facebook conversation...) > > > > The guy playing Chekhov is beyond terrible (and I seem to see that guy > cast > > in things fairly often and he's always terrible -- whose dicks is he > > sucking*), > > > I liked him, and don't assume he's sucking any cocks for any reason than > his > own pleasure. The kids liked him a lot. He took me right out of th emovie every time he was on screen - he was like an SNL parody of Chekov. > > > > John Cho and Simon Pegg are both underutilized and probably too old given > > the rest of the cast > I'm not looking it up - I'm assuming Cho played Sulu? I don't recall whether Sulu was supposed to be older - but Scotty was, no? Certainly McCoy was. > > > > Scotty FTW, underutilized only in that he shows up late. Yeah, Pegg was pretty awesome. I liked it a lot - fun, witty, entertaining, knowing w/o condescending - and I thought it was actually fairly smart (if a bit cliched - but so what) to use the timestream notion to account for th deviations from canon. And it made utterly perfect sense to me that Young Kirk was such a dick - you can definitely see that as a possible past for Shatner's Kirk. (Meanwhile, Shatner's looking at Smirking Young Model Kirk and saying, kid, look at me now: 40 years from now you'll be a puffy bloated joke - better enjoy being a joke!) (Shatner, actually, has pretty well redeemed himself from bad-joke status: first, by being a good sport; second, by being just quirky enough to make himself interesting. I mean, there's som weird shit on that Ben Folds record w/him. God I'm typing craply toinght - and not caring. MORE BEER.) - -- ...Jeff Norman The Architectural Dance Society http://spanghew.wordpress.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 21:28:34 -0700 From: Rex Subject: Re: movies you love to hate On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 8:54 PM, 2fs wrote: > On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Rex wrote: > > > > > Yeah, that's always kind of amused me. BTW, I think the "jerky camera in > space" is a total, uh, borrowing from BSG... Firefly had it first, no? And actual silent space exteriors? Did BSG have that? > > > But in fact, the reason we (where "we" = most of us anyway) accept this is > our immersion in the filmic language established over decades of common > usage - in other words, we know that visual language, so its (technical) > unreality doesn't read to us. Sometimes, yeah, this can be annoying: noisy > explosions in space from the POV of someone in a vacuum, squealing tires on > gravel - but a lot of conventions work because they're shorthand grammar > that conveys info much more efficiently than a strictly considered > "realism." Common usage in filmic language has had the "outer space shots" be more omniscient, though. "Wrath of Khan" had some of the best, really... elegant shot design and that fanatastic lighting in the Mutara nebula... quite likely my favorite ILM miniature work ever, on the cheap but smart. The funny thing about the over-lens-flare use in the new Trek is that it feels like a convention adopted to lend verisimilitude to the space stuff, but then spilled over into the live action bits, in which context it looks more like a mistake in the cinematography... someone didn't close the barn doors on a light or something. But once again, I liked the movie a lot. - -Rex > I should state that there are definitely times when you want to > question those conventions, and use realism as a tool to do it, so I'm > definitely not saying conventional film grammar's the only way to do > something, or that it's always wrong to try to be realistic. > > And carefully chosen realism can trump convention quite thoroughly: I mean, > movie convention is that someone can get tossed off a building and, if > they're not dead, not only get up and walk around but the next day (hell: > the next *hour* if it's _24_) with no ill effects, no apparent pain, etc. > This is, of course, not at all true: even falling from standing height onto > one's side to a marble floor (real experience) can be very painful, and > with > effects lasting for weeks. (I saw Wire in 2000 days after that...and damn, > that was a painful show...solely because of me, and I wouldn't have missed > it!) I think it was some Hitchcock movie where there was a fatal fight, and > Hitchcock intentionally prolonged it to th epoint that audiences became > restless...his point being how hard it was to kill a person (obviously, > we're talking sans machine guns here). > > > > > > I can't get my head around the term "unsimulated sex"... what else is > > "unsimulated" as opposed to be just plain "real"? > > > > That's actually an interesting distinction...I suppose you'd say that "real > sex" is what real people have when they're not doing it for a movie, or in > character. > > > > -- > > ...Jeff Norman > > The Architectural Dance Society > http://spanghew.wordpress.com ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V17 #141 ********************************