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SeanC
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Posts posted by SeanC
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I enjoyed the return to court politics, something that D&D were never good at writing when they didn't have GRRM's source material to fall back on (though admittedly, that's a long list of things).
Making Rhaenyra and Alicent the same age (and friends) is obviously the biggest change relative to the central premise, but that makes sense in terms of fleshing out character arcs from the rough plot synopsis.
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6 minutes ago, AntFTW said:
The childbirth scene was... a lot.
It's entirely possible, and maybe even plausible, that Aemma would have died in childbirth anyway but this... was unnecessary cruelty.
The Grand Maester was evidently of the opinion that it was a certainty at that point.
Period-specific surgery, etc. can be really terrifying onscreen. I always think of the John Adams depiction of an early 19th century mastectomy.
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The latest A24 genre effort, the English-language directorial debut of Dutch actress Halina Reijn.
This is probably the biggest surprise of the year for me, relative to my expectations for it, of which I had none. It walks the line between being extremely funny and also very tense, and given Reijn is a relative newcomer as a director, it's impressive how distinct the aesthetics are (set largely in a house with no power and lit by an array of ambient sources like flashlights and cell phones). And it builds to a truly fantastic final reveal.
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2 hours ago, Tenshinhan said:
Hopefully they lay off of the whole anti-mutant prejudice thing for a while.
That's the central theme of the entire franchise.
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24 minutes ago, Dani said:
Scorsese wants to blame Marvel style movies for the loss of “cinema” without considering that the problem might not be the intellectual capacity of the audience or the studios but that his movies don’t appeal to many people on an intellectual level because they aren’t actually written for them.
Who said it was about his movies? He hasn't been arguing about his films specifically (which generally do well, enough for him to keep making the kinds of films he wants to make), he's arguing about the state of cinema for adults in general.
There's plenty of quality films being made by and/or about women and people of colour these days that aren't getting commercial attention.
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On 8/3/2022 at 2:48 AM, Makai said:
Scorsese doesn’t “have time” to write female characters so why should I have time to watch his movies.
That is frankly absurd. Scorsese has directed ten different actresses to Oscar nominations, the second-most of any living director, including wins for Ellen Burstyn and Cate Blanchett.
He also, among other things, spearheads the World Cinema Project, which has spent decades rescuing and restoring neglected foreign cinema.
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44 minutes ago, Paloma said:
I do understand that the source material has cliffhangers, but for the very reason that it is one long story, as you said, the streaming service should have either authorized 2 (or more) seasons from the get-go or authorized enough episodes to be shown over one long season so that the story could be resolved.
Streaming services don't want to make multi-season commitments like that on unproven properties, and they don't need seasons that long.
It's not really functionally any different from that in ye olden days a new show could be cancelled after only a few episodes without any warning.
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On 8/1/2022 at 11:10 PM, Paloma said:
My husband and I loved this show up until the last few minutes, when it was clear the writers were going to leave so many plot threads hanging and so many questions unanswered. We are really getting tired of what I'm starting to think of as a "dirty trick" by the creators/producers of streaming shows, who do this in the hope that the show will get renewed but too often it doesn't. In the case of Paper Girls, I think there could have been some kind of satisfactory resolution that still left the possibility of new things to happen if the show is renewed.
Ending a season on a cliffhanger wasn’t exactly unusual in the pre-streaming era.
Based on the source material, there really isn’t any other way this could have ended. Paper Girls is one long story, it doesn’t have any intermediate resolution points; basically every issue ends with a cliffhanger.
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3 hours ago, Camera One said:
This movie just didn't seem like a genuine attempt to create historical fiction.
This sort of storyline is one of the prototypical types of historical fiction.
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4 hours ago, swanpride said:
Scorsese is good in his one niche, but I fail to see how a movie becomes better just by being more brutal.
When has he ever made that argument?
Scorsese does not have one niche. He's made some famous gangster movies, but he's also made The Age of Innocence, Kundun, and The Aviator.
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7 hours ago, CarpeFelis said:
As for the others, after going through a weird experience like this with them I’d think they’d be pretty well burned into her brain.
Adult Erin clearly doesn't remember any of this, though.
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13 hours ago, CarpeFelis said:
Not buying the ending. Why on earth would adult Erin not recognize her child self or remember the other paper girls?
I mean, would you be expecting your child self to walk in through the door? As to the second thing, they weren't close pals or anything, they literally just met in the course of these events.
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23 minutes ago, Kel Varnsen said:
But why would Marvel care? They put out a request for VFX companies to bid on a certain project and then accept the cheapest bid that they believe can get the job done? Is it up to them to make sure the company that is bidding low isn't doing the work for cheap by overworking their employees. Maybe the company that bids low is just super efficient. It's not like the VFX people are their employees, they are just paying for the finished product.
I mean, Marvel should care because they should want to be a good company to work with. Now, corporations in reality don't care about that, generally, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't protest their behaviour.
Though it is also affecting the quality of Marvel's own product, as noted in the article.
Just now, Cobalt Stargazer said:There were jokes about how bad the CGI in She Hulk was to begin with, and while it's been cleaned up, the quality of the work doesn't always match the quantity of it that's going on.
That one, I will say, is slightly different because She-Hulk is a TV show and even an expensive TV show is not going to have movie quality effects. Making a TV show with CGI main characters is a huge gamble, especially when said main character is supposed to be relatively human in appearance.
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22 minutes ago, Kel Varnsen said:
It seems weird to single Marvel studios though since I feel like VFX firms low bidding has been a problem since before Marvel studios was a thing.
Based on the article, evidently they are particularly dedicated to driving costs down, which results in fewer people being assigned to work on these projects even as they are more demanding than normal.
The choices suggested in the article are that Marvel needs to either (a) commit much earlier in the process to what it wants or (b) be willing to delay movies more extensively when they want to make tons of last-minute changes.
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This article has been generating a lot of discussion of late, as the most detailed salvo in a number of recent reports about how Marvel Studios has acquired a reputation as a terrible client in the VFX industry:
QuoteTo get work, the houses bid on a project; they are all trying to come in right under one another’s bids. With Marvel, the bids will typically come in quite a bit under, and Marvel is happy with that relationship, because it saves it money. But what ends up happening is that all Marvel projects tend to be understaffed. Where I would usually have a team of ten VFX artists on a non-Marvel movie, on one Marvel movie, I got two including myself. So every person is doing more work than they need to.
The other thing with Marvel is it’s famous for asking for lots of changes throughout the process. So you’re already overworked, but then Marvel’s asking for regular changes way in excess of what any other client does. And some of those changes are really major. Maybe a month or two before a movie comes out, Marvel will have us change the entire third act. It has really tight turnaround times. So yeah, it’s just not a great situation all around. One visual-effects house could not finish the number of shots and reshoots Marvel was asking for in time, so Marvel had to give my studio the work. Ever since, that house has effectively been blacklisted from getting Marvel work.
Part of the problem comes from the MCU itself — just the sheer number of movies it has. It sets dates, and it’s very inflexible on those dates; yet it’s quite willing to do reshoots and big changes very close to the dates without shifting them up or down. This is not a new dynamic.
QuoteThe main problem is most of Marvel’s directors aren’t familiar with working with visual effects. A lot of them have just done little indies at the Sundance Film Festival and have never worked with VFX. They don’t know how to visualize something that’s not there yet, that’s not on set with them. So Marvel often starts asking for what we call “final renders.” As we’re working through a movie, we’ll send work-in-progress images that are not pretty but show where we’re at. Marvel often asks for them to be delivered at a much higher quality very early on, and that takes a lot of time. Marvel does that because its directors don’t know how to look at the rough images early on and make judgment calls. But that is the way the industry has to work. You can’t show something super pretty when the basics are still being fleshed out.
The other issue is, when we’re in postproduction, we don’t have a director of photography involved. So we’re coming up with the shots a lot of the time. It causes a lot of incongruity. A good example of what happens in these scenarios is the battle scene at the end of Black Panther. The physics are completely off. Suddenly, the characters are jumping around, doing all these crazy moves like action figures in space. Suddenly, the camera is doing these motions that haven’t happened in the rest of the movie. It all looks a bit cartoony. It has broken the visual language of the film.
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On 7/25/2022 at 12:06 PM, Sheenieb said:
This is why I don't like this Tyler Perry shit some directors do. I don't think any director should also be the writer. You're too close to the material, and no one else has eyes on it.
Any film script that makes it through production, especially from a major studio, has had a million eyes on it.
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My main issue with this story is that the whole concept of the list is really just a reflection of standard qualities that any woman seeking a husband in this social setting would have been expected to have. There was a whole network of governesses, finishing schools, etc. built around facilitating the acquisition of all of these things. Well, other than being conversant in politics, that would be quite unusual for a man to want in a wife in this era. Which could have been social commentary on the marriage market itself, but the movie never makes that connection.
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The delayed Grand Prix assignments are likely out tomorrow, along with the finalized holding of the fourth Grand Prix in England.
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On 6/20/2022 at 3:21 PM, munchiewoman said:
Yet another show where I dislike the main character the most (Ginny and Georgia comes to mind.) Belly is just so ... amazingly self-centered. I get it, she's young, with this new "pretty" power, but playing with the feelings of not one, not two, but three good guys annoyed the shit out of me. All three deserved better and I didn't like any of them being jerked around.
I really don't see how played with anyone's feelings, let alone jerked anyone around.
Especially in the case of the brothers, both of whom are completely aware of her interest in the other and are actively the ones making moves on her.
On 6/21/2022 at 4:36 PM, SnazzyDaisy said:Protagonists have silly names (Belly? Connie?). WTF!
"Belly" feels like a nickname that would have been discarded by Grade 1, but "Connie" as a shortened form of Conrad is a longstanding usage. See, e.g., the hotelier Conrad Hilton. It is also a common shortening of Cornelius, as with Connie Mack I through V.
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16 hours ago, Dani said:
Yes, I know how Cinemascore works. It’s based on audiences who go within the first 24 hours. My point was that generally isn’t going to be casual viewers or even the average Marvel fan. It is going to be heavily weighted towards the fanatics who are often the most critical.
They also tend to be the people most likely to sustain a long box office run with multiple viewings and word of mouth, if you look at it that way.
16 hours ago, Dani said:Before 2021 only one MCU movie got below an A- (Thor) and there have been three is the last year. The scale for these movies is shifting. I absolutely think the movies that got lower scores have problems but no one will ever convince me they are worse than Hulk, The Dark World or Iron Man 3.
I don't think anybody was suggesting it's a measure of quality (audiences often reject anything that challenges them; I've seen plenty of films that have bad Cinemascores that I liked). It's broadly a useful measure of what a film's box office multiplier will be.
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53 minutes ago, Dani said:
Or self-selected to be way more critical than regular audiences.
No, it's a random poll of people who saw the movie. Which is to say, people who have already decided that they will probably like the movie by choosing to go see it.
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2 hours ago, Racj82 said:
Man, none of that crap matters. The vast majority of people aren't engaged in any of that stuff.
I'm not even sure what you mean by this. Cinemascore is a poll of theatregoers, it is by definition a measurement of general sentiment.
31 minutes ago, Hiyo said:So there has never been a movie in the history of time that wasn't successful with less than an A Cinemascore rating?
Nobody said that. It was noted that it's generally not a good sign for multiplier, as it wasn't for Multiverse of Madness.
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10 hours ago, Racj82 said:
That's not bad for a film of any type.
A B+ is not a good Cinemascore, since it is a poll of self-selected people who expect to like the movie. Anything not in the A-range is considered a disappointment.
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21 minutes ago, Dani said:
Same score as MoM which hasn’t hurt the domestic box office at all.
Multiverse of Madness did not have good legs; it made almost half its domestic gross on opening weekend, decidedly on the lower end of MCU multipliers. It obviously made plenty of money, as will Love and Thunder.
S01.E01: The Heirs of the Dragon
in House Of The Dragon
Hey, next you're going to say that Otto sending his daughter to the king's chambers immediately afterward to start the process of making her his new wife was too forward.