Movie Reviews 2.0

I thought Jungle Book is a full CG movie, I just learned that it wasn't.
Anyway, the kid's acting is really good, the CG is beautiful, and the story is nice, but somehow I prefer Zootopia more probably because it is more cartoon than this Jungle Book realistic visual. Too much uncanny valley's feeling in the movie.

 

Has anyone seen Hard Core Henry ?
this quote got me interested

 

I have not seen it, but read reports from people who tried to see it. Some didn't make it through more than 25 minutes before they had motion sickness and had to stop watching.

 

I don't think I would get motion sickness, but I doubt I'd make it through a movie where we don't see the main character's face. Filming an entire feature in first-person perspective would probably feel gimmicky very very quickly for me. *shrug*

Maybe I'd love it tho, I dunno. One shouldn't be prejudiced against new things...

Watched Goodfellas for the first time the other day. Pretty good movie, although I don't like that it doesn't really have a plot. Also, the freeze-frames, the repeated narration, and breaking the fourth wall at the end. But the acting is very very solid, so there's that. Also, the shifting fashion, cars and interior design as time passes. It's a good period piece. Pretty amazing and creepy though that the people this movie's based on could keep murdering and thieving for decades without getting caught.

Also: I have Episode VII sitting here next to me, waiting for me to watch it. Gonna do it after I've had some food to eat and enjoyed some fourth-season Babylon 5. I end up re-watching that series maybe once every year and a half or two or so. Will probably keep doing it as long as the DVDs still hold up and I own a drive to play them on.

 

Or rip them to x265 and keep them forever?

 

Nah, too much work. I'm so lazy... I'm holding out for the possibility there will be a HD release some day, then I'll just (re)buy a digital version, if discs are out of fashion by then.

Well, really, discs are rather out of fashion right now, but I like having a physical library of stuff. Besides... If I were to keep digital copies of all my BR movies it would take up a phenomenal amount of storage space, and streaming video is inferior in both video and audio encoding.

 

pirate it? you already bought it Yarrrrr arrrrr

 

Agreed. Just download an entire ripped set if you don't want to rip it yourself since you already own it.

My x264 Babylon 5 is 56Gb. Not exactly a huge amount. If you were to do x265 it would probably be 20-30Gb max.

 

Nah. A: I would have to find a torrent site that hosts the appropriate torrent and isn't shock full of malware (although there's torrentless torrents these days? *shrug* Not that I care.) And I hate having to search around, and then wait for all of it to download; I'm just too fucking lazy and impatient to pirate stuff.

B: I would be victim to the whims of whomever encoded the individual shows, as far as sound and video bitrate/quality settings is concerned. Also, is the collection complete? What about subtitles, are there subtitles? I always turn on english text even for english language, because growing older has made it harder for me to hear speech, especially in very quiet or noisy action scenes.

My blu-ray collection is several hundred discs in size. So it would take a fair amount of harddrive space to store them all.

 

I saw it about a week go. It's definitely a different type of movie. I enjoyed it, but I can see it not being for everyone. The first 30 min or so, the camera shakes too much, but it gets a little better. The movie is very gory, the body count is ridiculously high It feels like it's quite low budget, but that doesn't really make it worse by much. I think it was filmed in Russia and it definitely has an Eastern European vibe around it. It is almost non stop action from start to finish.

The characters are pretty good, but also weird,there are only few constant faces + tons of cannon fodder. It's probably one of those you like it or hate it type of things. There were some people leaving the theater early in the movie when I saw it. The shaky cam I can see to be an issue and the gore level also.

edit: Next Thursday it's Cap time.

 

*gets ridiculously excited*

Finished watching Force Awakens on BR a couple hours ago. It was fun. Really good movie, generally speaking. The things I liked about it first time around felt stronger, firmer the second time watching it, and the things that nagged me were no worse than back when I saw it on the big screen. I felt Phasma should have played a larger role, that's my biggest criticism I think. They had a strong villain in her, but she got very little chance to - er - shine. Other than that there was some questionable technobabble that could just have been skipped outright for the most part (don't try to explain how technology works in a star wars movie!), and a few unneccessary shoutouts to the first trilogy that felt strained. It didn't bother me much though. The new cast in particular just is so good my few criticisms don't really matter.

I like them all, Poe, Finn, Rey, Kylo. They did a really good job with the acting I felt, grounding the movie and making it believable amongst bizarre aliens and strange locations.

Perhaps Phasma got cut down for time, I dunno. I haven't looked at the deleted scenes, but I did watch most of the other extra material. No cast and director's commentary track, which is a crying shame. It really adds a lot, unless you're Tim Burton and probably half asleep towards the end, like in Sleepy Hollow... Last fifteen minutes I don't think he said more than three sentences sum total, lol.

In other news, the making-of documentary whitewashed the entire incident of the Millennium Falcon attacking and injuring Harrison Ford. It wasn't mentioned with one single word. Fucken lol. This is how history gets rewritten by big corps in the name of good publicity...

 

I'm not really surprised it didn't end up on the BRD extra's, they want to keep it light and fun and they are being prosecuted over it at the moment as well. I've listened to a number of podcast interviews where JJ has been quite frank about the incident and what didn't appear to be appreciated at the time was that JJ basically broke his back while trying to lift the door off Harrison.

 

There still are - unfortunately - some serious accidents on movie sets to this day, I remember a stunt woman getting disabled on Transfromers 3 (?) for example, or a camera operator killed by a car on one of the Taxi sequels. These are all bad, but at least there are security measures and such in place to minimize the risks.

What I personally think is similarly serious, but at the same time less discussed, is the stuff that some actors do for their roles, mainly extreme weight gains and losses. I think Christian Bale is a good example, with what he did through The Machinist, Batman Begins, The Fighter and then the rest of the Batman movies. Basically, slim down to near-death levels, bulk up to like 100 kgs, then slim down again, then bulk up again. I think he suffered some serious kidney damage through the process. Or there's Jared Leto and Matthew McConoughey for Dallas Buyers Club; and a lot of other actors are sort of forced to do similar things, particularly with the current trend of comic book superhero movies. It's just wrong to basically force people to go through such extreme changes in such short times.

Compared to this, breaking a leg is IMHO less of an issue. It could happen (and statistically, it does a lot more often) in everyday life at your own home.

 

This one?

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sun_Crusher

 

The Transformers accident wasn't even with a stuntwoman, she was just an extra. Suffered permanent brain damage.

 

I wouldn't be surprised. He looked like a concentration camp prisoner in the still shots from The Machinist I've seen. I believe Chris Hemsworth said that all the weight lifting and exercising he did for the original Thor movie made him physically ill throughout the entire shoot, and that he henceforth refused to do it to that extreme again. Understandable!

 

Mah most stuff gets posted with encoding details and you can see the list of files before actually downloading anything.

Hard disk size shouldn't be an issue. Even if you have 300 50GB BluRay rips you could still store all that on as little as 2 8TB disks. Obviously ripping everything is going to take some time but once you got everything ripped new additions shouldn't take up much time and if you got multiple people watching around the house running something like Emby or Plex gives you access to your media wherever you are with different accounts for different people all enabling them to track what they watched individually.

 

Regarding B5 on Blu Ray: IIRC they still have the film elements. But all the CGI was lost so they'd be stuck with the quality of what you see on the DVDs.
http://jmsnews.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2577&highlight=Blu+ray

Btw, that's the official JMS B5 forum. For some laughs, check here.
http://jmsnews.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2227

Edit: For some interesting short work that has Ed Wasser/Mr. Morden, check this thread.
http://jmsnews.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41663
I replied to one, and the director thanked me.
Hmm, here's one:

 

As far as I know, most of the CG work on the original Babylon 5 was actually done on Commodore Amiga computers; although they might have been using lots of extension boards for more CPU power and memory and such. The 3D animation and modeling software was an early version of Lightwave.

Back in those days it was something of a breakthrough, as CGI was dominated by the super expensive Silicon Graphics computers and the similarly expensive Alias and XSI software. B5 has shown that it can be done on a more reasonable budget, and the result was a lot of SF TV shows turning to Lightwave and studios like Foundation Imaging for their VFX work. Some of you may remember shows like SeaQuest or Space: Above and Beyond, and of course a lot of Star Trek SN9 and Voyager was also done on Lightwave (although the VFX studios had to abandon the Amiga and move to PCs).

On the other hand, most of that VFX work is just so... basic even by today's TV standards, practically every space sim looks much better. I think it'd even be possible to use a free game engine and some community models to redo all the space VFX at a far advanced level. I actually wonder why that hasn't been attempted yet.

 

I thought it had been established in the past that JMS held onto the original data files with a titan's grip. It would be greatly surprising if they've actually been lost - not to mention, a sign of a fuckup of the ages.

Have you seen B5 recently? It's beyond primitive. Indie space shooters look far better technically; it's the composition and animation of the shots that make them great. That would be a massive undertaking to recreate; you could get close perhaps, with enough work and sheer dedication, but it would be very hard and take a huge amount of time. Would Warner willingly want to spend that kind of money? Not likely, I'd think. They tried to kill the show every year until Sci-Fi Channel took over for season 5. In fact, I'm sure there's some fucking suit over there still pissed they didn't manage to shut it down...

If the original data files are indeed lost, to make a 1:1 re-creation of 3D battles with sometimes a hundred-plus ships, particles and explosions (which you'd also have to re-make all over again), from a 2D video source as a basis... Virtually impossible I'd think. You could only get close-ish. There would always be discrepancies, regardless how much money was spent.