Kevin's Watch

Ron Burgunihilo wrote:You're just an argumentative type, aren't you.

My instinct is to say no, but then that would just validate your point, right? I'm going to have to be a little more subtle ...

Ron Burgunihilo wrote:Actually my info comes from a friend who went to film school and has served as DP and cinematographer for a few different independent films, as well as directing some of his own shorts. Not saying he's right, or anything. But it makes sense to me.

insidemovies.ew.com/2011/04/12/the-hobbit-48-frames-peter-jackson/

much like a painting carries a different visual quality than a still photograph, the blurring effect of 24 frames-per-second is what gives movies their otherworldly, dream-like quality

It makes sense, which is why I brought up the photo/painting distinction myself. And I think that for many directors and/or cinematographers, this will probably turn out to seem like a truism. So in a sense I agree.

But if that's always true, then how is it possible for some photographers to produce dreamlike pictures? Visual effects like filters, lighting, exposure settings, even photoshop can be used to make this "realistic" medium as fantastic as you want.

With that said, I do recognize a certain kind of magic in paintings that you can't get in photographs, especially impressionism. Painting that doesn't disguise the fact that it's a painting--and yet allows a scene to "filter through" the brush strokes nonetheless--has an unmatched ability to call attention to the very fact of artistic representation and the act of human perception, all at once. Realism has a hard time doing that.

But if we were to seek this particular quality in movie above other factors, we'd just watch anime, cartoons, or pure CGI creations. Given that a direct analogy to painting exists in the movie world (cartoons), and yet we still crave live-action epics, it seems to indicate that this photo/painting analogy doesn't fully capture the parameters of this particular problematic.

Thus, I think there is room on either side of this argument for both us of to be right. (Paradoxically countering your "argumentative" claim without the need to argue against it. Phew! )

48 is too low. Having played around with animations (and messing with FPS in games), you want a minimum of 60, though I really prefer 75. Instead of doubling the usual framerate, you could triple it to 72 and call it close enough.

Re: the complaints about The Hobbit, remember that much of that footage that was screened was untouched / unfinished. If you've ever seen raw footage before it was processed into a feature film, you'll know that it looks nothing like the finished product, and in fact it looks like crap. There's a ton of work that goes into post so that you can enjoy it.

Anyway, I don't know why people are complaining about an increase in quality. It was jarring the first time I saw a TV that upped the framerate to 120hz, but I quickly adapted and now my PC automatically ups the framerate of everything I watch.

Rigel,

Going on with the black line dialogue...

Spoiler

That would be an interested take, though I doubt it given she has actual bodily functions (sweating, eating, etc) and David did not.

Spoiler

Replicants had normal bodily functions too. I loved the Niven/Pournelle books about Heorot, settlers on a new planet and how they faced and dealt with its monsters (Grendels). The lead character was called Weyland...I see 'sources' in this movie....

Meanwhile, I'm Ok with 3D, its new and directors have to work out how to use it to create the effect they want within their movie. Much as we have 3D used well (Thor, Avengers, Transformers etc) we also have a black and white silent movie winning Oscars (the Artist). Like most things its how the artist uses the media.

Funny thing. Z talks about film always having been higher res than HDTV and I've no doubt he's correct on that - but when recently I changed from my old 'tube' tv to a LCD HDTV (takes a while for new stuff to find it's way into my house) the first thing I noticed was that with the HDTV I could 'see' the makeup that the tv actors, and most particularly presenters on news programs and the like, were wearing. Now higher res or not, I have never experienced this in cinema films.

Peter, films projected on the screen at cinemas are much larger. So the fact that they are much higher resolution may be seem to be obscured by this, to a degree. Given the fact that you can change your seating position by 100 feet or more, your experience will vary depending on how close you sit. However, that doesn't change the fact that the level of detail in movies is always necessarily greater than in DVD or Blu-ray, since there is more inherent detail (resolution). But detail in movies is a lot like the real world ... perspective is relative.

It is for this reason that I opted to save hundreds of dollars and get a 768P plasma screen, instead of 1080p. If you are watching on a 50 inch screen at a distance of 10 feet or more, the human eye can't tell the difference. It doesn't matter how good you think you are as a viewer, the optics of the human eye writes these rules. This is a fascinating sub-topic within HDTVs that most people don't bother with researching.

Certainly the process of choosing the best tv turned out to be much more complicated than I had first thought it would be. Things were much simpler with your old cathode ray tube. This 'refresh' thing turned out to be of some import, then plasma or lcd or even led - and size; was bigger always better. Got through it all - made the decision - bought the tv - then a matter of days later spotted 3D tv's that seemed to be getting better and better!

Going to see this tonight. So pumped!! I'll come back with my thoughts later tonight.

Sooo...I loved it. I really loved it. I'm apparently the only person on the internet who does.

No. I loved it as well. Thought the 3D was seamless instead of intrusive. Loved the open-ended questions. I am hoping we get some definitive answers from the sequel but I'm still contemplating certain scenes 5 days later. I want to see it again and look for clues to the questions that it leaves open!

Feel a bit the same Brinn, tho' I am still looking for the framing of those questions.... they are not so much asked as intimated that there may be a question to be asked...if that makes sense.

Sort of like looking at a bed of earth, you know there's seeds planted and you are waiting for the shoots to appear, but there was no lable on the seed packet!

I do think tho' there were a lot of cuts and having Weyland even in the film must have some significance for any sequel or why the hell was he there taking time away from other more important character develoments. As I said I think the traditional Ridley Scott director's cut may lift the lid a bit, but we'll have to wait and speculate...... this might be fun but maybe polite to let other people see it first before delving into spoiler-land.

Glad that some others are geting a bit more out of the film than I did. I don't think I can add much to what I said above exept that reports from people who live near me who have seen the film seem to be pretty clearly divided. For some it works - for others not so much so.

One observation I would like to make pertains to a scene early in the film, set in a cave on the Ilse of Skye where two of the films main charachters discover some early cave paintings. To get an idea of how truly badly these were done see the Herzog film I refered to above 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams'. This is less to knock the film set designers than to demonstrate what true masters of art some of our distant ancesters were those 30 thousand years ago.

Saw it today; it was kinda silly. My friend kept ranting afterwards about the necessity to throw every gimmick imaginable at the audience:

Spoiler

Facehuggers, dna-destroying worms, evil space giants, Giger aliens, ribcage-bursters...a guy drinking alien worm -infected beverage, then impregnating his girlfriend with alien seed, who afterwards forces the ribcage-destroyer-fetus out through a c-section, which THEN grows up and eats the giant WHICH then gives birth to the Giger monster....

...a bit too much. Would've preferred to see something more slow-paced and filled with psychological thrill, rather than just pounding from one action scene to another.

At the beginning, my friend and I kept nudging one another because of the landscapes, and turned out parts of the movie were indeed filmed in Iceland. Bit of an odd deja-vu, what with just having visited the place in person a month back.

I'll admit the start was promising. Towards the end...meh.

Long, detailed discussion of 3D here.

Loved it, with one major caveat.....

Is it an Alien prequel or not?

In the Alien novelization, the moon is referred to as Archeron, in Aliens it's LV-426. In this film it's LV-223.

In Alien:

Spoiler

the Space Jockey is in the pilot's chair, in Prometheus, he's devoured by the xenomorph.

"Doctors, we are LEAVING!" is a direct hat-tip to, "Marines, we are LEAVING!" in Aliens.

The set-design of the ship is damn near identical to the Nostromo's.

The film suffers due to this schizophrenia. And it shouldn't, because it's really well done.

The "Prometheus" story takes place on a different planet Cail. The ship in "Alien" is on a different moon. Maybe one of the Engineers from this moon escaped but was infected with a chestburster and crashed onto the planet in the original Alien.

From an I09 link. Lindeloff answers the question "Do the Engineers want us to visit them?" His answer follows:

Lindelof: That's an excellent question and one that I'm not going to answer. But I will say that there's something fascinating about humanity where we perceive it as an invitation. You look at a cave wall, there's somebody pointing at some distant planets, and one interpretation is "This is where we come from" another is "We want you to come here." Where are we drawing that from? I think another thing that's interesting about the system that they visit is that the moon the land on in Prometheus is LV 223. And we know LV 426 is where the action takes place in Alien, so are they even in the right place? And how close are they to the place that these aliens on cave walls were directing them. Were they just extrapolating "This is the system that has the sun with the sustainable life." So there's a lot of guesswork. There's a small line in the movie where David and Holloway are talking about David's deconstruction of the language based on Holloway's thesis, and he says "If your thesis is correct" and Holloway says "If it's correct?" and David says "That's why they call it a thesis Doctor." And the reason we threw that in there is that we're dealing with a highly hypothetical area in terms of who these beings are, what, if any invitation they issued, and who is responsible for making those cave paintings. And did something happen in between when those cave paintings were made — tens of thousands of years ago — and our arrival now, in 2093, 2,000 years after these things have perished. Did something happen in the intermediate period that we should be thinking about?

JazFusion wrote:An interesting analysis of Prometheus. Re:Spoilers! Also, it's funny. And language.

Brinn wrote:The "Prometheus" story takes place on a different planet Cail. The ship in "Alien" is on a different moon. Maybe one of the Engineers from this moon escaped but was infected with a chestburster and crashed onto the planet in the original Alien.

From an I09 link. Lindeloff answers the question "Do the Engineers want us to visit them?" His answer follows:

Lindelof: That's an excellent question and one that I'm not going to answer. But I will say that there's something fascinating about humanity where we perceive it as an invitation. You look at a cave wall, there's somebody pointing at some distant planets, and one interpretation is "This is where we come from" another is "We want you to come here." Where are we drawing that from? I think another thing that's interesting about the system that they visit is that the moon the land on in Prometheus is LV 223. And we know LV 426 is where the action takes place in Alien, so are they even in the right place? And how close are they to the place that these aliens on cave walls were directing them. Were they just extrapolating "This is the system that has the sun with the sustainable life." So there's a lot of guesswork. There's a small line in the movie where David and Holloway are talking about David's deconstruction of the language based on Holloway's thesis, and he says "If your thesis is correct" and Holloway says "If it's correct?" and David says "That's why they call it a thesis Doctor." And the reason we threw that in there is that we're dealing with a highly hypothetical area in terms of who these beings are, what, if any invitation they issued, and who is responsible for making those cave paintings. And did something happen in between when those cave paintings were made — tens of thousands of years ago — and our arrival now, in 2093, 2,000 years after these things have perished. Did something happen in the intermediate period that we should be thinking about?

Right, that is self-evident based on the name of the moon.

I guess my issue is that the wrecked ship is wrecked nearly identically to what we've seen before. And if we accept that this is a different planet, that sort of obviates the entire premise of the first series of films. Unless we're to believe that no one in the Weyland corporation other than the people on the Prometheus were aware of where they were going and/or why. We'd also have to believe that there was no telemetry sent back home.

Scott clearly acknowledges all four original films, and as the interview suggests, nothing is there accidentally. So that causes continuity issues with what we've seen in both Alien and Aliens, unless we're to believe that the inquest shown in Aliens was held by people who had no clue what the company was into.

I'm just saying that it's problematic. It sounds like a great deal of this will be addressed in the 20 to 30 minutes that were excised from the theatrical cut of the film. But as one of the commentators said in your link, you shouldn't have to rely on interviews with the cast and crew, or deleted scenes to make sense of a movie.

i liked her viewpoint, plus she mentions Flex Mentallo

www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4P2WKa1opY

language alert