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Spatula City posted:Disturbingly, a lot of people in Eastern Washington have Southern-ish accents. As do a lot of poor people in the suburbs for no discernible reason. I can only assume it's either an affectation, or they're children/grandchildren of emigrants from the South.
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Jan 22, 2011 18:25
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CloseFriend posted:I live there, so I can verify this. It's not a very thick accent, but it's more common in a lot of the more rural areas. I just assumed it was a byproduct of the popularity of redneck culture in these areas. It's far from uniform there, though. I grew up in Western Washington, so mine is straight-up Seattle newscaster, and most people I know where I live now have an accent more like mine than, say, Jeff Foxworthy's. Eastern and western Washington are about as different as two places can be in the same state.
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Jan 22, 2011 19:41
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Definitely true. Every time I see anything set in Western Washington, it makes me homesick as hell, even Shadow Complex and Harper's Island.
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Jan 22, 2011 21:00
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penismightier posted:It's a style called cyberpunk, which exited in literature and comics, but hadn't really made it to film yet. There's a comic book called The Long Tomorrow which was a major visual inspiration. The term itself was first applied by a writer named Bruce Bethke to a story of his that was published at the end of 1983, and nobody loving noticed until William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer started getting attention. At the time, anyone watching Blade Runner would have understood the film to be neo noir (or just straight up film noir in a science fiction setting). It is absolutely the case that subsequent cyberpunk works borrowed enormously from Scott's film, to the point that almost all generic cyberpunk settings---and more generally almost every science fiction dystopian setting----since Blade Runner is almost identical to it, at least in terms of art design. But I really think it's a stretch to call any science fiction noir `cyberpunk', and I think that's what you'd have to do to call Blade Runner `cyberpunk'.
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Jan 22, 2011 22:52
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I think people connect Blade Runner with cyberpunk because although there is no real "cyber" component in blade runner, the concept of artificial organs and the trade revolving around it is very similar to how implants and augmentation are handled in cyberpunk. It creates a thematic similarity(On top of dystopian future. Also I need to go finish reading Neuromancer.
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Jan 23, 2011 00:53
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Snak posted:I think people connect Blade Runner with cyberpunk because although there is no real "cyber" component in blade runner, the concept of artificial organs and the trade revolving around it is very similar to how implants and augmentation are handled in cyberpunk. It creates a thematic similarity(On top of dystopian future. I think you are missing the point of what he said. (I think). Blade Runner was first, cyberpunk was a label put on the style retroactively, since the term cyberpunk was not invented at the time the movie was made. I don't think anyone can argue that whatever cyberpunk refers to is not what was represented in Blade Runner. Gibson said he almost gave up on writing Neuromancer because the movie had more completely realized what he was trying to write about, IIRC. (Or something like that.) My question was where that style came from. The dark wet look is from some place, but the mix of Chinese and Japanese writing (and the neon signs and what not) was something I had never seen before. What's really funny is that it is almost like Shinjuku (the shopping town in Tokyo) based its look on Blade Runner. kapalama fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Jan 23, 2011 |
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Jan 23, 2011 01:36
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EVERYTHING I SAY ABOUT JAPAN OR LIVING IN JAPAN IS COMPLETELY WRONG, BUT YOU BETTER BELIEVE I'LL 
ABOUT IT.
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kapalama posted:My question was where that style came from. The dark wet look is from some place, but the mix of Chinese and Japanese writing (and the neon signs and what not) was something I had never seen before. That aside, I think one of the reasons why Blade Runner isn't cyberpunk isn't just historical accident. One of the central ideas in cyberpunk---or at least in most of the major works that originally defined the term (like Neuromancer)---was about the failures of technology. It's sort of the antithesis of the view of science and technology from 1950's and early '60's science fiction, which was all about the view of science eternally triumphant, and the inevitability of a future that looks something like the world of the Jetsons. But while the future of Blade Runner is dystopian, all of the problems are man-made, not the result of technology gone bad. The reason why the planet is a dump isn't some sort of technological equivalent of an ecological disaster (as it usually is in cyberpunk), it's because technology allowed all the `fit' people to migrate off-planet (implicitly to nicer places). And the central conundrum of the narrative is predicated on the idea that we'd managed to produce these beings, replicants, that are essentially humans except in ways that their designers expressly prevented them from being human. I guess this point depends on how you read it---Tyrell, talking Roy says that he made them as well as he could (`the light that burns twice as bright' and so on), but Bryant tells Deckard that the short life span was artificially imposed, and was specifically done to prevent replicants from developing human emotions (the implication being that this would make them more difficult to use as tools). If you want to shorten this to t-shirt length, Blade Runner is about how humans treat technology (and other humans, or rather the idea of humanity); cyberpunk is stereotypically about how technology treats humans. Blade Runner is about the problems of the success of technology in a world where humans are still flawed; cyberpunk is stereotypically about the failures of technology. This is obviously a simplification, but I think that thematically Blade Runner is very much mainstream science fiction and is in opposition to most cyberpunk. It's just the visual look and overall dystopian feel that it shares with later cyberpunk works. Edit: To amplify: I don't think we're supposed to walk away from Blade Runner thinking that, for example, that replicants are intrinsically a bad idea; I think we're supposed to look at the confrontation between Roy and Deckard and think that maybe the fuckup here is on the human side of things. Contrast this with, say, the vision of technology in the Terminator films, which present the rise of self-aware technology as intrinsically and inevitably a catastrophe for mankind. I'd say that the Terminator films are more cyberpunk thematically, despite not sharing the same sort of overall mood or tone (being fast-paced summer blockbusters which don't indulge in the self-concious, murky moodiness of most cyberpunk). On the other hand it's hard to point to the basic mechanics of the Blade Runner narrative and identify anything that makes it cyberpunk that wouldn't apply equally to, say, Whale's Frankenstein (1931) (man creates robot that doesn't know what to make of life and disrupts social order of surrounding community). SubG fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Jan 23, 2011 |
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Jan 23, 2011 02:24
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SubG posted:This is obviously a simplification, but I think that thematically Blade Runner is very much mainstream science fiction and is in opposition to most cyberpunk. It's just the visual look and overall dystopian feel that it shares with later cyberpunk works. Which is ironic because Neuromancer is also about a computer whose potentially superhuman potential is being restrained by the humans who created it. But that's just the plot. On a different level, cyberpunk is noir in a sci-fi context, which fits Blade Runner to a T. And it started out in literature and had no visual works initially; Blade Runner was coincidentally a perfect complement to the words and the movement was all too happy to crystallize around it.
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Jan 23, 2011 02:48
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kapalama posted:I think you are missing the point of what he said. (I think). Blade Runner was first, cyberpunk was a label put on the style retroactively, since the term cyberpunk was not invented at the time the movie was made. I wasn't trying to counter your point or anything. I was just saying "I think this is why people associate Blade Runner with cyberpunk" even though it predates the genre and the term.
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Jan 23, 2011 03:03
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SubG posted:If you're in 1982, you think the future looks like Japan. Back then, everyone was extrapolating that Japan was going to buy America and then become the dominant culture in the coming decades or century. Yeah but 2 things. 1. Japan did not look like that in 1982, Shinjuku did not look modern Sinjuku looks back then, and few places outside of Shinjuku/Shibuya look like that now. There are plenty of urban areas that bear no resemblance to that. 2. Much of Blade Runner was Chinese, not Japanese. (Not that anyone can tell the difference in the US, but) On a separate note, I am not sure that the Shinjuku kind of Japan was what most people in 1980 thought of as Japan anyway. Japan in 1982 in the American mind was Karate, Cars, employees doing jumping jacks together before work, and guys in glasses and business suits. (And of course women in whiteface Geisha makeup, which they had in the movie.) (Separate note 2: Does Olmos always have to wear contacts in his movies? It was strange to see him with blue eyes.)
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Jan 23, 2011 03:27
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haveblue posted:But that's just the plot. On a different level, cyberpunk is noir in a sci-fi context, which fits Blade Runner to a T. That's treating the question as a problem of serious taxonomy. There's an entirely different question of what constitutes cyberpunk as editorial policy (of a publishing house or production company) or shelving policy (of a bookshop or video store), which is a broader category (loosely, something is part of genre foo if it is targeted at self-identified fans of foo). If you're saying that Blade Runner might get shelved as cyberpunk, no argument there. My point is that this identification has nothing to do with the underlying content, themes, style, and so on of either Blade Runner or of cyberpunk. Blade Runner certainly informed the visual sensibilities of later cyberpunk works. But that doesn't make Blade Runner a cyberpunk work any more than the fact that Stagecoach (1939) influenced so many later films makes all those other films Westerns (didn't Ridley Scott say that he watched and re-watched Stagecoach obsessively while making Alien (1979), or am I thinking of another film?). Or that all the films that have borrowed the overcranked, undersaturated look of the action sequences from Saving Private Ryan (1998) are war movies. Or I guess the argument would be the reverse---that Saving Private Ryan must be a science fiction film, because (for example) Terminator Salvation (2009) borrows so much from it visually. kapalama posted:Yeah but 2 things. As for the other cultural elements, I think they're there because the society (or at least what we see of LA) is supposed to be a `mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you' (to quote Deckard on the street lingo). This is a not particularly dramatic extrapolation, I think, from what most large American cities have looked like for a long time---a patchwork of a lot of different cultures and ethnicities. I think Chinese culture is in there specifically because the sort of glaring cultural otherness (and to some extent the sense of projected artificiality) is something people (or at least Hollywood) associate with Chinatowns in general. I'm not trying to say that this is absolutely where all this comes from. You'd have to get inside the head of Ridley Scott and the art directors/production designers to get a definitive answer on that. My point is that none of it is that out of left field given when the film was made.
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Jan 23, 2011 04:00
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Not sure if this should go in the "Recommend Me" thread or here, but what's the best Sherlock Holmes movie out there? I've only ever seen the Robert Downey Jr. version and the new BBC version, but want to see a more classic version of the character. I read a few of the short stories a few years back and really enjoyed them, but don't have a definitive screen Holmes yet.
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Jan 23, 2011 04:10
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feedmyleg posted:Not sure if this should go in the "Recommend Me" thread or here, but what's the best Sherlock Holmes movie out there? I've only ever seen the Robert Downey Jr. version and the new BBC version, but want to see a more classic version of the character. I read a few of the short stories a few years back and really enjoyed them, but don't have a definitive screen Holmes yet. Basil Rathbone is the classic movie Holmes in the eyes of many. VVVV Ugh, that's the dealbreaker for me Glass Joe fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Jan 23, 2011 |
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Jan 23, 2011 04:20
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Glass Joe posted:Basil Rathbone is the classic movie Holmes in the eyes of many. Fair warning, though - the Rathbone movies update them to a then-current setting. You're not getting OG Holmes, but it's close.
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Jan 23, 2011 04:23
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morestuff posted:Fair warning, though - the Rathbone movies update them to a then-current setting. You're not getting OG Holmes, but it's close. What if I do want victorian-era? What's the best film in that case? And if I do go with Rathbone, what's the definitive film?
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Jan 23, 2011 04:24
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feedmyleg posted:]And if I do go with Rathbone, what's the definitive film? The first two. Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
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Jan 23, 2011 07:04
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penismightier posted:The first two. Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Agreed. I also really like Sherlock Holmes in Washington, and the very silly Sherlock Holmes in The Spider Woman.
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Jan 23, 2011 09:40
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In May I'm going to be giving a seminar about bad movies at the Banff Springs Hotel, and I'd like to show some clips to illustrate some of things I'll be talking about. Unfortunately, I'm not too sure about the legality of showing short clips, especially since I'll be giving the talk in Canada, but using clips from movies from around the world. None of the clips I want to use are over a minute long, and I won't be getting paid for it. I guess I have two questions: 1. Is it legal for me to use short movie clips if I legally own the films and am not profiting from my talk? 2. If it is legal to use those clips, would it be legal to record my talk, including the clips, and put it on the internet?
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Jan 24, 2011 03:25
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Between rewatching The Dark Knight recently and seeing a preview for Rabbit Hole last night, has anyone else noticed that Aaron Eckhart has the exact same mannerisms and tics as Peter Krause? It was really bugging me because I kept trying to figure out who I know that acted like Eckhart and then I realized it was because I just watched all of Six Feet Under a few months back.
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Jan 24, 2011 04:31
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Hopefully this isn't a dumb question: You know how in the box on a movie or poster with the moving's rating there's usually a brief summary of why it's rated that? (Strong language, nudity, etc) Most of those are pretty self-explanatory, but there's one that I've not been able to figure out: what the hell does "Thematic Material" mean?
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Jan 24, 2011 04:57
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LucyWanabe posted:Hopefully this isn't a dumb question: It's a catch-all term to signify themes that some parents might find objectionable for children to be exposed to. In general, it seems like a handy way for the MPAA to justify giving a movie that might be a little too "mature" for young kids a PG-13 rating when there isn't much else in the movie to warrant the rating.
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Jan 24, 2011 05:55
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Ah, okay, that makes sense. It was the only one that ever made me pause because I couldn't parse it.
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Jan 24, 2011 06:12
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Tender Bender posted:Between rewatching The Dark Knight recently and seeing a preview for Rabbit Hole last night, has anyone else noticed that Aaron Eckhart has the exact same mannerisms and tics as Peter Krause? It was really bugging me because I kept trying to figure out who I know that acted like Eckhart and then I realized it was because I just watched all of Six Feet Under a few months back. Timothy Olyphant and Billy Bob Thornton are like that too. With each other, I mean. Not with Aaron Eckhart and Peter Krause.
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Jan 24, 2011 06:47
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BulletRiddled posted:In May I'm going to be giving a seminar about bad movies at the Banff Springs Hotel, and I'd like to show some clips to illustrate some of things I'll be talking about. Unfortunately, I'm not too sure about the legality of showing short clips, especially since I'll be giving the talk in Canada, but using clips from movies from around the world. None of the clips I want to use are over a minute long, and I won't be getting paid for it. I guess I have two questions: 1. Probably yes, practically yes. Nobody is going to sue or prosecute for non-commercial use of a clip in a very limited context. 2. This is much greyer. Even fair use provisions on use of clips are grey. http://www-sul.stanford.edu/cpyright.html I'd think that if you posted those clips online (even as part of a larger presentation) you are potentially vulnerable.
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Jan 24, 2011 12:55
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feedmyleg posted:What if I do want victorian-era? What's the best film in that case? And if I do go with Rathbone, what's the definitive film? Not films, but the TV series with Jeremy Brett is closest to what you're after.
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Jan 24, 2011 15:33
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therattle posted:1. Probably yes, practically yes. Nobody is going to sue or prosecute for non-commercial use of a clip in a very limited context. This is a huge help, thanks! I'll hold off on posting the video online, hopefully I can transcribe it without losing much.
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Jan 24, 2011 18:54
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I saw a guy put a talk like that on youtube, and he blurred out the clips but let the audio play through.
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Jan 24, 2011 18:59
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Cavenagh posted:Not films, but the TV series with Jeremy Brett is closest to what you're after. Thanks! And it's on Netflix Instant. Perfect 
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Jan 24, 2011 19:10
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I have a couple of questions about Back to the Future II. They're about less than tertiary characters, not about time paradoxes and that stuff. 1. When Marty first arrives in the future, and he's wandering around town , some old guy comes up to him asking him to donate to save the clock tower. They briefly talk about baseball, and then the guy states that he wishes that he could go back to the beginning of the season and bet on the Cubs. This statement gives Marty the idea to go buy the Sports Almanac. The thing is that this actor is OBVIOUSLY made up to look like he's much older. You can hear it in his voice. My question is: since this series is ALL ABOUT the younger and older versions of so many characters, was this guy someone important or one that we've met at another time in the series? Either that or he's just a friend of the film makers who wanted to have a cameo so they coated him in makeup so as to be unrecognizable... 2. When Marty goes back to the "Present" and is wandering around the lovely "Biff" themed world, he bumps into some bearded street guy who yells something like "Watch where you're going you stupid pedestrian!" Marty gives him some wild eyed look, says some kind of name in shocked recognition or something. Who was that guy? Was Marty just shocked that there are street people wandering around? Or was he someone he knew from either the "good" present or from some other time?
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Jan 24, 2011 19:14
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1. I can't be sure, but I'm guessing it's one of the actors from the first film, made-up to look older for continuity between films. 2. I think he's just bewildered in general and is taken aback when someone yells at him. I don't have my copy of BTTFII around to confirm these, though.
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Jan 24, 2011 19:18
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Rocket Ace posted:2. When Marty goes back to the "Present" and is wandering around the lovely "Biff" themed world, he bumps into some bearded street guy who yells something like "Watch where you're going you stupid pedestrian!" Marty gives him some wild eyed look, says some kind of name in shocked recognition or something. He's the old bum who in the first film says 'watch where you're going you crazed drunk driver' (in the second film he says 'crazed drunk... pedestrian')
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Jan 24, 2011 19:24
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Rocket Ace posted:1. When Marty first arrives in the future, and he's wandering around town , some old guy comes up to him asking him to donate to save the clock tower. They briefly talk about baseball, and then the guy states that he wishes that he could go back to the beginning of the season and bet on the Cubs. This statement gives Marty the idea to go buy the Sports Almanac. A little googling reveals the answer. Does everything have a wiki these days?
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Jan 24, 2011 19:27
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AHA! Cool. I mean, in a series that has little details like "Twin Pines Mall" vs. "Lone Pine Mall" I just KNEW that they had to be someone important. Very clever. Thanks!
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Jan 24, 2011 19:56
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I'm pretty sure the bum was also they mayoral candidate in 1955.
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Jan 24, 2011 20:06
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Apparently not. Although, it seems to be a common mistake. This is a good series for a wiki.
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Jan 24, 2011 22:24
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Kentucky Shark posted:It's a catch-all term to signify themes that some parents might find objectionable for children to be exposed to. In general, it seems like a handy way for the MPAA to justify giving a movie that might be a little too "mature" for young kids a PG-13 rating when there isn't much else in the movie to warrant the rating. I imagine it is a similar thing for television where one might encounter "Adult Situations". Personally, unless sex or nudity is also mentioned, I assume that they are referring to people doing their taxes.
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Jan 25, 2011 05:59
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Ninja Gamer posted:Apparently not. Although, it seems to be a common mistake. How many loving characters named Red can you have in one movie? One is too many if you ask me.
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Jan 25, 2011 06:14
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Baron von Eevl posted:How many loving characters named Red can you have in one movie? One is too many if you ask me. Morgan Freeman would like a word with you.
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Jan 25, 2011 14:48
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CzarChasm posted:I imagine it is a similar thing for television where one might encounter "Adult Situations". Personally, unless sex or nudity is also mentioned, I assume that they are referring to people doing their taxes. 1. INT. BREAKFAST ROOM - DAY CHARLIE pours himself a nice big bowl of Grape Nuts and sips his black coffee while reading the business section of the New York Times...
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Jan 25, 2011 17:07
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Magic Hate Ball posted:1. INT. BREAKFAST ROOM - DAY "Should I buy an iPad?" Charlie wonders. "No, I probably can't afford one right now."
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Jan 25, 2011 17:10
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