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Posts categorised ‘Film and TV’

Link: “Here’s Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)”

Original post found at: https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/

Interesting article talking about why movie dialogue has got harder and harder to understand over time. The biggest one seems to be disrespect on the part of filmmakers and crew for the job that the sound team has to do (at least, the part of it where they record the dialogue at the moment it’s spoken). But other factors include modern actors mumbling/breathing their lines way more than they used to, so they speak less clearly to begin with, and also sound systems (particularly at home but even in cinemas!) not being set up very well.

Romance? In MY Doctor Who?!

Since the start of December, I’ve been doing a rewatch of post-2005 Doctor Who. Today, I watched the finale of Series 2, the one where Rose is finally written out of the show (…but only temporarily, as it turned out).

When this season first aired, I was 13 years old and a huge Doctor Who fan. I read lots of fanfic, and even wrote some (having never been a really big fanfic person …

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I meant to point this out the other day, but I’ve finished series 1 in my Doctor Who rewatch, so my series 1 wiki page is now complete with my thoughts on every episode! 😇 I also went back and added star ratings for each episode now I’ve watched the whole thing. Next up: The Christmas Invasion…

Viv and I saw the second “Avatar” movie today (The Way of Water). We liked it, it was good, very beautiful visually, well-made… but 3h12 is too long for a movie. Thankfully it also has a lot of excessively long action sequences, so I had time to sneak out for a toilet break without missing a single plot development 😜

IDK. I also felt like the plot was less ambitious than the first one (I mean, in the first one they send an entire mining company packing! in this one, one family just goes into hiding then at the end they destroy a boat!!), and I also felt the lack of a real Grace-like character (even though Sigourney Weaver did return to play a different character in this). In fact, there were a lot of characters and as a result I felt like none of them got much by way of development… but I was interested in the world-building, again, I felt for the whale-analogues, and as mentioned the world was very pretty to look at.

One minor thing that confused me – after Kiri had her seizure, these two scientist characters turned up out of nowhere to declare she had epilepsy, then disappeared again? They were two of the scientists originally working in the forest, right? So… did they, like, follow the family to Beachtown just out of shot? (Considering we got footage of the family en route, and the scientists were not with them then.) Then where did they go after that scene ended?? They didn’t seem to still be in town when the climactic confrontation loomed. Am I crazy or does it genuinely not make sense what happened there?

I’m starting a rewatch of the “new” Doctor Who (2005 onwards). My tentative plan is 1–2 episodes a day (or at least most days), similar to when I first got into Doctor Who. That was 2003, when the ABC started showing every1 episode in order, from the First Doctor onwards, to celebrate the show’s 40th anniversary. If I manage to get through New Who, maybe I’ll start a rewatch of Classic Who afterwards 🙂

I started getting tempted to do this rewatch a few weeks ago, when there was all the hullabaloo around Jodie Whittaker’s last episode. At some point as an adult I stopped watching Doctor Who religiously, and there’s some big chunks of the show I’ve just never seen. Then there’s other chunks of the show that I did see, but don’t remember too well. Rewatching it in full just seemed like a neat thing to do! We’ll see how I go. First cab off the rank was Rose, which was… surprisingly dated… and everything about it except Rose and the Doctor themselves was naff. Nonetheless: onwards and upwards? 🙃

  1. Some serials with Daleks in them did not get aired, apparently due to a rights dispute with Terry Nation’s estate. The one I was saltiest about was the Second Doctor’s last serial, a ten-parter, which did not get aired thanks to a mere clip of a Dalek a few seconds long in one of the episodes. PS I still have never seen the Second Doctor’s last serial ↩︎

Link: “ABC statement on Doctor Who”

Original post found at: https://about.abc.net.au/statements/abc-statement-on-doctor-who/

Soooo apparently future episodes of Doctor Who are getting yanked off free-to-air TV in Australia, and are going to be locked behind Disney+. I have to admit I haven’t been watching the show all that much the last few years (I fell off during the Clara years, then came back for series 10 and 11, and then the ABC stopped advertising the weird timeslots they shunted the show to so I stopped watching again), but I have a lot of sentimental attachment to it and had always been kinda hoping to return. Definitely not going to do so on Disney+! 😤 Far be it from me to suggest “arrrrr, me hearties”, and yet…

Thoughts on Avatar (2009)

Last night Viv and I took his niece out to the movies (we were charged with baby-sitting, and told that seeing the remastered Avatar in 3D was what she wanted to do – although as she told us once we got there, that was more of an executive decision of her dad’s, not that she objected 🤣).

Neither Viv nor I had seen Avatar before. I have no real idea why I didn’t see it at the time, …

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Link: “I think flouting the Joker’s copyright is funny, and I’m tired of pretending it isn’t”

Original post found at: https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/16/23354819/the-peoples-joker-copyright-dc-tiff

I liked this piece about the stifling nature of our copyright laws. For most of human history, people were free to riff on pre-existing, well-known stories – a tradition still upheld today in modern fanfic culture, however “not totally legal” that may be – and I feel like that was better and healthier. Creatives have to make a living, sure, but that’s because we live under capitalism and dare I suggest that the capitalist system is designed to crush human creativity in this, and basically all other, regards.

Went to see Fight Club at a Hawthorn cinema last night, with my partner and my sister. I’d never actually seen the film before, although I read the book about a decade ago, and really enjoyed it as a story about alienation under capitalism (and, of course, toxic masculinity). For my tastes the movie dragged on too long – the book only took me an hour and a half to read, back in the day, and the movie manages to be almost an entire hour longer than that 😂 – but I enjoyed the beginning and the ending, so overall I’m left with a positive opinion. Not my usual kind of movie, and not perfect either, but pretty good.

Link: “Abolish the Military-Entertainment Complex”

Original post found at: https://jacobin.com/2022/06/us-military-hollywood-movies-top-gun-censorship/

Such a cavalier attitude coupled with the box-office success of the Pentagon-approved Top Gun convinced studios in the 1980s that agreeing to military demands and, hence, making ever more militaristic films was a guaranteed formula for success. Consequently, between the release of Top Gun and the beginning of the Gulf War, the Pentagon reported that the number of pictures made with its official assistance (and approval) quadrupled, and a large portion of these action-adventure productions (quickly synergized into video games, action figures, etc.) were for teenagers.

Though many parents might have objected to such obscene Pentagon-Hollywood collusion, most had no idea it was taking place. Unlike the proudly Pentagon-financed-and-advertised newsreels made by Hollywood directors during, say, World War II, filmmakers from the 1980s on almost never tell audiences that they are enjoying military-subsidized-and-sculpted productions. Viewers may think they are watching a purely commercial venture when they are often watching contemporary newsreels.

“Over and over [Pentagon] documents are full of statements where they are targeting children to be future recruits,” says journalist David Robb, whose seminal book Operation Hollywood examined the ties between movies and the armed forces. “The children and the people who see these films don’t know this is an advertisement for the military.”

Enjoyed this piece about the modern history of pro-military and pro-war propaganda in Hollywood productions.

a cartoony avatar of Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.