TV/Movies Megathread

[celedhring]

Watched another episode of Hannibal and saw Dan Fogler popping up. Now, if Lecter ends up killing him in an appropriately gruesome manner the show will end up being worth it.

[garbon]

What's the deal with closed captioning? Does it get created before the final edits of movies/shows? I've been noticing as of late (as I always have subtitles on) that in many cases there will be close captioning for statements that the characters don't make. Little one liners that fit but would've been to on the nose and aren't present in the spoken dialogue.

[celedhring]

What's the deal with closed captioning? Does it get created before the final edits of movies/shows? I've been noticing as of late (as I always have subtitles on) that in many cases there will be close captioning for statements that the characters don't make. Little one liners that fit but would've been to on the nose and aren't present in the spoken dialogue.

Captions are first created off the show's script and then adjusted when synced to the video. That leaves off some irregularities.

Live shows are obviously even worse since they are made on the fly.

[garbon]

Gotcha okay. I thought I was going crazy.

[Grallon]

I had a marathon of 'Downton Abbey' a couple of weeks ago.  I watched all 4 seasons in a weekend.  It was well worth watching.  There's nothing quite like 'Old School England' upper classes rolling in the mud. 




G.

[Phillip V]

Shit, I missed it.  Did Barney die?

[spoiler]Barney and Robin get divorced, the Mother dies, and Ted ends up with Robin.[/spoiler]

That's fucking retarded.

It's actually handled pretty well considering they tried to [spoiler]compress fifteen years of post meeting the mother time into 30 minutes.  If they actually gave more series time to the events of the finale it probably wouldn't of been a problem, but that would have been moving outside the central conceit of the show.[/spoiler]

Compression would not be a problem if the whole series before that last 30 minutes was not a problem.

Story aside, execution was a problem down to audibly and visually integrating old footage of the children with Future Ted.

[Admiral Yi]

Another good Shameless episode.  Great makeup job on Frank.  He really looks like hell.

[Ideologue]

Carlito's Way (1993).  I like this gunfight in the train station better than that other gunfight in a train station.

A

[Eddie Teach]

Safety Last! - The spiritual precursor of such classics as Vertigo and The Secret of My Success, it's about a small town boy who moves to the big city to provide for his high maintenance girlfriend. He has money trouble until he gets his boss to offer him a huge bonus for performing a publicity stunt to attract people to his store. Many amusing gags are had along the way.

[Josquius]

This is the end- well that was a weird film. Took me a while to get into it, at first it just seemed too silly. But it grew on me. Its alright.

[Ideologue]

Phantom of the Paradise (1974).  They certainly don't make them like this any more; although Jim Sharman made them like this for some period of time.  Doubtlessly more coherent and relevant than the subsequent year's similar picture show, I'm not sure it's as much fun.  But it is a very near run thing.

They say it's a mix-up of Phantom of the Opera, Faust, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and all of this is true; but an influence much closer in time informs both key plot elements and tone.  Of course, I speak of The Abominable Dr. Phibes, another movie about a vengeful keyboard player with an electronic voice.  If Dr. Phibes is a hair better, well, Paradise doesn't have Vincent Price, and not half as many awesomely stupid murders.  In this regard, it must be held to be lacking; in point of fact, there's really only one really awesomely stupid murder (though it is supremely awesome and stupid alike).  But if it stumbles in terms of content, in terms of its presentation...

Yes: Paradise is best known as the first movie Brian De Palma ever made  that anyone without a film-historical interest would be likely to give a shit about, now forty years later.  And one can see why.  It's a quantum leap in quality from the rather bad, not to say wholly inept, hyper-Hitchcockian venture that was Sisters.  In that film, you could see the man learning.

He's still learning a bit here, but it's nearly fully-grown De Palma.  The one filmmaking misstep in Paradise is some genuinely awful handheld shakycam that badly mars a long mobile take (and you know that thing weighed like eighty pounds back then, so I additionally feel sorry for the actual cameraman).  Otherwise, De Palma's maturing style is mesmerizing; it clearly prefigures the sublime heights he'd reach with Carrie two years later.  (As for why Obsession, between the two, is so much less interesting to look at than either, I don't know who could say.)

But it takes a village to raise a rock opera, and the production and costume design is spectacular (and the future Carrie, Sissy Spacek, helped!).

Finally, and maybe most importantly of all, actor and composer Paul Williams has deployed some damned fine music here.  But the real star of the show is, undeniably, that man's freakishly large left eye.  That is one noteworthy gaze.

A great deal of fun all around.

Either a very, very high B+ or a very, very light A

P.S.: I should've went with my gut and given Dr. Phibes an A

[Capetan Mihali]

Either a very, very high B+ or a very, very light A

Did your "-" key stop working?

[Ideologue]

I don't do minuses.  In retrospect, I should've.

[Ideologue]

So Mill Creek is releasing blu-ray versions of the eight Showa Era Gamera films, and for a pittance--$30 all told, less than four bucks per picture (or about $4.30, if you don't count Gamera: Super Monster as a movie, which you well should not).

The first issue is that it's two discs for all eight, but given that they're dual-layer BDs, and the two-film disc of the first two Heisei Gameras (Guardian of the Universe and Attack of the Legion) both look just fine, this probably isn't a big deal.

The second and huge issue is they have foregone the old Sandy Frank dub tracks.  Which is a kaiju-sized exercise in missing the point.

I'm not against subtitles by nature, but we are not exactly talking about High and fucking Low here; Toshiro Mifune does not play Kenny and it isn't Tatsuya Nakadai and Shimura Takashi in those rubber suits.  There is no acting involved in these movies that demands one experience it in the original Japanese.

Worse, half of the charm is the--let's say--"not conventionally good" dubbing done for overseas consumption.  Remember the Southern accents of planet Terra from Gamera vs. Guiron?  Or the preposterously stentorian voices of both Zigra and his lovely mindwiped assistant?  The little girl who just wants a damned Coke?  Of course you do.

And, most importantly, these are kids movies.  They are movies for children.  You know what four year olds don't really enjoy?  Subtitles.

[katmai]

I fucking hate dubbed movies and you are horrible for liking them.