TV/Movies Megathread

[Liep]

Hannibal. I was like a Red Wedding Reactions montage during the last 10 minutes.

[Ideologue]

Hannibal. I was like a Red Wedding Reactions montage during the last 10 minutes.

I don't know what happened, but it was great.

[Josephus]

I'm really glad that it got renewed for a third season, but a part of me kind of wishes Hannibal had been canceled and that this episode would have been the ending.   

I read a couple weeks ago that the producers werent' expecting to get renewed and thought that that might be the last episode.

[Savonarola]

The Giant Claw (1957)

Planes go missing as a mysterious creature from outer space comes to earth.  It's up to square jawed engineer Jeff Morrow and bitchy, gorgeous mathematician Mara Corday to save the world.  This should have been just a standard low budget science fiction movie, but the producer had so little money that he contracted with a puppeteer from Mexico City to make the monster.  The result was:



There's even this homage to a considerably better movie:



One thing that surprised me about the film is that they talked about anti-matter; and identify correctly one of the properties of anti-matter, that it explodes with matter.  I didn't know that was known in the 1950s, but it turns out Dirac had identified this in the 1920s.

[celedhring]

Speaking of great comic book films, I just caught Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer on the telly 

[Queequeg]

That's such a weird movie.  The Silver Surfer is fascinating and Fishburne's voice is great but it is such a fucking mess of a movie that even that is obscured. 

[celedhring]

I don't know. It's a guy on a surf table with a bodypaint job. He looks way too silly.

Funny how utterly unbearable Chris Evans is as Johnny Storm, yet he makes a quite good Cap.

[Queequeg]

Directing and writing make a world of difference.  I actually like Evans quite a bit, wish he wasn't giving up acting. 

[Syt]

Someone made the point that a bad performance by otherwise decent actors is usually the director's fault, because he's the one who should have the whole vision in his head, while actors often only see their bits, frequently not shot in order or without full context (not to mention having to react to not yet rendered CGI).

[Ideologue]

I really adore The Giant Claw.

[celedhring]

Main cast get the whole script, so he can have the "whole vision" in his head too.

Anyway, the character is written to come across as an unbearable prick, and Chris Evans portrays him as such. Don't think even Marlon Brando circa 1955 would have saved this one.

[dps]

Main cast get the whole script, so he can have the "whole vision" in his head too.

Even with the whole script, what ends up on the screen might not be all that similar to what's written down beforehand.  Lots of times, major changes are made to the script even during shooting, plus there's ab-libbing and improvised lines, and maybe most important, decisions made during editting.

[celedhring]

Of course, but an actor has to be aware what his character is about and his evolution throughout the story in order to portray it, it's part of his paygrade. They aren't blind parrots that just utter the lines they are fed every day.

[Sheilbh]

I think Jason Statham is...

[Scipio]

Of course, but an actor has to be aware what his character is about and his evolution throughout the story in order to portray it, it's part of his paygrade. They aren't blind parrots that just utter the lines they are fed every day.

That's an awfully romanticized view of it. Hitchcock was right: actors are cattle. Mamet is right: the search for the character is mental masturbation. The character is on the page. It is the actor's job to show up and hit his marks, as Cagney said. All the rest is funny voices.