TV/Movies Megathread

[Ideologue]

Hey Ide, you ever catch up to the Daimajin trilogy like I fucking told you to?

You made fun of watching Gamera movies.  Cognitive dissonance?

Anyway, I do still wanna see 'em.  I've also been sitting on Singin' In the Rain, Scarface, and Le Samourai for a month because other things have been distracting me.

[Admiral Yi]

Contact is on.  I had forgotten about the lame religion vs. science story line.

[CountDeMoney]

Hey Ide, you ever catch up to the Daimajin trilogy like I fucking told you to?

You made fun of watching Gamera movies.  Cognitive dissonance?

Difference is, I watched them when I was 12, and left it at that.

[Ideologue]

Contact is on.  I had forgotten about the lame religion vs. science story line.

It's the least good part of the movie, but it's alright.

[Tonitrus]

Contact is on.  I had forgotten about the lame religion vs. science story line.

It's the least good part of the movie, but it's alright.

The best part is when one guy briefly seriously considers that the aliens are Hitler/Nazis reborn.

[Ideologue]

It's a pretty great joke.

I think the science behind picking up TV broadcasts has been pretty thoroughly debunked though.  You'd need a receiver dish the size of the moon or something.

[CountDeMoney]

Yeah, the look on James Woods's face as the National Security Adviser is priceless. 

[CountDeMoney]

Conspiracy is on HBO this month. I doubt anybody in this crowd has missed it, but if you have, it's a great treatment on the Wansee Conference, with all your favorite Nazi baddies.

[Liep]

John Oliver.

[Josquius]

STNG, Schisms- 20th century alien abduction story. But....on the starship enterprise. err.....OK.

[Ed Anger]

John Oliver.

He has an annoying voice.

[Savonarola]

It's a pretty great joke.

I think the science behind picking up TV broadcasts has been pretty thoroughly debunked though.  You'd need a receiver dish the size of the moon or something.

That's an interesting question...

Free space path loss is:  20Log(d)+20Log(f)-147.55 where d is distance in m and f is frequency in Hz.  The lowest frequency (and therefore lowest loss) frequency in North America is about 55 KHz.  The nearest star is Proxima Centauri at 4.243 LY (4x10^16 m) away.  So the loss is 279 dB.

In North America maximum power is 100 KW; converted to dB scale that's 80 dBm, so received strength at Proxima Centauri would be 80-279 dBm or -199 dBm.

A television receiver would have a theoretical minimum reception sensitivity of the noise floor which is 10Log(f*t*B) where f is bandwidth in Hz, t is temperature in Kelvin and B is the Boltzmann constant.  Television channels in North America are 6 MHz wide.  Assuming a temperature of 3 K in space the radio would need a reception sensitivity of -128 dBm.

The difference between the received signal strength and sensitivity is the gain the antenna needs; a gain of 71 dB is needed.

The size of a parabolic dish determines it's gain where G=10Log(Pi^2*d^2/lambda^2)*Ea where d is the diameter of the dish, lambda is wavelength in m (5450 for 55 KHz) and Ea is a dimensionless antenna efficiency.  Assuming perfect efficiency (Ea=1) the dish would need to be six million meters in diameter.

The moon is 3.4 million meters in diameter; so even at our closest neighbor (and under highly idealized conditions) a receiver dish would have to be about twice the diameter of the moon (and be pointed directly at earth.)

[celedhring]

It's a pretty great joke.

I think the science behind picking up TV broadcasts has been pretty thoroughly debunked though.  You'd need a receiver dish the size of the moon or something.

That's an interesting question...

Free space path loss is:  20Log(d)+20Log(f)-147.55 where d is distance in m and f is frequency in Hz.  The lowest frequency (and therefore lowest loss) frequency in North America is about 55 KHz.  The nearest star is Proxima Centauri at 4.243 LY (4x10^16 m) away.  So the loss is 279 dB.

In North America maximum power is 100 KW; converted to dB scale that's 80 dBm, so received strength at Proxima Centauri would be 80-279 dBm or -199 dBm.

A television receiver would have a theoretical minimum reception sensitivity of the noise floor which is 10Log(f*t*B) where f is bandwidth in Hz, t is temperature in Kelvin and B is the Boltzmann constant.  Television channels in North America are 6 MHz wide.  Assuming a temperature of 3 K in space the radio would need a reception sensitivity of -128 dBm.

The difference between the received signal strength and sensitivity is the gain the antenna needs; a gain of 71 dB is needed.

The size of a parabolic dish determines it's gain where G=10Log(Pi^2*d^2/lambda^2)*Ea where d is the diameter of the dish, lambda is wavelength in m (5450 for 55 KHz) and Ea is a dimensionless antenna efficiency.  Assuming perfect efficiency (Ea=1) the dish would need to be six million meters in diameter.

The moon is 3.4 million meters in diameter; so even at our closest neighbor (and under highly idealized conditions) a receiver dish would have to be about twice the diameter of the moon (and be pointed directly at earth.)

It's decided, the villain of the next script I write will be an engineer.

[MadImmortalMan]

Okay well here's my sorry contribution. On the flight over Greenland and Iceland I watched Anchorman 2 and Last Vegas. And the first two episodes of Vikings.

Last Vegas was hilarious. Robert DeNiro and Morgan Freeman bitchslapping Turtle around was just fun. Plus lots of hot babes at pool parties and bachelor parties.

Whatever, it was fun.


Anchorman 2. All laughing. All the time. It's like all of Hollywood was standing in line to do cameos in that one. Just funny.

[Savonarola]

The Ten Commandments (1923)

In the early 1920s Hollywood was hit by a series of scandals; with Olive Thomas's death, the Fatty Arbuckle trial and the death of William Desmond Taylor all happening within a couple years.  In an attempt to clean up the motion picture industry's image Paramount had Cecil B. DeMille make this biblicalish epic.

The first part is the story of Moses and Pharaoh.  This is every bit as over the top as the 1956 production with it's enormous sets and thousands of extras.  There are even more chariots in this version then the later one.  There was no code or Legion of Decency in 1923, so the Golden Calf scene is more lascivious.  Some of the special effects work better in this film; God is a pyrotechnic cloud and the pillar of fire is done with double exposure; while both were done with animation in the 1956 version.  Other things are noticeably worse, for instance the drowning Egyptians are clearly toys.   

DeMille shot this in the exotic locale of Guadalupe, CA about 170 miles north of Los Angeles.  No one had ever done such a large shot before in such a distant location and the studio kept begging DeMille to come home.

This dissolves into what was then the present day.  A mother is reading her two sons the story of the Exodus.  The older brother (who, get this, is a carpenter) respects his mother's teaching but tries to moderate her bible-thumping.  The younger brother rejects his mother's teaching.  There's a girl that the brothers both love, she goes off with the younger brother and he swears he'll break all of the ten commandments.  Four years later he's a shady building contractor and a multi-millionaire.  Hilarity ensues as he builds a church with concrete laden with jute.

Not even Cecil B. DeMille could top the first part of the film; but that doesn't mean he doesn't give it a commendable effort.  The second story is a wild ride filled with lepers, an exotic Eurasian femme fatale, a thrilling motor boat escape through stormy seas, Jesus Christ and a collapsing church.

The pretentious film scholar who gives the audio commentary pointed out that the construction site scenes in the movie "The Fountainhead" are identical to the ones in this film; proving, once again, that objectivists are lazy thieves.