TV/Movies Megathread

[Ed Anger]

I think its a fun idea until you realise that no one is shaved down there. :puke:

You seem to be under the impression that I would be in a hurry with such things.  That would be a miscalculation.

Seedy: Yes, Mary Todd Lincoln, you will shave your pubic area. Oh yes.

[viper37]

Just for laugh XXX - The nasty show 2012.

Just for laugh is a popular comedy show in Montreal every year.  It is the english version of the more popular Juste pour rire.  Hosted by Bob Saget this year, this is supposed to be the funniest of the funniest humor shows, where everyone let loose and no censorship applies.  So you got a bunch of people saying "fuck", "piss", "shit" repeatdly while saying it's no longuer taboo, only "cunt" is now taboo, so they proceed for about 1.5hrs to repeat the word "cunt" everytime they can plug it, to the general laughter of the public.  Apparently, this is modern anglo-saxon humor, where dirty jokes and dirty words are judged so offensive that just saying them in any sentence is funny.

This is the cultural divide, I guess.  This warranted a special edition, at midnight, for adults only and aired on The Movie Network.  The regular stuff presented for everyone in French is about as crude as that, even worst sometimes.  It felt like a Seth Rogen movie, quite boring.

Anyway, Mike Ward was über funny, as he usually is in French.  I tried to find his english show online, but I couldn't find anything else than his french capsules. 

[Josquius]

How odd, I thought swearing was out, in the UK the sweary comic was 10+ years ago, the modern popular ones are very old fashioned style, telling 'proper' jokes and that sort of thing.

And north american views on cunt amuse me.

[Josephus]

Anyone watch 666 Park AVe?
Tenants in a high rise make Faustian pacts with the devil, sort of thing. Enjoyed the first ep. Not sure if it has staying power.

[Ideologue]

Saw Looper and liked it, despite the time travel nonsense. Although after watching it I suspected it was one of those movies that China helped to finance (in the film America is a third world hell-hole, while the PRC is the global superpower), and I just found out I was right. 

Whoa. That's fucking weak.  I don't the PRChinese to tell me that America is going to be a third world hellhole.  The laughable part is that China may achieve relative "superpower" status eventually, but they'll only have done it by being a third world hellhole fueled by slave labor.  Good plan.

As for the movie itself:

Looper (2012).  Looper's premise of a future where bodies can only be disposed of by sending them back in time to be killed in their past (and our present) is kind of preposterous, but I could roll with that.  It's at least inventive.  I don't understand why they don't just poison the person in the future, then send him back.  Or send him back one mile over the planet.  Or send him back in time thirty years without moving him in space, so that he pops back into existence billions of miles from a breathable atmosphere or the warmth of a sun.  But whatever!  Two things with the movie really bothered me however:

1)I hate the fucking Back to the Future time travel paradigm, though, where changes to the universe are reflected in arbitrary ways that don't stand up to scrutiny, while ignoring massive changes wrought simply by standing around and talking to people in the past.  I have always hated this type of time travel system, even in good movies (like Back to the Future).  Consider genetics: the most casual interaction with human beings in the past is still going to be macroscale, and any macroscale alteration will, within only a few generations, massively affect the genetic makeup of the entire human (and every other) species on this planet, and hence its history.  So, basically any time travel story that involves immediate changes to objects from the future (whether they be Marty McFly or Bruce Willis) based upon occurrences in the present is going to destroy the future.  And seriously, how is an asshole with his legs hacked off going to have remotely the same history as a guy who didn't?

There are two good time travel schemes--the Bill and Ted scheme, and the Source Code scheme,* and the Source Code scheme is better in terms of plausibility, while the Terminator scheme is better in terms of narrative elegance.  Everything else is both physically retarded, logically unsound, and aesthetically ugly.

2)Whatever they were doing to Joseph Gordon Levitt's face.  It worked about 75% of the time, but for the other 25% it's subtle body horror.  This was an interesting experiment, I guess, but waaay unnecessary.

All that said, it was fun.  My favorite part was when Bruce Willis says, almost directly to the audience, and almost verbatim, in response to Complaint Number One, "WHO FUCKING CARES, IT'S A TIME TRAVEL MOVIE!"

*I.e., time travel operating under the Novikov self-consistency conjecture and time travel, as elaborated upon by David Deutsch, within the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, respectively.  In each, a unique narrative problem presents itself.  In a self-consistent universe with past-directed time travel, nothing can change--fate is not what we make it.  I raise the specter of Terminator because it operates largely under Novikov constraints, even if it winds up cheating in T2 (and the idea that sweeping socio-historical events like the invention and rise of Skynet are robust, even if the exact consistency of the human species is not, is one of the interesting things about the underappreciated T2).  Bill and Ted, at least their Bogus Journey, operates entirely under self-consistency constraints, to the extent that De Nomolos, their chief antagonist and the sit up champion of the 27th century, is instrumental in Bill and Ted's ascent to superstardom.  So in a self-consistent universe, the writer usually winds up needing to conceal a great deal of information from the characters, and the audience, so that surprise is achieved and the plot can proceed in its foreordained manner--and in the process more or less does away with the characters' agency.  (Another related problem with this type of time travel story is that it is very hard to write since everything must fit just-so; thus, I imagine a lot people don't bother.)  The idea of time as a solid does, however, have a certain aesthetic appeal, and this is why it remains satisfying when done well, despite requiring severe narrative trickery and the abrogation of any free will.

Many worlds time travel has sort of the opposite problem.  So much agency that consequences aren't even perceived as real.  Take Source Code--Colter Stevens fails to save about fifty trains before he finally manages to preserve one (and in the process wipes a guy's mind, wears his body as a suit, and surely, shortly after the credits, rapes-by-fraud his victim's girlfriend, but that's neither here nor there).  In the many worlds interpretation, everything happens, so nothing matters.

MWI-type stories are newer to genre fiction, even though Everett proposed the idea like back in 1956.  There's surely some really inventive and probably depressing stories to be done with this time travel paradigm, but people are too busy doing logically busted Back to the Future-style "oh my God I'm fading out of the photograph!" stories instead.  Like, to tie it back together (GET IT): Looper.  C+

[Ideologue]

Oh, shit, and I forgot to mention in my complaining about China--you know the Red Dawn remake?  They spent millions and like a year in post-production turning the PRChinese villains into DPRKoreans, because it may have impacted their ability to sell films in the PRC.  Spineless and despicable--I've no interest in the movie, hell, I've no serious interest in the original, but the one thing I could respect was the idea that a film was willing to take on a new real-world villain.

But fuck that, I guess.

[Neil]

and any macroscale alteration will, within only a few generations, massively affect the genetic makeup of the entire human (and every other) species on this planet, and hence its history.  So, basically any time travel story that involves immediate changes to objects from the future (whether they be Marty McFly or Bruce Willis) based upon occurrences in the present is going to destroy the future.

Nope.

[Ideologue]

Destroy as in make the traveler's history inconsistent, I mean.

[CountDeMoney]

Oh, shit, and I forgot to mention in my complaining about China--you know the Red Dawn remake?  They spent millions and like a year in post-production turning the PRChinese villains into DPRKoreans, because it may have impacted their ability to sell films in the PRC.  Spineless and despicable--I've no interest in the movie, hell, I've no serious interest in the original, but the one thing I could respect was the idea that a film was willing to take on a new real-world villain.

But fuck that, I guess.

Yeah, it's probably the most spineless and pussified thing they've done movie-wise since they changed the script of The Sum Of All Fears from Muslims to neo-Nazis in a pang of post-9/11 cultural sensitivity.
Like my stadium would be nuked by shitty cookie-cutter neo-Nazis.  Everybody knows if neo-Nazis were to nuke anything, it'd be North Miami Beach.

Obama doesn't apologize for America.  Hollywood does.

[FunkMonk]

Speaking of time travel I'm watching Terminator 2 on AMC. The second-best time travel movie after Back to the Future. 

[CountDeMoney]

I was always partial to Time After Time.  Definitely the gold medal winner in Creepy Roles by David Warner in his collection of Creepy Roles.

And besides, who wouldn't want to slice Mary Steenburgen's whiny ass the fuck up.

[viper37]

How odd, I thought swearing was out, in the UK the sweary comic was 10+ years ago, the modern popular ones are very old fashioned style, telling 'proper' jokes and that sort of thing.

And north american views on cunt amuse me.

It might be just me.  Swearing, for a Québécois, is using religious terms.  Words like 'shit' or 'fuck' aren't considered swearing or vulgar in French.

[Grey Fox]

Oh, shit, and I forgot to mention in my complaining about China--you know the Red Dawn remake?  They spent millions and like a year in post-production turning the PRChinese villains into DPRKoreans, because it may have impacted their ability to sell films in the PRC.  Spineless and despicable--I've no interest in the movie, hell, I've no serious interest in the original, but the one thing I could respect was the idea that a film was willing to take on a new real-world villain.

But fuck that, I guess.

Yeah, it's probably the most spineless and pussified thing they've done movie-wise since they changed the script of The Sum Of All Fears from Muslims to neo-Nazis in a pang of post-9/11 cultural sensitivity.
Like my stadium would be nuked by shitty cookie-cutter neo-Nazis.  Everybody knows if neo-Nazis were to nuke anything, it'd be North Miami Beach.

Obama doesn't apologize for America.  Hollywood does.

China is the only place the studios make any money nowadays.

[Ed Anger]

I was always partial to Time After Time.  Definitely the gold medal winner in Creepy Roles by David Warner in his collection of Creepy Roles.

And besides, who wouldn't want to slice Mary Steenburgen's whiny ass the fuck up.

That movie is a favorite of mine too.

[derspiess]

Yeah, it's probably the most spineless and pussified thing they've done movie-wise since they changed the script of The Sum Of All Fears from Muslims to neo-Nazis in a pang of post-9/11 cultural sensitivity.
Like my stadium would be nuked by shitty cookie-cutter neo-Nazis.  Everybody knows if neo-Nazis were to nuke anything, it'd be North Miami Beach.

Obama doesn't apologize for America.  Hollywood does.

I thought replacing muslims with fascists would be the worst thing about that movie, but the worst thing turned out to be Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan.