Sundown

Seriously... Hikaru's not doing too shabby. I mean, how many of us honestly think that even if we were to be trapped for a few days with, say, an up and coming Britney Spears or whoever you fancy, would really stand much of a chance? Not to mention that he didn't even need to be trapped with Misa for something to happen. He only needed to act like a general jerk around her and get her to nearly kill him.

I'm curious whether Obi's age comes from before the PT's were made. In either case, the real problem is that Obi/McGuiness in ANH looks heck of a lot older than 57, and Ewan McGregor looks young for 38, the age he should have been in Episode 3. With McGregor 4 years younger than he should be, and McGuiness 5 years older than he should be, and with one actor who tends to look young for his age and another that looks a tad older, we've got a 10-15 year visual discrepancy. I admit they did a decent job makeup wise in Sith, and I can buy that McGregor's character is 38, but that's still a young 38, and they've got McGuiness looking 65-70 in ANH. In the end, it just feels "off", and it's hard to believe someone who looks like McGregor at the end of Ep III can look so much older in 19 years time. The biggest problem is that Sebastian Shaw was 78 when he played Vader/Anakin in ROTJ. They did an astounding job makeup wise, and he looks to have the posture, energy, and poise of a man in his 50-60's for those few moments we (no longer) see him as a Jedi ghost, and he even looks younger than 78 as Pastyvader. Even so, he's supposed to be 45 when he dies in ROTJ, and it's another visual stretch for someone who looks like Anakin in Sith (who also has young-ish features) to look as old as Shaw in 24 years time. There's a 30 gap between the actors that's still noticeable, even with the years erased by makeup, and I keep thinking that Lucas would have been better off either starting EPI earlier or making his characters older in the PT.

So Krylon's nice and durable, especially for toys... but I'm guessing the downside is the lack of color choices and finishes? How would Krylon fair with a topcoat to get the finish you want? But I suppose one might just use hobby paints if you're going to go about doing that...

Neeat. So why Krylon? Or at least why it's popularity here for customizing 1/48's? Why not one of the other paint brands, specifically those geared towards hobbyists?

Well, like I said... the speculation pretty much started and ended with me. Now the continuing discussion, which I still admittedly find intriguing, I don't take any blame for. Just so you don't get the wrong idea and start thinking good things about me... I know some folks might take offense with general stupidity-- that's admittedly kind of hard for me to relate to, as I don't happen to be one of those who feels much rage unless things are said in an undebatably demeaning manner. So I don't personally feel that there's been a lot of real wrong done here, that there's real fault to dole out, or that there's much actual hurt to account for... (besides the dubious wisdom of me answering for you, that was in hindsight, a little dumb)-- but if there's offense felt regarding specific things, then I'd rather not someone else take the blame for whatever I said, even if I don't at first think the issue a "big deal". Most of the stuff is still pretty funny and amusing to us guys (and I wager some women), many of whom might have a crass streak. Sure, we can stand to be more tasteful, tactful, and judicial, but most of the stuff here isn't said in an intentionally demeaning or degrading manner. Musings about the intricacies of reproductive systems and Hurin's urinary issues "in fun" isn't quite at the same level as disparaging and degrading women "in fun". And as far as I can see, we're not really out to defend our right to offend for humor's sake alone. I hope you can sort of understand that... but I know it might not necessarily make the antics here any less irksome.

I am so touched that I finally started a thread worth protecting. In the interest of fair trade, I can tell you that getting hit in the nuts is nothing like getting hit in the solar plexus, or anywhere else in a man's body. It's an entirely unique sensation, unbearable not only for its pain but for the nature of that pain. The sensation of having a gland crushed, the pain that swells forth to fill the entire lower abdomen, and the distinct and uncomfortable waves of pressure that mount as you seriously wonder whether the gland itself might burst... is one that leaves you quivering on the floor, feeling extremely vulnerable and wanting to die. I think the pain isn't as bad as the uncomfortable nature of the sensation. It just feels wrong, a very foreign and alien sort of wrong, as your body and mind both scream "this is not how it's supposed to be!" Yes he will. With orange foam.

Well, again. The "I'll save her the effort" post was also entirely and only mine, posted fretfully because "Have YOU given childbirth?" isn't something usually asked of a lady, or at least not in that manner... My bad if you would have preferred to answer yourself. Okay, and there was the one other post in response, more about the lurid nature of the sig than the actual bearing of offspring... but any lack of credibility there might be due to deducing something from your sig has to pretty much fall on me alone. I mean as much as I'd like to be one of the folks who's personal antics singlehandedly determine MW's collective level of awesomeness or retardedness, I think that job's already taken.

I'll take that as some sort of strange compliment. I'm a male. So that predisposes me to a sometimes unhealthy fixation with bathroom jokes and unnatural wonders of the reproductive and urinary systems. Of course none of us men will never know what it's like to have another human come into being from nearly nothing and crawl forth from within us. The prospect is entirely baffling. But it doesn't stop us from wondering what it's like. And sometimes the only thing we have to go on is what women say themselves, their own comparisons with things we can relate to, and of course our wild and innane speculations. But I figure that's a lot better than simply ceasing to care, wonder, and attempt a meager understanding simply because we can't ever fully know. Actually, just to clarify, Mike did initially ask. Rather forwardly, too. So much so that I was a little embarassed and pointed towards the sig. So I was the only one here that really speculated on whether you had kids. At any rate, he was simply opining that your insights would have real weight if you had both given birth and passed a stone, which to my total awe, you have. Now there's insight I can use. [spock]Facinating.[/spock]

To save her the trouble, I would wager from her sig that she has. I'm curious just how big Shatner's rock is. Do we measure in carats? With how much it went for, it wouldn't be too far off. edited to fix quotes

Then again, women are wired a bit differently there too, and a woman passing a kidney stone might experience something at least a little different from a man, whether it be in the nature or degree of pain. I bet it's not fun either way. Disclaimer: My male retardedness is not responsible for comparing childbirth to passing a kidney stone. The actual comparison is being made by women who have experienced both. My male retardedness is merely responsible for my intense fascination with the subject.

Hums Star Trek Original Series deathmatch theme: Dun dun, dun dun dun, dun dun dun.... Passing stones. Owie. So are you supposed to help it along down the pipe manually? I imagine it'd be a feat pushing it down yourself by bladder pressure alone. And... does it ever get stuck... you know... mid-pipe? O_O

To bodily go, where no man has gone before... I have to admire the fact that Shatner's willing to do this, despite it being kind of tacky. And in the end, the tacky's actually part of the charm, as Shatner willingly exploits himself for a laugh and charity. Wait, so you're actually suppose to... pass these things? Through there? *looks down* But... the orifice... is not... that big. O_o Hahahah. This actually had me stifling laughter in the office.

http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?...212548&GT1=7651 -Al

I guess it's more that I wanted to empathize with Kate, so I could have confused my motivations with the writers. It still doesn't make much sense though, and sort of stretches believability for me. Plus Kate's dark past was shrowded in mystery for so long that I sort of felt a, "What, that's it?" when that episode was shown. I do also think that the stronger characters are characters with something to like and to hope for, despite their past sins. That's just good writing. This worked for almost all of the characters on the island, including Sawyer, who was initially portrayed as a jerk, but is now one of the best characters given his past. Unfortunately I don't see much of that going for AL, and Kate's now a little bit in kinda-chilling-and-psycho-land which makes her a little hard to relate to. But at least we've been with her long enough that there's still something likeable about her. I'd thought about that, and the whispers would have definitely put her on edge in a situation beyond her training. But police officers are always trained to check hands (for weapons) and ID before shooting... plus Shannon was wearing something pink. But I guess I could see the accidental shooting happening. At any rate, I'm more annoyed at the writers for all the contrived bits in this season, and their comittment to teasing without giving anything solid, and it's left me less satisfied than season one did.

Well Kate could have been abused, but she herself says that isn't the reason she killed him (in her cofession to Sawyer/chaneling-dad). It's some psychobabble about knowing that she could never be good because the badness of her dad was in her in being his child. So somehow, her way to freedom was to murder him. That's just screwy. Now it'd make sense if all those factors, added up, caused her to formulate some weird rationale for killing her father, and that her explanation alone wasn't actually the sole reason she did what she did-- but according to her, that is, and it ends up being sort of chilling. Well, I think both society and law enforcement's definition of justice, at least as most folks understand it nowadays, is that the criminal receives fitting punishment for his crimes, and that the victim receives compensation if possible. But it also mandates that such punishment be doled out by the legal system. Anna Lucia could have put the sleazoid away for a long time, simply by pointing him out in the lineup-- and thus, justice here would have been served, at least in any context where we actually consider law and society. But instead, she chose to take matters into her own hands. Of course this is all while she's sworn to uphold and serve the law. The way I viewed it, she wasn't as concerned about justice as she was the satisfaction of personal revenge. Sure, justice is sometimes served in revenge, but personal revenge is often more concerned with the self-absorbed satisfaction at being the one to dole out pain, suffering, or death than simply seeing that justice is served. And in most modern societies, their understanding of justice would require that she in turn be prosecuted and convicted for this act of murder and vigilantism, especially as a police officer. Sure, her getting shot and losing her baby sucks. But I guess it's not easy for me to shrug at what I feel is a perversion of justice and her abandonment of her sworn oath to the law. Plus she was already down a notch in my book for her general annoyingness, and her killing Shannon in a spectacularly poor display of firearm handling as a former-trained officer.

I feel like the writing for Lost is starting to head downwards. It feels like the writers are either so reluctant to give us anything solid on what the heck's going on to keep us watching or they simply don't have anything to give and are writing junk out their butt. Ie, the Chris Carter syndrome. The original characters weren't fully explored and now they've stuck us with a new bunch to distract from the original storylines: A psychiatrist/ex-med school student who actually takes away from the importance of Jack's character in being a second makeshift doctor, A big spiritual wise brute of guy (who I actually kind of like), Rose's husband, who has yet to be developed, and Anna Lucia, who's just about as irritating as Michell Rodriguez has ever been in any her roles. Her background doesn't really give me much to like her for, and doesn't start to make amends for her killing Shannon, especially since of all the people on the island, she should have been the best trained against accidental shootings. Then again, she'd never been a very good cop. But not only is she now an incompetant one, she's also shown as one who doesn't even uphold law enforcement's most central principle when it matters. She commits what's essentially a premeditated murder in the desire for revenge, even when justice would have otherwise still been served. We still don't have much on the characters I'm most curious about: Jack, Locke, Hurley, and what's revealed about Kate makes about no sense at all. Her actual reasons for killing her father --it wasn't abuse, and it wasn't for how he treated her mother-- pretty much makes her borderline psychotic. In tryingto be profound and avoid the cliched, the writers attempted to give her a deeper, more poetic motivation for taking her father's life, but it actually fails because of its absurdity. A real person acting as she did with her admitted motivations would pretty much be institutionalized... Meh, I'm starting to lose hope for the show.

This mishap with Uwe Bol's Bloodrayne is our only hope: And I thought Kojima would only allow MGS to be made if he had some creative say?

True, but you can hardly classify Black Hawk Down alongside Pearl Harbor. It leaves on a much more bittersweet note than the other two movies. While it doesn't go very deep into the massive loss of civilian life, it does end with showing the audience that the battle, no matter how valiantly fought, resulted in a political defeat in Somalia. Eversmann, at the end of the movie, admits that "Nothing's changed", and the movie allows the viewer to ask if the sacrifices were in vain. At the same time, the films shows the viewer that to the soldier on the ground, the only thing that really matters is the man next to you. At any rate it refrains from altering Mogadishu's significance and meaning in history's context by artificially grafting another battle or by cutting some other one out. And yes, Pearl Harbor's ending was just silly, especially with the main characters again being involved in Doolittle's raid. That just stretched the bounds of believability. The movie would probably have been a lot more compelling if it ended with Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" speech, interspersed with shots of grieving, funerals, recruitment lines, and factory workers.

To me, he seems pretty much tired of the world, so ends up just saying whatever he thinks, which has him being tactless in that moment with Rachael. I didn't see him as being insincere when he said he was kidding about her being a replicant, and it came off more like he was lamely trying to cover up when she started crying, but I could have read him wrong. I actually liked the interaction between him, the noodle guy, and Gaff, and was hoping for more of that... and I think the tone of the narration matches better the personality portrayed in those beginning scenes, but in the director's cut, Deckard just ends up heading down spacey sombersville from there, having no one he can really play his thoughts off of, and he becomes more and more inscrutable. So the director's cut ends up being a lonely sort of movie, but loneliness is only interesting if you can get inside someone's head. It's almost more unbearable to have to watch it.

At least some of the feelings I have about it is pretty much on having seen the director's cut first. To me, the narration just felt out of character, given Ford's somber and spacy expression most of the time, and much of it didn't seem like something the brooding-in-silence Deckard of the director's cut would say. It just feels... different. I think wry and ironic still could have worked, especially since I live wry and ironic... but there was just something screwy with the delivery that makes Deckard sound lame rather than a cool sort of ass. I really should watch the whole thing through though.

Although Depp's political views and the ways he chooses to advertise them is wacky, I've heard that in person, he's one of the greatest and most down to earth guys. I worked with a designer who had bumped into him somewhere and they just ended up shooting the breeze for an hour or two. Very laid back. Yeah, that sounds like a much more plausible explaination. Bouncing back and forth over voice-over/no voice-over seems like something that would happen naturally during production. It might just be me, but Ford's narration sounds a bit hokey and hammy, as if he's trying to do Sam Spade, and not quite pulling it off. The mood of the movie and dialogue apart from the narration seems a lot more serious to me, and that hammy wryness in the narration just seems to contrast the feel of the shots, the dialogue, the story, and the background music. Maybe this is what Ford and Scott sensed too. But then again, I might have felt different had I seen the theatrical release first.

There is nothing going on in Matrix Revolutions. I've done just all of that and actually have a background in all these things, light on the networking, and there's nothing really going on. None of the ideas in Reloaded are actually really developed, and it ended up being an action vehicle without the soul of the first movie. It also made Reloaded a waste of time in retrospect, because althogh one might be lead to believe it was actually going somewhere, it was just the Wachowski brothers spewing gibberish that was never actually built upon in the last movie. Thanks for the link, March, even if I've already made my pilgrimmage there. And it turns out that Ginrai and I are both citing that same site in our back and forth. For someone who's kind of meh about Blade Runner, I really, really dig it.

There's nothing terribly wrong with that... I'm slightly infatuated with Julia Andrews and Debbie Reynolds. They're sorta, vaguely hot for their time. So long as you're not in love with Elton John.

Not necessarily. Most directors shoot a lot more film and some longer scenes than what actually ends up on the reel, and it gets pieced together and cut in editing. Ridley might be referring to the actual movie, edited with scenes sustained for the voiceover, not his specific intent at that moment of shooting. But I'll concede that he might have filmed it with voiceover in mind, just as he have been undecided when he was filming that scene and filmed it long enough to go both ways. I don't think that snippit states unequivocally Ridley's established mindset and intent while shooting, but it is suggestive that he at least had the narration in mind. I'm not sure who to listen to anymore, except I can't find anyone who outright says "narration had always been intended every step of the way." It seems more likely that there was a lot of indecision, and Ridley started to lean one way somewhere in production. But that's just my own speculation. For what it's worth Ford also hates the original, and feels after viewing the Director's Cut that with the voice-over removed, the movie is actually "not so bad".

I'd thought about this as I was writing, that there were lots of gaps that could be served by narration, whether intentional or whether Scott wanted the silence-- but it seems that if Ford felt that the narration didn't fit the movie as made, it may have been a sentiment he inhereted under Scott's direction, and thus, he might simply not have been properly prepped to do it as well as he could. I myself find his delivery surprisingly subpar for Ford, and keep thinking that it certainly could have been done better.Either way, I see more anecdotes supporting that in the minds of major players (Scott, Ford), narration didn't fit Blade Runner as Scott envisioned. The view that narration had been intended by everyone, including Scott through most of the movie's production (later disowned simply because of his obsessive personality), requires considerable conjecture and speculation on Scott's psychology that I personally don't feel comfortable making. Yes, he was an anal-retentive director and a pain to work with. But whether that anal-retentiveness is what caused him to retroactively change his stance, simply as an ego-saving measure to distance himself from what he didn't like, is not something I'd freely assert. There's also the story of a the ill-received sneak preview that caused the producers to request the reintroduction of the narration, so if that story is true, it seems to me that Scott was ready to consider the film done without voice-over. Ford has also said himself that his many attempts didn't work because the movie wasn't meant to have one. Whether this is out of deference to Scott or not, I can't say. So, I'd agree that the movie is a collaborative effort, that at least some of the creative team thought voice-over fitting of the movie, and that narration might in certain spots. I also think that narration could have worked even better than it did. But Ridley was definitely a force guiding the film's production, and his sentiments and lack of commitment to Blade Runner's narration produced what we know as the theatrical release. In my viewing of the that version, it shows.