algroth

Indian actor Dev Patel got nominated for Lion, and Fire at Sea deals with Middle Eastern immigration to Europe via Lampedusa. I don't see a problem with any of these films being nominated outside of Hidden Figures which does sound like a lot of audience-pandering nonsense. Moonlight is one of the year's best, Fences and Loving both have a lot of hype behind them and aren't really bad choices to have in competition at all. So yeah, no racism here, really, just a very very good year for the black community in film all in all. La La Land is pretty much locked in for one of the biggest Oscar sweeps though. I think the animation list of nominees is pretty ideal, and am perhaps most annoyed by the snubbing of Amy Adams who was great both in Arrival and Nocturnal Animals. Johann Johannson's score for Arrival was also far more worthy than the likes of Thomas Newman's for bloody Passengers. Silence and Nocturnal Animals should have received more attention too, the fact that they're tied with Suicide Squad for the number of Oscar nominations is at once hilarious and pathetic.

I really like the mood of that videoclip. I feel it works a lot better as an audiovisual piece than as an audio track specifically (though it's still a good song).

I saw three films the other day at the cinema... Arrival - pretty much my favorite film of the year. Extremely affecting, engrossing, sensitive study on communication and language, and the perception of time. Highly recommended to any fan of sci-fi. Train to Busan - the zombie apocalypse genre gets the South Korea treatment. It's a very enjoyable and creative genre piece with plenty of very likable characters, each with their compelling story arc, and plenty of black humour to boot. I reckon it ranks a little underneath other Korean genre films I've seen of its ilk, the likes of Joon-ho Bong's The Host for example, inasmuch as I find that film to be a bit more creative in its style and set-pieces, but this is hardly any less entertaining. If there is one thing that does bother me about it, is that as with many films of its ilk things seem to get a lot more screwed because one character starts acting extremely stupidly, all for the sake of driving the conflict forward. Those who've seen the film will know the character I'm talking about, I think, and I wish we could have done without him as he was pretty unneeded, all things considered. This aside, a must for fans of the genre and horror/action in general. Hacksaw Ridge - new Mel Gibson film that seems to behave the way all Mel Gibson-directed films do: it's a very classic, Oscar-baity melodrama that seems to differ from the norm only for Mel's eye for spectacle and his fetishism for gore. Kudos to him for even managing to frame the first romantic encounter around it, what with it happening in a hospital and protagonist Desmond Doss getting to know the love of his life Dorothy by offering himself as a blood donor (following a grisly car accident, of course). Without a doubt the battle sequences through the second half of the film are fantastic and it's where it soars the most, but I can't help feel the film treads the fine line between old-fashioned and anticuated a little too much in its more melodramatic half, often falling clearly in the latter category. Most of the non-war stuff is post-produced in this same Hallmark-esque golden glimmery style, the green screens look awful what with the edges being extremely visible, and the last ten or so minutes are, formally speaking, an utter train wreck, one shot in particular irking me to no end where a satchel is thrown into a pit, and the image is zoomed in digitally before being digitally panned to a corner in the strangest, most Sony Vegas style possible. There are moments of great formal mastery here mixed alongside amateurish blunders like that which make you question how much of that "genius" is not just some happy accident instead. I have to admit that I do like Mel a lot but I think Hacksaw Ridge right now is acting a bit like an all-too-necessary and all-too-asked-for "return to form" for him, from the community and media's side. I don't use this word often but I do feel it's being overrated due to this factor - everyone is approaching it with a lot of good will and they're wanting it to be great, and thus are forgiving its flaws all too readily; but they are there, and they do seriously hamper the overall work. It's a satisfying, oddly positive and feel-good film in the end, about the power of faith in the midst of conflict and sticking to one's beliefs against great adversity and so on, filled likewise with a lot of Gibson's usual Bible thumping, and not discounting its flaws it's an overall enjoyable if mixed bag.

Less than an hour in, Trump Admin takes down the official White House climate change website. Already this is boding very direly.

I'm glad that your mother is fine but I have to ask: why did you run 2 miles? Don't you have a car or at least a bike? Don't, unfortunately. I ought to get a bike, though, for certain.

Nice! I thought it could be, but wanted to be sure (I've seen replicas elsewhere and so on). Anyhow, thanks for sharing! I'd say the snow is pretty visible in all three, with the second one looking a little more like rain perhaps. Hope it helps.

I don't recall that thread, but this thread follows the same basic line that got the Politics 2016 thread locked. I think threads like this need their aside subforum, if a place here at all. I have made all of the comment I needed to make about the video above.

Yeah. Cool gifs by the way, where did you take them?

You're right, and I usually do. But I thought I should go ahead and say it just once, because this is not a legit thread, it is just an attempt to get the rise out of the other side. There's nothing interesting about the above video other than showing what we all know, that there are **** in either side of the fence, which you nevertheless present as being the global, general attitude of liberals towards the other party. So, yeah, it's just furthering the pissing contest.

Was called by my mother as she was collapsing last night at 2am. Had to run two miles down to her place, expecting the worst, but thankfully it was a blood pressure drop due to something she ate, little more than that. Was a scary situation however.

I wonder if this thread serves any purpose other than furthering the pissing contest between the left and right here in this forum. If this has to continue, can we at least make a politics subforum so that those of us not interested in this partisan bickering don't have to see it every time we look for other topics in the board?

No, he has a history of bulldozing over people's houses and threatening companies to shut them down in Peronist fashion if they don't do as he pleases. Pretty violent and hot-headed reactions all around, I'd say.

Except through the whole of his loudmouthed political campaign. Seen You've Been Trumped too? I'm sure he has his positive qualities, but being level-headed is not one of them.

So they vouched for another violently unstable person? Priceless.

The internet's ready availability of just about everything acts as something of a double-edged sword: true, you can likely find most texts needed to learn about a certain subject or other, but it's also easy to drown oneself in the noise generated by all the **** that goes around and is linked every day as well, it is pretty much an open invitation to forever procrastinate on that "self-education". One of the things I find with regards to the arguments in favour of autodidacticism is that, on one hand, they put a lot of weight on the singular cases where self-taught individuals found success while ignoring the fact that these usually are exceptions and not the rule; and the arguments seem to frequently overly simplify education as reading stuff off of books and so on. This notion usually ignores that there is such a thing as a learning process and that programs and courses have been designed by people who have studied and researched education and determined which is the most effective way to go about this better than most individuals would be able to do so on their own. It also ignores that several careers have a practical element to them, which cannot truly be learned just by reading theory. I for one have studied film and nowadays work more as a cinematographer and camera operator; but as someone who started out with no access to a camera or lighting equipment nor connections in the medium I likely wouldn't have been able to learn how to light a set on my own, what lights to use, filters, how to properly fill a scene and so on. I could read plenty about it all but I would have never known how and when to use an HMI or when a CTB-filtered tungsten spot refracted onto a styrofoam panel would have been enough, how far I should place a certain spot in order to produce a more natural shadow and lighting, and so on. You gain all of this through practice, and schools often provide you with the right equipment and context in which to be able to try and learn, make mistakes, experiment and so on. I feel that self-education is something that can work depending on the individual. Echoing what Lexx said, some people really live for what they do, and maybe have the drive to properly educate themselves on their profession of choice. But I think that most do need an order, discipline and guide that is provided through a more traditional means of education, and it also ensures that you've essentially covered the basic general grounds for your profession and haven't heavily ignored an important component of it. Yet again I think the cases that work usually make the exceptions and not the rule, and that the Matt Damon quote above is also akin to that of the idealistic cab-driver pretending he could run the country and fix it in a day.

Not sure what the policy on violence/gore is here, but in any case I'll go ahead and post an NSFW warning.

Motives do usually have an effect on the sentence and charge, though. Heck, it's what can make the difference between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. If the crime is demonstrably inspired by the perpetrator's prejudice to the victim's skin colour, race, nationality and so on, it does factor into the premeditation or intentionality of said crime. Not that there is much doubt in the above video and so on, but when you see the protests involving policemen harrassing and killing black men, it is an aspect to take into account. Now, whether it means hate crimes should have their own specific punishment aside from what is ruled by all other factors, that I'm not too sure about. But if nothing else, it is an interesting statistic to keep note of as a higher frequency of said occurences can highlight serious problems with a community at large.

That would probably be my dad's reaction. :D :D :D

Took me a moment. So... wankers? A wank end... Yes. Pretty much.

R.I.P.

Very interesting article on Children of Men, which still stands for me as one of the finest films of the century so far: http://www.vulture.com/2016/12/children-of-men-alfonso-cuaron-c-v-r.html?mid=twitter_vulture

Sergei Eisenstein, bro 4 lyfe.