Kubrick is the absolute master. He didn’t make a single shit film. Everyone (maybe not Eyes Wide Shut or Lolita) is a kind of masterpiece.
Also,
“The Shining” may be the best ever horror. “Dr Strangelove” the best comedy. “2001” the best sci-fi. “Paths of Glory” the best war film. “Barry Lyndon” the best (well, most beautifully shot) period drama.
Astonishing.
And all edited from a house just outside St Albans.
"Under Siege" - the best Steven Seagal film ever made!
Second best
Penn: Assumption is the MOTHER of all fuck ups!
......
Penn: Not mace, sweetheart. Pepper spray. Sold to civilians. [snatches canister from Sarah] Penn: But once you get used to it... [sprays some into his mouth] Penn: ...it just clears the sinuses!
......
Travis Dane: Yeah, I'm gonna shock the world by spreading ca-ca all over the place. Guangzhou is a chemical weapons plant masquerading as a fertilizer plant. We know this. The Chinese know that we know. But we make-believe that we don't know and the Chinese make-believe that they believe that we don't know, but know that we know. Everybody knows.
......
David Trilling: They said you were dead. Travis Dane: Yeah, very restful, no phone calls.
......
Mercenary # 2: Check the baggage! [Mercenary 3 shoots up the baggage] Merc # 3: Baggage checked!
......
Travis Dane: [holding a CD-ROM] 300,000 pages of code - or 60 minutes of triple-X interactive rubber and leather bondage porno. Technology can be used for beauty... . or debasement. And until you plug it in, you just can't tell. [Puts the CD in the drive] Travis Dane: Oh, gee! I seem to have brought targeting codes.
One of my old colleagues has suggested to me that Hogwarts Legacy is on course to do over $1bn in revenue not including add on sales. I hope companies learn that ignoring insane activists and the twitter mob is worth it. WB had a choice a few years ago to bow down and accept that they would never use the Harry Potter IP again or just ignore it all and continue anyway. They chose the latter and are about to have one of the best selling games ever not made by Sony or Nintendo and they have revitalised their premier brand licence after two or three flops in movies.
It's about time that more companies stop listening to the loud screeching and just get on and make content and products for the majority who enjoy it.
I wonder how many people bought it precisely because Woko Haram pronounced a fatwa against it.
The twatters should stick to soft targets.
JK Rowling deserves a lot of praise for the way she has consistently stood up to the mob in the face of death threats, threats of violence and attempting to silence her. She is the standout person for free speech and expression. She cannot be silenced or cancelled and she uses that power to enable others to speak out and tell their own stories.
A true inspiration and whatever royalties she gets from this game are well deserved.
Yes. Having daughters I was obliged to read the books, and attend the films (though I went on strike with the latter in the end). The first four or so books were good, though forgettable, fun. After that it got unnecessarily complicated and by the end I gave up the will to live. Just too long, and in the end absorbed. I think there is a chance she will not still be in the pantheon in a few decades.
As a spokesperson for proper feminism SFAICS she can do no wrong. Good for her.
I would say HP went downhill with the Goblet of Fire. A decent editor would have cut back the verbiage and kept the fun.
I think the point is that after 4 the fun goes away because Voldemort is back. It's supposed to have a tone shift to being miserable, this also reflects school kids finding fifth form and sixth form less fun than they did before as they grow up and take less joy from smaller things in life.
Speaking as someone who read it as it came out and did so at school age or recently out of school I completely understood the tone shift from the 4th book to the 5th book. In 4th form school was still fun, objectively, in 5th form it was all exams, teachers who seeming wanted you to fail and trying to get with girls from the girls school. The fifth book suffers from being too long, not because of the tone shift to being less fun.
Order of the Phoenix is one of the best Harry Potter novels. Half Blood Prince, on the other hand, is kind of shit.
I reckon "Prisoner of Azkaban" is the best, with some powerful themes, but still a rollicking tale.
Kubrick is the absolute master. He didn’t make a single shit film. Everyone (maybe not Eyes Wide Shut or Lolita) is a kind of masterpiece.
Also,
“The Shining” may be the best ever horror. “Dr Strangelove” the best comedy. “2001” the best sci-fi. “Paths of Glory” the best war film. “Barry Lyndon” the best (well, most beautifully shot) period drama.
Astonishing.
And all edited from a house just outside St Albans.
"Under Siege" - the best Steven Seagal film ever made!
And an unforgettable pair of tits leaps out in that one too!
One’s Seagal, who’s the other ? Oh, I see.
😇 . .
One thing I have a talent for is spotting actresses on the way up and predicting their success. Like Alicia Vikander before anyone else had heard of her, before she did anything in English. In much the same way I am now tipping Julia Schlaepfer.
I’m more into Korean drama at the moment, as I’m trying to learn the language. They have a load of very good actresses. My current favourite is Jeon Yeo-Bin, who’s excellent. The daughter of the rich family in Parasite - Jung Ji-So - looks promising.
Feel obliged to point out that Dura Ace is both older and teetotal.
In other news from Russia: a 42-year old man was detained when he tried to steal Lenin from the mausoleum. He was very drunk and could not explained what he planned to do with the body. https://twitter.com/SokovNikolai/status/1623029031032553473
Kubrick is the absolute master. He didn’t make a single shit film. Everyone (maybe not Eyes Wide Shut or Lolita) is a kind of masterpiece.
Also,
“The Shining” may be the best ever horror. “Dr Strangelove” the best comedy. “2001” the best sci-fi. “Paths of Glory” the best war film. “Barry Lyndon” the best (well, most beautifully shot) period drama.
Astonishing.
And all edited from a house just outside St Albans.
I don't know if I would have each of those as the best in its category, but what Kubrick managed was to make exceptional films in so many genres.
Breaker Morant is perhaps better than Paths of Glory in its rumination on the ethics of war.
As a horror, I find "Awake in Fright" hard to beat, but I do have a rather soft spot for Australian film. The craziness and horror sucks in the main protagonist so completely that it is another film that sticks in the mind.
The 1967 "Night of the Living Dead" is perhaps the film that most disturbed my sleep when I first saw it as a teenager in the Seventies.
Awake in Fright is fucking mental. But again, it says something about Australia which no other art form is going to go near.
You can't escape the Yabba. Have a drink you bastard.
I remember a weekend in West Victoria in a small town near the Grampians that started in a pub with some travelling sheep shearers and developed on not dissimilar lines of matey aggression.
Been a while since I saw either, but it’s a far more disturbing film than Deliverance, with which it should be compared.
I really rate "Once Were Warriors" too. Is it the best NZ film?
Probably.
Although I would also make claims for “An Angel At My Table” (Jane Campion) and “Sleeping Dogs”, which launched Sam Neil’s career.
I must look those out.
I love "Hunt for the Wilderpeople" too.
HfW is really good. Also “Boy” which you’ve probably seen too. I liked the “Breakerupperers” which I saw quite randomly on Netflix. I’m sure you’ve seen “What We Do In the Shadows”.
Some NZ films which nobody seems to know about which moved me in some way.
Dark Horse (2016) In My Father’s Den (2004) Out of the Blue (2006)
Surely every film should get a better rating from the audience than from critics? The audience is self selecting; those who think it will be a pile of shite don't go to watch it. However, critics are paid to watch it, and can't avoid it however bad they think it will be.
I suffered through about half of this film based on rave reviews from various critics. I should have trusted the viewing public instead.
And yes, there is a lot of potato peeling in it. Particularly well done in the second act.
A really interesting film, though builds very slowly.
The fact that Citizen Kane comes in the top five of every critic's 'best film of all time' list, tells you all you need to know about the rank stupidity of film critics.
Thing is, if you adjust for age - since films like most everything else are better now than they used to be - then CK really does belong in that top 5.
We don't adjust visual art, music or literature 'for age', so why films?
We do, otherwise so much really old stuff - and often the same old stuff - wouldn't be always included in 'top tens'. Like with sport. We adjust for age. Give it its due regard. Eg prime Pele wouldn't get in the Man City team. Prime Rod Laver couldn't take a set of today's world number 20. Yet we - rightly imo - consider both to be all time greats. It's a bit different in the arts but not totally different. This factor still applies.
Re Pele and Rod Laver, you should allow for the fact that the games have changed. E.g. Pele played with leather footballs, and super-sized and -strung rackets weren't available to Laver.
It’s impossible to compare eras really, but I believe that the greats of sport, had they been born into different eras would still have excelled. Matt Syed bangs on about 10,000 hours of training, and that’s certainly a part of it, but elite sports stars also have genetic advantages.
Don5 forget that players drive each other to greater levels. Andy Murray would have won more Slams in any other era than the Federer/Nadal/Jokovic nightmare he found himself in. But ironically he became a far better player by necessity to try to live with them.
The much quoted 10,000 hour "rule" is absolutely without proper evidence.
Yes. It’s a conveniently round number too, like 10,000 steps a day, 5 a day fruit and veg, and many many more things plucked from the air. I think my favourite is the number of glasses of water you supposedly need. Utter garbage, yet most of my students seem surgically attached to water bottles.
10,000 hours at least sounds plausible, in the sense that it feels right that you need to put in a lot of time to become an expert at something. The 8 glasses of water a day thing doesn't even sound right to me - that's an awful lot of fluid if you are not feeling thirsty.
We are limited by our genetic inheritance. Take running. I used to train 3 or 4 days a week, had a resting heart rate around 50 bpm and was pretty fit. Yet my fastest half marathon time is 2 h 14 minutes. Risibly slow. My best 5k was 26 minutes. The WR is half that. I simply do not have the ‘talent’ no matter how well I trained. It’s the same with sports needing coordination and reflex. Facing Joffra Archer hurling 95 mph bouncers needs both good eye sight and fast relexes, plus the ability to project the path of the ball and in built muscle memory from training. Yet Incould net for 10 hours a day for a year and still be shit against his bowling. The ten thousand hours is shorthand for those that making it being obsessed and from an early age. Like Bradman with his stump and golf ball (that may not be totally correct - I can’t recall). But I’m always suspicious of round numbers and with good reason.
There was some interesting research that showed that professional batsman don't actually look at the ball....they observe it at release and then immediately look at where it will be pitching and play shot. They are like human Hawkeye. Apparently it is part of the reason why back of the hand slower ball is so deadly in T20, most top class batsman can pick its not a standard delivery, but it comes out all weird and scrambles their brain. I can't remember the England test batsman who got one from Courtney Walsh in a test match and crouched down and it slowly passed them by and clean bowled them.
There was a brilliant experiment they did with baseball batters. They got them to face softball pitchers and they not only couldn't really hit it, they literally were swiping at thin air most of the time. Now I am sure if they faced several hours of that they would be dispatching them out the park every time, but the speed / trajectory was so different to facing a normal baseball pitcher their human Hawkeye model was totally broken. It is also why knuckleball pitchers can be incredibly effective even though they are throwing it at half the pace of a normal fast ball.
Kubrick is the absolute master. He didn’t make a single shit film. Everyone (maybe not Eyes Wide Shut or Lolita) is a kind of masterpiece.
Also,
“The Shining” may be the best ever horror. “Dr Strangelove” the best comedy. “2001” the best sci-fi. “Paths of Glory” the best war film. “Barry Lyndon” the best (well, most beautifully shot) period drama.
Astonishing.
And all edited from a house just outside St Albans.
"Under Siege" - the best Steven Seagal film ever made!
And an unforgettable pair of tits leaps out in that one too!
One’s Seagal, who’s the other ? Oh, I see.
😇 . .
One thing I have a talent for is spotting actresses on the way up and predicting their success. Like Alicia Vikander before anyone else had heard of her, before she did anything in English. In much the same way I am now tipping Julia Schlaepfer.
I’m more into Korean drama at the moment, as I’m trying to learn the language. They have a load of very good actresses. My current favourite is Jeon Yeo-Bin, who’s excellent. The daughter of the rich family in Parasite - Jung Ji-So - looks promising.
One of the parents at my kid’s school tells me that the “Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of Korean film” live a few blocks away.
Apparently they wanted a U.S. education for their kid(s).
Kubrick is the absolute master. He didn’t make a single shit film. Everyone (maybe not Eyes Wide Shut or Lolita) is a kind of masterpiece.
Also,
“The Shining” may be the best ever horror. “Dr Strangelove” the best comedy. “2001” the best sci-fi. “Paths of Glory” the best war film. “Barry Lyndon” the best (well, most beautifully shot) period drama.
Astonishing.
And all edited from a house just outside St Albans.
For a war film, I think I prefer Cross of Iron.
For you war film buffs, what do you make of the All Quiet adaptation currently leading the way at the Oscar’s?
Snotty film critics (ie me) disdain the Oscars. I haven’t seen it, but the general opinion I’m picking up from fellow snotties is that it’s sensationalist shit.
Kubrick is the absolute master. He didn’t make a single shit film. Everyone (maybe not Eyes Wide Shut or Lolita) is a kind of masterpiece.
Also,
“The Shining” may be the best ever horror. “Dr Strangelove” the best comedy. “2001” the best sci-fi. “Paths of Glory” the best war film. “Barry Lyndon” the best (well, most beautifully shot) period drama.
Astonishing.
And all edited from a house just outside St Albans.
For a war film, I think I prefer Cross of Iron.
For you war film buffs, what do you make of the All Quiet adaptation currently leading the way at the Oscar’s?
Snotty film critics (ie me) disdain the Oscars. I haven’t seen it, but the general opinion I’m picking up from fellow snotties is that it’s sensationalist shit.
Comments
Penn: Assumption is the MOTHER of all fuck ups!
......
Penn: Not mace, sweetheart. Pepper spray. Sold to civilians.
[snatches canister from Sarah]
Penn: But once you get used to it...
[sprays some into his mouth]
Penn: ...it just clears the sinuses!
......
Travis Dane: Yeah, I'm gonna shock the world by spreading ca-ca all over the place. Guangzhou is a chemical weapons plant masquerading as a fertilizer plant. We know this. The Chinese know that we know. But we make-believe that we don't know and the Chinese make-believe that they believe that we don't know, but know that we know. Everybody knows.
......
David Trilling: They said you were dead.
Travis Dane: Yeah, very restful, no phone calls.
......
Mercenary # 2: Check the baggage!
[Mercenary 3 shoots up the baggage]
Merc # 3: Baggage checked!
......
Travis Dane: [holding a CD-ROM] 300,000 pages of code - or 60 minutes of triple-X interactive rubber and leather bondage porno. Technology can be used for beauty... . or debasement. And until you plug it in, you just can't tell.
[Puts the CD in the drive]
Travis Dane: Oh, gee! I seem to have brought targeting codes.
They have a load of very good actresses. My current favourite is Jeon Yeo-Bin, who’s excellent. The daughter of the rich family in Parasite - Jung Ji-So - looks promising.
In other news from Russia: a 42-year old man was detained when he tried to steal Lenin from the mausoleum. He was very drunk and could not explained what he planned to do with the body.
https://twitter.com/SokovNikolai/status/1623029031032553473
Also “Boy” which you’ve probably seen too.
I liked the “Breakerupperers” which I saw quite randomly on Netflix. I’m sure you’ve seen “What We Do In the Shadows”.
Some NZ films which nobody seems to know about which moved me in some way.
Dark Horse (2016)
In My Father’s Den (2004)
Out of the Blue (2006)
There was a brilliant experiment they did with baseball batters. They got them to face softball pitchers and they not only couldn't really hit it, they literally were swiping at thin air most of the time. Now I am sure if they faced several hours of that they would be dispatching them out the park every time, but the speed / trajectory was so different to facing a normal baseball pitcher their human Hawkeye model was totally broken. It is also why knuckleball pitchers can be incredibly effective even though they are throwing it at half the pace of a normal fast ball.
Apparently they wanted a U.S. education for their kid(s).
And missed the point of the title.
I still got engrossed and came away thinking it a good film though.