Bayesian

Oh wow, this would be so much fun to attend! There’s no way I can make this one, sadly, but I hope there might be more concerts like this planned for other cities (like, say, SF or LA…)!

Eleven lol reactions so far. Let’s see if you’re all still laughing in three years when this pernicious AI is writing newspaper articles and scientific journal articles and social media posts and… oh wait that’s already happening! It’s past time to listen to Cassandras like me and get this this technology under some serious regulation. And while we’re at it, let’s destroy all the quantum computers. Just like we’ve banned human cloning, we must ban quantum computing—or one day, really soon, a quantum computer is going to figure out how to clone a human and some idiot in a lab coat is going to let it. It’s only 2023 and we’re already entering the fight of our lives for the soul of our species. Soon we’re gonna look back on this whole JW will-he-or-won’t-he sixth Oscar race with such chagrin—“ah, remember the days when we had the luxury to worry about something as trivial as that?”

Turning that joke into some kind of meta-joke is also hereby abolished!!

Did this forum not, like, constitutionally abolish that joke or something? It is, without exaggeration, the most played-out, dead and desiccated husk of an attempt at humor this side of "they're all dead." (And to think they both came out from the same movie...)

I get it if some folks are tiring of my anti-MCU position and I probably should lay off. But there is something fundamentally going off the rails at Disney with these endless superhero movies that is just painful to watch. To me, the mounting stories of overworked VFX houses and endless last-minute tinkering to make these utterly middling movies speak to the fact that Disney isn’t trying to give us the best possible storytelling within a shared universe anymore—they’re now just in the content commodity business. Where’s the pride in their work? Either way, I’ll stay out of this thread going forward, just like I avoid the Zimmer appreciation thread. I’ve been a wet blanket on this topic for long enough.

As far as I’m concerned, Marvel, keep it up, you’re doing great. I look forward to the day all your movies are such poorly rendered bilge that no one pays to see them and this stupid cash cow can finally quit being milked to death.

This is exciting news. I’ve always found Napoleon fascinating, so to soon have two high profile projects from two acclaimed directors (and at least one terrific actor) is a dream coming true. Even better is that we’ll enjoy the storytelling benefits of two different formats. And even better still, if Spielberg helms this, we have to expect JW will be writing at least some music for it. An entire miniseries might be too much work for JW’s comfort level but I’d be thrilled if he even just wrote the major themes and let someone else adapt them.(William Ross, à la HP2, maybe??)

I'm caught up to Ep. 5 now. Until I started hearing about this series last fall, I'd never even realized there was a video game by this name, so I'm watching this show with zero preconceptions. First, this is prestige TV at its near-finest. Terrific character development, amazing production values, and some truly gripping human story to keep your attention. I very much enjoyed watching the man-on-the-ground POV of the world starting to fall apart in Austin because I'm endlessly fascinated by how screen/teleplay writers choose to portray the end of the world. It's done very believably in TLoU. (It's also terrifying to think how quickly everything will go to shit in a shock-event situation like this. I kinda get the prepper mindset.) However, precisely because the producers go to such lengths to portray the decay of civilization as we know it as accurately as possible, I can't help but notice the way some elements stretch credulity. I agree with Jay the total unlikelihood that Bill & Frank's town would have gone undisturbed for 20 years, save one raider attempt. Bill somehow getting the regional gas utility infrastructure up and running so he could get his gas stove going was a little farfetched, to say the least. And the town itself, after 20 years, needed to show a lot more woody vegetation, roaming wildlife, rotting wood structures, eroding pavement, etc. Flags would have turned to bleached gray shreds. And gasoline would simply no longer exist in a usable form (Joel siphoning gas out of a car in that one episode was LOL-ridiculous). But I tend to notice this problem in all movies and TV: when something is supposed to look like it was undisturbed for a decade, the set decorators make it look instead like it was undisturbed for a year or two at best. But here I am nitpicking. The truth is that these things are completely forgivable in the face of such good storytelling. The way the writers play with our sympathies against the KC resistance and then for the resistance was really well done. And no matter how implausible it would have been in real life, Bill & Frank's storyline -- and the semblance of the old way of life they built under such bleak circumstances -- was beautiful.

It must have been a bit surreal for him to be doing session work, so to speak, at this stage in his career—a fun little time warp. I’m looking forward to this album!

Anyone read the comments on YT beneath the video? It’s almost entirely just people calling back to other movies to riff on how Dom makes clear throughout the franchise that family is everything. Is that a new trend (like how people used to post made-up “facts” about whatever movie the video was about) or what?

Pittsburgh is many states to east of me, but I wish I could be there for JFK and Call of the Champions. l love CotC.

Poor KOTCS. So much vitriol, invective and vituperation aimed at a movie that made for better viewing than 90% of what the studios have been shoveling into theaters every summer for the past 15 years. (The remaining 10% being mostly M:I movies, if memory serves.) Leave… KOTCS… alone!!

Yep. In the daylight, Batman just looks like a man in a silly costume. I miss the days when Batman had mystique because he lived and worked in Tim Burton’s neo-Gothic shadows.

Just saw the headline on the JWFan front page—congrats on your hard work officially becoming part of the premier destination on the web for all things JW!

91 and going as strong as ever. We are so lucky to be on the receiving end of such munificence. The best part is that JW isn’t toiling away in obscurity or rushing to get down on paper as much as possible before he dies. He’s already given the world the fruits of the labor of two or three men and has nothing left to prove. Everything he’s done from Vienna and Berlin onward has seemed like a victory lap. It’s absolutely rarefied territory he operates in now and no one else in his field is ever going to reach it.

It’s nearly a sure bet that it’ll be addressed in Avatar 3. The question is whether it was always intended to be addressed in that sequel (ie, before everyone started noticing the problem in TWOW), lol.

Interesting to read here the disappointment in Thor L&T. My wife is a pretty big MCU fan (unlike me) and she was also very “meh” about both that movie and Wakanda Forever. It seems like there’s a growing sense that the MCU gas tank is starting to run on empty. Not surprising given how many trips Feige has been making to the well.

Good, oh so very good, news courtesy of Fox: https://ew.com/tv/the-simpsons-renewed-season-35-season-36/ All together now: “They’ll never stop The Simpsons / Have no fears, we’ve got stories for years / Like Marge becomes a robot…” I think it’s worth noting they made this joke twenty seasons ago 😂

My copy arrived, finally! I took pics of the relevant pages and resized them to keep the text legible while also shrinking their file size. The entire issue looks like a great read -- the folks at Gramophone did a fantastic job, as usual. There are several articles that feature or discuss JW, which means a lot of pics to upload. I'll break it up over two or three posts. Next batch of pics... And final batch. Enjoy!

Very enlightening thread and a reminder of the wondrous sound that JW conjured for the prequels -- a soundworld that remains peerless even in his own body of work. But my eyes keep getting tripped up over the cue title. I'm sorry, but is it supposed to be "The Armies Face Off" or "The Armies' Face-Off"? Is face off used in the noun or verb sense?? 'Cause it sure as shit can't be both at once. Well, there you have it -- the only criticism toward JW I'll ever come up with.

Oscar noms are being announced tomorrow, I believe, and Avatar 2 is likely to score at least a couple, including best picture. That’s probably going to boost its box office performance for a few weeks. It’ll be close but I think Avatar 2 will squeak past TGM.

That reminds me, early in TWOW, we see a flashback to the scene from the OG (sorry, Avatar) when Selfridge and his team are being led away, and the decrease in quality in the rendering from that flashback compared to TWOW is noticeable. How do WETA do it, time and again?? Used to be that ILM was the top dog in the CGI business, but that's certainly no longer the case. Actually, come to think of it, I think I should be a lot more conflicted by the state of this art, since I seriously dread the way AI is soon going to make it impossible to know if we can believe anything we see on a screen, yet I've got nothing but praise for TWOW.

I saw it again last night in something called RealD 3D (in a Cinemark RealXD theater) and some of the flying scenes in the opening minutes looked rather video game-y in a hyper-real kind of way, if that makes sense. There were also a handful of moments where things looked just a tiny bit off—for example, when one of the massive flying ships was landing and you see the wheels up close, when they hit the ground the tires don’t seem to bulge at all, which was weird since they should bulge a bit when a 2-megaton vehicle is settling onto the ground. At one moment in the third act, Quaritch jumps down from a higher deck and he doesn’t quite move in a finished way. But believe me when I say that these minor things are completely forgivable considering everything else in the movie looks so good. Like when the whale-creature pulls the harpoon line through the superstructure of one of the boats and you see the violence in the metal and glass being ripped apart… if ASMR was visual, that’s the kind of shit it would look like.

I'm thrilled we're beginning to piece together the true scope of the Avatar franchise and understand/appreciate how impressive it will be once it's fully unveiled. At the end of the day, these are just movies and the world will carry on with or without them. But within the scope of the art and science of mass audience moviemaking, Avatar represents Cameron redefining how to truly astonish and entertain a public that has long since grown bored with cheap-looking world-building or the physics-defying (and stakes-free) feats of costumed man-children -- and reminding that same public that we can allow a plot to unfurl at a more leisurely pace as long as we enjoy the ride along the way.

I maintain the best title can only be "Music by John Williams," 'cause it's coffee table book-pretty and it's about as cleverly subtle as puns get. Subtitle: "Official companion to the Amblin/Apple TV+ documentary."