Chen G.

I haven't seen evidence of studio interference on Trevorrow's Jurassic films.

People tend not to not have an interest in things that they aren't very good at doing...

United Artists was a film studio... I'm just judging this on a case-to-case basis. I don't think Lynch, specifically, had a good Dune or Return of the Jedi in him. He has a very particular skillset that doesn't seem to lend itself to big spectacle films. It'd be like asking Christopher Nolan to do a comedy. Its just not in his blood.

Not always. Some directors just aren't cut-out for big blockbusters. Lynch strikes me as that kind of director. Its like back when United Artists wanted Michaelangelo Antonioni for The Lord of the Rings. Nope. Like Lynch with Dune, he was chosen not because of his skillset, but because he was the new "big" name after Blowup.

The issue with Attack of the Clones is that out of the stated 1080p resolution, they were probably only getting around 1.6K at the most, so its a pretty big upscale to 4K. Plus, its only 8-bit colour so it was never going to benefit much from HDR. I hear Revenge of the Sith fares much better, though.

So I’ve heard, but I’ve never seen any proof that it was indeed this particular scene. Plus, it never looked terribly digital to me. Certainly not in the way that Attack of the Clones looks. The Obi-Wan shot looks softer because it’s in red: the magenta layer of colour film is always less sharp and captures less detail, and so red colours and scenes lit in red would alway look softer. It’s also why one uses blue or green screens for composites: those colours look sharper. However, it does makes sense to use the digital camera for a night-time scene, so it’s certainly the prime candidate.

There's no scene in The Phantom Menace that jumps out as having been shot on a prototype digital camera. One has to wonder what that mythical digital footage is and what it amounts to. Other than the CGI scenes, the footage never quite looks digital, in spite of George Lucas' best (i.e. worst) attempts to smoothen and denoise it so as to make it uniform with its two sequels. If it doesn't look good, its probably more to do with the DI used on the film.

True, but surely any movie-going experience must boil down to "Did I enjoy what I watched? Did I dislike it?" If you didn't enjoy something - much less if you disliked it - than all the appreciation in the world makes precisely zero difference.

Does that matter if you don’t enjoy the movie?

Nope. 35mm resolves around 3K. 65mm resolves less than 7K at the most, and much less with older optics and stocks; probably closer to 5K. You’re conflating resolving power with oversampling and/or perceived temporal resolving power.

What films from 50 years ago would resolve 6K? Even those films that were shot on 65mm and DIDN’T involve any optical effects would not have resolved as much given the lenses available at the time.

Anyway, was Lynch ever a good match for this type of filmmaking? He's not the sort of director that pops to my mind when it comes to effects-laden, large-scale genre films. Maybe its just a case of a producer choosing an up-and-coming director for his name rather than his skillset?

And anything in a Middle Eastern setting in general.

I like the sequels fine. Put together, the whole thing makes for a nicely cohesive trilogy with a surprisingly poignnat ending. There should never have been a Pirates 4. I suppose part of the reason is that I wasn't too enamored with the first film to begin with. I mean, its a good action-adventure film..and?

Underwater photography loses a lot of the would-be image quality, anyway.

Arabic as a speaking language has many variations, yes. Its not quite a "family of languages" because - say - Morrocan Arabic would still be reconisable to an Iraqi Arab. However, I'm talking about written Arabic, which is the same everywhere. Dune seems to be drawing heavily on that as a "something exotic-sounding" for Western readers. Except I'm not a Western reader... I'm not saying its a deal-breaker or anything: just something that'll probably take a bit to get used to while watching the film.

That's it! That moment in the music right there, leading to the climax at 1:50. Bloody numinous is what it is.

Oh, I can't stand it, but I can applaud the effort. It would have worked, too, had they just stuck the landing. Sadly, they didn't.

There's no contest. The Mount Doom material is cathartic is a way that one would struggle to put into words. It belongs in the same category as the resolution of Gotterdamerung more than it belongs with Duel of the Fates.

I know; I meant good ones. Although, again, at least they're trying! I even appreciated the early DCEU films (which were awful) for staying away from the insufferable lightheartedness that the MCU perpetuated in the cinematic landscape.

Too somber today? If anything, all the tentpoles nowadays are insufferably lighthearted. This more than a bit of a hyperbole, mind you, but the whole point of good drama is that it puts you through an extended wringer of grim unpleasantness and then lets you out.

300 is a different kind of movie in terms of how stylized it is; as a result it is, like you said, not really somber in the same way that the others are.

Yes.

Both are superb.

Yeah, I suppose it didn't help that, in spite of numerous attempts, nothing from that period quite lived-up to the success of Gladiator (in the R-rated historical epic field) and The Lord of the Rings (in the PG-13-rated fantasy epic field), box-office or Oscar-wise. I wouldn't put Star Wars in quite the same trend as The Avengers, though. While The Force Awakens is a fun movie, it contain some fairly tragic overtures: it opens with a mass-massacre and ends with patricide. Rogue One isn't much more cheery. The Last Jedi has the kind of meta humour that we've come to expect from the MCU, but its still not a cheery movie overall.