Speaking of bad movies: I rented Three Musketeers. It wasn't as bad as I was expecting, really. Ridiculous, but none of the acting, special effects, or fight scenes were even as bad as anticipated. I don't imagine the original work is anything to go on in terms of this movie, but I really don't understand the reason for Milla Jovovitch's character's existence. It seems like the movie could have worked just as well without her existing at all and it just being the Musketeers vs. England and the Cardinal (or whatever he was; the French Catholic guy).
Lady DeWinter is a character from the original Three Musketeers novels. She's a villain there. That said, this character appeared because Milla Jolovich wanted to be in the movie. Her husband is the director IIRC.
I've always wondered about those sorts of working arrangements augmented by marital considerations. It's just gotta be so fucking surreal, especially when things get ugly.
Beckinsale met & married the director after leaving Martin Sheen during Underworld, whom she had a daughter with. That must have been awkward.
My understanding was that they had already broken up before filming the movie together.
Ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire were around for a really long time.
Using serf classes works best if you either psychologically indoctrinate them to believe that their lot in life is what they deserve because of their birth (Ancient Egypt, feudal Europe, and ancient China being prime examples) or if your slaves are sufficiently distributed that any given group of slaves is directly controlled by a local lordling who either is a member of the ruling class or believes that he can aspire to be such (pre-Civil War America or Ancient Rome being examples).
Both classes of slave-labor society are pretty much doomed to failure, but the indoctrination variety is more stable than the distributed-leadership version. My Roman history is a bit flaky, but I'm pretty sure they had a number of slave revolts with varying degrees of success. Egypt and China, by comparison, had fairly few, and all the ones that I can think of came with the introduction of a new ideology challenging the idea that the current leadership were literal gods.
Eventually, though, if your society is based on slave labor you're going to have a large enough slave caste in your population that a large-scale revolt will be too numerous to quash. And even if you did successfully kill the mob, you've just decimated your production force and lowered the morale of those who remain enough to further impact your ability to feed your populace.
Edit:
In the case of The Hunger Games it's neither. So far as I can tell, the vast majority of the populace are slave labor, guarded by slaves with military hardware, overseen by the remote technocratic overlords. They don't have any ideological reason not to revolt, they're just afraid of the Capitol.
/Edit
Also Voldemort is kind of a maguffin I think. You read Harry Potter so you can vicariously attend wizard school.
He started out that way, but somewhere around book 5 the Voldemort plot took over and the books stopped being about life at Hogwarts. Thinking back on it, the more the plot focused on directly chasing/fighting/interacting with Voldemort, the less I enjoyed the books (and, by extension, the movies).
Speaking of books about wizard school: I'd like to see someone do an adaptation of The Magicians.
Also Milla Jolivich went from Luc Besson to Paul W.S. Anderson? I guess she's going to marry Michael Bay next, followed by Uwe Boll.
But then Bay couldn't have a rotating cast of half-naked women in his movies. He'd have to always have the same half-naked woman. I don't think his directing style could survive that.
Speaking of bad movies: I rented Three Musketeers. It wasn't as bad as I was expecting, really. Ridiculous, but none of the acting, special effects, or fight scenes were even as bad as anticipated. I don't imagine the original work is anything to go on in terms of this movie, but I really don't understand the reason for Milla Jovovitch's character's existence. It seems like the movie could have worked just as well without her existing at all and it just being the Musketeers vs. England and the Cardinal (or whatever he was; the French Catholic guy).
Lady DeWinter is a character from the original Three Musketeers novels. She's a villain there. That said, this character appeared because Milla Jolovich wanted to be in the movie. Her husband is the director IIRC.
I've always wondered about those sorts of working arrangements augmented by marital considerations. It's just gotta be so fucking surreal, especially when things get ugly.
Beckinsale met & married the director after leaving Martin Sheen during Underworld, whom she had a daughter with. That must have been awkward.
My understanding was that they had already broken up before filming the movie together.
So awkward, but not AWKWARD....
That I didn't know.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
That map does not help anything about the problems that have been talked about.
Further, there are some very specific reasons why slavery has worked in the past, but if the author doesn't address that (and it sounds like she doesn't), then you can't handwave it away by saying "oh, it's happened before"
But then Bay couldn't have a rotating cast of half-naked women in his movies. He'd have to always have the same half-naked woman. I don't think his directing style could survive that.
I've heard Bay is extremely insulting to women on sets. I don't think she'd take his bullshit.
Speaking of bad movies: I rented Three Musketeers. It wasn't as bad as I was expecting, really. Ridiculous, but none of the acting, special effects, or fight scenes were even as bad as anticipated. I don't imagine the original work is anything to go on in terms of this movie, but I really don't understand the reason for Milla Jovovitch's character's existence. It seems like the movie could have worked just as well without her existing at all and it just being the Musketeers vs. England and the Cardinal (or whatever he was; the French Catholic guy).
Lady DeWinter is a character from the original Three Musketeers novels. She's a villain there. That said, this character appeared because Milla Jolovich wanted to be in the movie. Her husband is the director IIRC.
I've always wondered about those sorts of working arrangements augmented by marital considerations. It's just gotta be so fucking surreal, especially when things get ugly.
Beckinsale met & married the director after leaving Martin Sheen during Underworld, whom she had a daughter with. That must have been awkward.
My understanding was that they had already broken up before filming the movie together.
So awkward, but not AWKWARD....
What's even more awkward is that I met and talked to Michael sheen at comic con 2010, ran into len wiseman, and then ran into Michael sheen again so i went to talk to him (since we had a decent conversation earlier) and mentioned that I ran into Len wiseman a few minutes ago. Figured it was relevant to mention since it was so recent. At that time I was completely oblivious that wiseman stole his girl, I just knew him as the director of die hard 4. Sheen quickly kind of informed me of their relationship and I didn't really know how to respond. I think I just said "well that's a trip!"
The whole thing was really weird and surreal.
Heisenberg on
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
...Okay, when Dresden said Martin Sheen, I was confused.
That map does not help anything about the problems that have been talked about.
Further, there are some very specific reasons why slavery has worked in the past, but if the author doesn't address that (and it sounds like she doesn't), then you can't handwave it away by saying "oh, it's happened before"
It actually makes it worse. Those are huge regions for a very small region to be in control of. Unless they are ridiculously sparsely populated while the Capitol has the population density of modern Tokyo, all of them ninjas in extremely fast flying cars, there is no way that they could enforce much of anything outside of the nearest couple of regions. I mean, the USA has strong local governments capable of autonomously policing their regional populations because it's so big.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Seriously, who would dump President Bartlett?
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
That map does not help anything about the problems that have been talked about.
Further, there are some very specific reasons why slavery has worked in the past, but if the author doesn't address that (and it sounds like she doesn't), then you can't handwave it away by saying "oh, it's happened before"
It actually makes it worse. Those are huge regions for a very small region to be in control of. Unless they are ridiculously sparsely populated while the Capitol has the population density of modern Tokyo, all of them ninjas in extremely fast flying cars, there is no way that they could enforce much of anything outside of the nearest couple of regions. I mean, the USA has strong local governments capable of autonomously policing their regional populations because it's so big.
That map does not help anything about the problems that have been talked about.
Further, there are some very specific reasons why slavery has worked in the past, but if the author doesn't address that (and it sounds like she doesn't), then you can't handwave it away by saying "oh, it's happened before"
It actually makes it worse. Those are huge regions for a very small region to be in control of. Unless they are ridiculously sparsely populated while the Capitol has the population density of modern Tokyo, all of them ninjas in extremely fast flying cars, there is no way that they could enforce much of anything outside of the nearest couple of regions. I mean, the USA has strong local governments capable of autonomously policing their regional populations because it's so big.
Don't they have nukes? Large areas with sparse populations won't survive long with a weapon like that strategically detonated near their locations.
That map does not help anything about the problems that have been talked about.
Further, there are some very specific reasons why slavery has worked in the past, but if the author doesn't address that (and it sounds like she doesn't), then you can't handwave it away by saying "oh, it's happened before"
It actually makes it worse. Those are huge regions for a very small region to be in control of. Unless they are ridiculously sparsely populated while the Capitol has the population density of modern Tokyo, all of them ninjas in extremely fast flying cars, there is no way that they could enforce much of anything outside of the nearest couple of regions. I mean, the USA has strong local governments capable of autonomously policing their regional populations because it's so big.
Don't they have nukes? Large areas with sparse populations won't survive long with a weapon like that strategically detonated near their locations.
Well, does the Capitol want to survive? If they're dependent upon their vassal states for food and labor, they can't afford to nuke them. It kills their labor force and further reduces their (presumably) already limited supply of arable land. Further, nuclear weapons capable of effectively impacting a sparsely-populated region are fairly difficult to maintain. The majority of the modern nuclear arsenal do not have a blast radius capable of significantly impacting a target region the size of, say, Ohio. Cincinnati, yeah, we could turn that place into a glass plain. But nuking a region that covers something like 1/5th of the current USA would both be an enormous undertaking in terms of number of launched weapons, would create enough fallout to kill everyone in the country in short order, and would massively impact the local climate for quite a while. So even if they managed not to nuke all the crops and had magical no-fallout bombs, they'd probably kill a couple of years' harvest with alterations to the weather pattern.
That map does not help anything about the problems that have been talked about.
Further, there are some very specific reasons why slavery has worked in the past, but if the author doesn't address that (and it sounds like she doesn't), then you can't handwave it away by saying "oh, it's happened before"
It actually makes it worse. Those are huge regions for a very small region to be in control of. Unless they are ridiculously sparsely populated while the Capitol has the population density of modern Tokyo, all of them ninjas in extremely fast flying cars, there is no way that they could enforce much of anything outside of the nearest couple of regions. I mean, the USA has strong local governments capable of autonomously policing their regional populations because it's so big.
As I said, the population density is totally fucked (like, everyone in Appalachia is somehow in this one town square so there's like... 100k tops? Providing the coal to power the whole continent). But it doesn't matter, as you know, character story. Societies as a whole do ridiculous things all the time. Does Katniss' story make sense in her context? I tend to think it does.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
All of your criticisms are valid. It's still an enjoyable YA book that doesn't devolve into twilight territory, with a believable female lead. I'm super stoked about that movie. Also, it's kind of hard to have a discussion about a trilogy that's finished when the first movie is coming out and I haven't seen it yet.
The government's biggest power in the series is that it has a monopoly on the distribution of food, basically (there's a reason hunting is punishable by death). So the favored districts (aka the ones that supply soldiers and technical goods) get food, and everyone else is super concerned about staying alive. Basically the North Korea solution to political instability. Not something that works forever, but is pretty good in the short term. There's a reason the country's name is latin for "bread" and the book is titled "The Hunger Games."
EDIT: In this model, you just need to enslave the farmers/fishermen by force, and viciously crack down on any rebels in the other areas. Which basically seems to be how it works, as I recall.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
That map does not help anything about the problems that have been talked about.
Further, there are some very specific reasons why slavery has worked in the past, but if the author doesn't address that (and it sounds like she doesn't), then you can't handwave it away by saying "oh, it's happened before"
It actually makes it worse. Those are huge regions for a very small region to be in control of. Unless they are ridiculously sparsely populated while the Capitol has the population density of modern Tokyo, all of them ninjas in extremely fast flying cars, there is no way that they could enforce much of anything outside of the nearest couple of regions. I mean, the USA has strong local governments capable of autonomously policing their regional populations because it's so big.
As I said, the population density is totally fucked (like, everyone in Appalachia is somehow in this one town square so there's like... 100k tops? Providing the coal to power the whole continent). But it doesn't matter, as you know, character story. Societies as a whole do ridiculous things all the time. Does Katniss' story make sense in her context? I tend to think it does.
Yeah. The population density (as described by the books) is waaaay too low, which was probably the only thing mentioned here that I noticed while reading.
The government's biggest power in the series is that it has a monopoly on the distribution of food, basically (there's a reason hunting is punishable by death). So the favored districts (aka the ones that supply soldiers and technical goods) get food, and everyone else is super concerned about staying alive. Basically the North Korea solution to political instability. Not something that works forever, but is pretty good in the short term. There's a reason the country's name is latin for "bread" and the book is titled "The Hunger Games."
EDIT: In this model, you just need to enslave the farmers/fishermen by force, and viciously crack down on any rebels in the other areas. Which basically seems to be how it works, as I recall.
I don't think people watching kids fight to the death is abnormal or unrealistic behavior. We do have the classic example of the gladiators. You don't get much more historically grounded then that. You also got people watching the Guillotine during the terror(and public executions at any other time).
If you want things a little more close to home: Lynchings in the south where public spectacles with massive crowds. Lynching had the same purpose too, to keep the lower classes in line. They only stopped in 1920s, because the federal government was cracking down.
Even today, there are plenty of people that watch NASCAR, Formula 1 for the crashes and sports for the wipeouts. Is there any level that Reality Television will not stoop to? If so I don't think we have hit it yet. (Plastic surgery shows, Rehab shows, Fear Factor grossout).
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
I don't think people watching kids fight to the death is abnormal or unrealistic behavior. We do have the classic example of the gladiators. You don't get much more historically grounded then that. You also got people watching the Guillotine during the terror(and public executions at any other time).
If you want things a little more close to home: Lynchings in the south where public spectacles with massive crowds. Lynching had the same purpose too, to keep the lower classes in line. They only stopped in 1920s, because the federal government was cracking down.
Even today, there are plenty of people that watch NASCAR, Formula 1 for the crashes and sports for the wipeouts. Is there any level that Reality Television will not stoop to? If so I don't think we have hit it yet. (Plastic surgery shows, Rehab shows, Fear Factor grossout).
Again, the origin of the story was the author watching Iraq War coverage and reality shows and then conflating them. Which, considering the way we covered the beginnings of Iraq? Not that ridiculous.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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VariableMouth CongressStroke Me Lady FameRegistered Userregular
21 Jump Street is impossibly funny. It is delightfully irreverent at the least expected times and so completely self-aware that it just destroys the tropes that are usually expected from such a film.
There was a definite divide in the theater between the people who were expecting something scatological and simplistic though so I'm sure the reviews will be polarized.
Really fantastic movie. I actually start laughing again just reading about scenes.
I also have to say the movie is nothing like the trailers.
when the cop is telling them about their new assignment and they break the 4th wall pretty hard, I swear me and my friends were the only people laughing. it was bizzaro world.
it's a really well done comedy. I never expect to enjoy comedies so when I do it makes me so happy haha. this was great.
Ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire were around for a really long time.
Using serf classes works best if you either psychologically indoctrinate them to believe that their lot in life is what they deserve because of their birth (Ancient Egypt, feudal Europe, and ancient China being prime examples) or if your slaves are sufficiently distributed that any given group of slaves is directly controlled by a local lordling who either is a member of the ruling class or believes that he can aspire to be such (pre-Civil War America or Ancient Rome being examples).
Both classes of slave-labor society are pretty much doomed to failure, but the indoctrination variety is more stable than the distributed-leadership version. My Roman history is a bit flaky, but I'm pretty sure they had a number of slave revolts with varying degrees of success. Egypt and China, by comparison, had fairly few, and all the ones that I can think of came with the introduction of a new ideology challenging the idea that the current leadership were literal gods.
Eventually, though, if your society is based on slave labor you're going to have a large enough slave caste in your population that a large-scale revolt will be too numerous to quash. And even if you did successfully kill the mob, you've just decimated your production force and lowered the morale of those who remain enough to further impact your ability to feed your populace.
Quick Roman History aside:
Rome's slavery was fairly "progressive", at least compared to slavery in the United States. While most slaves were still manual labor, a significant portion performed the same tasks that a personal assistant or accountant might today. These slaves would often be freed at the owner's death or even be able to purchase their own freedom. And the children of freed slaves would become full Roman citizens!
A lot of Rome's destabilization was actually that they started to run out of sources of slaves. The slaves themselves weren't usually a massive problem because they never broke 50% of the population, they were (usually) treated reasonably well, and were led to believe that they could work their way to freedom for themselves or their children.
I don't think people watching kids fight to the death is abnormal or unrealistic behavior. We do have the classic example of the gladiators. You don't get much more historically grounded then that. You also got people watching the Guillotine during the terror(and public executions at any other time).
If you want things a little more close to home: Lynchings in the south where public spectacles with massive crowds. Lynching had the same purpose too, to keep the lower classes in line. They only stopped in 1920s, because the federal government was cracking down.
Even today, there are plenty of people that watch NASCAR, Formula 1 for the crashes and sports for the wipeouts. Is there any level that Reality Television will not stoop to? If so I don't think we have hit it yet. (Plastic surgery shows, Rehab shows, Fear Factor grossout).
Well, we don't actually have a murder reality TV show yet. And generally the introduction of capital-punishment-as-public-spectacle (as opposed to public punishment used to frighten the populace into compliance) has fairly shortly presaged violent revolution. The American South had lynchings in the decades following the civil war, but they also had riots from the oppressed blacks and their supporters.
Roman gladiators differ a bit from the Child Combat Show idea. Gladiators were either Roman criminals or slaves from foreign lands brought to Rome and trained for the purpose. In the case of Roman criminals, the public is okay with watching them getting killed because "oh, he's a criminal, he deserves it" in much the same way that people are okay with knowing that modern prisoners are routinely maimed and raped. Foreigners - especially in ancient times - are barely human and unworthy of pity. Who cares what a bunch of savages do to each other? And Rome spent a good deal of time, money, and manpower fighting wars with the lands where they stole slaves from. Which is why it seems awfully wonky that an entire populace is enslaved, give up their children to fight for entertainment, and are apparently okay with it enough not to fight back.
I didn't have a problem with Running Man's story because the contestants in the murder-game are, like the Roman arena victims, criminals. Same thing in Death Race. I can actually buy the idea that Americans could get behind watching televised no-rules cage-fights between convicted felons. Hell, you wouldn't have to even change the prison system very much... just install cameras and cut together footage of the fights, stabbings, and rapes. The Long Walk worked, using essentially the exact same premise as The Hunger Games because no justification for the contest was ever given. It was a character-driven story and King realized that there was no way to realistically justify the situation he wanted to tell a story about, so he just didn't bother. The kids were there, they were competing with their lives for a nebulous Prize, and that's all you needed to know.
If you're going to invent a complicated dystopian government to frame your story then I'm going to expect it to be believable, whether it's YA or not. Maybe even especially if it's YA. YA novels are shorter than adult fiction by roughly 25-30%, barring outliers like Harry Potter or Twilight. If you're writing a character-driven YA novel, there is zero reason to fill pages with exposition about your world's history and government unless it's critical to understanding the story. And if it's critical to the story, it should make sense. Aiming it at younger readers doesn't mean, to me, that you get a pass to be intellectually lazy. I enjoyed Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz vs. The Evil Librarians for the amusing writing and the fun characters and ideas, but the framing device about secret conspiracies hiding the real geography of the world grated on the back of my mind throughout the novel. Particularly since he could just as easily have used a magical other-world instead of nesting the real world inside of a significantly-larger Secret World.
Just as many of you said, the story falls apart if you really try to understand the world of Panem, but it works as an entertaining and somewhat mindless character based action story. I think that's why it'll work really well as a movie and I'm actually pretty excited to see the result.
http://www.danreviewstheworld.com
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Ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire were around for a really long time.
Using serf classes works best if you either psychologically indoctrinate them to believe that their lot in life is what they deserve because of their birth (Ancient Egypt, feudal Europe, and ancient China being prime examples) or if your slaves are sufficiently distributed that any given group of slaves is directly controlled by a local lordling who either is a member of the ruling class or believes that he can aspire to be such (pre-Civil War America or Ancient Rome being examples).
Both classes of slave-labor society are pretty much doomed to failure, but the indoctrination variety is more stable than the distributed-leadership version. My Roman history is a bit flaky, but I'm pretty sure they had a number of slave revolts with varying degrees of success. Egypt and China, by comparison, had fairly few, and all the ones that I can think of came with the introduction of a new ideology challenging the idea that the current leadership were literal gods.
Eventually, though, if your society is based on slave labor you're going to have a large enough slave caste in your population that a large-scale revolt will be too numerous to quash. And even if you did successfully kill the mob, you've just decimated your production force and lowered the morale of those who remain enough to further impact your ability to feed your populace.
Edit:
In the case of The Hunger Games it's neither. So far as I can tell, the vast majority of the populace are slave labor, guarded by slaves with military hardware, overseen by the remote technocratic overlords. They don't have any ideological reason not to revolt, they're just afraid of the Capitol.
/Edit
Also Voldemort is kind of a maguffin I think. You read Harry Potter so you can vicariously attend wizard school.
He started out that way, but somewhere around book 5 the Voldemort plot took over and the books stopped being about life at Hogwarts. Thinking back on it, the more the plot focused on directly chasing/fighting/interacting with Voldemort, the less I enjoyed the books (and, by extension, the movies).
Speaking of books about wizard school: I'd like to see someone do an adaptation of The Magicians.
Also Milla Jolivich went from Luc Besson to Paul W.S. Anderson? I guess she's going to marry Michael Bay next, followed by Uwe Boll.
But then Bay couldn't have a rotating cast of half-naked women in his movies. He'd have to always have the same half-naked woman. I don't think his directing style could survive that.
If you want to learn about roman slave revolts, the TV series Spartacus is 112% historically accurate
Well, egypt is a great example. How long were the jews enslaved?
Also, It was
This is the map:
that really can't be the map, or at least, it's anwful representation of what the books specifically say. For instance, the capitol is only approachable through the tunnels of the rockies OR via flight and they have super awesome anit-air guns...so the capitol should be far western colorado or eastern utah.
the key to believability is that, like ancient egypt, the pharoah err president snow, controlled the food. control the food with the most force and the rest of the districts are at your mercy.
So I was looking at movies soon to be release on Blu-ray and I saw that "We Bought a Zoo" was coming out...
I actually liked that movie quite a bit although for some reason had totally forgotten about it when everyone was posting their favorites from 2011 a while back.
What does it say when you like a film but have such an easy time forgetting about it?
"Get Low" was another movie where the same thing happened to me.
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HacksawJ. Duggan Esq.Wrestler at LawRegistered Userregular
21 Jump Street is impossibly funny. It is delightfully irreverent at the least expected times and so completely self-aware that it just destroys the tropes that are usually expected from such a film.
There was a definite divide in the theater between the people who were expecting something scatological and simplistic though so I'm sure the reviews will be polarized.
Really fantastic movie. I actually start laughing again just reading about scenes.
I also have to say the movie is nothing like the trailers.
Reviews were actually very positive.
This was a movie that I figured would be kinda funny but completely blew away every expectation I had. There were more than a couple scenes that kept the jokes coming so quickly that I couldn't breathe.
21 Jump Street is indeed a very funny movie. Everyone should go see it.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Wow, the Les Miserable musical is shaping up to look a lot more grim than I was expecting a loyal reproduction of the stage show to look.
Fer instance, here's Alfie Bowe in the role of Jean Valjean during its most recent London production:
And here's Hugh Jackman in the same 24601 drag:
Yeesh.
Les Miserables is directed by Tom Hooper (The King's Speech, John Adams) and stars Jackman, Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert, Anne Hathaway as Fantine, and Samantha Barks as Eponine, and is expected to be released during the 2012 holiday season.
So, Midnight In Paris. I........I think I love this movie. I'm not sure what people here think of it, and I probably need more time to properly digest it, but having just finished it like 5 minutes ago I think it might be one of the most charming movies I've ever seen.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
what will happen when audiences demand the further adventures of Jean Valjean
will they make
More Miserables
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
but seriously, Russell Crowe as Javert is a pretty boss idea
So, Midnight In Paris. I........I think I love this movie. I'm not sure what people here think of it, and I probably need more time to properly digest it, but having just finished it like 5 minutes ago I think it might be one of the most charming movies I've ever seen.
I think it's easy to take a run at it for being so transparently a Woody Allen product, but that's really not much of a criticism in and of itself. Granted some of its characters are fairly stock, but I give it credit for being a really sincere effort at magical realism. And everyone from the lost generation is very well cast.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
what will happen when audiences demand the further adventures of Jean Valjean
will they make
More Miserables
I don't know.
How would I know that?
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
Watched Outrage tonight, a Beat Takeshi movie about the Yakuza.
Beyond showing the relentless nature of an underworld where the most ruthless schemers are the ones that get to the top, and some frankly shocking scenes of violence, Outrage also succeeded pretty handily in making me think it was shot in the early nineties, when in fact it's from 2010. Nothing about it looks particularly 'new' or contemporary.
So, two thirds of the way through the movie there's a scene in a noodle shop and some guy walks into the scene with a DS Lite with him, it was a serious surprise.
It did drag a little bit towards the end when it seemed to become a tableau of who's killing who, but watching the exchanges of Yakuza factions where they continually to meet in order to smooth things over but always aggravate their problems because either a) the old ways don't work anymore or b) someone involved in the peacemaking process has his own stake in the disorder continuing is pretty gripping. I'll never hear the phrase "This is only a formality" the same way again.
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KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
Posts
Also to make some points about how death is not the worst thing. And racism/sexism being awful and stop it, y'all.
My understanding was that they had already broken up before filming the movie together.
So awkward, but not AWKWARD....
Using serf classes works best if you either psychologically indoctrinate them to believe that their lot in life is what they deserve because of their birth (Ancient Egypt, feudal Europe, and ancient China being prime examples) or if your slaves are sufficiently distributed that any given group of slaves is directly controlled by a local lordling who either is a member of the ruling class or believes that he can aspire to be such (pre-Civil War America or Ancient Rome being examples).
Both classes of slave-labor society are pretty much doomed to failure, but the indoctrination variety is more stable than the distributed-leadership version. My Roman history is a bit flaky, but I'm pretty sure they had a number of slave revolts with varying degrees of success. Egypt and China, by comparison, had fairly few, and all the ones that I can think of came with the introduction of a new ideology challenging the idea that the current leadership were literal gods.
Eventually, though, if your society is based on slave labor you're going to have a large enough slave caste in your population that a large-scale revolt will be too numerous to quash. And even if you did successfully kill the mob, you've just decimated your production force and lowered the morale of those who remain enough to further impact your ability to feed your populace.
Edit:
In the case of The Hunger Games it's neither. So far as I can tell, the vast majority of the populace are slave labor, guarded by slaves with military hardware, overseen by the remote technocratic overlords. They don't have any ideological reason not to revolt, they're just afraid of the Capitol.
/Edit
He started out that way, but somewhere around book 5 the Voldemort plot took over and the books stopped being about life at Hogwarts. Thinking back on it, the more the plot focused on directly chasing/fighting/interacting with Voldemort, the less I enjoyed the books (and, by extension, the movies).
Speaking of books about wizard school: I'd like to see someone do an adaptation of The Magicians.
But then Bay couldn't have a rotating cast of half-naked women in his movies. He'd have to always have the same half-naked woman. I don't think his directing style could survive that.
That I didn't know.
Further, there are some very specific reasons why slavery has worked in the past, but if the author doesn't address that (and it sounds like she doesn't), then you can't handwave it away by saying "oh, it's happened before"
I've heard Bay is extremely insulting to women on sets. I don't think she'd take his bullshit.
What's even more awkward is that I met and talked to Michael sheen at comic con 2010, ran into len wiseman, and then ran into Michael sheen again so i went to talk to him (since we had a decent conversation earlier) and mentioned that I ran into Len wiseman a few minutes ago. Figured it was relevant to mention since it was so recent. At that time I was completely oblivious that wiseman stole his girl, I just knew him as the director of die hard 4. Sheen quickly kind of informed me of their relationship and I didn't really know how to respond. I think I just said "well that's a trip!"
The whole thing was really weird and surreal.
Seriously.
It actually makes it worse. Those are huge regions for a very small region to be in control of. Unless they are ridiculously sparsely populated while the Capitol has the population density of modern Tokyo, all of them ninjas in extremely fast flying cars, there is no way that they could enforce much of anything outside of the nearest couple of regions. I mean, the USA has strong local governments capable of autonomously policing their regional populations because it's so big.
Well yes, this is true.
Don't they have nukes? Large areas with sparse populations won't survive long with a weapon like that strategically detonated near their locations.
Well, does the Capitol want to survive? If they're dependent upon their vassal states for food and labor, they can't afford to nuke them. It kills their labor force and further reduces their (presumably) already limited supply of arable land. Further, nuclear weapons capable of effectively impacting a sparsely-populated region are fairly difficult to maintain. The majority of the modern nuclear arsenal do not have a blast radius capable of significantly impacting a target region the size of, say, Ohio. Cincinnati, yeah, we could turn that place into a glass plain. But nuking a region that covers something like 1/5th of the current USA would both be an enormous undertaking in terms of number of launched weapons, would create enough fallout to kill everyone in the country in short order, and would massively impact the local climate for quite a while. So even if they managed not to nuke all the crops and had magical no-fallout bombs, they'd probably kill a couple of years' harvest with alterations to the weather pattern.
As I said, the population density is totally fucked (like, everyone in Appalachia is somehow in this one town square so there's like... 100k tops? Providing the coal to power the whole continent). But it doesn't matter, as you know, character story. Societies as a whole do ridiculous things all the time. Does Katniss' story make sense in her context? I tend to think it does.
EDIT: In this model, you just need to enslave the farmers/fishermen by force, and viciously crack down on any rebels in the other areas. Which basically seems to be how it works, as I recall.
Yeah. The population density (as described by the books) is waaaay too low, which was probably the only thing mentioned here that I noticed while reading.
This was my understanding as well.
If you want things a little more close to home: Lynchings in the south where public spectacles with massive crowds. Lynching had the same purpose too, to keep the lower classes in line. They only stopped in 1920s, because the federal government was cracking down.
Even today, there are plenty of people that watch NASCAR, Formula 1 for the crashes and sports for the wipeouts. Is there any level that Reality Television will not stoop to? If so I don't think we have hit it yet. (Plastic surgery shows, Rehab shows, Fear Factor grossout).
He kept trying to take control of the Collector base.
Again, the origin of the story was the author watching Iraq War coverage and reality shows and then conflating them. Which, considering the way we covered the beginnings of Iraq? Not that ridiculous.
when the cop is telling them about their new assignment and they break the 4th wall pretty hard, I swear me and my friends were the only people laughing. it was bizzaro world.
it's a really well done comedy. I never expect to enjoy comedies so when I do it makes me so happy haha. this was great.
Quick Roman History aside:
Rome's slavery was fairly "progressive", at least compared to slavery in the United States. While most slaves were still manual labor, a significant portion performed the same tasks that a personal assistant or accountant might today. These slaves would often be freed at the owner's death or even be able to purchase their own freedom. And the children of freed slaves would become full Roman citizens!
A lot of Rome's destabilization was actually that they started to run out of sources of slaves. The slaves themselves weren't usually a massive problem because they never broke 50% of the population, they were (usually) treated reasonably well, and were led to believe that they could work their way to freedom for themselves or their children.
Well, we don't actually have a murder reality TV show yet. And generally the introduction of capital-punishment-as-public-spectacle (as opposed to public punishment used to frighten the populace into compliance) has fairly shortly presaged violent revolution. The American South had lynchings in the decades following the civil war, but they also had riots from the oppressed blacks and their supporters.
Roman gladiators differ a bit from the Child Combat Show idea. Gladiators were either Roman criminals or slaves from foreign lands brought to Rome and trained for the purpose. In the case of Roman criminals, the public is okay with watching them getting killed because "oh, he's a criminal, he deserves it" in much the same way that people are okay with knowing that modern prisoners are routinely maimed and raped. Foreigners - especially in ancient times - are barely human and unworthy of pity. Who cares what a bunch of savages do to each other? And Rome spent a good deal of time, money, and manpower fighting wars with the lands where they stole slaves from. Which is why it seems awfully wonky that an entire populace is enslaved, give up their children to fight for entertainment, and are apparently okay with it enough not to fight back.
I didn't have a problem with Running Man's story because the contestants in the murder-game are, like the Roman arena victims, criminals. Same thing in Death Race. I can actually buy the idea that Americans could get behind watching televised no-rules cage-fights between convicted felons. Hell, you wouldn't have to even change the prison system very much... just install cameras and cut together footage of the fights, stabbings, and rapes. The Long Walk worked, using essentially the exact same premise as The Hunger Games because no justification for the contest was ever given. It was a character-driven story and King realized that there was no way to realistically justify the situation he wanted to tell a story about, so he just didn't bother. The kids were there, they were competing with their lives for a nebulous Prize, and that's all you needed to know.
If you're going to invent a complicated dystopian government to frame your story then I'm going to expect it to be believable, whether it's YA or not. Maybe even especially if it's YA. YA novels are shorter than adult fiction by roughly 25-30%, barring outliers like Harry Potter or Twilight. If you're writing a character-driven YA novel, there is zero reason to fill pages with exposition about your world's history and government unless it's critical to understanding the story. And if it's critical to the story, it should make sense. Aiming it at younger readers doesn't mean, to me, that you get a pass to be intellectually lazy. I enjoyed Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz vs. The Evil Librarians for the amusing writing and the fun characters and ideas, but the framing device about secret conspiracies hiding the real geography of the world grated on the back of my mind throughout the novel. Particularly since he could just as easily have used a magical other-world instead of nesting the real world inside of a significantly-larger Secret World.
farla.livejournal.com/tag/the%20hunger%20games%20series
Just as many of you said, the story falls apart if you really try to understand the world of Panem, but it works as an entertaining and somewhat mindless character based action story. I think that's why it'll work really well as a movie and I'm actually pretty excited to see the result.
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If you want to learn about roman slave revolts, the TV series Spartacus is 112% historically accurate
that really can't be the map, or at least, it's anwful representation of what the books specifically say. For instance, the capitol is only approachable through the tunnels of the rockies OR via flight and they have super awesome anit-air guns...so the capitol should be far western colorado or eastern utah.
the key to believability is that, like ancient egypt, the pharoah err president snow, controlled the food. control the food with the most force and the rest of the districts are at your mercy.
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I actually liked that movie quite a bit although for some reason had totally forgotten about it when everyone was posting their favorites from 2011 a while back.
What does it say when you like a film but have such an easy time forgetting about it?
"Get Low" was another movie where the same thing happened to me.
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21 Jump Street is indeed a very funny movie. Everyone should go see it.
Fer instance, here's Alfie Bowe in the role of Jean Valjean during its most recent London production:
And here's Hugh Jackman in the same 24601 drag:
Yeesh.
Les Miserables is directed by Tom Hooper (The King's Speech, John Adams) and stars Jackman, Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert, Anne Hathaway as Fantine, and Samantha Barks as Eponine, and is expected to be released during the 2012 holiday season.
will they make
More Miserables
I think it's easy to take a run at it for being so transparently a Woody Allen product, but that's really not much of a criticism in and of itself. Granted some of its characters are fairly stock, but I give it credit for being a really sincere effort at magical realism. And everyone from the lost generation is very well cast.
I don't know.
How would I know that?
Beyond showing the relentless nature of an underworld where the most ruthless schemers are the ones that get to the top, and some frankly shocking scenes of violence, Outrage also succeeded pretty handily in making me think it was shot in the early nineties, when in fact it's from 2010. Nothing about it looks particularly 'new' or contemporary.
So, two thirds of the way through the movie there's a scene in a noodle shop and some guy walks into the scene with a DS Lite with him, it was a serious surprise.
It did drag a little bit towards the end when it seemed to become a tableau of who's killing who, but watching the exchanges of Yakuza factions where they continually to meet in order to smooth things over but always aggravate their problems because either a) the old ways don't work anymore or b) someone involved in the peacemaking process has his own stake in the disorder continuing is pretty gripping. I'll never hear the phrase "This is only a formality" the same way again.
It's an "insider" run-down of John Carter's behind the scenes death spiral..
A bit sad, if true. The dangers of being an auteur. Once in a while, studios are right.