Whedon just isn't the guy you want writing an Alien movie period.
Back then, maybe not. Now? I'd be interested in seeing him write & direct an Alien sequel.
What has time changed for this?
Alien is just not the kind of franchise I see Whedon's style fitting with at all.
Firefly, Serenity and Angel. Avengers is meant to be incredible, as well. His movie might be slightly less bleak than a typical Alien film but he can do very serious drama and science fiction brilliantly when he needs to.
Whedon just isn't the guy you want writing an Alien movie period.
Back then, maybe not. Now? I'd be interested in seeing him write & direct an Alien sequel.
What has time changed for this?
Alien is just not the kind of franchise I see Whedon's style fitting with at all.
Firefly, Serenity and Angel. Avengers is meant to be incredible, as well. His movie might be slightly less bleak than a typical Alien film but he can do very serious drama and science fiction brilliantly when he needs to.
All of those can be bleak, but they are also Whedonesque even while doing so.
It's not a style that meshes with the Alien franchise.
I really like Whedon, and I really like Jeunet, but even if Alien: Resurrection didn't exist, and you told me either one of them was going to be involved with the Alien franchise, I'd probably give you a weird look. Neither of them are really suited for the franchise. Just because you're great at sci-fi doesn't mean you're going to be really great at every specific brand of sci-fi.
EDIT: Then again, I might have said the same thing about Cameron if Aliens didn't exist. It's possible Whedon could have penned a good sequel, but at the end of the day, he just didn't. He says the execution was wrong, but so much of just the basic story of that movie rubbed me the wrong way that I'm not sure I can believe him.
I enjoyed it. I didn't absolutely love it, which is probably because I hate horror movies. I appreciated all they did to deconstruct the genre, but it was pretty much just that, appreciation. Kind of the same way I like Shaun of the Dead, but it's only "like", because I don't enjoy zombie movies.
I'd recommend it, but only to people I know the tastes of in advance. Not my mother, for instance.
Whedon just isn't the guy you want writing an Alien movie period.
Back then, maybe not. Now? I'd be interested in seeing him write & direct an Alien sequel.
What has time changed for this?
Alien is just not the kind of franchise I see Whedon's style fitting with at all.
Firefly, Serenity and Angel. Avengers is meant to be incredible, as well. His movie might be slightly less bleak than a typical Alien film but he can do very serious drama and science fiction brilliantly when he needs to.
All of those can be bleak, but they are also Whedonesque even while doing so.
It's not a style that meshes with the Alien franchise.
After watching Cabin in the Woods my feelings may have changed on this. Granted, that wasn't Whedon alone, and even when things went to shit in the movie they were still more comical than bleak.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
I've never realized how well the word 'zinger' sums up Joss Whedon's oeuvre.
Alien Ressurection is frustrating. I want to love it, because:
1) It's written by Joss Whedon and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, holy crap. 2) I really liked it when I saw it in the theater, a week after my tenth birthday. 3) There's a lot that's good about it!
But it doesn't quite work. Joss Whedon claims that they ruined his script – not by changing it but by executing it badly. Which is a plausible because while the movie is gorgeous (as you'd expect from Jeunet), the performances are painfully over the top.
I mean imagine if the over-the-top Schumachery nervous guy was played instead by Alan Tudyk and he gave an actual performance. Imagine if the Ron Perlman character was played by Adam Baldwin (or else they asked Perlman to tone it way the hell down) - that character might have gone from “shouty guy whom I want to die horribly” to “loveable rogue”.
And comedy is all about timing so hey maybe if someone else was directing, the zingers would actually be funny.
So the movie probably could've been better with someone else at the helm, but I don't know how much better. The premise is kind of unambitious, after all: “aliens get loose on a spaceship”. And just so things seemed extra-rehashy they brought back Ripley. Also this movie was written by an inexperienced Whedon – this was before Buffy, and let's remember that the first season of Buffy kind of sucked.
What Whedon's good at is making stories with charming surrogate families filled with loveable people who love each other. This one doesn't give you a warm-and-fuzzy community (maybe it would if the acting was better) – but it does give you, at least, a nice one-on-one friendship. Sigorney Weaver plays an alien-human hybrid, and Winona Ryder plays a self-hating robot who wishes she was human. Both actors give good, restrained performances (unlike most of the cast). And the two characters are both outsiders who from this kind-of heartwarming mother-daughter bond. (Or maybe it's a homoerotic bond, whichever.)
(It's been awhile since I watched Aliens 1-3, but Ripley's sexuality is never really addressed is it? It'd be neat if for this one they were bold enough to be like “oh, by the way, Ripley's a lesbian.”)
One other person gives a really good performance and that's Brad Dourif. One scene that's great is when Dourif and two other bad guys look on as three humans become infected with the alien parasites behind glass. The scene is just so creepy, and visually it's beautiful, and Dourif's awed expression is perfect.
Well, at least, it's a great scene until one of the guinea pigs opens his eyes and starts screaming in a cartoony Malcolm in the Middle kind of way.
Whedon said he didn't like how they handled Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the movie, so he went and made it into a series. I guess he did the same thing with this movie because it's basically proto-Firefly. There's a rag-tag team of space pirates who do morally questionable things but look out for each other like family. Ron Perlman's character is basically Jayne. Ripley is basically River – she's got brain damage at first, she has superpowers, and she cocks her head animalistically (Sigorney Weaver plays the part beautifully). And Ripley starts out as a naked girl in a glowing box. (And when we first see her she's not an adult. How much do you want to bet that Whedon was like “hey what if we made cloned-Ripley a teenager?” and the studio bosses were like “uh we're cloning Ripley because we want Sigorney Weaver to be in the movie, remember?” and Joss Whedon was like “oh, right.”)
Anyway I hope the two Jeunet movies I loved in middle school (Amélie, Delicatessen) hold up better.
And Whedon will continue to keep denying that it was ever his fault thanks to his legion of fan trolls who are never two steps away from giving him free blowjobs.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
edited April 2012
Whedon is incapable of telling a story without a layer of ironic detachment. He'd be awful if he didn't pair that layer with a layer of sincerity and another layer of thematic concerns, but the result is still something slathered in "aren't I clever". As a fan of just about everything Whedon's done, he should never have been allowed anywhere near the Alien franchise. Alien and Aliens are modernist works; Whedon is extremely post-modern.
Edit: If Whedon's script hadn't been fucked, we'd be arguing over whether a funny, oddball sci-fi movie really fit in the series or not. But we wouldn't have to look past some truly awful execution in order to do so. Whedon's intentions wouldn't have meshed, but if they had led to a good movie I don't think anybody would care as much.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Cross-threadery alert:
Warners had a panel for distributors and theater owners at CinemaCon in Las Vegas today, with tons of new footage from TDKR, The Hobbit, and Dark Shadows.
All three got a strong reception, but the new 4K 48fps projection of The Hobbit was surprisingly and roundly panned by almost all in attendance.
Deets in the Hobbit thread.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
Warners had a panel for distributors and theater owners at CinemaCon in Las Vegas today, with tons of new footage from TDKR, The Hobbit, and Dark Shadows.
All three got a strong reception, but the new 4K 48fps projection of The Hobbit was surprisingly and roundly panned by almost all in attendance.
Warners had a panel for distributors and theater owners at CinemaCon in Las Vegas today, with tons of new footage from TDKR, The Hobbit, and Dark Shadows.
All three got a strong reception, but the new 4K 48fps projection of The Hobbit was surprisingly and roundly panned by almost all in attendance.
Deets in the Hobbit thread.
I've got a strong feeling the panel audience is on the wrong side of history. I've read the complaints, and the fact is, they're not citing anything that's essentially wrong with a difference in frame rate and resolution. It really does seem like they're incapable of dividing the notion of smoothness from cheap, anti-cinematic production values.
God knows I haven't seen it, so maybe I'll feel different, but all I know is...I really like live theater a whole lot, which is presented at a considerably higher frame rate and resolution. In good theater, you quickly forget your awareness of its theatricality. Sets stop becoming sets. What's more, there's a really profound intimacy about finding yourself somehow sharing that space with the performers. To me, this sounds like using emerging technology to create an experience more along those lines.
God knows I haven't seen it, so maybe I'll feel different, but all I know is...I really like live theater a whole lot, which is presented at a considerably higher frame rate and resolution. In good theater, you quickly forget your awareness of its theatricality. Sets stop becoming sets. What's more, there's a really profound intimacy about finding yourself somehow sharing that space with the performers. To me, this sounds like using emerging technology to create an experience more along those lines.
I'm excited to find out.
Except in live theater, you get that sort of experience because, you know, it's live and you're there.
It would be like expecting a concert DVD to perfectly re-create the experience of going to a concert. You can definitely enjoy it, but it will never be the same thing.
Live theater and film are so drastically different that a comparison doesn't really work.
The higher frame rate is the main reason why I haven't switched to Blu-Ray yet:
I saw part of POTC: Dead Man's Chest on the display TV at Best Buy a while ago, and was completely heartbroken at how cheesy and "fake" everything looked. The extra smoothing really took me out of the experience, and sort of 'destroyed' my suspension of disbelief, not to mention how horribly out of place Davy Jones seemed in comparison to damn near everything else.
God knows I haven't seen it, so maybe I'll feel different, but all I know is...I really like live theater a whole lot, which is presented at a considerably higher frame rate and resolution. In good theater, you quickly forget your awareness of its theatricality. Sets stop becoming sets. What's more, there's a really profound intimacy about finding yourself somehow sharing that space with the performers. To me, this sounds like using emerging technology to create an experience more along those lines.
I'm excited to find out.
Except in live theater, you get that sort of experience because, you know, it's live and you're there.
It would be like expecting a concert DVD to perfectly re-create the experience of going to a concert. You can definitely enjoy it, but it will never be the same thing.
Live theater and film are so drastically different that a comparison doesn't really work.
It's not a great comparison. My point is, in basically every form of visual storytelling, we're presented with some kind of artifice and told to deal with it. There's this looming problem of the uncanny valley, but I have a hard time believing that it's any more a boundary to our ability to appreciate the experience of film than almost any other technical boundary. I certainly don't love 3d, but I do know that I dealt with it quickly and found myself invested in whatever film shortly thereafter. I'm excited by the possibility that there's still a way to augment film that I actually just might like.
Warners had a panel for distributors and theater owners at CinemaCon in Las Vegas today, with tons of new footage from TDKR, The Hobbit, and Dark Shadows.
All three got a strong reception, but the new 4K 48fps projection of The Hobbit was surprisingly and roundly panned by almost all in attendance.
Deets in the Hobbit thread.
I've got a strong feeling the panel audience is on the wrong side of history. I've read the complaints, and the fact is, they're not citing anything that's essentially wrong with a difference in frame rate and resolution. It really does seem like they're incapable of dividing the notion of smoothness from cheap, anti-cinematic production values.
Because there's nothing technically wrong with the idea, but the reality of it, on the screen is jarring. Whatever the audience is capable of as soon as you have to start thinking about why what you're looking at is actually great and not horribly distracting you're in trouble.
The thing is though, there's nothing wrong with 24fps. There's no reason to go for a higher framerate. Higher frame rates are nothing new; they've been around basically since the dawn of film. Over the past century, with plenty of options in both directions, people have mostly decided that 24 looks the best. Yes, if a film is good enough, people could probably 'get past' it looking weird, but there's no reason they should have to.
The higher frame rate is the main reason why I haven't switched to Blu-Ray yet:
Currently at least, it typically has more to do with settings on the TV. I watch films on BluRay all the time, and they're always the correct frame rate.
Do we know why faster framerates make us think something looks hokey? Is it really just the association with TV framerates?
I think so, yeah. High-FPS video is inextricably linked with soap operas and generally cheap TV stuff, because back in the day it was super cheap to film on video tape instead of film and that had a higher FPS.
Alien Ressurection is frustrating. I want to love it, because:
1) It's written by Joss Whedon and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, holy crap. 2) I really liked it when I saw it in the theater, a week after my tenth birthday. 3) There's a lot that's good about it!
But it doesn't quite work. Joss Whedon claims that they ruined his script – not by changing it but by executing it badly. Which is a plausible because while the movie is gorgeous (as you'd expect from Jeunet), the performances are painfully over the top.
I mean imagine if the over-the-top Schumachery nervous guy was played instead by Alan Tudyk and he gave an actual performance. Imagine if the Ron Perlman character was played by Adam Baldwin (or else they asked Perlman to tone it way the hell down) - that character might have gone from “shouty guy whom I want to die horribly” to “loveable rogue”.
And comedy is all about timing so hey maybe if someone else was directing, the zingers would actually be funny.
So the movie probably could've been better with someone else at the helm, but I don't know how much better. The premise is kind of unambitious, after all: “aliens get loose on a spaceship”. And just so things seemed extra-rehashy they brought back Ripley. Also this movie was written by an inexperienced Whedon – this was before Buffy, and let's remember that the first season of Buffy kind of sucked.
What Whedon's good at is making stories with charming surrogate families filled with loveable people who love each other. This one doesn't give you a warm-and-fuzzy community (maybe it would if the acting was better) – but it does give you, at least, a nice one-on-one friendship. Sigorney Weaver plays an alien-human hybrid, and Winona Ryder plays a self-hating robot who wishes she was human. Both actors give good, restrained performances (unlike most of the cast). And the two characters are both outsiders who from this kind-of heartwarming mother-daughter bond. (Or maybe it's a homoerotic bond, whichever.)
(It's been awhile since I watched Aliens 1-3, but Ripley's sexuality is never really addressed is it? It'd be neat if for this one they were bold enough to be like “oh, by the way, Ripley's a lesbian.”)
One other person gives a really good performance and that's Brad Dourif. One scene that's great is when Dourif and two other bad guys look on as three humans become infected with the alien parasites behind glass. The scene is just so creepy, and visually it's beautiful, and Dourif's awed expression is perfect.
Well, at least, it's a great scene until one of the guinea pigs opens his eyes and starts screaming in a cartoony Malcolm in the Middle kind of way.
Whedon said he didn't like how they handled Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the movie, so he went and made it into a series. I guess he did the same thing with this movie because it's basically proto-Firefly. There's a rag-tag team of space pirates who do morally questionable things but look out for each other like family. Ron Perlman's character is basically Jayne. Ripley is basically River – she's got brain damage at first, she has superpowers, and she cocks her head animalistically (Sigorney Weaver plays the part beautifully). And Ripley starts out as a naked girl in a glowing box. (And when we first see her she's not an adult. How much do you want to bet that Whedon was like “hey what if we made cloned-Ripley a teenager?” and the studio bosses were like “uh we're cloning Ripley because we want Sigorney Weaver to be in the movie, remember?” and Joss Whedon was like “oh, right.”)
Anyway I hope the two Jeunet movies I loved in middle school (Amélie, Delicatessen) hold up better.
And Whedon will continue to keep denying that it was ever his fault thanks to his legion of fan trolls who are never two steps away from giving him free blowjobs.
YEah, cause it's not like we have easily verifiable evidence that Whedon can write great scripts and that those scripts can be turned into shit movies. No sir, certainly not. No, stop trying to say Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The thing is though, there's nothing wrong with 24fps. There's no reason to go for a higher framerate. Higher frame rates are nothing new; they've been around basically since the dawn of film. Over the past century, with plenty of options in both directions, people have mostly decided that 24 looks the best. Yes, if a film is good enough, people could probably 'get past' it looking weird, but there's no reason they should have to.
The higher frame rate is the main reason why I haven't switched to Blu-Ray yet:
Currently at least, it typically has more to do with settings on the TV. I watch films on BluRay all the time, and they're always the correct frame rate.
Motion Interpolation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation
Short Version, the TV drops some maths and tries to create new frames to smooth the gaps between the real frames; the animation students out there know this as the basic idea behind "tweening". Problem is, it's just a processor guessing at what should be displayed between the source frames, so depending on the brand, the algorithm, and the source, it can either look good, or like shit. Can be turned off on every TV I've checked.
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
The thing is though, there's nothing wrong with 24fps. There's no reason to go for a higher framerate. Higher frame rates are nothing new; they've been around basically since the dawn of film. Over the past century, with plenty of options in both directions, people have mostly decided that 24 looks the best. Yes, if a film is good enough, people could probably 'get past' it looking weird, but there's no reason they should have to.
The higher frame rate is the main reason why I haven't switched to Blu-Ray yet:
Currently at least, it typically has more to do with settings on the TV. I watch films on BluRay all the time, and they're always the correct frame rate.
24 fps was chosen because it's easy to divide into parts of seconds and it was the lowest acceptable framerate which cut film costs. It wasn't chosen because it looks best.
Joss Whedon isn't the guy to write an Alien movie because Alien movies aren't supposed to be funny and he is incapable of doing that. Breezy action-adventure with thematic and character depth? Whedon's your man. Dead serious sci-fi/horror? He's done a scene here or there, but he can't (or isn't interested in) sustaining it.
I think series are allowed to shift in tone, though. Aliens is lighter and more actiony than Alien. Star Trek II is pulpy, IV is a silly comedy, VI is weighty and intense.
I think I could probably get over the "high FPS looks fake as hell" barrier, but it would take a while and it might be a painful process. There just doesn't seem to be any reason to move on, though. I mean, best case scenario, movies have more frames, which means... not much. Worst case scenario, everything looks like a soap opera. So why bother?
Alien Ressurection is frustrating. I want to love it, because:
1) It's written by Joss Whedon and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, holy crap. 2) I really liked it when I saw it in the theater, a week after my tenth birthday. 3) There's a lot that's good about it!
But it doesn't quite work. Joss Whedon claims that they ruined his script – not by changing it but by executing it badly. Which is a plausible because while the movie is gorgeous (as you'd expect from Jeunet), the performances are painfully over the top.
I mean imagine if the over-the-top Schumachery nervous guy was played instead by Alan Tudyk and he gave an actual performance. Imagine if the Ron Perlman character was played by Adam Baldwin (or else they asked Perlman to tone it way the hell down) - that character might have gone from “shouty guy whom I want to die horribly” to “loveable rogue”.
And comedy is all about timing so hey maybe if someone else was directing, the zingers would actually be funny.
So the movie probably could've been better with someone else at the helm, but I don't know how much better. The premise is kind of unambitious, after all: “aliens get loose on a spaceship”. And just so things seemed extra-rehashy they brought back Ripley. Also this movie was written by an inexperienced Whedon – this was before Buffy, and let's remember that the first season of Buffy kind of sucked.
What Whedon's good at is making stories with charming surrogate families filled with loveable people who love each other. This one doesn't give you a warm-and-fuzzy community (maybe it would if the acting was better) – but it does give you, at least, a nice one-on-one friendship. Sigorney Weaver plays an alien-human hybrid, and Winona Ryder plays a self-hating robot who wishes she was human. Both actors give good, restrained performances (unlike most of the cast). And the two characters are both outsiders who from this kind-of heartwarming mother-daughter bond. (Or maybe it's a homoerotic bond, whichever.)
(It's been awhile since I watched Aliens 1-3, but Ripley's sexuality is never really addressed is it? It'd be neat if for this one they were bold enough to be like “oh, by the way, Ripley's a lesbian.”)
One other person gives a really good performance and that's Brad Dourif. One scene that's great is when Dourif and two other bad guys look on as three humans become infected with the alien parasites behind glass. The scene is just so creepy, and visually it's beautiful, and Dourif's awed expression is perfect.
Well, at least, it's a great scene until one of the guinea pigs opens his eyes and starts screaming in a cartoony Malcolm in the Middle kind of way.
Whedon said he didn't like how they handled Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the movie, so he went and made it into a series. I guess he did the same thing with this movie because it's basically proto-Firefly. There's a rag-tag team of space pirates who do morally questionable things but look out for each other like family. Ron Perlman's character is basically Jayne. Ripley is basically River – she's got brain damage at first, she has superpowers, and she cocks her head animalistically (Sigorney Weaver plays the part beautifully). And Ripley starts out as a naked girl in a glowing box. (And when we first see her she's not an adult. How much do you want to bet that Whedon was like “hey what if we made cloned-Ripley a teenager?” and the studio bosses were like “uh we're cloning Ripley because we want Sigorney Weaver to be in the movie, remember?” and Joss Whedon was like “oh, right.”)
Anyway I hope the two Jeunet movies I loved in middle school (Amélie, Delicatessen) hold up better.
And Whedon will continue to keep denying that it was ever his fault thanks to his legion of fan trolls who are never two steps away from giving him free blowjobs.
YEah, cause it's not like we have easily verifiable evidence that Whedon can write great scripts and that those scripts can be turned into shit movies. No sir, certainly not. No, stop trying to say Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
While you're hear do you want to recommend Firefly for the 900th time?
I'm sure that'll definitely bring it back!
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
I think I could probably get over the "high FPS looks fake as hell" barrier, but it would take a while and it might be a painful process. There just doesn't seem to be any reason to move on, though. I mean, best case scenario, movies have more frames, which means... not much. Worst case scenario, everything looks like a soap opera. So why bother?
There is an advantage in terms of detail that higher framerates offer. You get less bluring which removes some of the cinematic effect but makes it easier to spot details. And the cinematic effect is just a matter of cultural training. If I did TV shows in 24 fps and movies at 30 fps for a couple of generations people would have the opposite discussion, about how 30 fps was more cinematic.
Alien Ressurection is frustrating. I want to love it, because:
1) It's written by Joss Whedon and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, holy crap. 2) I really liked it when I saw it in the theater, a week after my tenth birthday. 3) There's a lot that's good about it!
But it doesn't quite work. Joss Whedon claims that they ruined his script – not by changing it but by executing it badly. Which is a plausible because while the movie is gorgeous (as you'd expect from Jeunet), the performances are painfully over the top.
I mean imagine if the over-the-top Schumachery nervous guy was played instead by Alan Tudyk and he gave an actual performance. Imagine if the Ron Perlman character was played by Adam Baldwin (or else they asked Perlman to tone it way the hell down) - that character might have gone from “shouty guy whom I want to die horribly” to “loveable rogue”.
And comedy is all about timing so hey maybe if someone else was directing, the zingers would actually be funny.
So the movie probably could've been better with someone else at the helm, but I don't know how much better. The premise is kind of unambitious, after all: “aliens get loose on a spaceship”. And just so things seemed extra-rehashy they brought back Ripley. Also this movie was written by an inexperienced Whedon – this was before Buffy, and let's remember that the first season of Buffy kind of sucked.
What Whedon's good at is making stories with charming surrogate families filled with loveable people who love each other. This one doesn't give you a warm-and-fuzzy community (maybe it would if the acting was better) – but it does give you, at least, a nice one-on-one friendship. Sigorney Weaver plays an alien-human hybrid, and Winona Ryder plays a self-hating robot who wishes she was human. Both actors give good, restrained performances (unlike most of the cast). And the two characters are both outsiders who from this kind-of heartwarming mother-daughter bond. (Or maybe it's a homoerotic bond, whichever.)
(It's been awhile since I watched Aliens 1-3, but Ripley's sexuality is never really addressed is it? It'd be neat if for this one they were bold enough to be like “oh, by the way, Ripley's a lesbian.”)
One other person gives a really good performance and that's Brad Dourif. One scene that's great is when Dourif and two other bad guys look on as three humans become infected with the alien parasites behind glass. The scene is just so creepy, and visually it's beautiful, and Dourif's awed expression is perfect.
Well, at least, it's a great scene until one of the guinea pigs opens his eyes and starts screaming in a cartoony Malcolm in the Middle kind of way.
Whedon said he didn't like how they handled Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the movie, so he went and made it into a series. I guess he did the same thing with this movie because it's basically proto-Firefly. There's a rag-tag team of space pirates who do morally questionable things but look out for each other like family. Ron Perlman's character is basically Jayne. Ripley is basically River – she's got brain damage at first, she has superpowers, and she cocks her head animalistically (Sigorney Weaver plays the part beautifully). And Ripley starts out as a naked girl in a glowing box. (And when we first see her she's not an adult. How much do you want to bet that Whedon was like “hey what if we made cloned-Ripley a teenager?” and the studio bosses were like “uh we're cloning Ripley because we want Sigorney Weaver to be in the movie, remember?” and Joss Whedon was like “oh, right.”)
Anyway I hope the two Jeunet movies I loved in middle school (Amélie, Delicatessen) hold up better.
And Whedon will continue to keep denying that it was ever his fault thanks to his legion of fan trolls who are never two steps away from giving him free blowjobs.
YEah, cause it's not like we have easily verifiable evidence that Whedon can write great scripts and that those scripts can be turned into shit movies. No sir, certainly not. No, stop trying to say Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
While you're hear do you want to recommend Firefly for the 900th time?
I'm sure that'll definitely bring it back!
While your hear, could you perhaps advance a decent argument rather then ridiculous strawmen? That might help you worthless goose.
I think I could probably get over the "high FPS looks fake as hell" barrier, but it would take a while and it might be a painful process. There just doesn't seem to be any reason to move on, though. I mean, best case scenario, movies have more frames, which means... not much. Worst case scenario, everything looks like a soap opera. So why bother?
There is an advantage in terms of detail that higher framerates offer. You get less bluring which removes some of the cinematic effect but makes it easier to spot details. And the cinematic effect is just a matter of cultural training. If I did TV shows in 24 fps and movies at 30 fps for a couple of generations people would have the opposite discussion, about how 30 fps was more cinematic.
Yeah, I'm not sure whether less blurring or more blurring is better or worse. It's probably something that ideally would be decided movie by movie, but to the extent that a common format is going to train us to see one frame rate as movie-like and faster frame rates as not movie-like, we've got to pick something, and 24 has the virtue of being something that looks movie-like to everyone.
I suppose the best thing to do would be to inch it up a frame per second every year or so, so that we all gradually get accustomed to higher frame rates :P Heck, TV could simultaneously throttle things down. Here's a fun thing to think about: is it good to have a division? Is it good that you can look at a moving picture and immediately tell whether it "feels like" TV or film? Regardless of who has what frame rate and whatever, is it good to have different rates?
Edit: If Whedon's script hadn't been fucked, we'd be arguing over whether a funny, oddball sci-fi movie really fit in the series or not. But we wouldn't have to look past some truly awful execution in order to do so. Whedon's intentions wouldn't have meshed, but if they had led to a good movie I don't think anybody would care as much.
Regardless of whether Whedon's script would've worked or not (I tend to agree with Astaereth - I don't see Whedon's irony working with the alien, at least not without changing it into something completely different), Jeunet is a bad, bad fit for his writing. Whedon is 99% about the words, but Jeunet doesn't do verbal humour, he doesn't seem to care about it, and English clearly isn't his language. Getting a director who *complements* Whedon's strength would've been one thing, but this is a director who was likely to downplay those strengths to the point of ignoring them. It'd be like having Terrence Malick directing a Billy Wilder script.
Imagine if Alien: Resurrection had been written and directed by James Cameron.
One of the things I appreciate about the Alien films is that they all offer a different take on the universe. Doesn't always work (I love Alien 3 but care little about Alien 4) - but I don't see Cameron doing anything else than his usual bombast if he were to revisit the IP. I liked Aliens well enough, but I don't Cameron doing anything interesting, or anything other than "bigger, louder, and now in 3D!" with an Alien script. (If any director gets to revisit the fictional universe, I'm glad it's Ridley Scott. He's hit-and-miss for me, but he has much more of a range than Cameron.)
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Joss Whedon isn't the guy to write an Alien movie because Alien movies aren't supposed to be funny and he is incapable of doing that. Breezy action-adventure with thematic and character depth? Whedon's your man. Dead serious sci-fi/horror? He's done a scene here or there, but he can't (or isn't interested in) sustaining it.
I think series are allowed to shift in tone, though. Aliens is lighter and more actiony than Alien. Star Trek II is pulpy, IV is a silly comedy, VI is weighty and intense.
Sort-of? I think it depends on the series, really. I would say the Alien series is rather unique in that its conventions and characters, while often carried over from one entry to the next, are kind of superfluous. The James Bond series varies a fair amount in tone, but the essential elements are numerous--the absurd spy plot, the colorful villain, the "Bond girl", the martini, the tricked-out auto, the gadgets, the Q scene, the unconnected cold open, the animated title sequence and theme song--and if you remove them you no longer really have a Bond movie, even if you make a spy film starring a character named Bond. (Even Casino Royale, one of the least Bond-like movies, made sure to include most of those elements.)
The Alien series, on the other hand, is really not defined by most of the shared elements. The only things you really need for an Alien movie are the xenomorphs, Weyland-Yutani (or in general the notion of corporate villainy), and the tone*. Ripley, the milk-bots, the spaceships, the ensembles, the HR Giger production design... that's all more tradition than anything else. But remove the xenomorphs and it's not an Alien movie; remove the anti-corporatism and it's just a monster movie; remove the tone and I'd say it's not an Alien movie either.
I'm trying to think of another series that's like that.... John Carpenter tried to do it with the Halloween movies, but they became about Michael Myers instead. The closest analogue might be Leone's spaghetti Western trilogy, and even they share the "Man With No Name" (which is why they're not grouped with Leone's other two Westerns).
*To this list I would add, if you want a really good Alien movie, you want to include the classic title font, as well as the "one hour set-up, one hour pay-off" structure that the first two films share.
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
I think I could probably get over the "high FPS looks fake as hell" barrier, but it would take a while and it might be a painful process. There just doesn't seem to be any reason to move on, though. I mean, best case scenario, movies have more frames, which means... not much. Worst case scenario, everything looks like a soap opera. So why bother?
There is an advantage in terms of detail that higher framerates offer. You get less bluring which removes some of the cinematic effect but makes it easier to spot details. And the cinematic effect is just a matter of cultural training. If I did TV shows in 24 fps and movies at 30 fps for a couple of generations people would have the opposite discussion, about how 30 fps was more cinematic.
Yeah, I'm not sure whether less blurring or more blurring is better or worse. It's probably something that ideally would be decided movie by movie, but to the extent that a common format is going to train us to see one frame rate as movie-like and faster frame rates as not movie-like, we've got to pick something, and 24 has the virtue of being something that looks movie-like to everyone.
I suppose the best thing to do would be to inch it up a frame per second every year or so, so that we all gradually get accustomed to higher frame rates :P Heck, TV could simultaneously throttle things down. Here's a fun thing to think about: is it good to have a division? Is it good that you can look at a moving picture and immediately tell whether it "feels like" TV or film? Regardless of who has what frame rate and whatever, is it good to have different rates?
I can't think of any reason for a division, and it would make everyone's life easier if we had one standard across the board for TV and Movies. Particularly in the digital age. The only reason we ended up with one is because syncing framerates to power frequency made life easy for television engineers.
Alien Ressurection is frustrating. I want to love it, because:
1) It's written by Joss Whedon and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, holy crap. 2) I really liked it when I saw it in the theater, a week after my tenth birthday. 3) There's a lot that's good about it!
But it doesn't quite work. Joss Whedon claims that they ruined his script – not by changing it but by executing it badly. Which is a plausible because while the movie is gorgeous (as you'd expect from Jeunet), the performances are painfully over the top.
I mean imagine if the over-the-top Schumachery nervous guy was played instead by Alan Tudyk and he gave an actual performance. Imagine if the Ron Perlman character was played by Adam Baldwin (or else they asked Perlman to tone it way the hell down) - that character might have gone from “shouty guy whom I want to die horribly” to “loveable rogue”.
And comedy is all about timing so hey maybe if someone else was directing, the zingers would actually be funny.
So the movie probably could've been better with someone else at the helm, but I don't know how much better. The premise is kind of unambitious, after all: “aliens get loose on a spaceship”. And just so things seemed extra-rehashy they brought back Ripley. Also this movie was written by an inexperienced Whedon – this was before Buffy, and let's remember that the first season of Buffy kind of sucked.
What Whedon's good at is making stories with charming surrogate families filled with loveable people who love each other. This one doesn't give you a warm-and-fuzzy community (maybe it would if the acting was better) – but it does give you, at least, a nice one-on-one friendship. Sigorney Weaver plays an alien-human hybrid, and Winona Ryder plays a self-hating robot who wishes she was human. Both actors give good, restrained performances (unlike most of the cast). And the two characters are both outsiders who from this kind-of heartwarming mother-daughter bond. (Or maybe it's a homoerotic bond, whichever.)
(It's been awhile since I watched Aliens 1-3, but Ripley's sexuality is never really addressed is it? It'd be neat if for this one they were bold enough to be like “oh, by the way, Ripley's a lesbian.”)
One other person gives a really good performance and that's Brad Dourif. One scene that's great is when Dourif and two other bad guys look on as three humans become infected with the alien parasites behind glass. The scene is just so creepy, and visually it's beautiful, and Dourif's awed expression is perfect.
Well, at least, it's a great scene until one of the guinea pigs opens his eyes and starts screaming in a cartoony Malcolm in the Middle kind of way.
Whedon said he didn't like how they handled Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the movie, so he went and made it into a series. I guess he did the same thing with this movie because it's basically proto-Firefly. There's a rag-tag team of space pirates who do morally questionable things but look out for each other like family. Ron Perlman's character is basically Jayne. Ripley is basically River – she's got brain damage at first, she has superpowers, and she cocks her head animalistically (Sigorney Weaver plays the part beautifully). And Ripley starts out as a naked girl in a glowing box. (And when we first see her she's not an adult. How much do you want to bet that Whedon was like “hey what if we made cloned-Ripley a teenager?” and the studio bosses were like “uh we're cloning Ripley because we want Sigorney Weaver to be in the movie, remember?” and Joss Whedon was like “oh, right.”)
Anyway I hope the two Jeunet movies I loved in middle school (Amélie, Delicatessen) hold up better.
And Whedon will continue to keep denying that it was ever his fault thanks to his legion of fan trolls who are never two steps away from giving him free blowjobs.
YEah, cause it's not like we have easily verifiable evidence that Whedon can write great scripts and that those scripts can be turned into shit movies. No sir, certainly not. No, stop trying to say Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
While you're hear do you want to recommend Firefly for the 900th time?
I'm sure that'll definitely bring it back!
While your hear, could you perhaps advance a decent argument rather then ridiculous strawmen? That might help you worthless goose.
Seriously.
I haven't seen anyone desperate to defend Whendon's failed projects but I've seen an awful lot of people will to treat anyone who defends anything Whendon does as zealots with no reason.
So Godfather maybe you should stop talking about the things that some anonymous person that isn't here says and address what people actually, y'know, say.
As for my feelings on Whendon I've seen no evidence that he always claims it was someones else's responsibility when something fails.
What I have seen is the annotation to the last paperback of Buffy season 8 where he admits using the him inclusive "we" that mistakes were made and they lost track of what the series should be. I've seen him admit failure. Whendon seems to think he could have directed a good alien movie. Maybe he is wrong. That doesn't make him not capable of admitting fault.
Blu-Ray has nothing to do with framerate, it's all on the TV or how the movie itself was filmed.
I'm firmly in the camp that no proper film should ever be higher than 24 frames per second. It just destroys immersion once you go higher, and there's no point. There's a reason why it's worked for a century. Doesn't surprise me that The Hobbit's 48 fps was panned. I don't know why the idea of increasing it was ever presented in the first place. It's like filmmakers got bored and decided to try to fix what isn't broken.
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Firefly, Serenity and Angel. Avengers is meant to be incredible, as well. His movie might be slightly less bleak than a typical Alien film but he can do very serious drama and science fiction brilliantly when he needs to.
All of those can be bleak, but they are also Whedonesque even while doing so.
It's not a style that meshes with the Alien franchise.
EDIT: Then again, I might have said the same thing about Cameron if Aliens didn't exist. It's possible Whedon could have penned a good sequel, but at the end of the day, he just didn't. He says the execution was wrong, but so much of just the basic story of that movie rubbed me the wrong way that I'm not sure I can believe him.
I'd recommend it, but only to people I know the tastes of in advance. Not my mother, for instance.
After watching Cabin in the Woods my feelings may have changed on this. Granted, that wasn't Whedon alone, and even when things went to shit in the movie they were still more comical than bleak.
And Whedon will continue to keep denying that it was ever his fault thanks to his legion of fan trolls who are never two steps away from giving him free blowjobs.
Edit: If Whedon's script hadn't been fucked, we'd be arguing over whether a funny, oddball sci-fi movie really fit in the series or not. But we wouldn't have to look past some truly awful execution in order to do so. Whedon's intentions wouldn't have meshed, but if they had led to a good movie I don't think anybody would care as much.
Warners had a panel for distributors and theater owners at CinemaCon in Las Vegas today, with tons of new footage from TDKR, The Hobbit, and Dark Shadows.
All three got a strong reception, but the new 4K 48fps projection of The Hobbit was surprisingly and roundly panned by almost all in attendance.
Deets in the Hobbit thread.
Holy crap.
That is a surprise.
I've got a strong feeling the panel audience is on the wrong side of history. I've read the complaints, and the fact is, they're not citing anything that's essentially wrong with a difference in frame rate and resolution. It really does seem like they're incapable of dividing the notion of smoothness from cheap, anti-cinematic production values.
God knows I haven't seen it, so maybe I'll feel different, but all I know is...I really like live theater a whole lot, which is presented at a considerably higher frame rate and resolution. In good theater, you quickly forget your awareness of its theatricality. Sets stop becoming sets. What's more, there's a really profound intimacy about finding yourself somehow sharing that space with the performers. To me, this sounds like using emerging technology to create an experience more along those lines.
I'm excited to find out.
True, but I have to believe there's a level of conditioning here that can be largely replaced by a more inclusive idea of what "real" can mean.
Yes. It annihilates our room to mentally fill in the gaps.
Except in live theater, you get that sort of experience because, you know, it's live and you're there.
It would be like expecting a concert DVD to perfectly re-create the experience of going to a concert. You can definitely enjoy it, but it will never be the same thing.
Live theater and film are so drastically different that a comparison doesn't really work.
I saw part of POTC: Dead Man's Chest on the display TV at Best Buy a while ago, and was completely heartbroken at how cheesy and "fake" everything looked. The extra smoothing really took me out of the experience, and sort of 'destroyed' my suspension of disbelief, not to mention how horribly out of place Davy Jones seemed in comparison to damn near everything else.
It's not a great comparison. My point is, in basically every form of visual storytelling, we're presented with some kind of artifice and told to deal with it. There's this looming problem of the uncanny valley, but I have a hard time believing that it's any more a boundary to our ability to appreciate the experience of film than almost any other technical boundary. I certainly don't love 3d, but I do know that I dealt with it quickly and found myself invested in whatever film shortly thereafter. I'm excited by the possibility that there's still a way to augment film that I actually just might like.
I've got a cautious optimism.
Because there's nothing technically wrong with the idea, but the reality of it, on the screen is jarring. Whatever the audience is capable of as soon as you have to start thinking about why what you're looking at is actually great and not horribly distracting you're in trouble.
Currently at least, it typically has more to do with settings on the TV. I watch films on BluRay all the time, and they're always the correct frame rate.
UNDERCOVER BROTHER Director Malcolm Lee to Helm SCARY MOVIE 5; Production Begins This Summer
Edit: Also, apparently Gina Carano has succeeded where Sasha Grey has failed. She is in talks to join the cast of Fast Six. Good for her.
I think so, yeah. High-FPS video is inextricably linked with soap operas and generally cheap TV stuff, because back in the day it was super cheap to film on video tape instead of film and that had a higher FPS.
YEah, cause it's not like we have easily verifiable evidence that Whedon can write great scripts and that those scripts can be turned into shit movies. No sir, certainly not. No, stop trying to say Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Motion Interpolation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation
Short Version, the TV drops some maths and tries to create new frames to smooth the gaps between the real frames; the animation students out there know this as the basic idea behind "tweening". Problem is, it's just a processor guessing at what should be displayed between the source frames, so depending on the brand, the algorithm, and the source, it can either look good, or like shit. Can be turned off on every TV I've checked.
24 fps was chosen because it's easy to divide into parts of seconds and it was the lowest acceptable framerate which cut film costs. It wasn't chosen because it looks best.
edit: and you should all come join us in the Instant Watch Film Society. There's a new movie to watch.
While you're hear do you want to recommend Firefly for the 900th time?
I'm sure that'll definitely bring it back!
There is an advantage in terms of detail that higher framerates offer. You get less bluring which removes some of the cinematic effect but makes it easier to spot details. And the cinematic effect is just a matter of cultural training. If I did TV shows in 24 fps and movies at 30 fps for a couple of generations people would have the opposite discussion, about how 30 fps was more cinematic.
While your hear, could you perhaps advance a decent argument rather then ridiculous strawmen? That might help you worthless goose.
I suppose the best thing to do would be to inch it up a frame per second every year or so, so that we all gradually get accustomed to higher frame rates :P Heck, TV could simultaneously throttle things down. Here's a fun thing to think about: is it good to have a division? Is it good that you can look at a moving picture and immediately tell whether it "feels like" TV or film? Regardless of who has what frame rate and whatever, is it good to have different rates?
One of the things I appreciate about the Alien films is that they all offer a different take on the universe. Doesn't always work (I love Alien 3 but care little about Alien 4) - but I don't see Cameron doing anything else than his usual bombast if he were to revisit the IP. I liked Aliens well enough, but I don't Cameron doing anything interesting, or anything other than "bigger, louder, and now in 3D!" with an Alien script. (If any director gets to revisit the fictional universe, I'm glad it's Ridley Scott. He's hit-and-miss for me, but he has much more of a range than Cameron.)
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Sort-of? I think it depends on the series, really. I would say the Alien series is rather unique in that its conventions and characters, while often carried over from one entry to the next, are kind of superfluous. The James Bond series varies a fair amount in tone, but the essential elements are numerous--the absurd spy plot, the colorful villain, the "Bond girl", the martini, the tricked-out auto, the gadgets, the Q scene, the unconnected cold open, the animated title sequence and theme song--and if you remove them you no longer really have a Bond movie, even if you make a spy film starring a character named Bond. (Even Casino Royale, one of the least Bond-like movies, made sure to include most of those elements.)
The Alien series, on the other hand, is really not defined by most of the shared elements. The only things you really need for an Alien movie are the xenomorphs, Weyland-Yutani (or in general the notion of corporate villainy), and the tone*. Ripley, the milk-bots, the spaceships, the ensembles, the HR Giger production design... that's all more tradition than anything else. But remove the xenomorphs and it's not an Alien movie; remove the anti-corporatism and it's just a monster movie; remove the tone and I'd say it's not an Alien movie either.
I'm trying to think of another series that's like that.... John Carpenter tried to do it with the Halloween movies, but they became about Michael Myers instead. The closest analogue might be Leone's spaghetti Western trilogy, and even they share the "Man With No Name" (which is why they're not grouped with Leone's other two Westerns).
*To this list I would add, if you want a really good Alien movie, you want to include the classic title font, as well as the "one hour set-up, one hour pay-off" structure that the first two films share.
I can't think of any reason for a division, and it would make everyone's life easier if we had one standard across the board for TV and Movies. Particularly in the digital age. The only reason we ended up with one is because syncing framerates to power frequency made life easy for television engineers.
I would have loved to see that movie.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
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Seriously.
I haven't seen anyone desperate to defend Whendon's failed projects but I've seen an awful lot of people will to treat anyone who defends anything Whendon does as zealots with no reason.
So Godfather maybe you should stop talking about the things that some anonymous person that isn't here says and address what people actually, y'know, say.
As for my feelings on Whendon I've seen no evidence that he always claims it was someones else's responsibility when something fails.
What I have seen is the annotation to the last paperback of Buffy season 8 where he admits using the him inclusive "we" that mistakes were made and they lost track of what the series should be. I've seen him admit failure. Whendon seems to think he could have directed a good alien movie. Maybe he is wrong. That doesn't make him not capable of admitting fault.
I'm firmly in the camp that no proper film should ever be higher than 24 frames per second. It just destroys immersion once you go higher, and there's no point. There's a reason why it's worked for a century. Doesn't surprise me that The Hobbit's 48 fps was panned. I don't know why the idea of increasing it was ever presented in the first place. It's like filmmakers got bored and decided to try to fix what isn't broken.