One of my favorite scenes in that movie is, and it's been too long so I can't remember it perfectly, is when he's angry at his former lover about abandoning him and she takes off the ring to reveal that she's still wearing the twine ring he made for her, and he's begging her not to take his hatred away from him because it's all that's kept him going for so long.
knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
Finally got to watch John Carpenter’s The Thing.
I’d gathered some idea of the plot through cultural osmosis but I overestimated exactly how much sitting around in rooms being suspicious of each other there would be, and underestimated how much runtime would be taken up by people yelling and shooting flamethrowers at some pretty gross (and nowadays pretty cheesy) practical effects and props.
Also the score is fine but the one that was discarded for this film and ended up in Hateful 8 was much better.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited January 2021
Fun fact: The Thing is actually a dramatized documentary about what happens on an acid trip after you've spent six months at an Antarctic research station. The only effective difference is that the research stations have super soakers filled with fruit punch instead of flamethrowers, and the dynamite is all sausage with little fuses in them.
I actually think the majority of the special effects in The Thing hold up.
The practical effects in said film look better than a large majority of CG in stuff today.
They look better than some of the obvious creature effect CG in stuff today.
The vast bulk of CG in stuff today is set dressing and backgrounds that you never notice because it all looks absolutely real.
As for practical effects vs. CG: I have a suspicion that a large part of why people think that objectively cheesy practical effects look better than objectively cheesy CG is what you were exposed to as a child. I grew up with rubber suits, puppets, and shitty animatronics so the "obviously a rubber model someone is waggling from off-camera" effects look fine to me. Some part of my brain is aware that it doesn't look at all real but another part is saying, "Yup, that's a movie, that's what movies look like". I suspect kids raised on low-quality CG cartoons and family-friendly movies with shitty CG effects will, twenty years from now, look back on movies with crappy digital effects with the same cognitive dissonance of knowing that, objectively, that's obviously a low-poly model with shitty lighting effects but also knowing that's just what movies look like.
Which isn't to denigrate practical effects. The stuff in The Thing doesn't look especially real but it's plenty impressive purely on technical merits.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
edited January 2021
Practical effects generally don't have to worry about lighting, sightlines, or actors interacting with the object.
Fencingsax on
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
With older practical effects, the biggest dead giveaway visually is clunky, stuff, robotic movements and things looking "dead". Case in point, basically any time practical effects from before, say, 2010 do something with a face; the face always look unreal because even if the lighting is now realistic, the prop just doesn't look like a face.
In the case of The Thing, it's still a very well-written and well-acted movie and almost all the practical effects are only used in the one place where the shortcomings can easily be "overlooked" by the brain: on hideous alien monsters. In this particular case, I really feel like they not only did great practical effects for the time, they intentionally leveraged the "inhuman" angle of their movement to enhance the film. The film will always "feel" real to me in a way that far more modern CG-heavy films (that look much crappier) do not.
Beyond that, I still say practical effects combined with CG make for the best effects and that pure CG only rarely is truly unnoticeable, at least when people are in a shot. And to make really really good effects that completely fool the senses, you need a core of practical effects with, potentially, CG enhancements. Otherwise, there's virtually always something about the shot that just doesn't feel right, from incorrect lighting to goofy physics to actors looking in the wrong spots.
I actually think the majority of the special effects in The Thing hold up.
The practical effects in said film look better than a large majority of CG in stuff today.
They look better than some of the obvious creature effect CG in stuff today.
The vast bulk of CG in stuff today is set dressing and backgrounds that you never notice because it all looks absolutely real.
As for practical effects vs. CG: I have a suspicion that a large part of why people think that objectively cheesy practical effects look better than objectively cheesy CG is what you were exposed to as a child. I grew up with rubber suits, puppets, and shitty animatronics so the "obviously a rubber model someone is waggling from off-camera" effects look fine to me. Some part of my brain is aware that it doesn't look at all real but another part is saying, "Yup, that's a movie, that's what movies look like". I suspect kids raised on low-quality CG cartoons and family-friendly movies with shitty CG effects will, twenty years from now, look back on movies with crappy digital effects with the same cognitive dissonance of knowing that, objectively, that's obviously a low-poly model with shitty lighting effects but also knowing that's just what movies look like.
Which isn't to denigrate practical effects. The stuff in The Thing doesn't look especially real but it's plenty impressive purely on technical merits.
Nah. People will still notice bad CGI. Because bad CGI tends to be related more to lighting, sight lines, and other things than it does raw visual fidelity. It’s the same reason bad practical effects look bad. They weren’t filmed in the same room as the actors and so lighting is off. The stop motion wasn’t filmed at a higher frame rate and then re-blended and therefore lacks the motion blur that every other frame of the movie has. The shot frames in so that you can tell it’s a separate space...
The stuff no one notices looks good because it’s a static model on static lighting or goes by so fast your brain is processing it as a stretch frame or blur.
Back to Master and Commander, that movie will have one thing that I will always treasure: people laughing a jokes.
In the dinner scene Crowe's character makes two jokes, one about sitting next to Nelson at a banquet and one about two vewils. I won't retell them, watch the movie. What gets me was that they where obvious jokes, intended to get the dinner guests to laugh and he succeeds! I have grown up in the 80s and 90s with action heroes and the like cracking one-liners every 20 seconds, but I have never really seen anyone laugh at the jokes. The Audience in the Cinema, yes, but people in the movies themselves? nope, stonefaced.
Like its actually weird that people in movies never try to make each other laugh.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
Back to Master and Commander, that movie will have one thing that I will always treasure: people laughing a jokes.
In the dinner scene Crowe's character makes two jokes, one about sitting next to Nelson at a banquet and one about two vewils. I won't retell them, watch the movie. What gets me was that they where obvious jokes, intended to get the dinner guests to laugh and he succeeds! I have grown up in the 80s and 90s with action heroes and the like cracking one-liners every 20 seconds, but I have never really seen anyone laugh at the jokes. The Audience in the Cinema, yes, but people in the movies themselves? nope, stonefaced.
Like its actually weird that people in movies never try to make each other laugh.
Spoken like someone who has never seen the Last Boyscout. I mean there is a literal scene where Bruce Willis gets a guy laughing to the point he can kill him.
And then he does it again later with a puppet. You just need to up your movie acumen!
Preacher on
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Back to Master and Commander, that movie will have one thing that I will always treasure: people laughing a jokes.
In the dinner scene Crowe's character makes two jokes, one about sitting next to Nelson at a banquet and one about two vewils. I won't retell them, watch the movie. What gets me was that they where obvious jokes, intended to get the dinner guests to laugh and he succeeds! I have grown up in the 80s and 90s with action heroes and the like cracking one-liners every 20 seconds, but I have never really seen anyone laugh at the jokes. The Audience in the Cinema, yes, but people in the movies themselves? nope, stonefaced.
Like its actually weird that people in movies never try to make each other laugh.
Spoken like someone who has never seen the Last Boyscout. I mean there is a literal scene where Bruce Willis gets a guy laughing to the point he can kill him.
And then he does it again later with a puppet. You just need to up your movie acumen!
The first one is both really impressive and such a product of the time, considering its "wife" versions of "Yo Momma" jokes.
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
I actually think the majority of the special effects in The Thing hold up.
The practical effects in said film look better than a large majority of CG in stuff today.
They look better than some of the obvious creature effect CG in stuff today.
The vast bulk of CG in stuff today is set dressing and backgrounds that you never notice because it all looks absolutely real.
As for practical effects vs. CG: I have a suspicion that a large part of why people think that objectively cheesy practical effects look better than objectively cheesy CG is what you were exposed to as a child. I grew up with rubber suits, puppets, and shitty animatronics so the "obviously a rubber model someone is waggling from off-camera" effects look fine to me. Some part of my brain is aware that it doesn't look at all real but another part is saying, "Yup, that's a movie, that's what movies look like". I suspect kids raised on low-quality CG cartoons and family-friendly movies with shitty CG effects will, twenty years from now, look back on movies with crappy digital effects with the same cognitive dissonance of knowing that, objectively, that's obviously a low-poly model with shitty lighting effects but also knowing that's just what movies look like.
Which isn't to denigrate practical effects. The stuff in The Thing doesn't look especially real but it's plenty impressive purely on technical merits.
Nah. People will still notice bad CGI. Because bad CGI tends to be related more to lighting, sight lines, and other things than it does raw visual fidelity. It’s the same reason bad practical effects look bad. They weren’t filmed in the same room as the actors and so lighting is off. The stop motion wasn’t filmed at a higher frame rate and then re-blended and therefore lacks the motion blur that every other frame of the movie has. The shot frames in so that you can tell it’s a separate space...
The stuff no one notices looks good because it’s a static model on static lighting or goes by so fast your brain is processing it as a stretch frame or blur.
I'm not saying they won't notice the bad CG. I'm saying they won't care that the CG is bad.
I grew up with primarily practical effects in movies and TV. I learned to just accept that Ninja Turtles were obviously dudes in rubber suits, Falcor was obviously a giant puppet with someone yanking a "mouth open/close" lever, etc. None of those facts are any less obvious to me for having gotten used to them, I just accept that's what movie special effects looked like and ignore it.
My contention is that kids raised on TV and movies with low-quality CG work will just be used to the fact that obviously-CG characters are lit wrong or that actors don't always look quite at the right point in space. They'll still notice it but they won't care because that's just how things were.
As a person who had already formed a set of expectations and biases about visual media before CG even existed, the set of things my brain is ready and eager to casually overlook is, I suspect, different from someone 20 years younger than I am.
I'm also curious how a person would feel who was born sometime post-2010 who grows up purely on modern film-making where practical effects are fairly rare. If their first interaction with, say, The Thing, or Jurassic Park, or Original Trilogy Puppet Yoda is as a young adult with already-formed biases. Would they be impressed by the practical effects? Or would they think, "That's obviously just a piece of rubber"?
Back to Master and Commander, that movie will have one thing that I will always treasure: people laughing a jokes.
In the dinner scene Crowe's character makes two jokes, one about sitting next to Nelson at a banquet and one about two vewils. I won't retell them, watch the movie. What gets me was that they where obvious jokes, intended to get the dinner guests to laugh and he succeeds! I have grown up in the 80s and 90s with action heroes and the like cracking one-liners every 20 seconds, but I have never really seen anyone laugh at the jokes. The Audience in the Cinema, yes, but people in the movies themselves? nope, stonefaced.
Like its actually weird that people in movies never try to make each other laugh.
Spoken like someone who has never seen the Last Boyscout. I mean there is a literal scene where Bruce Willis gets a guy laughing to the point he can kill him.
And then he does it again later with a puppet. You just need to up your movie acumen!
The first one is both really impressive and such a product of the time, considering its "wife" versions of "Yo Momma" jokes.
I still think roll her in flour and look for the wet spot was invented for that movie.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Back to Master and Commander, that movie will have one thing that I will always treasure: people laughing a jokes.
In the dinner scene Crowe's character makes two jokes, one about sitting next to Nelson at a banquet
As a book reader ...
Spoilers, I guess?
This is one of my favorite parts of the books. It is so transparently Captain Aubrey's Brush With Fame Moment, and he brings up the story all. the. time. Like, you can just feel the "One time I was working at the store, and [Football Player / Musician / Actor / Politician] walked in; Yes, you've told this story before" energy.
I actually think the majority of the special effects in The Thing hold up.
The practical effects in said film look better than a large majority of CG in stuff today.
They look better than some of the obvious creature effect CG in stuff today.
The vast bulk of CG in stuff today is set dressing and backgrounds that you never notice because it all looks absolutely real.
As for practical effects vs. CG: I have a suspicion that a large part of why people think that objectively cheesy practical effects look better than objectively cheesy CG is what you were exposed to as a child. I grew up with rubber suits, puppets, and shitty animatronics so the "obviously a rubber model someone is waggling from off-camera" effects look fine to me. Some part of my brain is aware that it doesn't look at all real but another part is saying, "Yup, that's a movie, that's what movies look like". I suspect kids raised on low-quality CG cartoons and family-friendly movies with shitty CG effects will, twenty years from now, look back on movies with crappy digital effects with the same cognitive dissonance of knowing that, objectively, that's obviously a low-poly model with shitty lighting effects but also knowing that's just what movies look like.
Which isn't to denigrate practical effects. The stuff in The Thing doesn't look especially real but it's plenty impressive purely on technical merits.
Nah. People will still notice bad CGI. Because bad CGI tends to be related more to lighting, sight lines, and other things than it does raw visual fidelity. It’s the same reason bad practical effects look bad. They weren’t filmed in the same room as the actors and so lighting is off. The stop motion wasn’t filmed at a higher frame rate and then re-blended and therefore lacks the motion blur that every other frame of the movie has. The shot frames in so that you can tell it’s a separate space...
The stuff no one notices looks good because it’s a static model on static lighting or goes by so fast your brain is processing it as a stretch frame or blur.
A big thing with this is that these issues aren't new. As you note with stop-motion but also with animation, these have always been the issues with these kind of effects. Someone on the forum (can't remember who or where) posted this video about Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and it goes over all the work they did to make the blend of animation and live-action work as well as it did. And even briefly show some examples of other movies, like Cool World, where it just doesn't work as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWtt3Tmnij4
CGI has made these kind of things easier and cheaper but it doesn't get around the same basic issues there has always been with these kind of effects. Practical effects, blended with cg or not, always have some benefits over that.
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Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
Back to Master and Commander, that movie will have one thing that I will always treasure: people laughing a jokes.
In the dinner scene Crowe's character makes two jokes, one about sitting next to Nelson at a banquet
As a book reader ...
Spoilers, I guess?
This is one of my favorite parts of the books. It is so transparently Captain Aubrey's Brush With Fame Moment, and he brings up the story all. the. time. Like, you can just feel the "One time I was working at the store, and [Football Player / Musician / Actor / Politician] walked in; Yes, you've told this story before" energy.
Meanwhile, Richard Sharpe, a lifelong infantryman, has breakfast with Nelson and a private talk with him. Suck on that naval literature protagonists!
My emotional state has rendered me a broken human. I've been rewatching the MCU in convenient timeline order on Disney+ and am enjoying it more than I ever did the first time through.
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BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
Back to Master and Commander, that movie will have one thing that I will always treasure: people laughing a jokes.
In the dinner scene Crowe's character makes two jokes, one about sitting next to Nelson at a banquet and one about two vewils. I won't retell them, watch the movie. What gets me was that they where obvious jokes, intended to get the dinner guests to laugh and he succeeds! I have grown up in the 80s and 90s with action heroes and the like cracking one-liners every 20 seconds, but I have never really seen anyone laugh at the jokes. The Audience in the Cinema, yes, but people in the movies themselves? nope, stonefaced.
Like its actually weird that people in movies never try to make each other laugh.
Spoken like someone who has never seen the Last Boyscout. I mean there is a literal scene where Bruce Willis gets a guy laughing to the point he can kill him.
And then he does it again later with a puppet. You just need to up your movie acumen!
The first one is both really impressive and such a product of the time, considering its "wife" versions of "Yo Momma" jokes.
I still think roll her in flour and look for the wet spot was invented for that movie.
Wouldn't doubt it, considering it was penned by a guy that made an echoing pussy joke one of the most rembered parts of an action film.
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
Back to Master and Commander, that movie will have one thing that I will always treasure: people laughing a jokes.
In the dinner scene Crowe's character makes two jokes, one about sitting next to Nelson at a banquet and one about two vewils. I won't retell them, watch the movie. What gets me was that they where obvious jokes, intended to get the dinner guests to laugh and he succeeds! I have grown up in the 80s and 90s with action heroes and the like cracking one-liners every 20 seconds, but I have never really seen anyone laugh at the jokes. The Audience in the Cinema, yes, but people in the movies themselves? nope, stonefaced.
Like its actually weird that people in movies never try to make each other laugh.
Spoken like someone who has never seen the Last Boyscout. I mean there is a literal scene where Bruce Willis gets a guy laughing to the point he can kill him.
And then he does it again later with a puppet. You just need to up your movie acumen!
The first one is both really impressive and such a product of the time, considering its "wife" versions of "Yo Momma" jokes.
I still think roll her in flour and look for the wet spot was invented for that movie.
Wouldn't doubt it, considering it was penned by a guy that made an echoing pussy joke one of the most rembered parts of an action film.
In another movie where the slabs of meat crack jokes and talk shit and actually react to one another.
RedTide#1907 on Battle.net
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Posts
"We shall call you Zatara."
"Sounds fearsome!"
"It means 'driftwood'."
~ Buckaroo Banzai
I love that in the end he is but one of a few characters who help Dantes remember his humanity.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I’d gathered some idea of the plot through cultural osmosis but I overestimated exactly how much sitting around in rooms being suspicious of each other there would be, and underestimated how much runtime would be taken up by people yelling and shooting flamethrowers at some pretty gross (and nowadays pretty cheesy) practical effects and props.
Also the score is fine but the one that was discarded for this film and ended up in Hateful 8 was much better.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Lower bodycounts and tastier psychotic breaks.
The practical effects in said film look better than a large majority of CG in stuff today.
Hey, guess what they did for the 2011 prequel!
I think, as is the usual with these kinds of things, producers and moronic test audiences destroyed what the movie could have been.
They look better than some of the obvious creature effect CG in stuff today.
The vast bulk of CG in stuff today is set dressing and backgrounds that you never notice because it all looks absolutely real.
As for practical effects vs. CG: I have a suspicion that a large part of why people think that objectively cheesy practical effects look better than objectively cheesy CG is what you were exposed to as a child. I grew up with rubber suits, puppets, and shitty animatronics so the "obviously a rubber model someone is waggling from off-camera" effects look fine to me. Some part of my brain is aware that it doesn't look at all real but another part is saying, "Yup, that's a movie, that's what movies look like". I suspect kids raised on low-quality CG cartoons and family-friendly movies with shitty CG effects will, twenty years from now, look back on movies with crappy digital effects with the same cognitive dissonance of knowing that, objectively, that's obviously a low-poly model with shitty lighting effects but also knowing that's just what movies look like.
Which isn't to denigrate practical effects. The stuff in The Thing doesn't look especially real but it's plenty impressive purely on technical merits.
In the case of The Thing, it's still a very well-written and well-acted movie and almost all the practical effects are only used in the one place where the shortcomings can easily be "overlooked" by the brain: on hideous alien monsters. In this particular case, I really feel like they not only did great practical effects for the time, they intentionally leveraged the "inhuman" angle of their movement to enhance the film. The film will always "feel" real to me in a way that far more modern CG-heavy films (that look much crappier) do not.
Beyond that, I still say practical effects combined with CG make for the best effects and that pure CG only rarely is truly unnoticeable, at least when people are in a shot. And to make really really good effects that completely fool the senses, you need a core of practical effects with, potentially, CG enhancements. Otherwise, there's virtually always something about the shot that just doesn't feel right, from incorrect lighting to goofy physics to actors looking in the wrong spots.
Nah. People will still notice bad CGI. Because bad CGI tends to be related more to lighting, sight lines, and other things than it does raw visual fidelity. It’s the same reason bad practical effects look bad. They weren’t filmed in the same room as the actors and so lighting is off. The stop motion wasn’t filmed at a higher frame rate and then re-blended and therefore lacks the motion blur that every other frame of the movie has. The shot frames in so that you can tell it’s a separate space...
The stuff no one notices looks good because it’s a static model on static lighting or goes by so fast your brain is processing it as a stretch frame or blur.
In the dinner scene Crowe's character makes two jokes, one about sitting next to Nelson at a banquet and one about two vewils. I won't retell them, watch the movie. What gets me was that they where obvious jokes, intended to get the dinner guests to laugh and he succeeds! I have grown up in the 80s and 90s with action heroes and the like cracking one-liners every 20 seconds, but I have never really seen anyone laugh at the jokes. The Audience in the Cinema, yes, but people in the movies themselves? nope, stonefaced.
Like its actually weird that people in movies never try to make each other laugh.
The weird thing about that TikTok video is that wasn't even edited. That was a single take!
Spoken like someone who has never seen the Last Boyscout. I mean there is a literal scene where Bruce Willis gets a guy laughing to the point he can kill him.
And then he does it again later with a puppet. You just need to up your movie acumen!
pleasepaypreacher.net
xbl - HowYouGetAnts
steam - WeAreAllGeth
The first one is both really impressive and such a product of the time, considering its "wife" versions of "Yo Momma" jokes.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
I'm not saying they won't notice the bad CG. I'm saying they won't care that the CG is bad.
I grew up with primarily practical effects in movies and TV. I learned to just accept that Ninja Turtles were obviously dudes in rubber suits, Falcor was obviously a giant puppet with someone yanking a "mouth open/close" lever, etc. None of those facts are any less obvious to me for having gotten used to them, I just accept that's what movie special effects looked like and ignore it.
My contention is that kids raised on TV and movies with low-quality CG work will just be used to the fact that obviously-CG characters are lit wrong or that actors don't always look quite at the right point in space. They'll still notice it but they won't care because that's just how things were.
As a person who had already formed a set of expectations and biases about visual media before CG even existed, the set of things my brain is ready and eager to casually overlook is, I suspect, different from someone 20 years younger than I am.
I'm also curious how a person would feel who was born sometime post-2010 who grows up purely on modern film-making where practical effects are fairly rare. If their first interaction with, say, The Thing, or Jurassic Park, or Original Trilogy Puppet Yoda is as a young adult with already-formed biases. Would they be impressed by the practical effects? Or would they think, "That's obviously just a piece of rubber"?
I still think roll her in flour and look for the wet spot was invented for that movie.
pleasepaypreacher.net
As a book reader ...
Spoilers, I guess?
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Has such a great ending, too.
A big thing with this is that these issues aren't new. As you note with stop-motion but also with animation, these have always been the issues with these kind of effects. Someone on the forum (can't remember who or where) posted this video about Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and it goes over all the work they did to make the blend of animation and live-action work as well as it did. And even briefly show some examples of other movies, like Cool World, where it just doesn't work as well.
CGI has made these kind of things easier and cheaper but it doesn't get around the same basic issues there has always been with these kind of effects. Practical effects, blended with cg or not, always have some benefits over that.
Meanwhile, Richard Sharpe, a lifelong infantryman, has breakfast with Nelson and a private talk with him. Suck on that naval literature protagonists!
Wouldn't doubt it, considering it was penned by a guy that made an echoing pussy joke one of the most rembered parts of an action film.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
In another movie where the slabs of meat crack jokes and talk shit and actually react to one another.
Come Overwatch with meeeee
I don't believe you!
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