"You will learn who your daddy is, that's for sure, but mostly, Ann, you will just shut the fuck up."
-Henry Rollins
YouTube - Don't Copy That Floppy (HIGH QUALITY version!)
Topic: Computers
3:39 pm EDT, Apr 3, 2007
Its ashame piracy ended the Gaming Industry in the 80's. It makes me wonder what could have been. PS. I think public service style rap might be the worst music ever made.
[ Stunning. I never saw the whole thing before. Sooo bad.
By the way, did you hear the guy say it could take AS MANY AS 20 or 30 people to make a game! 20 or 30! What is it these days, 20 times that? I love old tech references. -k]
De Furia said that while he believed the deputies' mistakes were not intentional, the Coffins had every right to lock doors, try to close their garage door and not cooperate.
"What took place in the house was unfortunate," De Furia said, "but Mr. Coffin ... had a right to resist."
[ Reason and logic... it's like a breath of fresh air. The dude's pretty lucky he didn't get shot, however. The main reason I wouldn't have resisted in this way is that Right or not, cops have guns and my propriety won't mean much to me if I'm dead. -k]
The past month there have been many threads (some that had nothing to do with the movie) that randomly derailed into posts screaming "THIS IS SPAARTHAAA!". Meanwhile, people are hard at work doing these hilarious 300 photo manips:
Some of these are fucking great; Worth1000 worthy...
I love the tubes.
Oh and fuck that dude who kicked a girl down the stairs... he goes straight to jail without passing GO or recieving 200 dollars.
Jeremy Roush let the game do the talking. Adam Sandler watched the plasma television as filmmaker Mike Binder looked on. They were demoing a video game for the Hollywood actor in hopes of convincing him to include it the upcoming Reign Over Me, co-starring Don Cheadle.
As usual, I direct you all to the Pajiba review of 300, which is spot on, but beware of minor spoilers (as in all reviews).
http://www.pajiba.com/300.htm
My metric in what i wrote back to tom in the Neal Stephenson thread dealt with it's faithfulness to the book, and it's power as an action film, but fundamentally, Daniel is correct in his assessment here.
My main caveat is that I don't care if it lacks emotional impact, because it was still so fun.
The high priest of heroism | Stars And Stories | Film | Arts | Telegraph
Topic: Miscellaneous
10:13 am EDT, Mar 23, 2007
"This, I hope, will be the last property of mine that isn't directed by me," says Miller as he settles behind the desk in his New York office. "I was directing on Sin City, learning what I was doing, when they started making 300. I had input, of course, but this is Zack Snyder's film. Zack clearly had such a strong focus on exactly where he wanted to take it, and I liked that. To put it really simply, I always wanted this to be like a story told by a soldier over a campfire."
The story of 300 is indeed just that sort of tale, although it is unlikely that any ancient warrior would understand its current incarnation. This is a live-action picture, with real actors (Scotsman Gerard Butler stars as King Leonidas), but, as with Sin City, they play against a CGI background, in this instance a harsh, epic landscape that recalls Miller's original artwork.
Uh-oh.
I'll reserve real judgement until I see what happends, but just from a gut reaction standpoint, I fear this decision.
Both movies were directed extraordinarily well. His statement that 300 is "Zack Snyder's movie" is kind of asinine. There is maybe 7 minutes of screen time that isn't virually a pixel perfect rendition of the graphic novel. I agree that those 7 minutes didn't really add shit to the film, but really, not so bad.
The audience members watching them play the same game: media-weary, hunkered down behind thick irony, flinging verbal jabs at the screen — until they see something that moves them. Then they’ll come out and feel. But at the first hint of politics, they’ll jump back behind their shield-wall, just like the Spartans when millions of Persian arrows blot out the sun, and wait until the noise stops.
Neal Stephenson offers an interesting review of 300. Anyone seen it?
I saw it too, of course. I've been jittery for it since the first preview I saw. Doesn't hurt that I enjoy greek classics and mythology already.
It was good, well done, and with one exception, extremely true to the graphic novel. In most cases the film is a direct implementation of the images and words in the graphic novel, almost to the point of a screen capture. In this sense, it's certainly a success. Having not read Herodotus, I can't say if Frank Miller was particularly true to the source, but I'm not so concerned with that... it's close enough, i'm sure.
As for all the other stuff people have been tossing onto the film, I think it brings up the fundamental question regarding wether a film maker is directly responsible for the voice of the film he produces. Or if he should have to be concious that such a voice exists in the first place.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a somewhat fictionalized interpretation of a historical battle and it's visually interesting and exciting to watch. I don't know that it has to mean more than that.
But, if you must search for deeper import, then at least it must be acknowledged that the voice of the film is not so much the filmmaker's as it is Frank Miller's. As I said, it's so identical as to render it thematically indistinguishable from Miller's work. Again, I can't say how closely Miller hewed to Herodotus, but I doubt the critics decrying what they see as blatant political posturing can either. I doubt they've read their histories and done a thorough analysis of it, so I really can't take their arguments seriously.
Anyway, go see, it, it's good. Decide for yourself if you like it, but I caution that any policial or ethical overtones you see are far more a reflection of yourself than of the filmmakers.
p.s. Stephenson makes note of Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos books and I can tell you they're pretty awesome. Very epic, twining Homer with Shakespeare and Proust, plus a healthy grounding in some very compelling hard sci-fi. This is literate "speculative fiction" of the sort that most of the mainstream bookie / literature crowd happiliy ignore because of the historical treatment of sci-fi as a low art. Neal says that's changing and I agree somewhat... I've never understood why sci-fi is looked down upon as weak and escapist, when the social, moral, and technological issues it addresses are frequently so valuable. On top of which, the stories themselves are often as fine as anything in any genre. One has only to read Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy to know that literature doesn't follow genre boundries.
Matthews grilled DeLay about passages in his book where he apparently ripped into fellow corrupt Texan Dick Armey, eventually asking the Hammer about describing Armey as “drunk with ambition.” DeLay denied writing that. “I wrote that he was ‘blinded by his ambition.’” Matthews starts flipping though the book and finds the “drunk with ambition” quote and reads it to Bug Man. And DeLay keeps denying it. Finally, Chris hands the book to Tom and tells him to read it himself. DeLay looks down, pauses, and says “I don’t have my glasses.”
I know it's a partisan site, but for fucks sake. Just how ridiculous can people be.
Talk about creating a false reality. It's written, in front of his damn face, and he can't own up to it.
On top of which, who cares?! It's such a minimal quote... why even lie about it.
This isn't about the quote itself, but about the lengths these fuckers will go to deny reality.
