posted
if anybody else has any films they really like, mention them here and I will tell you that they are gay. Also, add the names of films that you don't like, and I will tell you that I actually enjoyed those films. It's a free service that I'm offering exclusively on TMO.
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posted
I probably chiefed the intentional mis-spelling thing from New Way of Decay. Sadly, perhaps due to my poorly developed social skills, I'm unable to match Decay's 'cheeky chappie' appeal, which might explain why you find it so grating coming from me. But don't worry - I'm quite happy to modify my online persona if it would please you, and likely many other members of the forum. This is the Internet after all. We all have to do our bit to make it a more pleasant place for others. I'm also thinking of changing my avatar, as I've become rather tired of the existing one. Any suggestions?
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: There Will Be Blood is a strong dose of pure awesome. Everything Dang has ever written about films leads me to believe that he will hate it.
Right. I'm going to force myself to like it, just to prove you wrong.
posted
it's probably around the same. I picked it up for £200 without a HDD or Blu Ray. I might get a blu-ray drive.. I don't know. Can't decide. I have a 1.5tb SATA that I could stick in there instead. It doesn't do 3.5" HDD and BD at the same time, only 2.5" + BD or 3.5". Don't you need tversity to be running on a pc to send to the ps3? I was messing around with tversity trying to get muxed subs to play on the 360, but after half a day of cocking around with ffdshow settings, I decided that I'd rather just have a box that plays anything with no need for pissing around with containers, codecs or transcoding. I've already got a nas to store the media, I just need something to make it appear on the TV without any hassle. Plus, it has mvk support and is fanless. The main reason I went for this over the older one is that it has gigabit ethernet.
Yes, you need to run TVersity on a server. I've got one running in my loft with all the music, TV, movies and photos on it and use the PS3 to spit it out onto the screen. It took a bit of initial configuration to get it all to work properly, but I'm pretty happy with it now. It's not silent, but then neither is my flat.
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posted
yes, I've never really been happy with the results / effort of on-the-fly transcoding, especially when subs come in to play, and I definitely can't be doing with leaving an actual PC on in any room in the flat.
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Misc was it you who pushed me in the direction of Media Portal? I'm checking it out now and it's pretty good. Skinnable, hosts external metadata etc so I can tag all films with IMDB It plays whatever you have the codecs for. I'm just gonna use a really basic bare bones system that boots to media portal
posted
Can I just be clear... this is so you don't have to walk from the CD rack to the stereo (or DVD rack to TV) when you change what you're listening to?
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: Can I just be clear... this is so you don't have to walk from the CD rack to the stereo (or DVD rack to TV) when you change what you're listening to?
Hopefully it means I can get rid of the DVDs I've got. I don't listen to CDs anymore, so there aren't any of those in the house now. DVDs take up a lot of room, and I rarely watch them, but I don't want to not have the films, if only because of the time I spent getting them.
Also it means that stuff I pick up online will actually play now, and I can finally watch video files that have muxed subs.
I'm also interested to see what kind of stuff it can stream from the net, and obviously, it's £50 off being a blu ray player.. but I'm not sure if I'm going to bother with that.
quote:Originally posted by Kanye West: yes, I've never really been happy with the results / effort of on-the-fly transcoding, especially when subs come in to play, and I definitely can't be doing with leaving an actual PC on in any room in the flat.
I haven't found many files that need to be transcoded - the PS3 plays almost anything I throw at it natively (DIVX, MPEG, MP4, WMV). Perhaps it's different with subs.
quote:Originally posted by New Way Of Decay: Media Portal
Yeah, MediaPortal is pretty amazing for free software. I haven't kept up with the PC based media centre software since I got the PS3, but last I heard, it was the best out there. Much more capable and customizable than Vista Media Center, anyway.
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quote:Originally posted by MiscellaneousFiles: Perhaps it's different with subs.
It is. Also, the xbox is much more picky than the ps3 when it comes to accepting media. For the most part it's been fine, but the subs + mvk thing is a pain, especially considering the number of foreign films I watch, and the whole setup is really bare bones.
quote:Originally posted by New Way Of Decay: Media Portal
Let me know if you want that Microsoft Media Centre remote control. Works superbly with MP.
Oh yes, and emulators. Get yourself hooked up with MAME, Snes9x, etc and pick up a gamepad.
I've got my PSP running everything from BBC Micro to (some) N64 games, and instead of it languishing in a drawer, I find myself using it all the time now. Battery life is excellent as it doesn't have to spin up the UMD all the time. Chuckie Egg on the train on the way to work for the win.
quote:Originally posted by MiscellaneousFiles: Perhaps it's different with subs.
It is. Also, the xbox is much more picky than the ps3 when it comes to accepting media. For the most part it's been fine, but the subs + mvk thing is a pain, especially considering the number of foreign films I watch, and the whole setup is really bare bones.
Well, not really I spent a month fine tuning and testing that MKV setup I sent you recently. It's working out for me. the only thing holding me back at the moment is the number of drives I need for the data management, seeing as I'm looking at a cross platform environment at home.
quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: What did you think of In Bruges?
Sorry, ended up doing some work yesterday.
Yeah, it was ok, but I didn't think it was that original. Not that I'm able to give you a list of films I think it was like, just that I felt I'd seen it before, mainly in French films I can't remember the names of. It didn't leave much of an impression on me really, though I did watch it one evening when I was very tired so I probably missed a bit, I dunno.
Anyway, I watched There Will Be Blood last night and that was a lot more effective.
* There Will Be Spoilers *
It was cleverly filled with forboding from the start, like a Thomas Hardy dramatisation, or like Jean de Florette/Manon des Sources. So, in a good way. In fact, of course, very little really happened, which probably made it more effective than cramming in endless violence and incident, but still...
I wasn't really clear why Daniel was such a twisted character, seeing as he'd simply worked hard and been shrewd and no one had particularly done him any injustice. The ending, in particular, was (on first viewing) quite inexplicable. Apart from being a bit of a gobshite, the preacher didn't seem to have ever done him any harm. Perhaps some minor humiliation during the baptism scene, but that was only in front of people who though it was a wonderful thing and welcomed him for having done it. Oh, and he didn't miraculously cure the child. Hmm.
His fake brother didn't do him any physical or financial harm either, as far as I could make out. (Also, once the brother was, er, out of the way, didn't anyone ask after him?) I might have missed some bits, although I did watch it all and wasn't tired. I might watch it again to work it out a bit better. Or maybe he's just meant to be one of those seething people that finally lose it. I dunno. Seemed that pretty much everything went right for him really.
But as an atmospheric, tension filled movie it was very good and I did enjoy watching it.
I should go and look for your original review now.
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posted
Ah, right. That thread didn't really take off, did it? Has anyone else seen the film, I wonder?
But you kind of said similar things to me, except that you explained the two main characters as "a pair of intelligent, hubristic dickheads". If that is just taken as read, then I suppose there is no need for further explanation. And we've all met people like that, sure. As a simpleton myself, I'd possibly have been slightly more convinced if something had happened to make Plainview like that (the preacher at least had some reason, having seen his father's land being bought up and drilled). I'll probably go for a second viewing some time and just accept the character as he is.
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quote:Originally posted by dang65: I'd possibly have been slightly more convinced if something had happened to make Plainview like that
I dunno. A lot of great art revolves around what's left unsaid, and truly successful works tend to revolve around giving you just enough information to be aware that certain elements are there, without full articulating them. Anything that sought to explain why Plainview was the way he was would be kind of glib and diminish the power of the story.
If it's about a guy who's misanthropic to the point of total self-loathing, then Plainview can carry a lot of thematic weight and stand in for capitalism, human nature, human endeavour, the self destructive impulse, Western imperialism, American foreign policy - anything where the seeds of endeavour ultimately lead you to a place where your humanity is stripped away and nothing you wanted to happen has happened. If we're told that Plainview is a jerk because his mum ignored him, then all it is is a story about how you shouldn't ignore your kids.
The same is true of the Preacher. By not giving him a backstory that explains why he behaves the way he does, his hypocrisy is the hypocrisy of all religion (maybe even beyond that - maybe it's an attack on all rationalisations of greed).
At the same time, the characters do have recognisably human motivations (pursuit of wealth; pursuit of peer-respect), so they're not simply ciphers. They felt like characters to me, with enough left unsaid that the film created a rich and shifting subtext.
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: I dunno. A lot of great art revolves around what's left unsaid,
I would definitely agreee with that. An excellent example of this would be in Jeff Wayne's "War of the worlds".
In the record version, there is absolutely no reason given for the martians to be coming to attack the earth. All you know is they're here and they're going to burn you. I think this is all you need to know.
However, in the live version, they tagged on a bit at the start with a meeting of the martians discussing how they were running out of resources on mars and were going to have to come to earth to continue the survival of their species.
This actually took a lot of the menace out of them as rather than thinking they were here to kill everything for the fuck of it, you realised they were actually just trying to survive and to be honest, having met humans, I reckon the world may have been better off with the martians.
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