I vote Riker.
I vote Riker.
With all due respect, you’re straw manning me quite a bit. I never said anything was “bad” and I never call into question taste. There is not an objective metric to enjoyment of movies or art etc.
There are objective—e.g true or false statements—about the film or story itself. A story absolutely is objectively measurable in a structural sense. You can contend that your enjoyment of a movie is totally subjective, which it is, however you nonetheless would likely agree that for some reason 95% of the stories you consume conform to common structural conventions.
You can test this by playing any number of these action movies side by side with a stopwatch if you’d like, and time when the narrative milestones occur. You could do the same for scene length relative to the purpose of each scene in the story.
There are methods of structuring story elements that absolutely will affect the way you successfully or unsuccessfully enjoy a story.
For example: it is objectively incorrect if you said John Wick follows the conventions of a body horror film. The evidence? Quite literally the actions of the characters and subsequently the mise-en-scene which is there to support your consumption of said characters.
But let’s take a much more obvious example instead of comparing Hollywood tent pole films.
The 2011 film Samsara is considered a documentary film. I would argue it is “documentary” in the most basic sense, in that it quite literally documents happenings on earth—from the directors’ point of view obviously.
Their are objective facts about this movie: it is shot on medium lenses which replicate the human eye, it has very saturated color hue, and there are 0 characters.
You can love this film and feel all sorts of things. But you definitely won’t love the main character and how he does XYZ. It doesn’t have this; it is not a story. The director may say something like “it is a story” in the meta sense, but that is interpolation ultimately, and not something he shot from a screenplay for you to enjoy.
I think if you made film and television for a living, you would likely completely change your perspective.
Yes, objective relative to the rules or conventions of visual storytelling in an anatomic sense. This means the literal structure of the action and its values relative to characters.
Each shot (that is not in a moment of montage) has a quantifiable beginning-middle-end that is motivated by the character’s actions on the screen, and again nested inside of the sequence or scene. The reason most people experience the pace of Mad Max as unrelentingly brisk is due to the lack of wasted frames on characters. It is hyper efficient. There isn’t a single shot-reverse shot dialogue in the whole film. There isn’t unmotivated action. There is not an unnecessary or missing character on screen. And the framing from edit to edit does not yank your eye somewhere it’s not meant to be.
Compare this to another all-time action film, Bourne Ultimatum—which has an insane volume of superfluous or narratively unmotivated camera coverage in its action. Literally the action 50% of the time, while utterly spectacular, does not advance the characters at all, and certainly does not have an opinion of its action to infer from the camera choices.
You’re also completely entitled to not care and think it’s boring! But there are definitely objective storytelling mechanics that are binary insofar as they are present or not on a scene to scene, shot to shot basis.
Honestly I am baffled by your meh opinion. Fury Road is hands down a top 10, top 5 action film of all time. I’d say the main rivals are The Matrix, Mission Impossible Fallout, Die Hard, Fifth Element, etc.
It is really even top 3 for narrative action, meaning how the action forwards the characters so consistently, which is notable here given the lack of dialogue.
EDIT: You could not like it as much in the context of the Mad Max series; however by most objective narrative measures, it is easily a top film.
I did not; was working for a company. I have had Sundance and SXSW films, but never Cannes!
I went my first and only time in 2011. Drive, Tree of Life, We Need to Talk About Kevin—feel like I lucked out that year.
Sean Baker is legit. Excited for his film.
Best movies are Requiem and Dallas Buyers Club. He is 6/10 serviceable in anything else.
Metro can often refer to the core city plus the suburbs in its county. So LA County more or less == LA metropolitan area; contiguous development despite there being technically multiple cities contained—LA proper, Hollywood, Studio City, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Venice, etc. Oklahoma City metro contains OKC, Moore, Edmond, and so on.
Thievery is soooo good.
Beach House circa Myth, along with TV on the Radio, M83 and Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2011 - 2014 era) were my favorite shows of all time, clustered. Good times.
EDIT: And LCD Soundsystem, that is pure fun.
If you update it will change your UI and balance so you can play online with Reforged players.
You don’t get RF but some multiplayer is playable. Some maps are RF only in rare cases.
I have RF but hate the look and always play OG graphics.
Warcraft OG isn’t playable anymore FYI. They force update legacy clients to conform to WC3 Reforged. You could only play an offline crack of the old game if you can find it, and never let it phone home.
From a certain point of view.
I guess I am not communicating well enough but you’ve summarized the real question of this definition well: is the being within, or without our universe?
If above, then there is no contradiction. If they’re within our universe proper, on “our level” then there is a contradiction that can’t exist.
The power to create and destroy universes cannot come from within this universe. Hence this debate is rendered moot, if that is the premise that they are not within our universe/physics.
And there is only a true point in this type of discussion if you’re talking about what is applicable within our known universe.
FWIW I do not believe determinism can be real in any practical sense. Even if it is provably true, it’s not actually practically applicable in anyway because it is describing an inaccessible layer of physics, to us anyway. The “layer” above our determined one would necessarily have to be non-determined to have ignited the determined “sub-reality” of ours.
I would contend that what you’re describing cannot be knowledge. Knowledge is a certainty by definition. It is “known.” Probability trees are a web of the unknown. “Knowing” the tree =/= knowing reality. Probability is not real, just as numbers are not real. They are concepts. They do not fall into the realm of known reality/experience/matter. You describing knowing that 2 + 2 = 4 conceptually. You are not describing the knowledge of the four trees in your lawn, of which there is only one instance.
I’ve not heard this way with “goodness” — I think the scientific way is that he can be omnipotent or omniscient, but not both. Their coexistence is a logical contradiction. Since omnipotence suggests a free will whereas omniscience is determinism.
Moore’s law and exponential technological progress viewed from the wider frame of biological evolution, and “the singularity,” are pretty compelling and likely upon first hearing them. They’re many nutters around it but Kurzweil earlier books on it are quite sound.
We need an encyclopedia of posts/content like this that is the masterbook of Fediverse ops and scaling “how-to.”
One of the best scenes of that entire show tbh. That was when it peaked.