Posts by BenWilson
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I would debate it bigtime. There was no impression that the destruction of Home Tree was a good thing to do. The only message that I might take issue with is that tendency in "The Last Samurai" to exalt death cults, which slipped in there subliminally by virtue of the fact that a warrior was they only human who could truly connect to these aliens. But unlike the Samurai, they weren't just sticking to their old ways for the sheer honor of it. They were defending against a massive full scale assault on their home. It's something I would most likely do, if it ever came to it, but I doubt it would have a happy ending.
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"Phonetic" is not even phonetic. Wanganui and Whanganui are like Thomson and Thompson. Take them seriously and you won't get them. To be precise, getting serious, you can't take them.
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I was sitting 3 rows back from the front too, could account for some of the difficulty. Usually I actually prefer this spot, but I think the more immersive technologies like 3D sound and projection typically have a 'sweet spot', most likely the very middle of the theatre. The blurriness at the top left corner for the left eye may have been a consequence of leakage of polarized light on account of riding close to the crossover angle in those spots.
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I still want to hear what Geoff and Craig have to say on it. Geoff has seen it. Craig has said he will, and will cream his jeans over the effects. No need to be scared off just because others are raving. There's still plenty of room for criticism. I did feel it was light on comic relief, for starters.
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I don't think 'failing to distinguish oneself' is such a bad deal. I know the gifted usually feel bad about it, but on the other hand they are usually capable of getting by in life on piss-all work in perpetuity. That's worth something.
Not to mention the fact that they're only a few hard years of graft from distinguishing themselves, if they ever really want to.
Furthermore, there are the odd ones who do distinguish themselves very much.
But I do agree it's a tough path and parents should not obsess about developing superbrainy kids. Mine were wise enough not to.
Sometimes I wonder how I might have been if I'd gone harder in my studies. But the answer if obvious. It's the same answer to how I'd go if I went really hard in my work right now. I'd do well, like most people do who try hard. The reasons for not going as hard as I could are many and various - they can't be laid squarely at the feet of childhood precocity. I still like to think I have agency, that I could change. Indeed, I'm always working on it. It's just a bit of a meandering path.
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I just got back from it and I thank Graham for his recommendation - I don't usually go to the movies in these days of BluRay and MySky and endless downloads. But this one struck me as one not to miss.
Firstly, the 3D side of it was brilliant . It's been an extremely hard thing to bring successfully to the big screen for a lot of technical reasons, but more importantly a lot of non-technical reasons - the film craft was not there to fully use it. Cameron managed to make a 3D film that wasn't all about the 3Dness. In fact, a number of times you just forgot about that, and fell into it, and that's the mark of a good movie, IMHO. It was immersive. It was like being the avatar, and that, if anything, was the point of the technology.
My eyes did hurt, but I've heard that most people feel that way about every new medium. Film, television, using a monitor. Hell, reading a bloody book hurts the eyes, because you have to learn to use them in a different way. Driving a car, operating a sewing machine, all of these things challenge our sight because the require of it something that it's unaccustomed to. I quickly realized that you simply have to shift your mind to different norms when watching 3D - you have to follow the focus a lot more, where in 2D film I look at the background a lot, that's not something that works so well in 3D, because you can't 'draw it into focus'. Also, the whole idea of 3D is an optical illusion, your brain is fooled into seeing a flat image as 3 dimensional, because it is presented with 2 images, one for each eye. But when you look around in real life, the convergence of your eyes is not the only thing that shifts - your focus does too, whereas when watching a 3D movie (or any movie for that matter) the focus has to remain fixed on the screen. So of course the brain is going to be a little confused and disoriented. But you can learn to see it, and the pain goes away. In fact, I think, to be honest, that my eyes felt less worn out afterward than they usually do after a movie, because the level of convergence shifts backwards and forwards, giving the eyes a much more natural kind of movement. They were sore, but in a different way, it was more that my visual sense was basically bombarded and overloaded and my brain was blaming that on my eyes.
I did think it was a mistake to put a voice over giving crucial plot information right at the start of the film - I pretty much missed everything he said, because I was trying to adjust my eyes. But then again, it did force me to stop thinking about the eyes and just use them. And I guess the presumption is that you'll watch this movie more than once. I will, I want to see if Digital 3D compares well. For some reason, I found my left eye slightly blurry towards the edges of the screen. Could have been bad glasses.
</spoiler warning>
Secondly, regarding the message and plot, seriously, why would anyone particularly care about that in a fantasy/scifi story? The point is immersion, not reality. Not even a mirror of reality. If there were political messages in there, I could not care less, except in so far as they may have added to the immersion a little. There never has been, and probably never will be, a successful violent defence against massively technologically and numerically superior alien invaders, in the entire history of humanity. That plot belongs entirely to fantasy and its sister, Scifi. So frikken what? It still stirs the emotions to see a such a eucatastrophe, for whatever reason. It's a nice idea, even if it's total bollocks. Guess what, the idea that there is a planet full of blue giants that look much like us, who can ride on big flying reptiles, is bollocks too, it's someone's imagination. If you don't like fantasy and/or scifi, don't watch this.
Yes it would have been more realistic if the aliens all got slaughtered and ended up as boozers and whores in some sleazy spaceport. Or if the humans had negotiated a treaty with them, and assimilated them progressively over a 100 year period. Or if the aliens had turned out not to be noble savages, but more like human savages, full of internal rivalries, treachery, greed, oppression of the weak, etc. Or if the future of humanity isn't on a remote planet mining for something in an anachronist play on humanity's colonial past, with space exploration outsourced to thugs, rather than tiny little robots fronting a huge team of scientists for no profit other than exploration, the way it is now.
Originality? There's always a case to answer for that. I imagine Homer was told his version of the Iliad was totally derivative, and it surely was. As far as I'm concerned Avatar was an old, old story, told in a new, beautiful and immersive way.
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dyan, there's truth in the idea of precocity being a difficult path. But it's not a guaranteed fail any more than a guaranteed pass. Also, one can always start anew, and the precocious will still always have an advantage at that, and perhaps the character they might have lacked earlier will have formed.
I sometimes regret various missed opportunities, but I think I'm wise enough now to see that such regrets are only useful if they change your behaviour. Otherwise they become excuses.
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Yes, there's unknown quantities of Dark Sarcasm yet to be mined. But thread cooling is another matter, a few degrees could be catastrophic.
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Yeah, exams are not for everyone. Plussage seemed like a good system to me, because coursework is not for everyone either. Doesn't work for a lot of subjects though, pretty hard to not do the coursework in sciences.
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A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread
and you beside me singing in the wilderness,
and wilderness is Paradise enough"For a cheap date, that guy could really write"
-The Wizard of Id
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