Persistent, Niggling Questions

[mudshark]

I remember seeing the exclamation point used as much as five years ago (possibly longer) in the TBBS Enterprise forum among the Reed-Ragers and Tuckerites. Evil!Reed sticks in memory, but I know there were other examples. Whether this constituted standard usage at the time I can't say.

[Nate the Great]

So sfdebris is reviewing Red Dwarf. Aside from "smeg", I knew nothing about it.

PNQ: What is the allure of this show? A grunt, a copy of a pretentious peon, a cat that can talk, and a computer trapped aboard a starship three million years in the future?

I can understand British scifi/comedy, that's why I love The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But this stuff is just too much.

Am I missing something here?

[MaverickZer0]

Yes.

The hilarity.

It's a seriously funny show. So long as you're watching the original, anyway. Give it a chance. If you like HHGttG, you'll probably like Red Dwarf.

[Nate the Great]

I can understand not listing hidden tracks on the back of a CD case, but WHY can't the information be part of the file's metadata for iTunes purposes? Why "unknown" or whatever?

[Nate the Great]

Disney bought Marvel?

PNQ: What? Just...what?

[Nate the Great]

For complicated reasons I was reading some lists of those movies considered the best of all time.

PNQ: What's with Citizen Kane? Whether or not it's a good movie is a discussion for another time; I'm just debating it's position as one of the best of all time. Have any of you ever watched the thing for entertainment? Or did you watch it for scholarly reasons?

[Nate the Great]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower

PNQ: They renamed the Sears Tower? What? I kinda thought that this building had achieved enough notoriety to have an immutable name!

[evay]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

PNQ: What's with Citizen Kane? Whether or not it's a good movie is a discussion for another time; I'm just debating it's position as one of the best of all time. Have any of you ever watched the thing for entertainment? Or did you watch it for scholarly reasons?

Scholarly. And frankly I didn't get it and didn't really enjoy it. I think Citizen Kane is one of those movies which is famous more for being a First than for being a good film. I am not a film student, but Wikipedia has an overview of why the movie is considered "important" in film-making terms. The problem for modern viewers is that everyone after Welles borrowed all his tricks, so when we come to see CK after years of seeing his methods used as standard MO everywhere else, unless we know what to look for, all we see is a standard movie with a not-particularly-interesting plot.

Other examples of Firsts would be the kinds of films or TV shows which launched genres: "An American Family" plus The Truman Show and "Survivor" were the predecessors of voyeuristic reality TV. Halloween and Friday the 13th begat legions of mostly mindless horror flicks. Our own beloved "Star Trek" was one of the first TV series to treat scifi as intelligent adult drama rather than the kiddie-level "Flash Gordon" tripe from the '50s. I think "Hill Street Blues" was the first police procedural, IIRC. Again, whether any of these examples stand up to being "good" entertainment years later is in the eye of the beholder; I'm saying that these were the important, ground-breaking works. A different kind of First would be Pulp Fiction and Sixth Sense, as I would argue that those two movies have the added layer of being great First films for a director or writer who then can't come up with any other directing (Tarantino) or storytelling (Shyalaman) gimmicks and so keeps doing the same thing with every new movie.

So whether CK deserves the "best film of all time" label is dependent on what your definition of "best" is. Broke new ground? Categorically. Revolutionized the art form? Quite possibly. Engaging to watch a century later? Your mileage may vary.