Persistent, Niggling Questions

[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.

[Nate the Great]

So I just saw the pilot of Stargate: Universe on Hulu...

PNQ: Is anybody else annoyed by this "you have to start off with a bang, then use flashbacks to show how people got here" thing?

I like events to occur in their proper order, except when necessary for exposition. If there is no valid reason to shuffle events out of order, I hate to see it. As simple as that.

P.S. Aside from that, I'm excited about Universe. Sure, I would've liked another season or two of SG-1 to finish the Ori storyline properly, and the cancellation of Atlantis ticks me off greatly. Well, any Stargate is better than none, right?

[Nate the Great]

So once again I see a YouTube video with the annotation "all negative comments will be deleted."

PNQ1: Does anyone else think that posting this is grounds for deletion of the video? If you can't handle criticism you should NOT post the video!

After all, one of the guiding principles of democratic countries is freedom of speech, right? As long as you're not making threats or making judgments based on race/religion/gender/etc. everything should be allowed.

PNQ2: And a lot of these videos really are of low quality! Why bother posting something that you know will garner a negative response? Why torture yourself like that?

[Nate the Great]

Forget it...

[NAHTMMM]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

PNQ: Is anybody else annoyed by this "you have to start off with a bang, then use flashbacks to show how people got here" thing?

Not much, but if I kept seeing it be done over and over again, I expect that it would get old fast.

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

So once again I see a YouTube video with the annotation "all negative comments will be deleted."

PNQ1: Does anyone else think that posting this is grounds for deletion of the video? If you can't handle criticism you should NOT post the video!

After all, one of the guiding principles of democratic countries is freedom of speech, right? As long as you're not making threats or making judgments based on race/religion/gender/etc. everything should be allowed.

Well, some people are really sensitive to criticism or just overly defensive in general, I guess. I agree, you should be able to take that, but it's YouTube's site and they have decided to allow people this much latitude in handling their uploaded videos, and they have that right. *shrug*

And KJ just brought up the point that they may not be warning off negative comments in general, but senseless flaming in particular. Insipid little bits like "this iz dum" really aren't much good to anyone anyway.

(I should probably say something about that here, shouldn't I?)

Anyway, this brings up a PNQ: How much server space would it save YouTube if all those ridiculous "chain letter" comments suddenly disappeared entirely?

PNQ2: And a lot of these videos really are of low quality! Why bother posting something that you know will garner a negative response? Why torture yourself like that?

You know, it occurs to me that some of these people may be uploading it to show a particular group of friends, not to show the world in general (although if they actively wanted the world in general to not see it, they wouldn't put it on YouTube). If I did that, it would certainly annoy me if random strangers kept stumbling upon it and leaving derogatory comments. I'd feel like "This isn't for you in the first place, so why do you care?"