Random Rant Thread

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I can live with this review.

I'm not so sure about the "sociology" since Villeneuve is a bit sloppy with details, but the movie lacks the very things that made me like Dune (novel) to begin with. Landscapes, "environment," and so on, I got them from John Schoenherr's original illustrations already. The fact that Villeneuve recreated it on the screen is not terribly important for me.

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It's been known for ages by anyone who has any decent analytical skills that Facebook's algorithms were designed in such a way that the users who are vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking tend to be pushed farther and further into the rabbit hole. The point is to get you *addicted* to FB, and the company clearly didn't and doesn't give a tinker's fuck about the social implication of what their algorithms do to people.

Now we've got some evidence for all of that in the form of internal documents. But if this is somehow news to you, if you are somehow shocked, you truly are a dim bulb.

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I've said this many times before in this thread, but it doesn't matter how huge a stock pile of expensive weapons you have in your basement. In an apocalyptic scenario where chaos reigns, your rugged John Wayne individualism wouldn't be worth a shit. Hell, you would die *because of* that stupid American conservative delusion.

You'd be crushed in a day by a bunch of kids with minimum weapons, with all of your shiny expensive weapons confiscated, because in a conflict, in a war, in a battlefield, organization always, always, always trumps individuals, and that's absolutely the case in the times of chaos too. Hell, in social chaos the social infrastructure that sustains the illusion of the power of rugged individualism all but disappears, so John Waynes of the world would be actually even more vulnerable to coordinated attacks by a team/gang/organization no matter how strong and brave and beautiful they may be as individuals.

The more cool weapons you have, the more attention you get from organized teams/orgs like shit attracting flies. And you'd have no chance in hell unless you know how to organize. 

This may sound like a random rant, and it is, but the stupidity of this preppy right-wing fantasy about individualism, which is so prevalent in the US in particular, always astonishes me. It's so stupid that it's not even funny.

Movies are movies, folks. They are not real. Rambo wouldn't survive a day in reality. And more and more people who don't understand that are getting elected for Congress. It's just scary.

[K1power]

Well, this IS the random rant thread after all .

[K1power]

So I finally saw Dune. I liked it. Before seeing it I watched a couple of 'Before you watch' videos on YouTube and while I still felt underprepared I dove in and think I got the gist of it. Obviously I'm missing a ton of lore/backstory and might have completely misread a few scenes and visual clues, but luckily I never felt lost. Multiple viewings are probably required to get everything out of it.

While the film kinda throws you into the deep end without really explaining much, it still very much had an origin story feel that made me think they're probably only scratching the surface here. And the final line of dialogue pretty much drives that home.

As for technicalities I dug the visuals and while I liked the score I can see how the pattented 'Zimmer-horns' may not be everyone's idea of a good fit for this zany world. But then Zimmer is kinda WB's go-to guy for most big projects and I don't think they'd pick a relative newcomer for this so that would leave us with someone like Alan Silvestri or maybe Danny Elfman? Perhaps Hildur Guðnadóttir who did an awesome score for Joker would have been a good alternative choice, but again, relative newcomer.

From what I've read WB witheld Villeneuve from shooting parts one and two back-to-back which is a shame, but somewhat understandable. Given the film's production budget of 165M USD (which may or may not be including marketing), it's gonna have to make about twice that amount just to break even. And this tends to be the type of film that ends up costing the studio money, even before the pandemic. To try and secure bigger box office they made it PG-13, which is why most of the knife killings happen off-screen and may be one of the reasons we haven't really seen any 'grotesque' imagery (yet). Here's hoping a sequel does happen and we get to see the 'real deal'.

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Oct 24, 2021 16:32:25 GMT 1 K1power said:

So I finally saw Dune. I liked it. Before seeing it I watched a couple of 'Before you watch' videos on YouTube and while I still felt underprepared I dove in and think I got the gist of it. Obviously I'm missing a ton of lore/backstory and might have completely misread a few scenes and visual clues, but luckily I never felt lost. Multiple viewings are probably required to get everything out of it.

While the film kinda throws you into the deep end without really explaining much, it still very much had an origin story feel that made me think they're probably only scratching the surface here. And the final line of dialogue pretty much drives that home.

As for technicalities I dug the visuals and while I liked the score I can see how the pattented 'Zimmer-horns' may not be everyone's idea of a good fit for this zany world. But then Zimmer is kinda WB's go-to guy for most big projects and I don't think they'd pick a relative newcomer for this so that would leave us with someone like Alan Silvestri or maybe Danny Elfman? Perhaps Hildur Guðnadóttir who did an awesome score for Joker would have been a good alternative choice, but again, relative newcomer.

From what I've read WB witheld Villeneuve from shooting parts one and two back-to-back which is a shame, but somewhat understandable. Given the film's production budget of 165M USD (which may or may not be including marketing), it's gonna have to make about twice that amount just to break even. And this tends to be the type of film that ends up costing the studio money, even before the pandemic. To try and secure bigger box office they made it PG-13, which is why most of the knife killings happen off-screen and may be one of the reasons we haven't really seen any 'grotesque' imagery (yet). Here's hoping a sequel does happen and we get to see the 'real deal'.

Good, good. You know, I'm jealous of people who like/love the film because I really, really, really wanted to love it. And the worst thing is that I had already read a few raving reviews before actually watching it. I had completely overhyped it for myself in advance.

So, unfortunately it didn't work for me, which does make me feel a bit bitter, but I'm genuinely happy that you liked it.

And yes, Zimmer's score was just too grandiose. Ended up giving us way too much audio-visual information in many scenes. In other words, overkill, and the pace was off too IMO.

Dune is the kind of stuff that is fundamentally not really appealing to the general public. In many ways it's a disturbing story, about colonialism, messiah, sexual tensions between mother and son, etc. I really don't think it will be anywhere near the status of the LotR, and it's quite possible that there won't even be Part Two at all.

[K1power]

At the end of the day it's all about the money, so if this makes even just a little profit I think WB will go ahead and greenlight the sequel. This being somewhat of a 'prestige project' for the studio may give it a bit of extra leeway into getting part two made. But if the sequel is also PG-13 - which is likely - they will definitely change/omit some of the stuff you mentioned. It's a trade off which happens all the time.

I read very few books, but Stephen King's IT is one of the few big ones I read and really liked (took me forever to finish though) and both movie adaptations shied away from some of the truly grotesque and sexually 'uncomfortable' material. Even Andy Muschietti's rated R one. And to be fair I completely agreed with some of those omissions.

Also it's not an easy task to condense huge novels down to 2-3 hours and have them be fantastic representations of the source material. We tend to latch on to stuff that may not be considered crucial to the story or overall experience and that can be the downside of bringing one's baggage into an adaptation.

[miscmisc]

Yeah, it's been so critically acclaimed already that deciding not to go ahead with Part Two purely based on cost-profit analysis would create such a backlash especially in this day and age. So I would bet on Part Two to be made, but I also learned a while ago that you can never say anything definitive about any project in and around Hollywood. So much of that industry depends on pure luck, or the lack thereof, and coincidences.

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Update: the vaccination rates in Bulgaria is 20.9%. Their Covid death/hospitalization rates are about the worst in the EU now.

So, again, what the hell?

You really wonder how that's possible. Are they pulling some Squid Game shit and only a selected few can get vaccinated after winning "games" or something?

No, I COMPLETELY get the same old argument about the former Eastern bloc countries' general distrust in authority. I mean, duh, that kind of shit used to be my specialty. The sociology behind it is more complicated than you think it is, I'm telling you.

But anyway, the vaccines available in Bulgaria are Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, J&J, and AstraZeneca. Not Sputnik V, and certainly not Bulgarvax or Zhivkovax (<-- cool name, isn't it). I just made up the last two, but you know what I mean.

I see a Bulgarian protester (against "Green certificate" or whatever it is that the government is introducing) holding up a sign that says, "No dictatorship! Don't poison us!" What "dictatorship"? You can understand this terminology purely in terms of New World Order/Illuminati/Shadow Global Hegemon kind of narratives, because otherwise it would make no sense.

And it's inconceivable that a vast majority of Bulgarian adults are into that stupid crap, so the question remains: What the hell?

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You keep objecting to my use of the word "idiot" to describe Zuckerberg, but I'm just at my wit's end to come up with a better term for that void of a man.

I mean, what would you call this creature? I go the "evil" way, "corrupt" way, and end up circling back to, you know, a "fucking idiot." An idiot can be evil and corrupt and vapid and nihilist and all of those things, and still just a fucking idiot. Zuckerberg is a fucking idiot whose intellectual capacity is shaped like a pile of poo emoji.

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Not a fan of Weisenthal, but this pretty much sums up my feeling toward the crypto fools like jack.

I would really, really take them seriously if they started making goddamn sense. They almost never do in reality.

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I'm so sick and tired of Americans' (by which I basically mean US-born Americans) silly fetishism and obsession with the US constitution that I often provoke them by calling it the bad first draft of the Japanese constitution. Because it kinda is.

It's so antiquated and anti-modern. It was unique a few hundred years ago, but now?

The irrational deification of the founding fathers and fetishism with the constitution clearly show that they actually wish that they had a royal family. No wonder they are obsessed with the House of Windsor.

The French are made of much harder stuff in comparison.

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Hahahaha, keep it coming.

FYI, "We wouldn’t launch if there was a material trade-off with MSI" basically means that they wouldn't do anything that could reduce the traffic/clicks.

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Of course, the whole pile-on re: Facebook stinks too. It's basically a turf war, and Facebook has been on the defensive now. I find Zuckerberg particularly egregious among all the CEO's for many different reasons, a few of which are admittedly personal, but it's not like there's anything truly extraordinary about how Facebook does its business, or that the "whistleblower" revealed anything earth-shattering. It's all roughly what you'd expect from a private-information-selling company like Facebook, and what those little stories reveal is, again, how big a fucking idiot Zuckerberg is.

I say screw Zuckerberg while understanding all of that, because fuck him. The problem with our age is that our quintessential villain looks and sounds like THAT.

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One potential problem with Dune Part Two is that it would be kind of tricky in China given how the story goes.