Posts by Steve Parks
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I'd have said four through nine, but it hasn't just been a slow decline. I've really like a number of episodes in seasons 19 and 20.
Yeah, I'd say that's about right. The Simpsons has started a decline since...well, somewhere in the middle of their 21 seasons, but I couldn't say exactly where. But there has still been some excellent episodes even in the more recent seasons, and I wouldn't say there's any point at which it has jumped the shark. Yet.
Freaks and Geeks ... is OODLES better, but of course it is one of my favourite shows of all time.
Yep - great show, sadly cut short.
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Really? I thought the Really Big Fight At The End was brilliantly realised -- or, as our in-house action movie expert put it, "exhilarating". I'm really not sure what recent action spectacle you'd be unfavourably comparing it to.
Giovanni pretty much covered it, although he was a bit harsher than I would be. I thought the big fight was reasonable, it just wasn't as impressive as I was hoping for. It certainly didn't have a wow factor. Cameron has directed better action set pieces in earlier films.
But I suspect even having a Really Big Fight At The End is part of the criticism.
Not at all. Take out the action spectacle and we really would be left with dreck.
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the "understated ecological message of the film" ....
understated ??
Where's that quote from, Andin? (Or is that you paraphrasing?)
The messages in Avatar were about as understated as a Lady Gaga music video.
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oops, I should at least spell the guy's name right: Slevin.
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I just wish a fraction of the painstaking care and ingenuity expended on the FX had gone into the story.
BTW, I'll call bullshit on the idea that "fantasy" (or any other form of genre storytelling) gives you a pass on banal and lazy story-telling.
Quite. I had my hopes up for Avatar, in part because usually reasonably reliable film reviewers seemed surprisingly impressed. Dan Selvin* called it "the finest example of commercial blockbuster entertainment in years but still containing more than enough subtle surprises to satisfy the film nerds."
I can think of a number of superior blockbusters, and what are these surprises to which he was referring?
It was dopey as all get out, with a trite message and unoriginal story - I was prepared for that. But to add to the disappointment, I couldn't even enjoy it much as pure action spectacle. The action set pieces were very average - and Cameron can do good action. It seems all his attention was on perfecting the spectacle from a technical angle, and in terms of the broad creation of the world/environment, such that nothing stood out as a memorable action set piece.
*Mind you, Selvin thought Slumdog Millionaire was the best film of the year. -
But any number of novels conventionally considered science fiction are comments on the human condition, so that can't be a distinguishing criteria.
"Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen."
Her distinction between sci-fi and spec fic is flimsy and ultimately pointless.
Anyway, here's the article.
"It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians." - Atwood.
Based on that statement, it looks to me like she started with a fairly narrow view of what should be classed as science fiction. She eventually took a perfectly reasonable stance: "Atwood has since said that she does at times write science fiction, and that Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake can be designated as such. She clarified her meaning on the difference between speculative and science fiction, while admitting that others use the terms interchangeably"
In the end, a work should be judged by its own qualities, not whether it could, perhaps arguably, be classified as "science fiction" or "speculative fiction" or "horror" or what have you. I don't quite get Paul's genre politics.
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Coincidently, I've just had Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided recommended to me, which may share some of your reservations:
"A sharp-witted knockdown of America's love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism ...
Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news that you only have to want something to get it, because God wants to "prosper" you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of "positive psychology" and the "science of happiness."And what about those art prizes? When did a painting of some kittens ever win an art prize? The Art Establishment is biased against the kitten-painting community.
Poor analogy. A better one would be if an art prize purported to be for the best work of art, but in practice was biased towards painting, and didn’t give fair consideration to sculpture, or photography or whatever. If the best work of art is a photograph, it should win; if the best book of the year happens to be categorisable as science fiction, it should still take the prize.
Re: the ‘Iain M Banks’ v. Iain Banks issue, it seems to be more a way of labelling a particular type of science fiction he happens to like writing a lot of (namely, the more overtly fantastic, far-flung future space opera stuff) rather than cordoning off all his science fiction or fantastical literature.
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Okay. Do you treat foreigners always with hostility?
No. Why do you ask?
I have a life besides my keyboard and like to comment on some things despite of that fact.
That is not relevant to the point. The criticism is not that you are an “outsider”, but that you are new, and yet chimed in on an issue that you yourself said you didn’t have knowledge on and wasn’t what you were purportedly interested in discussing.
It was such a broad argument that it WAS the topic of this forum for a while.
But not what you considered to be “on topic”. Confer:
I decided to comment on this page only, when some people can stay on topic. ... I just thought, that there could be an interesting discussion about sustainability going on and I am very interested in this topic due to my education as architect.
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all the shouting of 'fuck off' and so on that appeared in the discussion with conseismal.
Wasn’t it just one comment of “fuck off”? And in context it was obviously from a moderator who was getting (understandably) a little tired of dealing with a certain poster? Your argument is entirely dependant on exaggeration for relevance.
snap Steve
Oh, I always lose at snap. My reflexes are almost as slow as Chris Martin's.
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Is it really necessary to respond on the same level as the offender?
No. Why do you ask?
...is it really necessary to mention that and to show me that I am an outsider in your community?
The point isn’t that you are an outsider. It’s that you are new, and not up to speed with some of the interactions you have decided to comment on. Also, as you say yourself, you are interested in staying on topic. So wouldn’t it have been better to lead by example, and perhaps held your tongue on the “trolling debate”, the history of which you admitted that you had no knowledge about?