Movie: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Quote :

Humans and apes are on the brink of war in "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," and movie critics are siding with the apes.

With CGI and MC getting better all the time this could be pretty interesting.
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/4/article/p2p-80770892/

Quote :

There were many moments where I admired this movie for its craftsmanship, but virtually none where I was swept away by its storytelling and couldn't wait to find out what would happen.

This is, unfortunately, what I find to be the case in many (all?) of the recent CGI-based films. The producers depend on the animation to carry the film and everything else is secondary.

I hope this film is an exception.

_Howard wrote:

Quote :

There were many moments where I admired this movie for its craftsmanship, but virtually none where I was swept away by its storytelling and couldn't wait to find out what would happen.

This is, unfortunately, what I find to be the case in many (all?) of the recent CGI-based films. The producers depend on the animation to carry the film and everything else is secondary.

I hope this film is an exception.

Why limit that to CGI films?

NoCoPilot wrote:

Why limit that to CGI films?

Because that is the subject of this thread.

The producers of a live-action film certainly wouldn't depend on the animation to carry the film, so that pretty much limits my remark to CGI films. There are certainly plenty of shitty non-CGI films, but they are shitty for different reasons.

Okay fine. I was just trying to say shitty films come in all flavors.

I couldn't agree with you more on that! It seems that the producers and directors have forgotten that a movie needs  a story line and good dialogue.

Now and then my wife buys a new movie on DVD. We probably have a dozen that have been gathering dust for months and I just don't have the interest in them to take the time to watch them.

On the other hand, when the cleaning lady came today she brought me a gift: the last episode of M*A*S*H, which I've never seen (there was a storm that shut down the electricity on most of the west coast the night it aired). Now, there's a program I will take the time to watch. Of course, it may have lost a little something in the last 30 years or so. ***NO SPOILERS, PLEASE!*** I've been waiting 30 years to watch this thing.

I barely remember it.

I remember the Henry Blake episode, that wasn't the finale but it was a shocker at the time.

Every fan of the series remembers that episode.

The other episode which has stuck with me all these years, I don't remember all the details, but Charles Emerson Winchester got a letter from his sister announcing her engagement to, what was it, an Italian? Charles fumed and fulmigated and wrote her a nasty letter telling her what a big mistake she was making.

Eventually Pierce & Honeycutt heard about it and explained to him what an ass he was making of himself, and he wrote a second letter to his sister apologizing for the first letter.

That episode always seemed like a major milestone to me. Dunno why.

Don't remember that one at all.

It was called "Bottle Fatigue" and I'd forgotten and/or mangled many of the details, as usual.

I managed to find time to watch the final M*A*S*H episode yesterday.
Surprisingly, after three decades, the characters were as familiar as when I was watching the program every week.

It did lose a lot by not being viewed when it was originally broadcast, but it was still very enjoyable. Makes me miss when they made tv programs of that quality.

MASH was a show that made it to British TV, and it was a much better show there. They removed the laugh track (which was appallingly bad and ruined half the jokes), leaving you free to enjoy the actors' delivery. When I came to New York, I found that I couldn't watch the show in the form it was broadcast on American TV.

I also do not like laugh tracks on tv shows. But when you brought this up, I could not recall noticing any laugh tracks on the episode I watched yesterday. So I look it up on wikipedia, and they had this to say:

Quote :

Series creators Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds wanted M*A*S*H broadcast without a laugh track ("Just like the actual Korean War", Gelbart remarked dryly), but CBS rejected the idea. By season two, a compromise had been reached, whereby the producers were allowed to omit the laugh track during operating room scenes if they wished. As a result, few scenes in the operating room contain laughter. Certain episodes omitted the laugh track completely ("O.R.", "The Bus", "Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?", "The Interview", "Dreams", "Point of View", "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen") as did some international and syndicated airings of the show. The first five seasons used a more intrusive laugh track, similar to other laugh-tracked sitcoms of the period; by Season Six, newer, significantly quieter laughs were recorded and employed. In the United Kingdom, where the show was broadcast by the BBC (and therefore also without advertising breaks), the laugh track was entirely absent from all episodes.

On all released DVDs, both in Region 2 (Europe, including the UK) and Region 1 (including the U.S. and Canada), there is an option to watch the show with or without the laugh track.

So it seems the episode I just watched did not have a laugh track, which could explain why I couldn't recall it (normally I blame lack of recall on Mother Nature - the bitch). I think it's great that they have programmed the DVDs to allow watching without the laugh track

But don't get too pompous - if I recall Benny Hill had a very intrusive laugh track.

_Howard wrote:

It did lose a lot by not being viewed when it was originally broadcast, but it was still very enjoyable.

Indeed.  I have searched my memory banks for shows I enjoyed immensely in my youth (or even more recently), trying to determine if I might enjoy them enough on repeated viewing to make to worthwhile buying the DVDs.  A lot of it has to do with how important the 'surprise factor' is.

Non:

• M*A*S*H*
  
• The Sopranos
  
• The Wonder Years
  
• The Six Wives of Henry XIII
  

Oui:

• Whose Line Is It Anyway
  
• Six Feet Under
  
• The Avengers
  
• Connections
  
• BBC Planet Earth, Blue Planet, Life, Human Planet
  
• Alien Nation
  
• Clatterford
  
• Hunderby
  
• Monty Python
  
• The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
  
• Fawlty Towers
  
• To The Manor Born
  
• Good Neighbors
  
• Penn & Teller's Bullshit (surprising number of British comedies here...)
  

Oui but probably should've been Non:

• My Favorite Martian
  
• The Mod Squad
  
• Rising Damp
  
• The Young Ones
  
• A Doctor in the House
  

_Howard wrote:

Every fan of the series remembers that episode.

Do I remember correctly?  I seem to recall that the cast wasn't told beforehand about the twist in the script, so their reactions on-camera were real.

Snopes says no - sort of.

_Howard wrote:

I think it's great that they have programmed the DVDs to allow watching without the laugh track.

The movie was at times uncomfortably between comedy and pathos, IIRC. Trapper John's suicide scene, for one.

Snopes wrote:

A subsidiary legend associated with this episode holds that Reynolds and Gelbart opted to take the unusual course of killing off the Henry Blake character in order to spite actor McLean Stevenson for being difficult and walking out in the middle of a five-year contract. Larry Gelbart also disclaimed that legend:

Quote :

[H]aving Henry die was not a show-business decision; we were not punishing an actor for leaving the series. We were trying to make his departure one that would be apt, as well as memorable.

But that legend wasn't something the fans came up with. I saw McLean Stevenson in an interview, some time after the series finished (so years later), and he quite bluntly made the assertion that the reason his character was killed was because they didn't want him to be able to do any sort of spin-off.

Apparently the American public didn't want him doing any spin offs.