Guaporense's live action thread

Well we've found the first comment that should be deleted at least.

I already put him in my ignore list. Anyway some people here need to get some minimal cultural education in the fact that not everybody in he world is a brainwashed hollywood drone and so some people might not praise any piece of garbage that the US movie industry pumps out to the high heavens.

Hollywood is not "movies", hollywood is only a small corner of the world of movies. Not praising hollywood to the heavens doesn't mean one dislikes "movies" in general. It's a very xenophobic attitude actually, as if hollywood was the be all end all of movies. Heck, Miyazaki already made a dozen of movies better than any movie that was ever made in the North American continent anyways.

And I love hollywood more than most people but one has to understand that I am not an Anglo Saxon so that I do not share the share the viewpoint regarding it than someone who grew up only on hollywod who thinks "movies = hollywood".

I have never heard of Miyazaki

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Mad Max Fury road is trash

( -_-) Have I gotten under your skin, Camo? Where have I wronged you?

( -_-) I don't think that's what Camo was saying even if what he was saying wasn't very compromising or diplomatic.

That seems to suggest that all movies from the United States are related to Hollywood in some way.

This is exactly why I can't get behind your previous comment, Guap, where you said:Even if you personally feel otherwise that attitude does not paint you as someone open to new ideas. It also doesn't hold up under scrutiny because for that statement to be true would require you to have foreknowledge of every movie that has ever been made in North America.

The 90% claim also doesn't seem to consider the fact that the range of movies that could potentially appeal to you increases every year.

You'll find an overwhelming majority of people who watch mainly Hollywood movies do not actually distinguish themselves as "Anglo-Saxon".

Flee, wiggy! FLEE WHILE YOU CAN!

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Movie Reviews | Anime Reviews
Top 100 Action Movie Countdown (2015): List | Thread
"Well, at least your intentions behind the UTTERLY DEVASTATING FAULTS IN YOUR LOGIC are good." - Captain Steel

Thing is that it's very unlikely that some indie film nobody heard about is going to top Apocalypse Now or 2001, my favorite American movies. So while it's true I only watched 4% of all American movies, I think I watched most of the best ones. There are diminishing returns to watching stuff inside a culture: first you watch the best stuff and then you start watching the more obscure second rate stuff.

Ok maybe I got a bit exaggerated there. Still it's true that today it's very hard for me to find a new masterpiece in either hollywood or anime. I would guess that Indian and French cinema might be new options for me to expand my favorites list. But in terms of hollywood and Anime I indeed think that 90% of the great stuff already made by 2015 I already consumed.

Here 95% of the hollywood fans are Anglo saxons. The ones who are not Anglo Saxon are three: the Portuguese guy, gatsby and cobbyth. Thing is that people here are, well, a bit, let's be candid, xenophobic (some even endorsing trump) and unaware of the fact that the US is not the world.

You'll notice my number one favorite is the only indie movie on that whole list. ****in' worth it.

You also broaden your horizons that way. You'll never know just how good a good movie is until you know just how bad a bad movie can be.

I guarantee ya there's a totally awesome movie you haven't seen yet and wouldn't expect to like already just sitting around waiting for you somewhere.

To a degree that's almost certainly true, but also bear in mind that English being the most predominant language in movies and the main method of communication on this board... most people are going prefer the most accessible selections available to them in that language which are more than likely also limited in some respect to their country.

It doesn't even take racism or xenophobia to dislike second language movies, some people just find subtitles or dubbing too distracting.

Let me explain the mathematics behind my assertion that I watched most movies worth watching:

It goes like this, when I got serious about Anime about 5 years ago I watched a lot of great stuff in a small amount of time and then the interval between great gems amid a sea of mediocrity increased over time:

First 100 anime - 13 masterpieces
101 - 200 anime - 5 masterpieces
201 - 300 anime - 2 masterpieces
301 - 500 anime - 1 masterpiece

This was over the last 5 years. There exists about 9,000 Anime counting series, ovas and movies. I watched 6% of the whole medium (about 550 anime), however, considering that the rate of finding new masterpieces is decreasing exponentially, the expected number of masterpieces existing over the 8,450 Anime I haven't watched is very low (less than 5), so that I have watched the vast majority of the best Anime even though I have only watched 6% of it. That's because the great stuff tends to stand out and so finding hidden gems becomes harder and harder.

With hollywood movies my experience was the same, now I would need to watch over a thousand American movies before I can find a great movie like Apocalypse Now again. Although I cannot give you a time line of density of masterpieces per block of movies watched.

It's more rational to go to other mediums instead of hollywood or Anime in search for great stuff. The last year I am way more into manga, which is a huge medium and has more masterpieces than either Anime or hollywood.

Also, my claim is that Miyazaki made 4 movies (Nausicaa, PM, Spirited Away and Totoro) that I would prefer over the entire set of American cinema and is based on the same logic: Miyazaki movies are so enormously superior to the set of hollywood movies I watched over the past couple of years that I find it tremendously unlikely that there exists a hollywood movie as good: for example, if I watched like 100 movies, with a rating varying from 3 to 8, standard deviation of .5 around 6.5, while Miyazaki movies are 10, so like 7 standard deviation above typical hollywood movies, since the highest rated one out of a set of a 100 is 8, it would take many tends of thousands of movies to get a 10.

You're WAY overthinkin' this, dude.

The only thing visually impressive about The Force Awakens is the quantity of it's special effects ... the amount of money they spent on special effects ... actually nothing. At least the original trilogy was ahead of it's time in it's use of special effects. TFA is just typical aside from having a little more money to blow than other Blockbusters. Was it more visually impressive than Transformers? Not one bit. It wasn't even as impressive visually as Avatar. At least Avatar progressed something, even if it was a useless gimmick like children's pop up books. TFA did not do anything visually to talk about. It looks like a typical Hollywood movie in every possible way.

I was reading an article titled Avatar: how the biggest film of all time got left behind by The Telegraph, and they said this, "Another Hollywood analyst told the magazine: 'The industry is looking for its Citizen Kane, its definitive work of 3-D, and Avatar may be that film.'"

-http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/avatar/james-cameron-box-office-cultural-impact/

Even for people who haven't seen Citizen Kane, if they know anything about film they've most likely at least heard of it's reputation. But at least Avatar, even though it was pretty much a failure, is something to talk about visually.





These two screen shots don't even look like they're from a Star Wars movie. They look like they're from Captain Power or something else that's just ripping Star Wars off. Actually I take that back, it isn't fair to Captain Power.



Considering their budget I'd say Captain Power put a lot more effort into their costumes than TFA.

That leads me to my next point. Special effects are not the only part of visuals. Personally I'd go so far as to say that special effects are the least important part of visuals. Cinematography, props, set design, costumes, and models are all more important. Not to say that special effects aren't important, but they don't matter if the movie's overall look isn't just as well handled. Everything has to look not just good, but exceptional, and there has to be something above and beyond that in order for a movie to be "impressive" in the sense that Madoka is visually impressive.



Look how fake that picture is. The costume looks like it was polished before they started the shot. It doesn't look like a soldier in the middle of a battlefield. Look at how fake the debris is. It looks to me like a modelling shoot or a Coca-Cola commercial.

Special effects may be the most obvious visual technique but far from the most important. I wonder if the reason why animation is more visual than live action is because of the nature of the filming process? An animator has to put everything they're making in front of the camera manually, so that makes them by nature very conscious of what they're doing visually. With live-action a film maker can simply point a camera and shoot. Maybe the lack of visuals is due to that? I wonder how much the use of computers in animation affects it's visual dynamic.



This may not look like a visually impressive picture to many people. But notice how detailed the carpet is? Not many anime shows would put that level of detail into the carpet. The carpet would usually have the same detail as the sofa, wall, and floors. Also the teddy bear and toys are hand drawn, they would usually be part of the background painting with less texture. But the screenshot above doesn't contain anything that raised the bar or impressed anyone, just that even it's less impressive shots are at par visually (which is to say that it's overall visual quality is at least exceptional).



Madoka was made to the technical level that is extremely rare for television, and that is even rare in film. So while I may not agree to the same degree as Guap, I can see what his point was about how television rarely has the visual depth of film, and how Japanese animation is leading cinema in visual terms.

There are other aspects to visuals that can't be portrayed with screenshots (and this work computer is so old that it has trouble even with gif's). In animation it is much harder to produce motion continually than in live action, which is why a lot of animation has stills or pans with dialogue or one little thing moving. Madoka had tons of motion going off with very detailed backgrounds and lots of moving parts. Also what it presented visually was new and inventive, especially the monster worlds which had some pretty far out there backgrounds, landscapes, creatures, and just collages of color and shapes.

The only thing I can think of outside of Anime in Television that is as impressive as Madoka visually would be the mini-series Unsere Mutter, Unsere Vater.





While it's not something that people are raving about the visuals. It's not ground breaking or revolutionary. It's just really really solid; one of the only shows I've seen that's up to par with film visually (and up to par in the broader sense of quality too). I'd say it's pushing the envelope for TV. They don't really seem to be focusing on visuals in particular, it's just that their visuals happen to be really good along with everything else because it's just a masterpiece of cinema.

A couple older shows that might be noteworthy are Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People. They were not particularly focusing on visuals, just the peak of quality that I've seen on TV.

Correct! Now replace "Hollywood" with "anime" and you'll see the problem.

You guys seem to take "visuals" like a bar of raising expectation. OF COURSE you're going to be constantly disappointed if your standard is "Better or GTFO", but it's entirely fair to consider the elements of style and collective visual design as similarly important parts inclusive in what you judge as "visuals".

For example: How is the passage of time represented in the design of the Stormtroopers' armor?



All Stormtroopers look like that when they're deployed, they're supposed to look like factory-fresh uniform minions.

*laughs* Okay.

Considering the negative impact of computers on animation doesn't not seem to give much credit to the advantages and options it provides to animators, and again I'm inclined to think of Black Rock Shooter.


A lot of animation work went into Force Awakens as well and as much as I won't defend certain times it was used, it was an invaluable asset when it came to the aerial battles which were arguably the fakest looking visual effects of the older movies.

Agreed.

Can't say I agree with that.

In at least for it's unique and subversive visual style, Madoka is certainly commendable.

My point there was just to give an example of a visually inventive TV show to explain that some TV shows can be as visually inventive as any movies released for theater.

Also, Star Wars 7 is not visually inventive because the way it's directed and the shoots are composed do not appear to be anything exceptional in pure visual terms (if you compare to a movie like Stalker for example), its visuals are standard of a modern Hollywood blockbuster, in fact even the 1999-2005 Star Wars movies are visually more creative and more artistically ambitious (although failures). Although I loved Star Wars 7, its emotional appeal is pure nostalgia and is essentially a completely derivative fanfiction based on the original trilogy.

But, that was a great post!!! I would have given it 100 reps if I could!

No Yoda.

The problem is that I cannot even give my opinion regarding some mediocre movies that the xenophobe rednecks already jump at me like a pack of mongrel dogs. This type of behavior is even criminalized in some countries.

I guess I should start defending myself a little more. Even though this is absurd: I cannot even review movies in peace in my own thread now! Why? Because I don't share their xenophobic cultural values!

And people wonder why Trump is so popular... The rejection and hostility I get here is reflective of the general xenophobia present in the US white population that's supporting people like him to kick out the "foreigners".

Well "xenophobe rednecks" certainly isn't winning you back any fans.

That's just an insulting generalization.

I am just defending myself.

And I don't want to win any "fans".

I have nothing to talk with these people. Its best for them to not read my thread and it's best for me to not have to interact with them either. Don't like me? Good, don't try insult me, if you do I will retaliate. I am tired of being nice

Seems like lashing out to me.

*laughs*

I am just explaining why one doesn't need to know all Hollywood movies to claim he has watched the best Hollywood movies. (Substitute Hollywood movies for music, books, European movies, Japanese movies, you name it).

It's just not a mathematically provable concept. Next month there will be more movies and your estimations will be slightly more off.

Disregard whether they're "Hollywood" movies or not and just pick and choose what to watch based on what interests you conceptually. You'll almost certainly have better luck that way rather than setting a bar for budget.

I joined this forum back in 2012 because I was moving to the US (the reason was that the US has better facilities than Brazil for the type of research I am doing) and I decided to get to know American culture.

What I learned since is that Anglophobes (US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc) live insulated from non-anglophobe culture and are not really aware of that. I love Anglophone culture (more than Brazilian culture), but I never expected that these people to be so tremendously insulated to the point of being scared of foreign culture while also not being aware that it works under different aesthetic principles and judging it from Anglophone perspective is plain wrong.

Oh yeah, it's totally like that.

Here's a particularly frustrating cliche: People who say the US is the greatest country on earth even though they've never been outside the country.