Have you noticed how movies are getting longer?
Prouvaire @ Prouvaire @kbin.social Posts 2Comments 114Joined 2 yr. ago
Prouvaire @ Prouvaire @kbin.social
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Both Dial of Destiny and Dead Reckoning had similar budgets (around $300M) and similar opening weekends (around $80M). But the reviews and audience reactions have been better for Mission Impossible. This suggests the movie will have longer legs than Indiana Jones. Undoubtedly Paramount is hoping that Dead Reckoning's trajectory will be more like Top Gun Maverick's (staggering) 5.66 multiplier and less like (say) Quantumania's 2.02 multiplier.
edit: The article also mentions that the global opening weekend box office numbers for Mission Impossible are a lot better than the numbers for Indiana Jones, at $235M (ie $80M domestic + $155M overseas) vs $130M (ie $85M domestic + only about $45M overseas). That said, it's difficult to compare overseas numbers without a detailed breakdown of which markets each movie opened in. Mission Impossible may have played in more countries its first few days than Indiana Jones did.
Tom Cruise hits ChatGPT in the face. Or, rather, vice versa.
Vulcan system
I choose to believe that the term "system" can be used in different contexts, and that in this case it's a synonym for "neighbourhood".
What the script means by “sub-impulse” speeds is also unclear
Possibly thrusters or something similar? Maybe the ship has three different propulsion methods: thrusters (or whatever you want to call it), impulse and warp. Even impulse speed can be pretty quick - eg in TMP they got a fair way across the solar system on impulse before "risking" engaging warp drive.
Spock and Chapel’s confession and clinch, of course, is in opposition to what happened in TOS: “The Naked Time”,
I'm hoping that the writers have an endgame for Spock (and by extension Chapel and T'Pring) in mind. Arguably Spock in SNW has been exploring (or been forced to explore) his human side way too much compared to what TOS established. (By the way, I'm not saying these episodes haven't been entertaining as hell.) Arguably also then, the impact of pivotal moments of character growth, such as "This simple feeing" in TMP is retconned away if we've already seen him come to terms with his dual heritage years earlier.
What I think could work however is if Spock's arc in SNW is one where he does explore his human half, but then either chooses to reject this in favour of the the Vulcan path before the events of TOS take over; or have his accommodation of his human half stripped from him.
Imagine a scenario where he and Chapel do have a romantic relationship, but that somehow, for reasons of plot, he forgets but she remembers. (Maybe in a "Requiem for Methuselah" "Forget..." moment.) That would actually add a lot of subtext and poignancy to the unrequited love we see Chapel display in TOS in episodes like "The Naked Time" and "Amok Time". She doesn't just pine for him because of what she thinks could be, but because of what she knows had been.
I loved Jeff Russo's main title theme to Counterpart but I have to admit for me his work on Trek (DIS, PIC, SNW) has depended too much on an awkward (to my ears) bookend structure where he:
- starts with a familiar Trek motif
- introduces new theme or a variation/development on a Trek theme
- ends with a familiar Trek musical motif
That said, given the premise of SNW, it's more justifiable for that show than the other two.
how I sign up to mastodon instances and whatnot with kbin
As I understand it, you don't sign up to a mastodon instance with kbin. Rather, kbin has the ability to act as a way of following fediverse users and hashtags in the same way as mastodon does.
In other words, if mastodon is the fediverse's version of twitter, and lemmy is the fediverse's version of reddit, then kbin is a combination of the two.
However, while kbin's lemmy/reddit features are maturing nicely, the mastodon/twitter functions are still pretty embryonic. (Bear in mind that kbin is a young project that for most of its life had only a single developer.)
For example:
- On kbin you can follow fediverse users by clicking on the "Follow" button in their profile (similar to the way you can follow users on mastodon), but I don't think there's a way of having their posts appear on a timeline yet.
- Similarly, while you can create a magazine that follows certain hashtags in the "microblog" section of a magazine, you can't currently do that as part of your kbin personal profile in the way you can choose to follow hashtags on mastodon and have them appear in your feed. (And the propagation of hashtags between kbin and the wider fediverse seems to be haphazard at the moment in any case.)
What I would recommend for now is to create a mastodon account on a mastodon instance of your choice, and treat the two ecoystems as largely independent, until kbin's feature set matures.
"Duet", as it's a loose adaptation of the play (originally novel and later also film) The Man in the Glass Booth.
Arts and culture is a very broad topic area. It covers (among other things):
- performing arts (eg plays, musicals, film, TV, radio)
- visual arts (eg painting, drawing, sculpture, crafts)
- literature (eg books, poetry, the various literary genres)
- design (eg fashion, typography, architecture)
Mastodon has several instances focussed on different aspects of arts & culture, eg:
Different lemmy and kbin instances have various arts & culture communities (some are reasonably active, some aren't). You can use community/magazine search tools to find ones to your liking.
Eg to search for theatre related communities you could use:
- https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=theatre
- https://kbin.social/magazines?query=theatre&fields=namesdescriptions&federation=all&adult=hide
- https://browse.feddit.de/
Note that due to the way the fediverse works, these search aggregators aren't necessarily comprehensive. So it's worth spreading your search over several tools.
Everyone’s been in Marvel content at some point and it’s not really acting
Mission Impossible ain't exactly Ibsen.
edit: I totally forgot when posting this that I actually saw Hayley Atwell as Rebecca West in Rosmersholm. 😂
See my comment to spacedancer - it's the actors not the writers who have been advised by their union to keep working.
It's the actors, not the writers, who have been advised by their union to continue working:
And per guidance from the actors guild stateside, members working under [British] Equity contracts are to “continue to report.” SAG card carriers working on Equity productions may choose to boycott but, due to tough anti-strike laws in the UK, studios would be able to sue them directly to force them back on to set.
The article doesn't make it clear whether the WGA (the writers' union) is advising its members to do the same on this show. Presumably it would depend on whether the writers' contracts are struck under British or American law.
Theatre is an expensive business. Not as expensive as making a big budget movie or TV show of course, but the potential to recoup your investment is limited to the size of the house you're playing, each of which incurs high running costs. In movies you can recover the capital cost (pre-production, production, prints) of a $100M film across 5000 screens each seating 200 people at a time four screenings a day, with close to zero recurring costs (other than advertising and revenue share with the cinema). In theatre you have to make back your $10M capitalisation from one venue, 1000 people at a time, with you also having to pay actors, backstage crew, front-of-house, and the venue owner for every performance, which are usually limited to eight per week max.
This is why it's increasingly common for major theatrical productions (mostly musicals, but also larger-scale plays) to be based on existing IP, and to also feature Hollywood stars to draw in the crows. So in terms of plays (as opposed to musicals), we've had stage adaptations of recognisable movie properties like Misery (with Bruce Willis) and Network (with Bryan Cranston).
I would guess that whoever they cast in this Doctor Strangelove adaptation will be well known to the general public. Someone who could certainly do the roles justice is Geoffrey Rush, who's got the name, the stage experience, and the acting chops. He also played Sellers in what I think might be his best performance, in the TV movie The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. (That said, he is getting on in age and his reputation of late has - shall we say - been tarnished.)
Coincidentally, some years ago I saw a play that was partly about Stanley Kubrick making Doctor Strangelove, and partly about John F Kennedy facing down the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Bashir was noticeably nervous in "Past Prologue", their first meeting. It's interesting that fans ignore that, or chalk it up to him being nervous because Garak might be a spy, as opposed to accusing the actors and writers of extracting humour out of the "gay panic" trope. I guess it's because now people know theirs turned into a real friendship (or even more. ;-) ) Although I suspect if "Past Prologue" had aired today, there'd be a lot more outrage.
As mentioned, I think there's some evidence of Garak being queer, but not a lot of Bashir. That's where fan theorising comes in. But even in fanon I don't think people thought they were "in the closet", ie hiding their sexuality. It was more a case of "what we see on-screen is not the whole story, the fun stuff happens when the cameras are off them".
This is similar to how a lot of fans saw Seven as queer (even though I personally don't think there was a lot, if any, evidence of it on screen). But there was sufficient momentum for this fan theory that the writers made Seven canonically queer in Picard.
I've been thinking of starting a theatre-focused kbin instance, but realistically not until the platform has matured, as my sysadmin days are well, well, well behind me. In the meantime I've started a Musicals magazine on kbin.social.
Robinson 110% played Garak as being sexually interested in Bashir in his first appearance. And in the (non-canon but very very good) novel A Stitch in Time that Robinson himself authored, he establishes Garak as having had relationships with men and women.
As the show developed the producers/writers/studio backed away from that idea (which, to be fair, I think is a spin that the actor himself put on the script, rather than being there on the page itself), hence giving Garak a girlfriend.
Personally I never read into any of their scenes together that Bashir was interested in Garak as anything more than a friend, but if the show had been more progressive in that respect I suppose it might have evolved into an explicitly romantic relationship. Early 1990s vs early 2020s I suppose.
DS9 was pretty progressive in that the idea of "being in the closet" wrt ones sexual orientation was never a consideration. In "Rejoined" for instance, nobody has an issue with Dax loving another woman - the taboo was about reassociation. And "Rules of Acquisition" people didn't judge Pel (who people thought was a man at the time) for falling in love with Quark - the taboo was about Ferengi females wearing clothes etc. (Not sure if that Matt Baume video mentions this - it's been a while since I saw it.)
I know there's a perception that Leonard Maizlish was the power behind the throne, but even if he was meddling with the production and causing general mayhem, he was still there at Roddenberry's behest, especially in the first season.
You may have a point about Roddenberry spiking Gerrold's story for personal reasons. Star Trek was never the sole creation of Gene Roddenberry. Justman, Solow, Coon, Fontana and others arguably added as much to the franchise as Roddenberry as he himself did (though I don't dispute his was the most pivotal contribution). But one gets the sense he wasn't willing to be as collaborative during TNG as he had been during TOS.
It's a shame Gerrold left under such bad circumstances. There's a lof of his DNA in TNG. Some of the ideas - like the Captain not leaving the ship to go on landing parties (err, sorry, away missions) - came straight out of his book The World of Star Trek.
Roddenberry was showrunner at the time, so surely it would have come down to him to make the call. I suppose it's possible that Paramount may have put pressure on him, but this is the same Roddenberry who did NOT nix the interracial kiss even though he was told it would cause NBC affiliates in the south to drop the show. I suspect he just may not have felt as strongly about LGBTQ rights as he did about other things. Which I'm kind of equanimous about. Not everyone has to feel equally passionately about every cause.
Across the Spider-Verse Part 1 is one of the year's best movies, but I think it could have benefited by cutting about 15 minutes. The pacing felt very deliberate. Scenes took their time to play out, which taken individually were all fine and justifiable, but cumulatively took their toll. In particular I felt that most of the action set pieces could have been trimmed a little here, a little there. That way, that huge action sequence towards the end, where Miles Morales goes up against the combined forces of spider-men, spider-women and other spider-beings (and which I do NOT think should be cut), would have had more of an impact.
Dune, I'm really pleased to hear, is now a three-part movie, with Part 3 adapting Dune Messiah.