Sundown

Don't thank his agent. Thank Germany. He was absolutely hilarious as himself in Dodgeball though. I guess I'm turning into some sort of apologist for bad actors, being able to find at least one redeeming moment for each one. Except Segal. I got nothing for Segal... oh wait, yes I do. The moment he falls and dies in Executive Decision. Stunning performance. It made the movie, primarily by removing him from it.

My extra two cents... the new face seems off enough that it no longer resembles Komillia. She's got a small mouth, smaller eyes, and more of a chin in that Miyamoto portrait, and her eyes tend to slant downwards for that sleepy and dreamy but not seductive look... these features really define Komillia for me. Her hair could also be cropped a bit more... and I think making those changes would add tremendously to her likeness. But great work.

That's pretty unfair. He's hardly "bent on being defensive". I actually see more folks focused on raising suspicions and making unflattering and unqualified assumptions because of his screen name than I see him going out of his way to defend himself. His reaction and response is perfectly composed, reasonable, and expected, and I'm actually surprised he's even put up with us this far. Sorry, but I'm going to have to call it as it is. Bringing up valid questions is one thing. But bringing forth accusatory comments without qualifying them and then picking out someone's sig (a sig that wouldn't be very effective if he was actually trying to scam us) and calling him a "dumba**" when he's at least appears to be making every effort to remain civil and answer questions isn't really exactly being unantagonistic.

Really?! How well done is it? Believable real-time Radiosity/Global Illumination is one of the things that will really change the immersiveness and believability of 3d environments, at least when simulating real life locations. Does it actually do much to much to make the lighting look near-photo-real?

Wow, totally forgot about JLo. She's on the top of my can-actually-act-but-won't actor list. Actually I don't have a list, as it only includes her. I've heard she was very good in Selena and you can see her put out serious efforts and performances in otherwise crappy movies while she was still hungry-- I couldn't help but notice how serious she seemed to take her role in the first Anaconda oblivious to the fact that everyone else was sort of just sleepwalking through it. But now that she's huge, and thinks she can sing, she just sort of halfheartedly plays herself dressed as a maid, a wedding planner, or what not. Wow! He would have been perfect for Anakin! Now I think about it, even Ewan would have been a better choice for Anakin. -Al

Except I like Jimmy Fallon. And he was actually watchable in Fever Pitch (didn't hurt that I sort of adore Barrymore, even with her mentioned elsewhere in this thread). To top it off, he somehow nabbed a cameo role in Band of Brothers (for reasons that completely escape me... he looked like he was about to crack up in mid sentence the same way he does doing Weekend Update, except he was talking about being low on ammo and his squad having taken a beating at Bastogne.) Heh, come on, give the guy some credit. He was absolutely convincing in Harold and Kumar... as himself. Albiet a hopped-up-on-E, jerkward version of himself. Whether that's "acting" or simply familiarity with his subject, I don't care to know. -Al

For a moment, I got flashbacks of Primal Rage.

Yeah, that's exactly it. He plays a pretty good conflicted, insecure normal guy with a dash of wit. But he just gets super-man roles now. Speaking of which, I'm suprised he hasn't been offered Superman already. Hah, exactly. He's fun, but he's one of those actors that are fun to watch more out of their personality and delivery than out of the genuineness of their portrayal. Aside from Banky, you never quite get the impression that Lee believes that he's actually that character, but that doesn't stop you from chuckling along to his acting. He's no Edward Norton though. a black person originating from the african continent Actually the proper answer to that is, "Back Rage!!! Black Rage!!!"

Who knows. Maybe Jackson's Halo will be so good that producers will actually start to license video games with the intention of hiring the proper talent to do them, knowing that more cash might actually be made that way. They might even jealously guard the licenses from the likes of Bolle and Andersen so that they can be properly made instead of being squandered and butchered like they usually are. U2 might do the soundtrack. And monkeys might fly out of my butt. I would actually love to see a MGS movie. But I demand that Kojima only be allowed to be responsible for part of the treatment, and that a team of scriptwriters be there to call him out on his tendencies to inject plot twists and then never resolve them.

Okay, I think this thread is more appropriately titled "Worst Actors that actually still get top-tier jobs". The actual worst actors of all time are usually on TNT on any given Saturday afternoon. For what it's worth, I found Ben Affleck pretty watchable and decent in Chasing Amy. He pulled off the goofy comic dork well enough, but then again he had Jason Lee backing him up. After that it's pretty downhill, although he's still occasionally and marginally entertaining.

I know that you know this, and it was just a mental hiccup on your part. But for those who may not know, I think you meant that the game is set between EpIV and V. H 342061[/snapback] I... no longer deserve to hate the PT. *cries* -Al

Meh, just read that it looks like once we pick a profession, we're STUCK with it for the lifetime of the character... which means that for us vets who respec into a new profession, we'll never be able to play from the ground up without deleting that character and all the badges and special items that go with them. Even worse, with the limitation of one character per server (except for those who ground out Jedi), we'll never be able to try out another profession without axing the original. So in one fell swoop, Star Wars Galaxies has turned from the MMORPG offering the most freedom and customization for a character into the most limiting... and it seems that either the developers were extremely shortsighted or it's a nefarious ploy to get us to buy more accounts so we can play with our friends on our old server. -Al

Welcome to the new aesthetics ushered in by the PT. =T Oh yuck. I've always hated gameplay that was needlessly fast and twitchy, following the simplistic philosphy that screams "FASTER IS MORE EXCITING!" and sacrificing the visuals and immersion. Battlefront was fast enough, perhaps just a touch too twitchy for my taste... bummer to hear the problem get worse. -Al

Funny, because CoH is actually one of the faster MMORPG's in terms of action. Most of it happens so fast that it's really nearly real-time, at least once you're high enough level and have enough powers to keep your cycle going at all times. Where I'm at, I actually have more powers ready to use than I know what to do with, and my blasts are going at a constant clip... it plays more like gauntlet than anything. As far as immersion goes, Star Wars Galaxies currently fails not because of its speed, but because the developers have turned SWG into a generic Star Wars themed fun-land, a platform to show off Star Warsy gimicks that one grinds for by completing difficult but unimmersive quests that rarely feel like anything from the movies. The result is a game featuring a mish mash of the OT and PT, with nothing truly interesting to *do*, instead of a game that really looks, feels, and plays like the Star Wars universe right between Ep I and II, which is when the game supposedly takes place. -Al

Bwhahahaha. *Tears* -Al

Well I'm not exactly sure comparing the dialogue tracks between the old and new movies is exactly a good way to compare movies, since both and meant to be watched and acting is as much about facial expressions and body language as it is about annunciating lines from a script. At any rate, my experience has been the exact opposite... I'd rewatched the trilogy a little bit ago to make sure that it wasn't just nostalgia that made me think the originals much better movies. It wasn't. The dialogue, while campy in a few places, was delivered in a much more compelling, convincing, and entertaining manner (then again the OT had the benefit of Ford's ad-libbing). The writing, while not academy award stuff, was simply tighter and better. It wasn't that much longer after that I saw Sith, and although I enjoyed it as Star Wars themed fluff, I ended up groaning and rolling my eyes in more places than I cared to. The two shouldn't produce such different reactions from me when they're see so close together and in context of each other. I'd also shown A New Hope to a friend who actually hadn't seen most of the OT before and even he could see the differences and why I might enjoy one more than the other. The actual differences between the PT and the OT isn't illusion or nostalgia. Nostalgia and familiarity do make us react more strongly when we spot those differences... but there have been too many reasonable critiques and too many well-argued comparisions of the two films for the differences to be explained away glibly as being just a figment of our imaginations. -Al

Nuts. I can't believe they're actually doing this... although my complaint with SWG was never about it being turn-based. The things most wrong with the game are its lack of content, immersion, and balance... but it looks like at least a few of these things are going to be addressed, especially with them dropping most of the professions, making the game much easier to balance. I'm now faced with a delimma, cancel my subscription now, since I've been meaning to for a long while... or wait for the revamp to roll out, and cash in on some of the veteran goodies. Mehh. -Al

A bazooka named Rosebud. 340743[/snapback] Nah, too girly. How about Bloodrose? 340748[/snapback] No, that's the name of his battle ax. I think Kane also sounds like he should chomp on a cigar. And suck blood. Well Battlefield Earth is actually already a remake of sorts. Except the original epic runs several thousand hours and costs viewers several hundreds of thousand dollars before they get the story straight. It's got a bit of a cult following though. -Al

Issit the KM Gashapon Figure you're talking about?

Man... why is it that every Asian-American actor who actually manages to become well-known for a role that breaks ethnic stereotypes turns out to be gay? First B.D. Wong, now my dear Excelsior captain. -Al

I'd be down for a few 1/48 TV pilots.

That's just silly. No matter how you spin it, reading subs take some amount of focus away from the image. Subs aren't all that distracting in certain films or anime with natural language or where the focus is on action... but in heavy dialogue laden anime, reading what amounts to small novellas gets tiresome. I'm going through Legend of the Galactic Heroes and I keep wondering how different the experience would be if I could actually react to the dialogue as it's spoken, instead of reacting to reading text on the bottom of the screen. And I miss reading a word or there here, which is entirely annoying to someone like me who needs to hear, understand, and contemplate every word and isn't happy with just getting the gist of things. I even find close captioning on English films and TV shows distracting, and I actually understand the language and don't even have to process one language while my ears are hearing another. Close captioning ruins punchlines and surprises. So I can only wonder how different my anime watching experience is from someone who actually understands the actual language, because I sure as heck know that someone in Japan watching Lost with Japanese subtitles is not getting the same experience that I am. I'm not even getting that when my silly friends are adamant about leaving the close captioning on. If reading text while listening to a language they can't understand makes someone feel that they're somehow much more intellgent than your average viewer, then that's their perogative, however silly it is. But the truth is that there's simply something lost in the experience, and frankly the actual experience should be more important than whatever notions we have about ourselves based on our viewing selection. -Al

You know, this got me thinking. It's odd for us to pretend to have a say in the artistic integrity of a certain work of fiction when none of us have anything to do with its creation, and none of us feel the effects the creators do whether they alter their creation to make it more accessible or not. We can agree or disagree with a decision but we hardly have the right to suggest how things simply and absolutely should be or shouldn't be. And finally, I would readily debate whether dubs automatically render a film or work less faithful artistically. If a dub was so well written and delivered that it actually conveyed the subtleties that were present within the original language, I would consider it to be more faithful artistically than a subtitle that didn't. And most subtitles, frankly, don't. The language is more often than not simplistic, unartistic, and makes for lousy dialogue and prose... the audience is often left to fill in the gaps based on their own understanding. And frankly, it doesn't matter if the subtleties actually "exist" there in the original language soundtrack, if the viewer cannot understand and experience these subtleties. It benefits no one if they remain no more than incoherent sounds... however faithful to the original those incoherent sounds are... the artistry is in effect lost, because the work simply fails to express. -Al

That is an appalling statement, beneath any further comment. Think Roy's just being facetious here... but it's just not quite as charming when his avatar isn't a gratuitous, bare-chested shot of himself and when that particular schtick's already been played out. -Al

Eloquence. Will you marry me? The only thing we have to lose from having Macross made more accessible through a dub or say (dare I even mention) an updated score is our own sense of being some imaginary elite. That we're some special group of folks whose anime preferences somehow indicate our intelligence and personal brilliance rather than our aesthetic sense, upbringing, and cultural values. Our desire to deny other folks from enjoying much of what we enjoy simply because they're "average" and don't belong does happen to indicate something beyond our personal tastes-- it indicates how willing we are to bank our self worths on a Japanese TV show made over 20 years ago. The original Macross that we hold dear wouldn't somehow be lost or be made unavailable. It might actually be on the very same disc as the dubs, and we'd still be able to watch them over and over to our hearts' delight. We have nothing to lose-- except the priviledge of feeling entirely special about ourselves. Is that really such a gastly "cost" to us? -Al