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Control

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  1. Daleks are my favourite, but they're hard to use well, I think. I liked how they were used in Series 1 the most. I even liked them at the end of series 4, if for no other reason than getting to hear Daleks speak German, and the line "Daleks do not accept apologies!" That's just so evil.

    I've read that the Daleks are only encountered twice during Tom Baker's entire run. If that's true, I've seen 'em both. One serial was glorious; the other was laughably bad.

  2. Paul Verhoeven is some kind of sci-fi action auteur. I can't think of anyone else who was so good at blending special effects into their films; sure, the stuff in ROBOCOP looks dated, like ED-209, but it looks way better than a lot of its contemporaries. And it blends into the live action really well.

     

    When trailers for the new ROBOCOP hit, a few posters here were talking about how ROBOCOP was the perfect film, and they were fucking it up. And that seemed silly, really; ROBOCOP is fun, but it's fucking ROBOCOP. However, it held up better than I thought. The satire is pretty good, but lets not pretend that its NETWORK or anything. That said, it's definitely on a level with Romero, as JT said. As satire, it misses the mark when it connects Dick Jones with Clarence Boddicker; the biggest crooks do everything legally (or semi-legally). Obviously that connection is needed for the action, though.

     

    When I was a kid, i was always bothered by the fact that ROBOCOP ate baby food. I mean, it's introduced as a slurry of protein, which the one guy says tastes like baby food, but then when Lewis brings Murphy some later it's in actual fucking baby food containers. Of course, I realized this time around that they never show him eating--that would be way too emasculating. You don't want your hero looking like a baby. Anyway, after ROBOCOP goes solo, and throws off his connection to the military-industrial complex, he tells Lewis he's "not hungry." So I guess he's exited his infancy and become an adult. (ED-209, on the other hand, is only ever a tool, and it gets turned into a baby, when it falls down the stairs and starts crying.)

     

    The tone of the movie is pretty unique. STARSHIP TROOPERS is the only thing I can think of with a similar tone, but it's much more on the nose. For instance, virtually no in ROBOCOP just gets shot once. Maybe Lewis. I'd say, on average, most characters are shot 30-40 times. Murphy's shooting and ED-209's victim are the most preposterous. In a good way. And Murphy's cornball lines, which seem like a pastiche of film heroes, kind of jarringly contrasts with those scenes in which you're meant to sympathize with his condition.

     

    Anyway, at the last conference I went to I met a guy who studies fiction and film centred in Detroit. He told me that there is a whole group of what he calls "Last Honest Man in Detroit" films. ROBOCOP being one of them. I asked him why he thought Detroit had become the dystopian city of choice in America--why it was so often and so regularly depicted as not only an industrial wasteland, but also a city of crime and corruption. His short answer was that it was that race played a big part, but I'd be interested in hearing what you guys think.

     

    I'd probably still call TOTAL RECALL Verhoeven's sci-fi masterpiece, but I'm not sure if RC or ST comes next.

  3. I'm not going to get into all the issues I have with TDKR (mainly bc I haven't seen it since it initially came out and am fuzzy on details), but you could have removed Batman/Bruce Wayne completely and had essentially the exact same movie, albeit about 30 minutes shorter.

    You're thinking of Indiana Jones.
    Indiana Jones isn't in TDK. If he was, it wouldn't be so boring.
    No, but he was an unnecessary part of his own movie.

    God that argument is stupid. If Indy wasn't in RAIDERS, there'd be no movie. How many scenes in the film aren't focused on his actions?

  4. I'm not going to get into all the issues I have with TDKR (mainly bc I haven't seen it since it initially came out and am fuzzy on details), but you could have removed Batman/Bruce Wayne completely and had essentially the exact same movie, albeit about 30 minutes shorter.

    You're thinking of Indiana Jones.
    Indiana Jones isn't in TDK. If he was, it wouldn't be so boring.
  5. Whoa, yeah. That's too slim for your height. If you're just a little more doughy than you'd like, definitely think more about putting on muscle rather than just losing poundage.

    Shit, I'm only 5'11", and when I was 180-185 a while back, I didn't even really look that chubby.

    Now I'm down to 145, which is...yeah, probably too skinny. Which is why one of my resolutions is adding some muscle weight.

    I looked sexy as hell at 185. I'm still carrying more flesh through my torso and hips than I'd like. Still, I take your point, and will probably be focused more on gaining muscle.

    I wish weights weren't so expensive

  6. Speaking of BLOWN AWAY, Jeff Bridges' filmography is much spottier than I thought it was. In my mind it was kind of uninteresting until THE BIG LEBOWSKI, and after that it was all aces, but looking through IMDB I see that he's all over the place throughout his career.

    Was it SEABISCUIT that really established him as a "great actor" in the public imagination?

  7. Finish my dissertation and get my goddamn PhD. I've been hovering near completion for far too long.

     

    Also, get out more (I'm a homebody), and try to lose 5-10 pounds. I'm at 195 after a lazy few months, which is decent enough for my height (I'm 6'3), but I was down to 185 a few months ago. 190 seems like a weight I can maintain.

    Also, try to get a couple more publications, since I'll be on the job/post-doc market soon.

     

    Maybe introduce more vegetarian/vegan meals into my diet, and do some yoga or something.

     

    Read some more poetry.

  8. The more I think about Time of the Doctor, the more I dislike it.

     

    You know, I really liked Matt Smith as the Doctor, but I didn't like the Matt Smith Doctor, if you catch my meaning. He went full-on wizard/superhero in the last few seasons. He can take out entire fleets of daleks; in contrast, I just watched "City of Death," and Tom Baker wouldn't even fight a surly butler.

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  9. Looking for a new, relatively inexpensive desktop {C to pick up in a Boxing Week sale. Any suggestions? It doesn't need to do much: I just use it for word processing, reading articles, and surfing the internet (I'm a scholar, so I have to type a lot, and I'm used to using a desktop). It just needs to be quick and let me multitask. The computer I'm currently using is 8+ years old. I really don't even know what to look for. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

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