The last movie you saw Thread

[yovargas]

I have seen and enjoyed both well enough but in both cases, though in very different ways, I left feeling like it was more an great idea for a movie than an actual great movie. Great concepts a bit undercooked. I'd love to hear your Primmy thoughts. On both if you go nuts!

[Primula Baggins]

Well, we might just go nuts. I've been working all days of the week and most evenings for weeks now (really a couple of months), and I'm ready to claim the right to say, hey, I wanna do this.

Unless I don't wanna, which is possible; I'm bone-tired, and there's Thanksgiving and houseguests and all that between now and then.

[Impenitent]

I thoroughly enjoyed Fantastic Beasts. Loved Eddie Redmayne as Scamander, and the 1920's New York setting gives it a different vibe to HP, while still being firmly in the same universe. In fact, I'd say after only one viewing its one of my favourite Potterverse movies. My impressions may change over time.

Eddie Redmayne was terrific, as were the other three major characters, but the rest were sketchy and unconvincing, and the plot was thin and relied on magical thinking (quite different to and not to be confused with potterverse Magicke).

[Pearly Di]

I really enjoyed Arrival. It's wonderfully atmospheric, it all feels very real, and Amy Adams is very good indeed - and how refreshing to have a female academic as the main character! (I also really like the 1998 film Contact, with Jodie Foster, which is very similar in many ways.)

I have a question, though:

Hidden text.

So, would Jeremy Renner's character leave Louise? Didn't quite get that bit.

I saw Frozen on TV last night, and am glad I didn't spend the money to see it on the big screen.

Visually, it's beautiful, but the plot, the singing...meh. I really don't understand all the hype I've heard about it.

I agree! I prefer Tangled to Frozen by miles. Tangled is charming, funny and gorgeous. There's no character development in Frozen, the relationship between Elsa and Anna is very undercooked. I do love the song 'Let it go' though.

I will definitely see Fantastic Beasts - for Eddie, if for no other reason.

[JewelSong]

Loved Arrival. And, to answer your question Di...yes. But she goes for it anyway, knowing. And also knowing about her daughter.


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[yovargas]

And, to answer your question Di...yes. But she goes for it anyway, knowing.

That was my understanding as well.

[yovargas]

Well, we might just go nuts.

So, did you go nuts?

[Primula Baggins]

No. We were pretty tired from Thanksgiving. I spent the evening before at urgent care with my dad, which is when we usually do a lot of the cooking. (He's fine, but he had to be seen.) Tom persevered, and I helped when I got home at 9:30, but Thursday was pretty intense although a success (and fun). We had company until Saturday, and I also had to work both days and Sunday evening, because I didn't finish everything I needed to before the holiday.

Next weekend, I hope. :|

[yovargas]

Ah, shoot. I was hoping the universe would give Mr. & Mrs. Prim enough breathing room to get in a little personal movie time.
I shall hope for next weekend too.

[Primula Baggins]

Thanks, yov.

Tomorrow I take Dad for follow-up, and next week to his regular doctor. It's necessary, and his problem isn't dire and will be taken care of through all this; but now that taking him anywhere at all is a three- or four-hour (and $60 or $70) process, life is more complicated.

[Nin]

For the first time in months went to the movies yesterday to see Arrival. I was disappointed. Too foreseeable for me. And the "linguist" is just crap- sorry, but there is no other word.

[yovargas]

You're the only other person I've heard say they were disappointed which is nice if only to make me not feel like a crazy person.

Curious what you mean by the linguist was crap? I mean, I found the language stuff fairly unrealistic but I was able to suspend disbelief of that stuff given the story they were trying to tell.

[Nin]

THIS MIGHT BE CONSIDERED AS A SPOILER FOR SOME!!!!!






Well, first being a linguist does not at all mean to know many languages - I mean, whatever language you want, name it, she speaks it - that's not being a linguist! Linguistic theory is about grammar constructions, about structures in languages. It's very different. I don't know what job she could do in a university, and what they would even mean by a "translation expert". (I went to see the movie with a PhD in linguistics - he said it's like saying that a car mechanics and a space engineer do the same job.)

Then, how she deciphers the signs of the heptapodes, it is not said or explained or anything at all. But that's ok, because the employed method could not explain it - so the remark: thanks to our pakistani friends who helped to read the signs...

Also, the whole explanation she gives, on pronouns and then again on signs and alphabets and the first signs with "human" written on it, they are totally based on English (languages without pronouns or question mark exist) and a lettered alphabet (chinese anybody - letters are not the only way to write!!!). A good part of what she said that a language needs to function is so obviously untrue if you actually speak several.

Or course, you can suspend disbelief, but it's a lot harder if you actually know a bit of the stuff she is supposed to know about and if you are (like I was) a bit bored by the main story line and your brain gives you time to think.

But I am also disappointed with parts of the "message" of the movie, but to talk about that would be even more of a spoiler than this post already is.

[yovargas]

Funny you say that cuz while I didn't consciously think of those things while considering why I didn't particularly love the movie, I did note most all of those things while I was watching it. They played pretty loose with their ideas of language and communication and while in the moment it didn't bother me much (like I said, I could suspend my disbelief for most of that) it did perhaps contribute to me not being all that engaged by it. It was a movie that was *acting* like a smart, heady sci-fi movie while doing a fair amount of non-smart things about its central concept. (Not unlike Interstellar, which is similar in some ways though I perhaps liked Arrival a bit better.)

[Sunsilver]

Nothing will kill a movie or TV show faster for me than playing fast and loose with the facts for something I know really, really well!

Many nurses love to watch medical shows on TV, so they can laugh at the mistakes. (Their families hate them for this...)

If it's a minor goof, I might be able to let it slip, but if it's something central to the plot, like being able to communicate with an alien species, sorry, you've lost me!

Which reminds me...how did Star Trek explain the science behind their universal translator?

[Primula Baggins]

The same way they explained the science behind the transporter.

[Teremia]

I liked Arrival despite the handwavium in the whole linguistics bit. Of COURSE it would be harder--as in "impossible"--to learn an alien language just by writing "human" on a board and holding it up in front of you! Ha ha! There's an old TV show called "French in Action" that would present a noun--"femme"--and then show many little clips from films to illustrate/define it. And every time you could have been TOTALLY misled by the examples. (I used clips from it for our discussion of linguistics in the film theory class, just to show how tricky definitions are.) So when they have words + pointing (basically) work for alien communication, I did laugh.

BUT the basic thing in Arrival, about seeing the world/time in different ways and saying yes to the big picture, even knowing it will bring moments of great sorrow--that I really liked.

And when I went and read the original story by Ted Chiang ("Story of Your Life"), I particularly appreciated the example of light refracted through water, how, looked at from one way of thinking, the light has to already "know" its whole path from the get-go (whereas we generally think it "gets to the water and bends").

I don't know. It's not perfect at all, and too bad about the dumbing down of linguistics. But I was in the mood for a thoughtful movie about aliens and longing, so I went with the flow and was quite moved.

p.s. Thinking it over, the aliens of course had complete confidence that Louise WOULD learn to communicate with them and perhaps had English dictionaries at home on the shelves! (Not entirely kidding.)

[Primula Baggins]

This is an interesting argument for me because the novel I'm getting ready for publication does involve humans learning an alien language from the aliens, and boy do I pass over it lightly. I am not, not, not a linguist.

However, my aliens are humanoids who've been knocked back to an unpowered, untechnological level of civilization, and they do recognizable things; they cook food and eat it out of bowls, they wear clothes in winter, and they read and write. (There are some other ways in which they're very different from humans.) So I like to think it isn't unreasonable that humans would be able to learn to communicate with them on sort of a nouns-up basis. I do try to show that there are social concepts that are difficult to translate (and that this in fact leads to trouble).

[yovargas]

The problem with it in Arrival is that it is not passed over it lightly - I'd say it's primarily what the movie is about (at least plot wise, though even thematically language and communication are very central). Sci-fi stories very often have to do hand-wavy things in order to tell the story, which is usually fine, but if what you're hand-wavying is the story, it can be a bit of a problem....

[Primula Baggins]

Well, I'm still hoping to see it. It got crowded out of this past weekend, but this time it was good things—picking out a Christmas tree, putting up our outdoor lights and greenery, beginning to decorate the living room and dining room. Candles everywhere, wheeeee!

My friend who was most enthusiastic about it does not read much SF. So I'm prepared to be grumpy about some of the points Teremia and yov and others have made, which she might not have spotted. But I really do want to see it, if only because it's an actual serious SF film. There have been a few of those in recent years, and I appreciate them for that if nothing else.

We may have to see it during the week, though, because Star Wars opens next weekend. And I am so seeing that, too. Science fantasy has its place.