Erkki

I don't know Triumph of the Will, in fact this is the first time I heard about it. I'm sure there is value in seeing it and studying it if it's well made. That doesn't yet make it a classic that gets paraded around as something that everyone should watch because it's such a good doc. The Searchers especially, and It Happened One Nigth to a lesser extent are films that are actually in various "top movies of all time" and "films you should watch before you die" lists and are brought out as great examples of their respective genres: Western / Romantic comedy. One is also racist to the core and the other is sexist, if not outright misogynistic to the core.

Man, I would like to play NOLF again... I wonder if it works properly with a 16:9 resolution? And how did Deus Ex handle that? PS. Might be hard coming to this after Deus Ex, where you can basically retreat to some dark corner and wait and think of a plan. As much as I remember from NOLF, I think it had a somewhat annoying respawn rate so you could never create a really safe spot and always had to keep moving.

Case in point, a comment about IHON on IMDB: "I'm glad to see very little mention among the comments about the sexism of it all. The characters have life; their words have life; and if such art as this could only be produced by a sexist society, it's almost worth creating a sexist society (and then dismantling it), in order to get the art." This is total bullshit. This wasn't some era that was only able to produce sexist works. I haven't seen THAT many movies from the period, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had a not that dissimilar ratio to sexist and human works to our current society. [edit] Another review starts like this: "You can’t really escape sexism in most movies but the older the movie, the more likely that the sexism will be overt. Just like the racism in classic films, though, everyone involved in making the films was oblivious to what they were doing. Nobody was trying to be sexist. They just were." A more thoughtful one: "I definitely run the risk of giving a pass to old movies, over-compensating for the jarring, outdated ideology at work and the old-fashioned (by our standards, totally backwards, sexist, patronizing) attitudes towards women and sexuality. In trying to see through it to the movie that they would have seen at the time, and simultaneously trying to measure it against whatever “objective” criteria I have today, I can come through the other side completely bereft of a satisfactory critical methodology of any kind, and find myself resorting to “Did I like it or not”-isms, like now. I liked it! If you like old movies, you might like this too! But if you don’t, then you probably won’t make it halfway through." These are both from the first page of google results for "It happened one night sexist". Why the hell should these movies get a free pass because people at the time "just were" sexist?

http://election.princeton.edu/ 93% of Clinton win. Should feel pretty safe. I think at the point they appeared close to tied, that site still calculated Clinton win % above 70.

Kubo and the Two Strings is a technically amazing animation. A children's kung-fu/drama. With a stupidly simplistic story. I wish I could give a good rating just on technical excellence - I didn't know it was stop-motion and not 3D animation until I saw some low frame-rate animation occasionally and even then I found it hard to believe. The problem is that it has some really inane dialogue like "I should have listened to my parents" and "I guess I married a bug" (not direct quotes as it was dubbed in Estonian) and all of the character motivation comes from somewhere outside, and is unexplained. It's almost worse than a typical video game story from the 2000s.

How much, if at all, do you post-process these? The colors look amazing.

The Girl with All the Gifts is good! Occasionally reminded me of Last of Us, but the way the story progresses is more interesting.

I like! PS. I just got a slightly different portrait machine: 75mm (150mm equiv.) F1.8 -- cost me quite a bit, especially compared to previous gear, but it looks great, I think.

I have also retroactively realized that I was probably depressed during Uni, which is likely a big part of why I never graduated. And I too was convinced at the time that it was part of my personality. I also tried to use Count Monte Cristo as an example of why it was ok to suffer (for a while) - although in my head only, I never told anyone about that. I still think I'm a lazy person in some respects, but on the other hand I'm proving not to be in more and more areas of life, so maybe that's not true at all.

Congrats!

I think it will work great as a low budget but beautiful indie movie. Michelle Williams as Delilah, please.

I think I got lucky with this one, and it only starts looking good in B&W after cropping & curves adjustment. Also I like this one because it makes me think about "Stand by Me"

What about http://election.princeton.edu ? Even though the numbers have dropped, it still shows Hillary having a ~70% chance of winning.

Another problem with the algorithmic learning is that the specific algorithms may not be that well designed. Duolingo kept showing me the same things I had nailed tens of times, especially when I chose to practice things learned earlier. And some things I had trouble with just didn't come up very often. As we learn from mistakes we need to understand what our errors are, but as you said that's not always clear and maybe nobody has yet developed that algorithm that can understand your mistakes. Maybe Duolingo combined with something which teaches rules would be ideal. But then I personally would probably still need some human aspect to keep me interested.

Toni Erdmann is the shit! Serious classic material

PS. I need a region-free VOD player! (and don't tell me it's a VPN, there's also things like checking that a credit card is of the right country) Just wanted to pay for and download The Scarapist (Amazon VOD | iTunes) but neither would accept my credit card as it's of the wrong country. (The Scarapist has some of the same actors as The Dark Knight, 2011, which was a great bad movie)

Yeah, there are some. I'm not aware of any particulars. Just watched this version - looks great compared to Mr. Bongo! Also sounds better as some of the hiss is gone.

My movie event of the year has arrived! I have been waiting for this since last Winter and checking almost daily - the new Criterion restoration of Chimes at Midnight has appeared on torrent sites! I would be happy to pay if there was a proper UK Blu-Ray release, but Mr. Bongo botched it last year. I'll buy it when it gets a new release there or if I ever get a region free player, I'll buy the Criterion one. Can't wait to watch it two or three times within the next week or two. I've only seen it twice or thrice this year.

I'm pretty pleased with this shot from recent weeks:

I'm not sure that's what it suggests. I had the same problem while I was starting to take courses and still using Duolingo. Now I have a feeling that past a certain point it just isn't a very effective method for learning Spanish*, especially with the phone app, just because you learn so little about the rules, and what are exceptions to the rules, and when even the exceptions have structure. I must say that my initial vocabulary was rather good largely thanks to duolingo, though. I didn't learn that many new words during the first half a year of courses. * (and perhaps other languages)

I started at A1.2 after a month of intensive Duolingo use. I'm glad I made that switch as pushing further with Duolingo's "guess the rule!" system would have been a waste of time for me. Might work for someone else, though.

At the beginning of the year I gave myself some specific goals for movie watching because I was drowning under a growing watchlist: 1) To have at least a 1000 movies marked as watched on Letterboxd. CHECK. 2) To have watched the Letterboxd Top 100. Getting close... except all that remain (> 80h in total) are mostly mini-series, Shoah, Satantango and a few other rather long movies. I think I'll never cross this off completely because it also contains "The Godfather Epic" as a separate entry from the first two Godfathers, and I've no plans to watch that cut. 3) To watch all Ingmar Bergman movies. Maybe this was a bit misguided, as I didn't quite realize how many he made, but I have watched quite a few and liked what I've seen. 11% done according to Letterboxd. In the Spring I was already feeling a bit trapped with these goals (except the first one, which came easily) and I also started watching all the movies that appeared on the FilmStruck sizzle reel http://letterboxd.com/t4ffer/list/filmstruck-sizzle-reel/ . 3 more to go there. I also started looking at the Rotten Tomatoes Top 100, IMDB Top 250, Sight & Sound 2012 critics & directors polls. There are some overlaps among these top lists of course, so one of them might be completable besides the meat of the Letterboxd 100. I have liked almost all of the movies in these top lists that I've seen so far and feel like my film education has improved a lot in less than a year. However, I'm again beginning to feel a bit trapped by having to watch all these classics and not being able to watch movies on my actual watchlist. Furthermore, I payed for a year of Mubi subscription and now I feel that since I've paid for it, I need to watch movies on there as well... and they usually don't coincide with my watchlist or the top lists. To reduce the potential ones to watch from Mubi, I've also started to cross check their list of 30 movies playing against letterboxd average score and filtering based on that and then filtering further based on my own taste. On my HD, I now have hundreds of movies, mostly in good HD quality. I have also purchased a bunch of Blu-Rays and have only watched a small portion of them. In the summer I did a Spanish movie night series with my Spanish class, but from making the selection, I now also have a bunch of unwatched Spanish movies. Meanwhile, my watchlist still kept growing (from ~400 to 570). So at any time I could pick among hundreds of movies to watch, and it's making me feel a bit overwhelmed. Maybe at one point I should just call my general movie education in classics finished and start picking movies based on content again, and movies that interest me personally, rather than base my selection mainly on some average score...

I'm learning Spanish, but replaced Duolingo with a human teacher after the first month.

Binged through Stranger Things. It was quite enjoyable, but from the hype I was expecting something grander. I associate it more with Super 8, not so much with Stand By Me, even though of course there are some commonalities and probably some influence. Overall, I think it works really well as a homage to all the things it is a homage to, and as a well-done mix of several different movies put into one (if you look at the different character's perspectives, almost feels like they are from different genres, IMHO).

Also, the popularity of DVD is a total mystery for me. I don't ever plan to buy one again (I only have bought docs like Get Lamp) and it's bothering me that they are often placed among Blu-Rays on shelves so it's hard to tell the difference.