For a second series that was just inching along prior, the final two episodes finally gained some momentum, IMO. I was stoked with the last two episodes.

But explain something to me (and forgive my lack of names - I'll try to describe them).

The red-head guy who took Winterfell - he made a speech, the guy from the Office clocked him on the head, and the next thing the whole place has burned down. How does that work? Why didn't the 500 Starks outside bust in and stop them? What happened to the red-head? They couldn't burn down Winterfell and then hand him over and just wander off, surely? They'd have them on spikes in no time.

Also, Sansa is told by the Dog that he'll take her to Winterfell at the end of ep.9 - then in the finale he's just gone and she's still around. What?

Apart from that, on the whole, my only criticism as a noob is general pace. Some story lines are left unprogressed for ages, while we watch Rob slowly fall in love with someone. There are so many people we're attached to on cliff-hangers, spending half an episode setting up a romance between Rob and his ladyfriend is just redundant.

Otherwise, it's no Breaking Bad but I like it.

I disagree. QT knows exactly what he is doing. Some of his films are dialog driven (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown) and some are genre and/or action driven films (True Romance, Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds). I have no doubt he is capable of writing another Pulp, and that one day he probably will, but for now he is doing high-art pastiche of the classic exploitation dramas he grew up with. This is not to say that these action films are less good than his dialog films, they just have different aesthetic criteria.

He is much like Speilberg in this way, if polar opposites in dialog and style. Speilberg has his serious movies, and he has his homages to the serial action films of his youth.

Prediction: Eventually Quentin will eventually get his fill of action films and create another magnum opus, and likely get himself an Oscar in the process. I would absolutely love for him to take his favorite film of recent times, Battle Royale, and make an American-culture-specific version - not a remake of the film, but a remake of the concept as it would occur if it played out with American high schoolers.

Also, comparing QT to Shayamalan is blasphemy. Even Shayamalan's best work was an average film with a great twist. Shayamalan has never shown even an ounce of the writing or directing skills that QT has. Take it back. TAKE IT BACK!!1!>> ^lucky760:

Win.
I no longer have any confidence Quentin will make another Reservoir Dogs- or Pulp Fiction-caliber film, and I've made my peace with that, but I will still eagerly await every one of his new projects with fervent anticipation.
(I just hope he never descends as far down as M. Night Shyamalan.)

I understand that there are time concerns with a televised series, but I felt like there was a lot in this battle/episode that I missed in comparison to the book.

I've read that George R. R. Martin is a fan of the Chinese historical novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" (I'm a fan also), and to me it seems pretty clear that the Battle of the Blackwater was fairly strongly inspired by the Battle of Red Cliff (Chi Bi) from that book.

Both have a long lead-up to a known naval battle, led by very intelligent strategists (Tyrion in GoT, Zhuge Liang in RoTK) coming up with a strategy that involves clustering/connecting the boats with a chain/chains and then hitting them with fire. The nuances present in the telling of both of these battles in their respective books are great, and although I personally think that the GoT version was partially inspired by RoTK, Martin did a good job of putting his own spin on it and making it his own.

The TV version was still entertaining for me, but I kept on thinking about what was missing that makes the characters (particularly Tyrion) shine even more. It also seemed that everything happens so fast that it would likely be fairly confusing to viewers who haven't read the book also.

Anyone coming from a TV perspective only have a take on that? Or is anyone familiar with RoTK and see the shadows of it come through in Game of Thrones like I do?

Probably both
>> ^peggedbea:

"hey! i'm awesome middle aged dad guy! stop with the whimsical fuckery! i'm paying too much to make my kids like me! grrrrr" you're either a giant troll or a giant douche. or both. congrats.

>> ^zaust:
>> ^eric3579:
I bet you're a ton of fun to hang out with.
Erm you uploaded it, think your kinda biased. Btw I took my kids (aged 12-9) to see My Chemical Romance, Off Spring, The Madness, Limp Biskit, The Strokes, Motorhead and even Slipknot last year. I am fun - I just don't need crap from the serving staff any more.

"hey! i'm awesome middle aged dad guy! stop with the whimsical fuckery! i'm paying too much to make my kids like me! grrrrr" you're either a giant troll or a giant douche. or both. congrats.


>> ^zaust:

>> ^eric3579:
I bet you're a ton of fun to hang out with.
Erm you uploaded it, think your kinda biased. Btw I took my kids (aged 12-9) to see My Chemical Romance, Off Spring, The Madness, Limp Biskit, The Strokes, Motorhead and even Slipknot last year. I am fun - I just don't need crap from the serving staff any more.

>> ^eric3579:

I bet you're a ton of fun to hang out with.

Erm you uploaded it, think your kinda biased. Btw I took my kids (aged 12-9) to see My Chemical Romance, Off Spring, The Madness, Limp Biskit, The Strokes, Motorhead and even Slipknot last year. I am fun - I just don't need crap from the serving staff any more.

"Honey, this is what you mean to me - piss in my pants."
ROMANCE

Check the video description on the youtube page. ddpyoga, ddpyoga all over the place. This is just an advertisement...not saying that this didn't really happen, but advertisements suck the life and caring out of me. Nothing like capitalism to suck the romance out of everything.>> ^CrushBug:

>> ^rottenseed:
I said it on reddit, and I'll say it here: why the fuck do I feel like I'm being sold something?
I'm sorry for being so jaded, but I do have a decent (if not hypersensitive) bullshit detector.

It is always good to exercise caution on things like this, but I think this is safe. Short of mentioning a Yoga instructor's name, there is no other promotional text or Send money here, or captioning to visit a web site, or any of the other indicators. Seemed like an honest "Thanks and don't limit yourself" video.
I watched it, and I just felt fucking pumped. Woe be to he who puts a challenge in my way today!

Funny how these remakes/sequels/prequels/reboots/reimagainings do kind of give you a SENSE of having watched a classic but without any of the emotion or gravitas that made it remembered in the first place. A 23 year old girl told me she liked Singer's Star Trek 'because it wasn't like sci-fi'. I passed a bunch of middle aged women a while back and caught the words "..doctor manhattan.."

Modern marketing is reshaping, monetizing and pushing EVERYTHING that was interesting, exciting and cult, into a sort of vanilla paste to be squeezed into the minds of people who have less and less ideas about life but who vaguely know that these titles are remembered for decades for some reason.. it seems some extended cartoony dance-fight for the boys and some saccharine melodramatic romance for the girls is all you need to get in there.

The world is run by inheritees.
They can't be expected to know how great things were done by their forebears.
They do however own the show and are forced by their own need for self respect to believe they are entitled to make creative decisions WAY beyond them.

What are they going to do? Imitate and resell the past till its worth nothing. Anyone want to take this bet: spiderman reboot reboot reboot by 2020, Lawrence of Arabia with Robert pattinson by 2015, and on and on until we all kill ourselves.
As long as they do Krull with Samuel Jackson I'll go quietly.

A fair summary, though I should point out that I was trying to claim that you implied there was no craft or artistry to The Raid (with your unfair Ass comparison), not Ebert.

I think we've beaten this dead horse to a pulp at this point, but I'd like to also point out that, though you may not be able to achieve transcendence from a martial arts film, I think it can have other pleasures that are equally as valid. And I'm not saying that all you want is transcendence from a film, but obviously you're placing more value on it with your comparison.

As I said before, I think that a film whose sole objective is pure entertainment can have just as much value as a film whose ambitions are more weighty. A movie like, say, Singin' in the Rain's sole purpose is to put a smile on your face. The characters aren't particularly deep, nor is the romance anything that hasn't been done a million times before. But it's a classic, and rightfully so, because it's really well made, the dance numbers are inventive, the performers are all very charismatic, and the songs are catchy. It's a very fun movie, and there's not much more to it than that, and that's okay.

I personally think that there is a lot of pleasure to be had from a really well-executed, complexly choreographed fight scene. You disagree. But that's fine; art is subjective. It would be pretty boring if we all agreed on everything.

And yes, I think The Raid is art.

Ta-Nehisi Coates says it well:

All parties agree that Ron Paul is not, personally, racist and that he didn't write the passages. This is comforting. I am not an anti-Semite. But give me a check to tell Harlem the Jews invented AIDS, and I'll do it.

As I've said before, we all must make our calculus in supporting a candidate or even claiming he is "good" for the debate. But it must be an honest calculus.

If you believe that a character who would conspire to profit off of white supremacy, anti-gay bigotry, and anti-Semitism is the best vehicle for convincing the country to end the drug war, to end our romance with interventionism, to encourage serious scrutiny of state violence, at every level, then you should be honest enough to defend that proposition.

What you should not do is claim that Ron Paul "legislated" for Martin Luther King Day, or claim to have intricate knowledge of Ron Paul's heart, and thus by the harsh accumulation of evidence, be made to look ridiculous.

loving is always the better choice.>> ^StukaFox:

The problem with loving someone: someday, in some way, you'll have to let them go.

Hey Enoch,
yeah we agree on some things but disagree on more.
To clarify, I'll take the central point as you have mentioned above:

"why would somebody find a video where a man admits,on VIDEO,how he almost killed himself due to his addictions and lost that which was most dear,and his consequent "recovery",be perceived as a bad thing?
and the only conclusion i could come up with was the "jesus" factor as being the bitter pill"

I don't understand why this is the "only conclusion" that you could come up with when I've already stated the contrary and given the central reason *twice*. I've also stated that I'm glad he kicked the habit by whatever means, including religious ones (no matter how misguided I feel these reasons to be) and that my criticism lies in the style and tone of the video production. To me it reminds me of a Maralyn Manson video that attempts to glorify the darkness in life and the attractiveness and worthiness of suffering. Allow me to try again.

The style and the tone of the video screams "listen to this worthy man for he is wise through the experiences he has gone through, and his words have more weight than yours".

To entirely take religion out of my point: I have the same problem with how public figures such as Kurt Cobain are deified after their suicide. That somehow through ending his life he gave his words more weight and his outlook more credos. That now he was a tortured glorious soul, that really knew the truth about life. So now rather than his death being a tragedy for himself, his child, and the mother of his child, it was re-contextualised into some form of glorious statement.

The same is true in the coverage of suicides in the media here in Europe. Always there is an air of romance in the notion of killing oneself due to some form of suffering. That's what I abhor, and that's what comes across in this video.

To re-state my very first comment:
"... I have a huge problem with the way he's portrayed in this video. It glamorizes the perceived value of having put his life in the toilet for years. Let's remember that this guy was an idiot who took drugs to the point of it ruining his life, and his daughters life - and still didn't quit after his wife died from the very drugs he was taking. These actions don't give him a ticket to sagedom. Among his tattoos he should have one that states - "I am capable of making the worst possible decisions and taking actions that could have led to my death, and made an orphan of my daughter"."

The religious aspect is an absolute sideshow.

Set a course for adventure, your mind on a new romance!

Different strokes for different blokes I guess. I like the romantic subplots.

>> ^shuac:

I just wish this show was more of a police procedural and less of a soap opera with all the dumb romance subplots that I could not possibly care less about. I fast-forward right through those.