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Entertainment, Two-Minute Hate

I’ve moaned about this nonsense before:

Since hitting UK cinemas last month, the atomic bomb thriller Oppenheimer — which stars Cillian Murphy in the titular role — has been given a slew of five star ratings while critics branded it Nolan’s ‘best and most revealing work’.

However:

BBC News star Jane Hill revealed she walked out of Christopher Nolan’s film halfway through after spotting a major flaw that left her ‘disappointed’.

I was thinking “historical inaccuracy” or “gratuitous sex/violence”, but no:

It appears Jane was certainly not in agreement as she shared that she was frustrated at not being able to hear the film’s dialogue properly due to the loud soundtrack — and was even more astounded to learn that the issue occurs in almost ‘all’ of Nolan’s films.

She told her followers: ‘Saw Oppenheimer. Well, managed half of it. Disappointed that music & effects often drowned out the actors, I missed whole chunks of dialogue. 

Well, that takes the movie off my “to watch” list.

Till fairly recently, I thought that this degraded sound in movies was simply the result of my age- and tinnitus-ridden hearing, but now I know the truth.  It seems that the new trend in cinema verité  is now to muddy up the dialogue either by having the actors mutter their lines — and sometimes in thick, incomprehensible accents withal — or else to submerge the speech with over-loud sound effects and / or “background” music.  Or in the case of this weasel Nolan, both.

Sorry, but there’s not much verité  when you can’t hear it being spoken.

I know, the answer is to wait for the movies to appear on a streaming service, and then tap the “subtitles” button.

Nah I’m not going to do that.  If I’m going to have to use subtitles, then I’ll just watch furrin stuff like gloomy Scandi detective shows or Belgian whodunnits, which quite frankly are often better than their “English” competition anyway.

The Son&Heir suggested that I get a sound bar for my TV so that I can turn up the “mids” (mid-range audio) and compensate, but I’m not going to do that either.

This little trend is like an artist covering his painting with sheets of thick gauze so you have to strain your eyes to see what’s on the canvas.  I wouldn’t bother looking at those, and I’m not going to watch these shitty movies either.

A pox on all of them.

Related:  Oppenheimer  director Nolan tells us all to fuck off.

3 Questions That Shouldn’t Need Answering

3 Inexplicable Things, Guy Stuff

Every so often one will come across a question to which the answer is self-evident, but someone’s going to ask it anyway.  Here’s an example:

1. “When you find a rusted-out old kitchen knife, why not just toss it out and buy a shiny new one from Williams-Sonoma?”
— because nothing looks as fine as a well-restored blade, not just in appearance, but in its intrinsic history.  Need proof?  See here, where some guy with mad skillz goes after an old cleaver.

Here’s another one:

2. “Why would someone spend $170,000 on a replica of an old car?”
— because as long as the replica has been manufactured by engineers with all respect for quality as well as heritage, it’s worth it, and not the least because the originals require not just stupid money, but insanely-stupid money available only to Russian oligarchs, software company founders and parvenus like Jeff Bezos (also criminals, some overlap with the aforementioned).


(watch the second video at the link…)

Here’s another question of this ilk (but by no means the final one):

3. “Why is The Repair Shop such a popular TV show?  All they do is restore old junk.”
…it’s not “junk”, it’s heritage, history, treasured artifacts and sentimental objects.  To watch Steve Fletcher fixing an old clock, Will Kirk restoring an old piece of furniture or even those two old pink-haired biddies bringing wrecked toy dolls and teddy bears back to life is to see and feel the joy of a miniature triumph of life over death.  If you are not moved by that, you are a foul, crass and cynical human being.

The overall answer to all the above questions can be summed up in one word:

Craftsmanship.

It’s a rare talent (and becoming rarer still when so many people are seduced by cheap, fragile and nasty knock-offs from China or Eastern Europe), and if we hold on to no other custom, craftsmanship is worth everything. To quote Oscar Wilde’s words from Lady Windermere’s Fan :

Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.

I know I’m always teetering dangerously close to the latter, but all I can say is:  guilty as charged.  Especially where beauty and craftsmanship are involved.

Karma Smiles

Marketing / Advertising, Sports

Two headlines that had me chuckling, when seen one after the other:

…and then:

So their lesbians beat our lesbians.  (I know, this whole Lesbo World Cup is of little interest over in this corner of Teh Intarwebz, being a) soccer and b) womyns’ sports, but stay with me here.)

This whole non-singing of the national anthem — when you have been chosen to represent your country — has stuck in my craw since Day One.  By not singing the anthem, what you’re saying is that this is not a momentous privilege but just another thing you have to do before signing that lucrative endorsement deal.

And then kvetching when you don’t get that lucrative endorsement deal.

I know, I know:  it’s their First Amendment right and all that, but people need to understand that sometimes there are consequences to actions, and this would be one of those times.

I’m no longer an executive in this business but if I were, there is absolutely no way I would sign up one of these unpatriotic and ungrateful assholes and pay them some large sum of money, because in all good faith I couldn’t show them wearing the Team USA shirt (on the Wheaties packet, for example) when they’ve basically indicated that wearing said shirt is anathema to them.

Enjoy your stay in Oblivion City, shitbirds.

But Of Course

Good Stuff, Legal Stuff

You will remember last week’s post wherein we all giggled upon seeing some shoplifting scrote getting his just deserts at the hands (stick?) of a shop owner who was fed-up by having said scrote stealing from him for the third time.

Well, because this happened in Cali-fucking-fornia, we now have this development:

Apparently, while many California cities have no desire to actually enforce the laws against people who steal from business owners and put them in financial peril, they are interested in enforcing battery laws involving the protection of said businesses. According to a new report, the Sikh man is now facing criminal charges as local police investigate the incident.

My own modest suggestion would be to borrow the man’s stick and beat the shit out of whoever actually charges this hero, but no doubt somebody’s going to have a problem with this.  (Just nobody, I suspect, among my Readers.)

But here’s what gets the RCOB moving:

Some are making the argument that the force used on the shoplifter in the video was excessive, and as a purely legal matter, that may be true. The shoplifter was begging for mercy while the store owner continued to swing back and strike him. The question is at what point the store owner is expected to disengage, and he likely passed that point.

The store owner “disengaged” before breaking any bones or causing any lasting damage to the asshole.  All he did was deliver a sound beating, and only in today’s pussified society could this be termed “excessive”.   Nobody cares if the scrote was “begging for mercy”, especially after the store owner tried his best to stop the overt shoplifting in a non-violent manner before resorting to the stick.

I am so glad I’m going to the range this afternoon with the Son&Heir…

Classic Beauty: Colleen Moore

Classic Beauty

Silent / talkies star Colleen Moore, I think, typifies both the look and the ethos of that most interesting era.

And when she moved away from the “flapper” look:  still more beautiful.

One last note about Colleen Moore:  unlike so many actors and actresses of her (or any) era, she actually learned how to keep and grow her income through careful investment.  She even wrote a book about it.  Gorgeous and intelligent, by golly.

It’s just a tragedy that most of her movies, like so many of the early stars, have been lost so we can’t appreciate them fully.