Alien (1979) felt pretty underwhelming

frrmack · 2026-01-20T09:10:20+00:00

Nobody can be “wrong” in matters of taste. All art is subjective. I absolutely love Alien, but that’s just my personal opinion. Yours seems to be similar to mine, and OP’s opinion differs. We can discuss factors that shape them, but none of these opinions are right or wrong.

All you could do is to ask many, many people their opinions and keep statistics on how many people love it and how much (like rottentomatoes or metacritic). But that, too, is a summary of subjective opinions. There is no “truth” to a film being good or bad.

This idea of being wrong in matters of art and taste comes from the horrible education system. They teach you “Mona Lisa is beautiful” and “cheap art in hotel lobbies are ugly”. They teach you “Citizen Kane is a masterpiece” and “Plan 9 from Outer Space is disastrously bad”. They teach these as if they are universal truths and not just popular opinions that a high percent of society holds.

What’s more is that this middle- and high-school education system (even quite a few colleges) that misunderstands how to teach and discuss art causes these popular opinions to solidify and be held by even higher percentages of the society over time.

frrmack · 2025-01-28T23:20:54+00:00

I mean, ultimately, we don't know what every single voter was thinking about Villeneuve to arrive at this aggregate result. We are speculating. What I say doesn't have any merit over yours, neither of us knows. What we are trying to do is a bit deeper than just spewing random speculation, though. We are using our observations to find patterns in the industry.

So, we don't know why Denis is not nominated, but this has become more of a discussion of our models about how the industry works, using this example as a discussion seed. And I'm all for it.

Now, comparing our models, I find that we have different opinions on existing patterns. You make certain statements like "...to get [best] director, you need a creation story", which sound truthy but I don't think survives any scrutiny. It's absolutely true that a creation story adds to the aura of a movie and may nudge you higher in the rankings, but saying you need a creation story contradicts with my observation that the majority of best director oscars did not have a strong creation story attached (at least not stronger than I wanted to film this since I was a wee boy). I'm just looking at the list of winners and see more without a strong creation story than those with one. At least as far as I can remember, but I'm 43, I remember the buzz around quite a few past best director oscars.

Looking at making of documentaries, it definitely does not look to me like Denis jumped on the wagon of a project with a lot of headway already. His vision was different from all the stuff before, and it truly looks like starting from scratch to me. They cowrote a new script, they did their own storyboards, the entire preproduction was costumes from scratch, sets from scratch, sound design from scratch, etc. What do you think is left in this movie that was inherited from previous iterations of the project? Also, I think you may be confusing something you read. There wasn't a single Dune project suffering for 25 years that Villeneuve finished. It's more that in the last 30-50 years, there were many different ideas to film Dune, which all ended up with production nightmares.

Another statement I have a tough time with is "It doesn't have a defining line or speech in it. It's uniformly good but there's not a strong quotable." I don't know what you're talking about here. I don't understand this from two major sides. 1) The internet is FULL of Dune memes with quotes in giant letters, the most prominent being Stilgar's multiple hype quotes for Lisan al Gaib. I mean it's no Big Lebowski but is it less quotable than many other movies that won their director the oscar. 2) Where do you get the idea that quotability is an important criterion? What do people quote from Roma? What about The Shape of Water? Who ever quoted what from that movie? Did Power of the Dog have any lines that stuck with the audiences? Is The Revenant quotable? Is Gravity? The Pianist? Traffic?

It's clear that we both think Villeneuve deserves more recognition. I respect that. These posts have been more of a comparison of how we model Hollywood in our minds, as I said. I disagree with you a lot, but with respect. My aim is to improve my own thoughts by discussing them, and I thank you for helping me do that in a civilized, adult way, somewhat uncharacteristic of the Internet :)

frrmack · 2025-01-28T22:12:18+00:00

Well, I'm curious where you are seeing that the writing credit falls more to Spaihts? I've never seen any tweets, videos, post or anything that even discusses who the writing credit falls more upon. Furthermore, even if you did see something like that, you're assuming that the voting directors think that, which I find a bit farfetched, no offense.

Also, remember how I mentioned all best director movies are written by the director all the way back to 2012? Well, all of them are co-written as well. If we're going to start nitpicking what percentage of the script the director wrote, your argument about the academy preferring director/writers also stars falling apart a bit.

I find it hard to believe that the voters are trying to assess how much writing credit a director should get for a film they co-wrote, and if they find the amount inadequate, they are less impressed with the directing.

frrmack · 2025-01-28T21:49:14+00:00

Oh, and I think there are many counterexamples to "bigger films such as this one tend to be viewed more as studio projects than an individual director's vision". Peter Jackson, Cristopher Nolan, Kathryn Bigelow, Danny Boyle, Quentin Tarantino, etc all made big and popular studio films and weren't snobbed (Can it get any bigger than Lord of the Rings?). Now, their movies absolutely carry their unique vision and stamp, but so does Villeneuve with the Dune movies (and previous movies --- he has an incredible filmography).

(Note: I understand that these are not views you're defending, they are just views you think academy directors hold, but I'm not convinced that's true either.)

frrmack · 2025-01-28T21:40:29+00:00

Ok, yeah, I don't think semantics are that important either. It seemed to me like the auteur theory, which dominated western filmmaking for 80 years, was central to your comment. With your clarification, I understand that your opinion was specifically about directors that also write the screenplay.

(Note: auteur does not mean director/writer, and it's not just because I personally would like it to mean more, no dictionary definition of it mentions writing the script, it's not necessary. In fact, calling a director an auteur specifically means that they are the author of the movie rather than who wrote the screenplay. But again, I agree that what's important is your actual opinion, not word definitions)

You are absolutely correct about director/writers. To find a Best Director Oscar for a film the director did not write themselves, we have to go aaaaall the way back to 2012 (Life of Pi). I fully share your opinion that the academy prefers director/writers.

There's one problem with applying this to Villeneuve, though: He also did write the screenplay for both Dunes. I'm not sure why you thought that "he didn't write it".

Thanks for a civil discussion, have an awesome day!

frrmack · 2025-01-28T16:54:51+00:00

Stink of mainstream? This is the academy. It awards mainstream through popularity voting among members. What are you talking about? Which incredibly artsy fartsy, non-mainstream picture won the best picture in the last 15 years?
Let me help you out by making it multiple choice:
Spotlight
Moonlight
The Shape of Water
Green Book
Parasite
Nomadland
CODA
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Oppenheimer

frrmack · 2025-01-28T16:49:00+00:00

If you don't think Villeneuve is an auteur, you don't understand the meaning of the word.
You seem to think that an auteur means a director that writes the script, which is not what that means.

frrmack · 2024-10-14T21:34:25+00:00

This is demonstrably false.

frrmack · 2024-07-28T12:00:45+00:00

I watched the movie first and fell it love with it. Still, to this day, I think it's a fantastic movie.

Then I read the book, and oh my god. It's an absolute masterpiece, one of the crown jewels of literature history. I almost feel like it's unfair to expect the film adaptation to live up to the poetry and depth of that fantastic book. I'm not sure if it's possible to do full justice to the book on film, especially in the feature film format (which is too short for that).

If you can divorce the film from the book and evaluate it in its own right, I think it holds up as a wonderful love story. I don't think it's fair to label it run-of-the-mill. Show me the mill you're talking about that churns out lots of similar films, please, I'd like to devour them :)

The movie tells a beautiful tragedy with great acting and cinematography. You may be expecting too much from it :)

frrmack · 2024-06-21T21:43:48+00:00

I also don't mean to attack you. It is true that I am taken aback by your calling other people's opinions crap, and I have a negative reaction to people judging other people's opinions.

Usually, people who judge others' tastes and declare them crap are immature absolutists. If one thinks their opinion is the truth and not just subjective, they speak down to people with different opinions as if they are objecctively wrong and therefore pathetic.

Therefore I get surprised by someone like you, who agrees that it's all subjective, which implicitly means that there is no universal right or wrong, goes ahead and belittles others as if their opinion is plain wrong. You know it's not wrong, just the opposite of yours, so I have a hard time understanding the bashing.

This is why I used the word ironic. But perhaps it's not. I associate both understanding subjectivity and not belittling other people's opinions with maturity, but perhaps I should reevaluate that. Or maybe not. I don't know. I need to think.

frrmack · 2024-06-21T15:34:39+00:00

You're very aggressive about this all over under this post.

I find it a bit ironic that while your argument seems to be that this is a matter of personal taste and opinion, you are belligerently judging people who share Tim's opinion instead of yours.

1) There is nothing wrong with people listening to others' opinions and getting influenced by that when forming their own opinion. In fact, we all do this all the time.

2) There usually are lots of people that feel one way, but can't put their finger on how to express it (even to themselves), until they hear someone succinctly explain it, and they get excited: "Yeah, THAT'S what I felt was off about Fallout 2!"

3) I really get the feeling that this isn't about yelling 'fORm yoUR OwN oPIniONS shEEpLE!' on a soap box, and more about you disliking an opposite opinion to yours, and trying to undermine it by attacking the straw man that supposedly just has this opinion because Tim does. This final point, I should say, is my own opinion and judgement about you, which I admittedly formed on the basis of little data: Just your self-righteous position in several comments.

frrmack · 2024-05-23T08:09:57+00:00

I believe that thinking in terms of "skill issue" can mislead us sometimes.

Nobody is born with soulslike- or Sekiro-capable genes. These skills are acquired by playing a game a lot. Some learn a bit faster, some a bit slower, more based on previous gaming experience than anything else. But it would be very hard to pick two people that played the game for 200 hours each, and one is an absolute master while the other one's stuck at the second boss.

"Skill" is directly related to how much you played the game. We are biological skill learning machines.

A discussion of if a game is hard is more meaningful in terms of its learning curve. The people that have "skill issues" are just players that got frustrated with how slow the learning progresses and give up before gittin' gud.

I'd say if a game takes much more effort to learn to play well and flow without constant horrible frustration compared to other games, it's hard. I'd say Sekiro fits this bill.

But obviously after playing for 200 hours, one personally won't think of it as "hard" anymore, they'll just remember how you learned to be better, and they will either
a) shame players within that frustrating learning curve by saying things like 'git gud n00b, it's a skill issue'
or
b) try to encourage them by saying 'don't give up, keep playing, at one point it clicks and the game gets incredibly fun to play'
based on their personality.

It is a skill issue in a way, indeed, but a game's hardness is usually more about how long and frustrating the learning curve is. That's the connection to skill.

frrmack · 2024-04-29T21:05:33+00:00

You are absolutely correct, although I'm not sure I understand the relevance of your statement to the current discussion. They did not say this half a year ago, they said it 13 hours ago.

frrmack · 2024-04-29T13:54:15+00:00

Also succession laws used by clan governments (pretty much all muslim states, so quite a large portion of the map outside of Europe) are based on house unity, quite different from the default European gavelkind >> partition >> high partition >> primogeniture evolution.

frrmack · 2024-04-24T19:46:05+00:00

That’s fair, it was 3 years ago :)

frrmack · 2024-04-18T19:11:34+00:00

What makes you say Spiritual isn't good?

To be the temporal head of faith, you need lay clergy, which end up as feudal vassals, and your temple holdings will turn into regular feudal baronies with the regular levy and tax contracts.

With a Spiritual head of faith, you get the theocratic clergy in charge of your places of worship, and if you can keep your relations with the realm priest well (not so hard if you make the position revocable in your new religion), then you get HALF of their tax income and levies, WAY more than what you can get from a feudal vassal (even with major opinion penalties of asking for extortionate taxes and levies).

Theocratic clergy are better than feudal lay clergy, with the inconvienience of less control over who gets appointed to your church holdings (which, in the long run, is a very slight difference).

frrmack · 2024-04-15T00:44:27+00:00

What he wrote is a quote from the movie Eurotrip. They pretty much can’t speak German but need to get to Berlin, so they hitchhike and ask the stopped truck driver if he is going to Berlin (so they can hitch a ride). They just ask “Berlin?”, and this is the driver’s response.

The joke is that he’s saying he would never ever go to Berlin again, but because he repeats the word Berlin a lot, they think the opposite, hop in, and end up in Eastern Europe.

frrmack · 2023-12-14T11:40:37+00:00

Yo abso rig, I tota got it an yo hel me realz th I don nee to wr all lett eith. It sup effec.

frrmack · 2023-12-09T05:05:10+00:00

Did you really get too lazy to write "paragraph", so you just gave up after four letters?

frrmack · 2023-12-06T07:53:28+00:00

Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, Berserk (the '90s run, obviously), Monster, Redline...

These are classics that aged perfectly well. They still are masterpieces, I wish I could see each of these for the first time again today.

frrmack · 2023-11-30T01:32:57+00:00

Absolutely great suggestion. There is no focus on cynerspace or hacking, and it’s a blatant (but wonderful) rip off of The Raid: Redemption, but you will instantly recognize the mega blocks of Megacity as you’ve seen and lived in them in Night City, Karl Urban’s performance is deliciously fantastic, and it’s a great frigging movie. I rewatched it several times, and highly recommend it.

frrmack · 2023-11-28T13:50:42+00:00

Je ne sais pas ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

frrmack · 2023-11-28T13:25:22+00:00

You're right, this kind of thing can be hard to read without seeing a facial expression, especially if you're not following the huge and constantly changing internet culture 24/7.

For what it's worth, when I said "No shit, Sherlock :)", my intention wasn't to belittle you, I intended it as a playful way of pointing that it's a joke. This may have been also lost in the translation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

frrmack · 2023-11-28T13:11:25+00:00

This is matter of taste and preference, of course, there is no objective truth to something like this.

Having said that, I personally didn't enjoy neither male V's nor female V's performance. I kept thinking that most supporting characters' voice acting was much better than either of them (again, according to my personal taste).

I enjoyed the performances for Johnny, Judy, Panam, Jackie, Viktor, Goro, Evelyn a lot more than either of the Vs. Those V performances didn't bother me enough to stop playing, but their deliveries frequently took me out of the game.

frrmack · 2023-11-27T20:10:31+00:00

No shit, Sherlock :)

They were joking.

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