I'm going to be blasphemous. I didn't care for Steel Magnolias. In fact, I kind of got the impression that people have confused it with a similar but better movie. Everyone who's suggested it to me as been all "Yay, strong women sticking together and supporting each other, yay!" and um... OK. If you say so.
It's a very typical -- I'd say archtypical -- 1980s women's picture. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's another movie where even if you haven't seen it, you've probably seen it.
I probably would have enjoyed it more if I'd been able to pretend that Shelby had some rare condition that was completely not diabetes. Because that was completely not diabetes. They even tried to make it "special" diabetes, but it's just not cutting it.
First, so she has an insulin reaction, and you can tell because she has a... kinda seizure-y type thing? That's... unusual. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's unusual. My grandmother's aunt, or so I'm told, would fall asleep when she had an insulin reaction and could not be woken up until some form of sugar had been forced down her throat. My grandmother would turn violent or throw a temper tantrum. My extremely diabetic teammate in high school once had a bad insulin reaction while on a field trip bus, and they knew because while trying to fall asleep on his seatmate's shoulder in the middle of the day, he asked "isn't it cold in here?" -- in 90F weather with no air conditioning.
You look up "insulin reaction", seizure is not one of the common things to come up. It's usually some form of cognitive change (confusion, temper, or temper tantrum), or falling asleep and not responding to attempts to be woken up. If it gets to the seizure point, a doctor needs to be called, even if the juice makes them feel better.
Next problem with the diabetes issue comes as a result of the other big problem with the movie: a woman with baby fever with no regard for her own health. Death is an acceptable side effect if it gets you a kid made of your very own genetic material. Real women have babies. Full stop.
Yeah, it's one of those.
So of course Shelby has to have a baby of her very own genetic material with no consideration that she's got a very good chance of passing on her "special diabetes".
Now the major concerns of a diabetic woman becoming pregnant are:
1) Birth defects. Blood sugar levels off either way can cause problems, so you have to keep them under control. (Shelby didn't put any thought on-screen into this aspect of her choice. What little we see is "It might kill me but I'm OK with that because Real Women Have Babies.")
2) High blood pressure and it's associated effects. From my reading, blindness is usually the first major complication that shows up from diabetes-induced high blood pressure during pregnancy.
Not with Shelby though. Somehow the "special diabetes" completely trashes her kidneys while doing absolutely nothing else. No eye problems, no heart problems, just boom. Kidneys are completely gone. (It's OK, she just borrows one from Mom. And you thought it was bad when your kids take off with your clothes!)
And then finally she just goes into fatal renal failure with virtually no warning signs. Two pangs of pain in the back and boom, she's braindead. No fatigue, no nausea, no extremities swelling, no abnormal creatinine levels. Just drops like a rock.
But not before she drags the telephone outside to try to call for help, instead of calling from where the phone is located.
There are better Female Buddy Flicks out there.
(Poor Netflix. You know how it tries to bring up suggestions on movies you might like? It's just thrown up its hands and given up with me. Can't say I blame it. I mean, I loved Van Helsing and liked League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, yet didn't care for Underworld. How to you guess with someone like me?)
Friday, November 27, 2009
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Babylon 5 DVDs - the technical issues
Babylon 5 was an awesome series. If you're a sci fi person and you haven't seen it, you should. If you liked Star Trek DS9, you'll like Bab 5 even more (and, um, that's not a coincidence. ^_^;)
However, the DVD releases have some technical issues. The way I hear it, Straczynski was perhaps a little too farsighted. He realized that 16:9 proportion HDTVs were coming and that syndicated reruns and video sets of TV series were going to have a market and acted accordingly, and IMHO that actually makes the current release worse than it would have been if he'd been as shortsighted as everyone else in the mid 90s.
Three problem areas: Live action shots, CG shots, and live action w/ CG special effects. (Yeah, that pretty much covers everything. Hang with me here, though.)
Live action shots have the least problems. Straczynski realized that widescreen TVs were coming and so taped the live action portions in widescreen on high resolution movie film. However, shots were still framed for the ubiquitous 4:3 TVs at the time. So at best, there's a lot of basically empty space on the sides of every wide shot. Close-ups are worse, though. A lot of his closeups are so close to show facial expressions that the tops of heads are cut off. This was fine on a 4:3 where the framing made it obvious (or more accurately, less jarring) that this is why the heads are chopped off. But in widescreen, you've got someone's hairline cut off and tons of empty space in the sides of the shot. It looks for all the world like they've made a mock widescreen by cutting off the tops and bottoms of a 4:3 shot.
(Even knowing scenes were actually filmed widescreen, I'm still convinced the Sci Fi channel did just cut off portions of some of the later episodes during their first widescreen showing, because the contents of Cartagia's desk were really quite important to that scene. But that's beside the point.)
Bigger problem is the CG scenes. They were NOT originally rendered in high resolution 16:9. The idea was that by the time 16:9 HDTVs became commonplace, computer rendering technology would be much better, so they would just re-render the scenes for widescreen with the better technology. I can see where at the time that seemed like a good idea, especially given how slow rendering was at the time (and probably still is, really). Looking back, I can also see how what actually happened was almost inevitable.
See, there were a few important questions that were not answered when they made this decision. Will the future technology be backwards compatible with our files? Will our files be high resolution enough to look good with the future technology? And, the one that bit them in the ass, do we have a robust storage system for all of our files?
When you're doing CGI, you aren't working with a single file. Usually each object, or at least each major object, is in a separate file for easier reuse and lower file sizes. Well, they've lost some of the models; they just don't have them any more.
So, they CAN'T re-render the CG scenes, because they don't have some of the important files. They don't have good archival copies of the CG scenes, because "we're just going to re-render those". All they have is the lower resolution NTSC format.
So, they're mixing the excellent image quality of the widescreen live-action scenes with the absolutely awful quality of the NTSC CG scenes that have not been stored well. To be perfectly honest, the switching back and forth from great quality to horrible gives me a headache to watch.
And, of course, to widescreen the CG shots they do have to chop off bits of the screen.
The worst to me, though, are scenes where CG effects are used in live action shots. They can't redo the CG effects. Sometimes they can recomposite the original effects over the better widescreen footage, which doesn't always looks so good. Sometimes they can't even do that and the entire image quality drops, which gives the effect of "Whoa, Delenn, you went all fuzzy all of a sudden". And whenever they do a composite shot, they have to chop off bits to maintain the widescreen ratio, because they don't have the sides of the shot in the special effects footage.
Lots of fans are unhappy with the image quality on the DVDs, and of course everyone has different ideas of how it could be fixed. Me personally, assuming it's possible, I'd rather have just the original 4:3 format shows, with the associated lower image quality in the live action shots but consistent quality throughout. It's the jump in quality between scenes depending on whether there's CG or not that gives me headaches. And frankly, I'd rather have the full shots of the CG scenes than the extra unessential side areas of the live shots that we get when converting to 16:9.
However, the DVD releases have some technical issues. The way I hear it, Straczynski was perhaps a little too farsighted. He realized that 16:9 proportion HDTVs were coming and that syndicated reruns and video sets of TV series were going to have a market and acted accordingly, and IMHO that actually makes the current release worse than it would have been if he'd been as shortsighted as everyone else in the mid 90s.
Three problem areas: Live action shots, CG shots, and live action w/ CG special effects. (Yeah, that pretty much covers everything. Hang with me here, though.)
Live action shots have the least problems. Straczynski realized that widescreen TVs were coming and so taped the live action portions in widescreen on high resolution movie film. However, shots were still framed for the ubiquitous 4:3 TVs at the time. So at best, there's a lot of basically empty space on the sides of every wide shot. Close-ups are worse, though. A lot of his closeups are so close to show facial expressions that the tops of heads are cut off. This was fine on a 4:3 where the framing made it obvious (or more accurately, less jarring) that this is why the heads are chopped off. But in widescreen, you've got someone's hairline cut off and tons of empty space in the sides of the shot. It looks for all the world like they've made a mock widescreen by cutting off the tops and bottoms of a 4:3 shot.
(Even knowing scenes were actually filmed widescreen, I'm still convinced the Sci Fi channel did just cut off portions of some of the later episodes during their first widescreen showing, because the contents of Cartagia's desk were really quite important to that scene. But that's beside the point.)
Bigger problem is the CG scenes. They were NOT originally rendered in high resolution 16:9. The idea was that by the time 16:9 HDTVs became commonplace, computer rendering technology would be much better, so they would just re-render the scenes for widescreen with the better technology. I can see where at the time that seemed like a good idea, especially given how slow rendering was at the time (and probably still is, really). Looking back, I can also see how what actually happened was almost inevitable.
See, there were a few important questions that were not answered when they made this decision. Will the future technology be backwards compatible with our files? Will our files be high resolution enough to look good with the future technology? And, the one that bit them in the ass, do we have a robust storage system for all of our files?
When you're doing CGI, you aren't working with a single file. Usually each object, or at least each major object, is in a separate file for easier reuse and lower file sizes. Well, they've lost some of the models; they just don't have them any more.
So, they CAN'T re-render the CG scenes, because they don't have some of the important files. They don't have good archival copies of the CG scenes, because "we're just going to re-render those". All they have is the lower resolution NTSC format.
So, they're mixing the excellent image quality of the widescreen live-action scenes with the absolutely awful quality of the NTSC CG scenes that have not been stored well. To be perfectly honest, the switching back and forth from great quality to horrible gives me a headache to watch.
And, of course, to widescreen the CG shots they do have to chop off bits of the screen.
The worst to me, though, are scenes where CG effects are used in live action shots. They can't redo the CG effects. Sometimes they can recomposite the original effects over the better widescreen footage, which doesn't always looks so good. Sometimes they can't even do that and the entire image quality drops, which gives the effect of "Whoa, Delenn, you went all fuzzy all of a sudden". And whenever they do a composite shot, they have to chop off bits to maintain the widescreen ratio, because they don't have the sides of the shot in the special effects footage.
Lots of fans are unhappy with the image quality on the DVDs, and of course everyone has different ideas of how it could be fixed. Me personally, assuming it's possible, I'd rather have just the original 4:3 format shows, with the associated lower image quality in the live action shots but consistent quality throughout. It's the jump in quality between scenes depending on whether there's CG or not that gives me headaches. And frankly, I'd rather have the full shots of the CG scenes than the extra unessential side areas of the live shots that we get when converting to 16:9.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Maybe I'll Pack This Nano Up
As I usually do in November, I've been participating in Nanowrimo. You might not know this except for the status widget temporarily living in my side bar, because I haven't really been talking about it. There's so much stressful stuff going on in my life this time around that I wanted this one to fairly light, low emotional investment compared to some year, and most importantly, be eminently bailable.
It's gone OK for the most part. The story's been pretty fun and there haven't been any angst puppies. But, then a non-writing problem came up. If you're reading this in November, see the block of red where 3 days were short and two didn't get any writing at all? Well, that's when what was supposed to be a squeeful indulgence of buying a fancy new sewing machine turned into a complete fiasco that took a ton of my mental energy and a significant amount of time (including taking off of work early one day) to sort out. It's still not settled, but it has settled down and right now I think it'll come out well, but it took a lot of footwork on my part for that to happen.
So now I'm about 5,000 words behind. That is absolutely overcomeable. In the past there have been times I wrote that much in a single day. In 2007, there were several times I did that much in a single day. But you know what? I just don't want to.
I'm just not feeling the love. The story's fine, there's nothing I want to do different. I'm not unhappy with it. I'm just not feeling it. The part I'm doing now ought to be the good part. My main characters have been kidnapped by terrorists and they're in the midst of the exciting death defying escape complete with crawling through Jeffries tubes and spouting technobabble, and once they escape the civil war will start, and it all ought to be cool. This is the part I was looking forward to writing. But now I just want to get it over with.
More importantly, I don't want to spend my vacation doing this. (Apparently I want to spend my vacation crazy quilting, which isn't the easiest thing with the sewing machine fiasco, but that's beside the point.)
Before I pack it up completely, I think I'm going to start playing with another story. If my muse goes nuts on the new, or goes "No, I do want to finish Emily and the Emperor", then great, we'll do it. If that's not happening either, then that's fine, too. Nowhere is it written that I must bat 1000 every time in everything.
It's gone OK for the most part. The story's been pretty fun and there haven't been any angst puppies. But, then a non-writing problem came up. If you're reading this in November, see the block of red where 3 days were short and two didn't get any writing at all? Well, that's when what was supposed to be a squeeful indulgence of buying a fancy new sewing machine turned into a complete fiasco that took a ton of my mental energy and a significant amount of time (including taking off of work early one day) to sort out. It's still not settled, but it has settled down and right now I think it'll come out well, but it took a lot of footwork on my part for that to happen.
So now I'm about 5,000 words behind. That is absolutely overcomeable. In the past there have been times I wrote that much in a single day. In 2007, there were several times I did that much in a single day. But you know what? I just don't want to.
I'm just not feeling the love. The story's fine, there's nothing I want to do different. I'm not unhappy with it. I'm just not feeling it. The part I'm doing now ought to be the good part. My main characters have been kidnapped by terrorists and they're in the midst of the exciting death defying escape complete with crawling through Jeffries tubes and spouting technobabble, and once they escape the civil war will start, and it all ought to be cool. This is the part I was looking forward to writing. But now I just want to get it over with.
More importantly, I don't want to spend my vacation doing this. (Apparently I want to spend my vacation crazy quilting, which isn't the easiest thing with the sewing machine fiasco, but that's beside the point.)
Before I pack it up completely, I think I'm going to start playing with another story. If my muse goes nuts on the new, or goes "No, I do want to finish Emily and the Emperor", then great, we'll do it. If that's not happening either, then that's fine, too. Nowhere is it written that I must bat 1000 every time in everything.
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