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Interesting. I just reread Dune through Dune Chapterhouse less than a year ago, so some of the details will be fresh. Unlike the purists, I'll go see it or at least buy the Blu-Ray.
I have a high tolerance for deviation between a novel and its movie version, as long as the director and cast mean well. Lord of the Rings was great, and I enjoyed the Hobbit trilogy simply because they told a good story within the Tolkien universe. On the other end of the spectrum, the worst offenders in recent years were I, Robot and Starship Troopers.
I, Robot wasn't bad as long as you forgot Asimov's stories. Sadly, I don't think the Good Doctor's stories hold up as well today, given present technology.
Starship Troopers was a desecration and a travesty. I don't think Paul Verhoeven even read the wikipedia article on the novel, much less the novel itself. His claims that he was satirizing the politics in Heinlein's novel is a lame attempt at justifying his ineptitude.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I enjoyed the Dune films and look forward to the next one and I agree that Starship Troopers was a truly terrible film but Battlefield Earth has got to be the worst scifi travesty yet.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: Battlefield Earth
Yes, but the film only emphasized the level of über-suck in the book. I made the mistake of reading it.
Software Zen: delete this;
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There is an old saying : never judge a book by its movie.
and I am not claiming you that you are.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: as long as the director and cast mean well. Lord of the Rings was great, and I enjoyed the Hobbit trilogy simply because they told a good story within the Tolkien universe
Having read the books - including reading Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings aloud to my son (age eight - it took a year), I have a certain desire for some accuracy. Add in Silmarillion and it's intensified.
That being said, I also accept that in a mere 10 hours of movie time they'd have to skip a lot. Mrs Wife, who'd not read it, enjoyed it thoroughly and is a fan of Ents. But true to the Tolkein universe? Not so much.
The greatest affront of all was making Gimli into a buffoon and his friendship Legolas swapped for the Elf and Ranger being the buddies. Dwarves were nobodies fools. Hell - even look at how they debouched Hobbit: Legolas making an appearance.
Not at all as a purist but at the same time I have some limits. I could whine about more. Interestingly, I though I would, but never get around to wanting to re-watch the trilogy. Maybe that says something. The Hobbit movies were a bit of a travesty.
But, rolling back to the OP, I'll chant a tune I've implicitly and explicitly sung before (as would an elf under the stars): they know their audience. Special effects or you lose their attention. Power-up pellets, like in a video game, in the form of super-weapons and such. Plenty of big blasts, perhaps. In a world where remakes are what passes for imagination, why expect more?
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I agree with Maximilien that the David Lynch movie was far superior to the later teevee series.
Unfortunately, it appears this new movie casts Timothy Chalamet as Paul Atreides ... a wanna-be actor who proved he can't act when miscast as Henry V in the movie, "The King."
While Chalamet may possess a currently fashionable whimpering-emo-metro persona, the role of Paul demands an actor capable of ... as Paul evolves ... portraying gravitas.
For my tastes, in sci-fi, the ultimate manifestation of gravitas was Edward James Olmos' role as captain Adama in Battlestar Galactica.
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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The worst film ever, made from one of the best books ever. Oh well, the trailer looks like this one will be just as bad, although with better special effects.
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I found the Dune movie a basic bore as well. Haven't done the book - scared off by the movie.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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The book was brilliant, assuming you like SF, and was so much more than was in the film. Much greater development of the characters and their relationships. I have moved on in my reading interests since then but may well go back to it some time.
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I agree the book was brilliant, but I found that the further I went into the sequels, the worse they became, to the extent that I never finished God Emperor of Dune. I never saw the movie, and probably won't bother with the new one, although I did enjoy hearing Pink Floyd again.
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I totally agree with you about the sequels although I did plough on to the end.
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Never seen the original movie, never read the book. Meh.
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I used Dune (194) Extended Edition to get to sleep last night. 41 minutes of extra footage. I couldn't tell you where the extra scenes are because I fell asleep so fast!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Of all the things one can use to weight one browser vs another...one thing I liked about IE is that you had a trivially easy way to always, consistently, get it to prompt you where to download files (Save As rather than Save).
I'm avoiding Chrome, and I'm no fan of FireFox. So I'm trying to get used to Edge (or as some call it, now that it's using Chromium, "Chredge").
However, like Chrome, when you download a file, the download starts immediately, defaulting to your Downloads folder. Which you can change...but that's to permanently change your downloads folder.
But very often I want to tell a browser to download a specific file into a specific folder, and Save As worked great for those "one-off" situations. But Chredge insists on downloading everything into the one designated folder, without prompting you. Or, every once in a while, I do get a Save As prompt, but it's very inconsistent. I honestly have no idea what triggers it (why at times it comes up, and at others, it doesn't).
There's a right-click option, Save Link As, which works for links that are pointing directly to the resource to download (it triggers a standard Save As dialog box, which is what I want). But if the download is implemented through button or an image that triggers some script that eventually gets you to the download, then the best that might happen is a prompt to save an HTML page, and not the actual file.
If I haven't discovered it yet by now, then I can't imagine it's there and I've just missed it. Thoughts? A custom policy maybe? The one-liner question is: I want an option for the browser to always prompt me where to save a given download.
[Edit]
And if your suggestion is to move the file out of the Downloads folder and into the target folder after it's done, then you're missing the point.
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edge://settings/downloads
Tick "Ask where to save each file before downloading".
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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facepalm
Ok, I went there...and it's checked. So shouldn't it, y'know, "ask where to save each file before downloading", like the label says...??
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It should. It's always worked for me in Chrome. Maybe there's a bug in "Edge-ium". 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Did I hear Elephantium?
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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Why do they hide these useful things...
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No fan of FireFox but this is important to you.
Well, in FireFox, you simply open the options page (Tools->Options> and on the very first page of adjustments (General) you can scroll down to "Files & Applications" and set two convenient parameters:
One: set a default directory for downloads.
Two: click checkbox to "always ask"
It's been trivially easy like this for many years.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Nice.
What this tells me is that, if they went through the trouble of "re-introducing" the feature...then I can't possibly be the only one to find the current behavior annoying.
Looking forward to it. I really liked the Save vs Save As options to be there instead of the current one-size-fits-all solution. Because conversely, sometimes I do want to be prompted where to save it, and at other times, I just want it to use the default. It makes sense to me to make both options readily available for each download.
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This is a consistent pattern in all of Microsoft's applications that have the ability to save files. For example, I can never tell where Outlook will default to saving an attachment. It's never the same folder twice. The other Office applications exhibit the same behavior. Most of their non-Office apps insist on using the Documents folder, even if you've already saved something in a different folder in the same session.
Software Zen: delete this;
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You have to take into consideration that we're not normal. Normal people just do things with their computer as-is. If they download something, they expect it to be in their Download folder. If they save a picture, they expect it to be in their Pictures folder. If the browser asks them where to store a downloaded file or picture, it will just confuse and annoy them.
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