What Am I Watching Right now?

Claire Danes (Carrie) used to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Mandy Patinkin (Saul) played in Princess Bride alongside Robin Wright, who is now in House of Cards.
Amazing versatility.

LeCaptain wrote:Claire Danes (Carrie) used to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Mandy Patinkin (Saul) played in Princess Bride alongside Robin Wright, who is now in House of Cards.
Amazing versatility.

Criminal Minds went down the crapper when he left.

Yeah, this Mandy fellow is quite the actor!

tim1_2 wrote:Yeah, this Mandy fellow is quite the actor!

I think Barry Manilow wrote a song about him.

LeCaptain wrote:Claire Danes (Carrie) used to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Mandy Patinkin (Saul) played in Princess Bride alongside Robin Wright, who is now in House of Cards.
Amazing versatility.

And Carol Kane (who was Miracle Max's wife on PB and Larka's gilr on Taxi) is now the Penguin's mother on Gotham. And Kevin Spacey's big break came as the cocaine snorting deuchbag in the limo in Working Girl. Are we playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon?

I just watched Boyhood. Just WOW. Best movie of the year no contest. They filmed it within 12 years with the same kid growing up from 6 until he's 18 and go to College.

Watched The Edge of Tomorrow a couple days ago. Decent. Have Gravity line up for tonight. Unfortunately I know the storyline. I'll have to act surprised for the wife.

Also downloaded S1 of Pushing Daisies. I think the kids will like it.

Edge of Tomorrow was awesome I thought, and Gravity is spectacular, but I saw it on IMAX 3D, where it blew my mind.

Gravity on IMAX 3D was the best experience of 2013 entertainment wise.

By the way, stay away from movie presentations in HFR (High Frame Rate). It looks suspiciously like "motion smoothing" -- that's the algorithm used on 120Hx and higher TVs where they take two successive frames and interpolate a third frame to insert in-between. The end result is known as the soap opera effect where material shot on film starts to look like video tape. It works for sports but I, personally, hate it for movies.

EDIT: I guess I'm not the only one who hated it:
http://www.cnet.com/news/the-hobbit-3d-tech-divides-our-cnet-reviewers/

We've decided to push Gravity off to New Year's Eve and watch it with the kids.

Pushing Daisies was a bit of a disaster. Every one wanted to watch it after I played a few minutes on the tablet, but the content I downloaded included two audio streams -- the original English (stream 2) and Russian. On my tablet (VLC) I can select which audio stream to use, but when using BubbleUPnP to stream the content to my smart tv, the player on the smart tv did not have such an option and I ended up with both audio tracks playing (the English one much quieter than the Russian one). They thought it was funny for the first 30 seconds but quickly got tired of it when they realized I could not turn it off.

I tried playing it using VLC and casting it to the ChromeCast device but the ChromeCast could not play the audio at all (guess it didn't have the codec for it). There were no firmware updates for the TV and after updating ChromeCast it still did not play the audio.

So I had to delete and re-download everything again. Now I'm having trouble finding the subs for episodes 7-9. The best I found for E07 is pretty close until about half-way, beyond that it's drifted by about 5 seconds (which makes it hard to watch). Pushing Daisies has a lot of fast-dialog and subs help.

I wonder if all of this is a plot to get people to buy the blu ray box sets.

wprager wrote:By the way, stay away from movie presentations in HFR (High Frame Rate).  It looks suspiciously like "motion smoothing" -- that's the algorithm used on 120Hx and higher TVs where they take two successive frames and interpolate a third frame to insert in-between.  The end result is known as the soap opera effect where material shot on film starts to look like video tape.  It works for sports but I, personally, hate it for movies.

EDIT: I guess I'm not the only one who hated it:
http://www.cnet.com/news/the-hobbit-3d-tech-divides-our-cnet-reviewers/

It's awful.

wprager wrote:I wonder if all of this is a plot to get people to buy the blu ray box sets.

Getting you off piracy shouldn't be considered a "plot"

LeCaptain wrote:

wprager wrote:By the way, stay away from movie presentations in HFR (High Frame Rate).  It looks suspiciously like "motion smoothing" -- that's the algorithm used on 120Hx and higher TVs where they take two successive frames and interpolate a third frame to insert in-between.  The end result is known as the soap opera effect where material shot on film starts to look like video tape.  It works for sports but I, personally, hate it for movies.

EDIT: I guess I'm not the only one who hated it:
http://www.cnet.com/news/the-hobbit-3d-tech-divides-our-cnet-reviewers/

It's awful.

The weird thing is that in TV sets they are "making stuff up" by interpolating edges from two successive frames. But in the HFR case they actually filmed it at 48 fps. I used to think that the problem was with the interpolation, but if actually filming it at a higher frame rate does this then I'm at a loss why it's so bad. I've seen nature shows where a particular scene (e.g. frog flicking its tongue out at a fly) is shot at a high frame rate, and it looked great.

Not really watching, but figuring out the driving tomorrow. Out of town tournament and first game is 11L30 in Napanee. So I was wondering how far it is from the rink to the hotel (figured maybe my wife could take my other daughter and check in while I'm at the first game). Google maps showed 2 hours 36 minutes. What? Apparently whiteout conditions on the 401 resulted in a serious accident just outside Kingston that's got it backed up all the way to Gananoque. We have snow on the way (total of 4 cm expected today and overnight) and I was planning on taking highway 7 to the arena. Now I'm not so sure. Will 7 be plowed or will I be better off taking the 416 to the 401? It's about 50 km longer that way but driving time is almost the same. Driving conditions will make all the difference.

I'll be leaving at 8AM.

I generally prefer the 416 just because it's multiple lanes, but 50km longer is significant. The 416 will likely be better if there's any amount of snow though. I dunno...you're kind of doomed either way. Best of luck.

And if the noon game tomorrow isn't enough the coach called a practice for 7PM tonight. I don't want to go. My daughter doesn't want to go. The turkey in by bowel probably doesn't want to go either. Had to get up at 6 this morning to drive my son to his 7AM shift (sure, he gets time-and-a-half, what do I get) and then tomorrow will likely have to get up at 6:30 to pack and leave by 8. My parents never paid $780 for hockey registration plus $200 team fees and various other incidental expenses just so they drive three hours to spend $300 on a hotel room and spend the weekend in a cold arena. My parents *were* smart after all.