The reason is that these are hand painted and are done by highly skilled professionals whereas the final retail versions are done by factory workers in Vietnam or China for the head and the tampograph machines for the eyes. To get such a high quality paint application, it is going to cost you an additional 150-250…

I have many Hot Toys figures and they really do look good but it should also be specified that they rarely look as good as those prototype pictures. There is always a loss of detail and quality during production. Those pictures are like the perfect figure perfectly painted and molded with the perfect lighting.

The most visually stunning movie I’ve seen in a long time was Phantom Thread, which was ineligible for the cinematography Oscar due to not having an official director of photography credit, so I’m good with Deakins finally getting his Oscar.

Fair point. I didn’t take “The Blackout” to mean a literal power outage, but as the nickname for some kind of catastrophic worldwide failure of drives, but agreed that it’s an exaggeration either way. That said, I think it was acceptable as a device to harness the dread of mass information loss, which is both…

So he was asked a question and answered it by saying essentially what you said above and that’s ‘sour grapes’?

I quite liked it, but opinions vary and that’s cool. The only thing I wanted to get into was that, as a librarian, the destroyed records really hit home to me and didn’t seem all that unlikely. Digital preservation is a huge issue; it’s so much more difficult and so much more vulnerable than most people think.

There are no clearly-defined villains

We riot if Deakins doesn’t win. (But I’m going to guess that the award goes to either Dunkirk or Shape Of Water. Deakins deserves it, but the streak will probably continue. If it makes it any better, he’s no doubt the only cinematographer in the group with a knighthood.)

I love this guy so much that I bought Blade Runner 2049 on Blu Ray without having seen it simply because he directed it.

This is Deakins’ 14th nomination. He’s never won before, which is insane. If he loses this one, he should just assume everyone hates him for personal reasons and have conspired against him.

I appreciated the soundtrack as well, but man, did theatres love pumping the volume up to 11 for this one. I saw it 3 times in the theatre and every time I found certain parts distractingly loud. I’m not sure if that’s as intended.

For the second year in a row, Denis Villeneuve made my favorite movie of the year. It’s not an Oscar, but it’s still a pretty high honor.

I have high hopes for this movie, but it annoys me when people make a big deal about works of entertainment being “for adults.” I just got done re-watching Babylon 5, and even though I still enjoyed it a lot I still don’t care for all JMS’s talk about how he was making a show FOR ADULTS! People who say things like…

Boy child of prophecy gets magic powers that allow him to take down an oppressive empire.

This really needs to be on HBO as “Game of Thrones in Space”.

Yeah, Lucas took from stuff that was much, much older than Dune.

I guess you haven’t seen the director’s cut.

I’ve read ‘Dune’, I’ve seen the Lynch ‘Dune’, and I gotta say...I have no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. I mean, they do both feature a desert or two here and there, but I can think of very little that connects one to the other. I mean, unless he’s trying to suggest an analogy between the Ewoks and the Fremen,…

Ewoks doing their taxes?

It’s going to be like Howard’s End, but with people who eat fermented worm shit.