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PaperclipPerfector  2hr ago (text post)   86 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 1, 2026

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Finished watching Jaws on Netflix before it went off the air. I found it disappointing, which is surprising considering its reputation (the first summer blockbuster, recommended by both Roger Ebert and Critical Drinker, etc.)

I think the problem is that I couldn't connect to the characters. Chief is too much of a coward, both morally (fails to stand up to the Mayor) and physically (afraid of water). Quint has potential, but in the end he comes across more as a greedy asshole than as a truly passionate shark hunter. And the research dude is just there. I don't care what happens to these people; none of them are awesome enough to keep my interest. Combine that with the slow pacing (the shark is famously not shown until the final act to build suspense) and I was left looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie would be.

It only really gets good in the last twenty minutes when they are directly battling the shark, and by then it is too late.

Very interesting. I watch it every year. There are to my mind some absolutely brilliantly constructed scenes. When Alex Kintner gets eaten, that whole set-up prior (the sounds of the beach radios disappear as the camera goes out to Alex's distance, returns when the camera is back on the beach, etc ) is so well done. The whole movie is so full of granular detail of this sort that when I hear people say they dislike it I wonder if either they're watching a different film or they are used to more, I don't know, motion or action. I love JAWS , almost as much as I love Close Encounters. The same things are happening in that film. The cuts, the shot setups, it's just so rich. If you didn't like the JAWS film characters you should definitely avoid reading the novel.

I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike these films, but to me they're both eminently rewatchable.

I found myself similarly disappointed. Although my impression was just that it was poorly made. In the same way that CGI or fight choreography from old films is just bad compared to modern films, Jaws felt sloppy and amateurish.

Honestly, I struggle to watch films made before the 1980-90s. Comedies tend not to age well for reasons of cultural change (with notable exceptions, e.g. the Python films or Airplane!) and dramas need to have a really compelling script to allow me to forgive the fact that filmmaking was just worse back then. Maybe part of it may be my ruined modern attention span, but I think filmmaking has genuinely improved. Compare the fight scenes in Enter the Dragon to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; or the battle scenes in Zulu to Saving Private Ryan. Incomparable.

Honestly, I struggle to watch films made before the 1980-90s. Comedies tend not to age well for reasons of cultural change (with notable exceptions, e.g. the Python films or Airplane!) and dramas need to have a really compelling script to allow me to forgive the fact that filmmaking was just worse back then. Maybe part of it may be my ruined modern attention span, but I think filmmaking has genuinely improved.

For me, I think this mostly just applies to movies made in the late 60s-70s. It's dated now, but I find that a lot of movies before that period don't have the same problem with filmmaking that the 1970s stuff did - for example Hitchcock's oeuvre for the most part feels like the work of an extremely competent and confident filmmaker with a large amount of control over the medium. Even as late as 1966, I find many films to be eminently watchable (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, for example).

It was when New Hollywood started really exploding in popularity that I truly find films start appearing very overly indulgent; apart from a select few movies that are classics, there's an almost intolerable amount of sloppy poorly-framed low-budget guerrilla cinematography passed of as grittiness, horrible audio mixing that renders the voices barely audible, bloated pacing that includes extraneous shots of lazy improvisation and oceans of irrelevant dialogue that are kept for "authenticity's sake", and other such elements that make them difficult to watch. Say what you want about the studio control of the Golden Age, I think that era reined in the worst impulses of auteurs and forced them to become a bit more economical and deliberate with their filmmaking.

Yeah, I saw it for the first time a few years ago and felt rather underwhelmed. If compiling a list of my Spielberg films it certainly wouldn't crack the top five. (I did enjoy it more than Close Encounters, though.) Definitely a film which fell victim to the "Seinfeld is Unfunny effect, where it's hard for modern viewers to appreciate how inventive it must have seemed on release.

A classic line:

“My son,” said the old Gascon gentleman, in that pure Béarn patois of which Henry IV could never rid himself, “this horse was born in the house of your father about thirteen years ago, and has remained in it ever since, which ought to make you love it.”

What does the original French look like?

―Mon fils, avait dit le gentilhomme gascon—dans ce pur patois de Béarn dont Henri IV n'avait jamais pu parvenir à se défaire—, mon fils, ce cheval est né dans la maison de votre père, il y a tantôt treize ans, et y est resté depuis ce temps-là, ce qui doit vous porter à l'aimer

1,2,3

If you glance through some amateur French stories, it's rather hilarious to see different authors use three different quotation styles—the two illustrated above, plus «guillemets». (What is this, Japanese?) In contrast, amateur English is dominated by the USA's “double quotation marks”, and the British ‘single quotation marks’ have fallen by the wayside. (Some amateur authors use single quotation marks to denote internal monologue, or to differentiate scare quotes from dialog. I find both practices quite annoying.)

1Fun fact: The leading dash used in this quotation style officially is supposed to be, not an em dash (Unicode character 2014), but the separate "horizontal bar/quotation dash" character (2015). The two characters look identical in Arial, though.

2It's time for the daily Two Minutes Hate against translators/localizers/paraphrasers who take unjustified liberties with the source material. "Said" rather than "had said"? "Old gentleman" rather than "gentleman"? Commas rather than em dashes? No repetition of "my son"?

3When you need to add attribution or a footnote to an inline quote, it normally goes after the quote. However, treatment of blockquotes is more complicated. (a) Placing the attribution before the blockquote is inconsistent with the treatment of inline quotes; (b) placing the attribution at the end of (inside) the blockquote makes no sense semantically; and (c) placing the attribution after the blockquote creates an ugly short paragraph. Overall, I am inclined to think that option C is the best and option B is the worst.4The Pennsylvania Supreme Court uses option C. The US Supreme Court uses a weird variation on option B: placing the attribution at the end of (inside) the blockquote, but putting quotation marks around the actually-quoted material, so that what we've been calling a "blockquote" actually is just indentation with no semantic meaning whatsoever. The New Jersey Supreme Court uses a different weird variation on option B: placing the attribution at the end of (inside) the blockquote, but in its own paragraph and enclosed in square brackets. Obviously, both of these variations are better than the basic version of option B (since they eliminate the semantic issue), but still worse than option C.

4There's another topic: Should footnotes be capable of containing multiple paragraphs? The in-progress CSS standard to which I pointed previously allows both single-paragraph (inline) and multi-paragraph (block) footnotes. But the standard footnote notation puts the footnote pseudo-heading inline as part of the first paragraph, implying that there really should not be more paragraphs past the one in which it is embedded. Compare that to the standard section notation, which puts the heading as its own pseudo-paragraph lording it over all the real paragraphs.

Your Two Minutes Hate quote from Nabokov is great. I've noticed myself that I often prefer the clunkier fan translations of Japanese visual novels to the elegant modern localisations, especially that of Fate Stay Night where the writing is fairly execrable at least in English. Lots of repetition, fragments, and clunky sentences - "People die when they are killed." - but there's an interest to it that gets lost in the polished remake.

«guillemets». (What is this, Japanese?)

I thought Japanese uses「this」『type』.

The joke is comparing the three French quotation styles to the three Japanese writing systems (kanji, katakana, and hiragana).

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