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Updated 48 Days ago
Calling For The Return of the '90's Movie
I love movies - the good, the bad, and the ugly. I grew up in a decade where a single song defined a movie, when according to Don LaFontaine every movie was an astronomy lesson ("In a world..."), when DVD's were just a twinkle in some data storage geek's eye, and when Adam Sandler made funny movies. Some call the '90's a dark time in movie making history, but I beg to differ. What happened to the '90's movie magic? I would like to sound a call for that magic's triumphant return.
- To revive the '90's movie you cannot, under any circumstances, call your picture a film. The grunge rock generation took their music too seriously, not their movies. Art house pictures stayed in the art house and the movie theater was reserved for movies made by members of the "Saturday Night Live" cast.
- Which leads me to my second point: Adam Sandler, Rob Schnieder, and Will Farrell need to be reintroduced to their comedy roots. I propose a Clockwork Orange style treatment session for each of them where their eyes are peeled back and recent movies are associated with nausea. This process should go for as many hours or days it needs to until they start remembering how to be funny again.
- Forget a breakout soundtrack - all a really good '90's movie needed was one key song. For The Wedding Singer it was "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," in Wayne's World it was "Bohemian Rhapsody," and in Titanic it was "My Heart Will Go On." Once you have that one song play it in the trailer then rinse and repeat at key points in the movie. Does finding that song sound like a daunting task? Take a cue from the The Wedding Singer and Wayne's World (both exceptional "SNL" alumni flicks) - if you can't write one that everyone will like, find one that everyone already likes.
- Speaking of trailers - stop putting all of the funny stuff in the trailers and having little to no additional funny content in the movie. Bring back the voice over. We really didn't mind the "In a world..." or "In a city..." stuff even though we weren't seeing movie clips. Which also begs: for the love of all things that don't spoil a movie - stop making so many different trailers that the audience knows the entire plot after seeing a few of them!
- Forget the lonely guy formula: in all great '90's movies the lead guy has an entourage to provide comic relief when it gets to heavy and to encourage him in his pursuits whilst not overshadowing his role as the lead character. Your hero needs friends; if he doesn't have them it is usually depressing, which probably means art house, and tell ya what guys - with the markets and newspapers the way they are I don't need depressing.
Call me uncultured, but I don't really need a thinking man's film or a "comedy" that tries to offer me insight. I call for a return to the days of epic romances starring cute guys with bowl haircuts, I ask for a return of cyberpunk cinema, and I weep for the days when a funny character was so well thought out and executed that I could laugh until tears come from my eyes. Are you with me and my (perhaps misguided) requests?
About The Author:
Got a story you want to share, or just need someone to talk to? Email Me! melody@toastedrav.comI have a penchant for pizza, a love of books, and a strong cup of coffee always makes me smile. When I'm not writing for ToastedRav I like long walks on concrete sidewalks, hanging-lamp lit dinners, and a good bottle of Shiraz.
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You see, even pondering the 'torture treatment' of these comedians brings on the inner panic! I'm gonna go grab 'the Big Lebowski' (on disc) before I do something drastic!
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.