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Post by Jeremy on Feb 16, 2018 10:19:33 GMT -8
There are lots of short miniseries that could conceivably be broadcast as films. I've argued that Crisis in Six Scenes is just a 2.5 hour film masquerading as a miniseries. Over the Garden Wall is classified as a miniseries, but its total running time is under two hours.
But calling Twin Peaks: The Return a film makes no sense, because the only film criteria it meets is "being made by a director who usually makes films."
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Feb 16, 2018 12:37:18 GMT -8
There are lots of short miniseries that could conceivably be broadcast as films. I've argued that Crisis in Six Scenes is just a 2.5 hour film masquerading as a miniseries. Over the Garden Wall is classified as a miniseries, but its total running time is under two hours. But calling Twin Peaks: The Return a film makes no sense, because the only film criteria it meets is "being made by a director who usually makes films." No Jer, don't you get it? The only difference because film and television is that film has prestige and television is proletarian garbage. Ergo, Twin Peaks is a film.
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Post by guttersnipe on Feb 16, 2018 13:26:13 GMT -8
It's funny we should be talking about this because I'd just been perusing TSPDT's newly-updated 21st century list and that features Twin Peaks too, much to my confusion/chagrin (I was going to announce that they'd also recently updated their overall Top 1,000 on the Film forum, but kinda figured no-one else but me really cares).
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Post by ThirdMan on Feb 16, 2018 14:12:54 GMT -8
Lists are usually interesting. Post away.
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Post by otherscott on Feb 20, 2018 12:15:26 GMT -8
Wayyyy off topic but for me it's a little weird that the list of Top 50 films (out of the top 1000) in the 21st century has 14 films made in 2000 and 2001 and only 1 top 50 film since 2012.
I'm not sure if the reason is anti-recency bias, movie making has actually gotten worse, or that films need a few years to truly evaluate their impact to be able to rank them compared to things that have been around for almost 20 years.
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Post by Jeremy on Feb 20, 2018 13:28:12 GMT -8
Combination of the first and third reasons. Critics are hesitant to put shiny new films on a "greatest of all time" list because it's difficult to judge something separately from the immediate hype surrounding it. That's why most "Best of the Decade" lists tend to skew more towards the first two-thirds of said decade.
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Post by ThirdMan on Feb 21, 2018 19:33:09 GMT -8
You know, I think Another Period's biggest problem is that Mr. Peepers is such a stereotypical Native American character. Anyways, they're really doubling down on the incest humour this season. Beatrice is told her brother Frederick was actually adopted (a lie), and suddenly their romantic spark is gone. So Frederick tries to re-create said feelings by having them revisit the locations of their past dalliances, including her childhood CRIB, where it first went down, to the best of their recollection. Man, this show certainly doesn't pull any punches.
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Post by Jeremy on Feb 21, 2018 20:46:00 GMT -8
I'm afraid I stopped watching Another Period midway through the previous season. It's a modestly funny show, but the humor is very broad and over-the-top, and the show's anything-goes style leads to a lot of misfiring jokes. It's too bad, because it has one of the best comedy casts anywhere on television - too bad the writing doesn't always measure up.
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Post by ThirdMan on Feb 21, 2018 21:52:57 GMT -8
Oh, I figured you weren't watching it, which is why I decided to detail a recent premise.
The show's riciculously over-the-top, but I think "modestly funny" is a bit off. To me, much of the time, it's stupidly convoluted, but at least once or twice an episode, it generates a laugh-out-loud moment, because of how far it'll take a joke. And I very rarely laugh out loud when I'm watching a comedy by myself, so I'll gladly indulge ten 20-minute episodes of this per year, even if I'm rolling my eyes much of the time.
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Post by Jeremy on Feb 22, 2018 10:01:00 GMT -8
Yeah, I can see that. It does have a few laugh-out-loud moments; it just also has a lot of flat notes as well.
On the other hand, I'm still watching Superstore, which - three seasons in - has also yet to fully capitalize on its premise and cast. It's a slightly above-average workplace comedy, but not much else. Still, I like the characters and the shades of earlier NBC sitcoms (the creator is a former writer for The Office), even if it's never going to be The Good Place.
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Post by guttersnipe on Feb 22, 2018 10:20:15 GMT -8
Combination of the first and third reasons. Critics are hesitant to put shiny new films on a "greatest of all time" list because it's difficult to judge something separately from the immediate hype surrounding it. That's why most "Best of the Decade" lists tend to skew more towards the first two-thirds of said decade. I'd agree that some anti-recency bias is in play, but I think at the same time that there are simply very few films released this decade that have magnetised critics to that kind of extent. I for one don't really subscribe to the idea of time as a (dis)qualifier and reckon 'fridge brilliance' should only take a little while to take effect, but as most polls are derived from top tens, how many people rank any recent movie that high? On the other hand, Sight & Sound do these polls once a decade and L'Avventura landed at #2 only a couple of years after its release (or less, given international trickle-down). Apparently The Tree of Life fell just one vote short of making it into the 2012 update, though it, The Turin Horse and Uncle Boonmee have been fixtures of the TSPDT Top 1,000 since they debuted. On a tangential issue, I like their point about how the 2012 update (the first of the broadband and DVD era) introduced mammoth pictures such as Shoah, Jeanne Dielman, Satantango and Histoire(s) du Cinema, ones that have struggled to find a screening/audience in times gone by. Out 1 (longer than all the above) has since had a home release, so I'd like to think it'll appear in 2022, but esoteric is practically Rivette's middle name. Incidentally I read this article earlier about Sight & Sound's controversial decision to treat Twin Peaks as a film, and I'm pleased that at least one person took umbrage with the accusation that Buffy "looks awful". I think another bias worth paying attention to on these critics' polls is that of the deathly serious, which seems to explain the ubiquity of Bresson on these lists, not to mention the relative marginalisation of comedy.
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Post by otherscott on Feb 22, 2018 11:06:50 GMT -8
I think we have to stop looking at visual or storytelling form for our differentiation in classification between film and television. The lines there are too blurred now and there is a lot of implications that "Twin Peaks" is a movie because it exceeds the medium of television.
I think the classification is simple: Is it presented in multiple episodes? I don't mean is there an episodic form to it, because there's films that do that and TV shows that don't. But physically, is it presented in parts that each come to an end with some sort of break in between - whether it be time for the next one to air or Netflix's screen asking if you want to continue. If yes - TV show. If no - movie.
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Post by guttersnipe on Feb 22, 2018 12:42:51 GMT -8
I think of it in the simple terms of the circumstances of broadcast. Out 1, which I just mentioned (and it's not often that that plays out in a single day) was intended for the cinema and is somewhat broken into 'parts', but really only to afford the audience breaks in what would be too much to process in a single sitting (it's very resistant to conventional storytelling.
Dekalog was made for television; it is neither one film nor ten. The Short Films, extended episodes from the middle of the series, were released in cinemas (one getting away with stronger content than would have been permitted on television, at least at the time) and are therefore films.
Twin Peaks was intended for television, and that's what it is. Fire Walk with Me is a film.
I think the only blurring of the lines is with 'TV movies', which I don't hesitate to refer to as films, if only because treating them as standalone episodes doesn't make sense on a grammatical level; you can't have a 'chapter' or 'instalment' that doesn't relate to anything else. It's at this moment that I point out that I haven't seen Columbo, so I genuinely don't know what it's perceived as.
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Post by Jeremy on Feb 22, 2018 14:58:51 GMT -8
Columbo is an odd example, because it began life as a TV movie, then morphed into a TV series with movie-length episodes. But for most of its run, those episodes aired in regular (or semi-regular) periods over standard TV seasons. It wasn't until the '90s that the movies began airing sporadically - and even then, those last dozen on so episodes are usually classified as a final "season."
As an aside, there are also examples of TV shows that inadvertently became films after the fact. For example, the 2003 Lone Ranger series filmed a 90-minute pilot episode, but was never picked up to series, and the pilot was eventually aired as a standalone TV movie.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Feb 22, 2018 19:01:00 GMT -8
Yeah, I can see that. It does have a few laugh-out-loud moments; it just also has a lot of flat notes as well. On the other hand, I'm still watching Superstore, which - three seasons in - has also yet to fully capitalize on its premise and cast. It's a slightly above-average workplace comedy, but not much else. Still, I like the characters and the shades of earlier NBC sitcoms (the creator is a former writer for The Office), even if it's never going to be The Good Place. You said it was better than Brooklyn 99 . I think I can forgive you if you officially rescind that statement though.
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