movie recommendations

[JRD]

If he is the problem...

Spoiler

He has a small role and dies half way through the flick, then it's Sandra Bullock all by herself

[Art Blade]

REALLY?!  ??? Man, that's fantastic!! Now I'll get it. :-D

[fragger]

 :-D

[fragger]

As for the pysical flaws... come on, we all watch Star Trek, Star Wars, Battle Star Gallatica, Alien, and whatnot and never complain about how innacurate those movies are... and that's just because we ignore that in order to enjoy the fun. It's not a documentary and movies should not always portray the world as it is... otherwise it'd be boredom all over.

That is true. One of the things I did admire about the film was the fact that unlike so many space movies, a good dollop of attention was paid to real physics. A few liberties were taken (like Clooney zooming around the shuttle almost aerobatically in his backpack) and a bit of belief suspension was required in other places, but otherwise it was very commendable regarding attention to the way things actually behave in freefall.

I've certainly seen a lot worse (Armageddon springs to mind...)

[JRD]

Interstellar

Just came out of the theater. Really enjoyed it. Directed by Christopher Nolan who also directed Inception and the recent Batman trilogy. He has a talent to tell mind blowing stories and this is one of them. Ok, you may not like Batman but he did a great job on the three movies.

This is a near future sci-fi centered not just on special effects but on a thick story line. Without spoiling it, I can say that fans of time traveling and advanced physics will like it. The theoretical background is dimmed down just enough to allow the audience to follow what's going on without making it an over-the-top movie. A couple scenes are there to hold your hand and drive you while quantum physics is explained but not too much to make you feel dumb. The soundtrack also helps in setting the mood by NOT being heroic and some attention to details such as no sound in space is also observed.

Typical haters will always bitch about this and that but again, this is sci-fi and is there to entertain not to be 100% faithful to the real world so chew on your pop corn and enjoy the flick!  8)

[Art Blade]

one more on my to-watch list. :-X

[fragger]

That one's on my radar as well.

[JRD]

fragger, as a time travel afficionado, I believe you are going to flip a double somersault pike for this movie  ;D

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yes, I quite enjoyed Interstellar, and even Matthew McConaghey's (sp?) best efforts didn't ruin it. He was actually the least Matthew McConaghey-ish that I've seen him in a while, so there's that.

Also, at the end of the film, someone at the end of the row I was sitting in was audibly sobbing. I heard a few sniffles in the row behind me, and when the lights came up after the movie was over, the one woman behind me asked her friend if she was crying at the end. So yeah, it's that kind of movie.

Just make sure to visit the restroom before you see it, almost 3 hours is a while to hold it.

[PZ]

... even Matthew McConaghey's (sp?) best efforts didn't ruin it...

[Art Blade]

 :-D

[fragger]

fragger, as a time travel afficionado, I believe you are going to flip a double somersault pike for this movie  ;D

Cool :-X I'm also a quantum physics freak - not that I can get my head around a lot of it. I certainly don't profess to be any kind of authority on it, but I can get to a certain point of understanding until my brain simply boggles out. But then some of the best quantum researchers on the planet get boggled out too, so I don't feel too clueless :-()

I won't be a stickler for it though come movie time, however. I promise not to let my scientific pedantry get in the way of a good yarn

[JRD]

Cool :-X I'm also a quantum physics freak

As I was reading about the movie after I left the theater, I learned that Kip Thorne is the executive producer and physics advisor for this movie. I saw an YT movie where he is actually writing all equations on a chalk board you see during the movie. He explained to the CGI specialists how light would behave around a black hole and a worm hole so the effects you see in the movie are as close to reality as physics and math can explain.  8)

I don't want to spoil the movie but there is more than just physics and CGI to this flick, there's also a, let's say, human factor, that seems to be the focal point of all bad critics. I actually went to the movie expecting to see some strong emotionally appealing scenes, the kind of cheesy scene made to bring tears to your eyes, but what I saw wasn't too exagerated, a little bit maybe but fit to the movie  :-X

[fragger]

I'm very interested to see that Thorne was on board for the production :-X That guy is brilliant.

[Art Blade]

REALLY?!  ??? Man, that's fantastic!! Now I'll get it. :-D

Got it today, watched it today, ignored the nonsense, and I'm ready to have forgot it by tomorrow. :-D

What I found truly remarkable is something you might not expect: Gravity is one of a handful of about perhaps 1,600 films that I've got that actually feature more than one scene that makes extensive use of surround sound. The start of this film is particularly intense with loads of sound effects that gyrate all around you. :-X

[Art Blade]

In the local souvenir shop I bought the 'uncut' version of Das Boot, called "Die TV-Erfolgsserie von Wolfgang Petersen". The film is burnt on 2 DVD's and consists of 282 mins of pure film material

I think I used to have it on VHS back in the day. I then got a director's cut on DVD (which is actually a completely different experience as it was cut differently and scenes added, really a lot better than the theatrical version) and then one extended version on BR.

Now, today I found (and bought) the original "successful TV series" (Die TV-Erfolgsserie von Wolfgang Petersen in HD-Qualität) which is likely the same that you got on 2 DVD, only mine is on 2 BR and 308 minutes long and in HD.  :-()

<rubbing hands in anticipation>   :-D

[Binnatics]

Excellent ^-^ :-X

[Art Blade]

I just watched the first two out of six episodes. It is indeed so that there are scenes that I hadn't seen before. Just to clarify, when I said that..

I think I used to have it on VHS back in the day

.. I meant the theatrical version, the normal film, not the series. This is for the first time that I'm actually watching it. Which is nice. :) Das Boot is one of my all-time favourites and likely the only German film that I can stand, including German audio. To me, we have the worst actors in the whole bloody world. They open their mouth and I can virtually see the script they're reading from, even if learned by heart, it still sounds like, "now I have to act. I have to recite this. I am on a cheap theater stage and nobody will notice how bad I'm at acting, anyway." The difference with Das Boot is that basically every single actor in it would become famous and at that time, they weren't quite yet. They were fresh, and more importantly, they acted nicely and talked naturally. Not like wooden puppets with a language disorder. So that film really is good and the cast was splendid. Most notable is Jürgen Prochnow, even to a non-German audience. That film was a launch pad for careers and Wolfgang Petersen made a name for himself with it. I really enjoy watching Das Boot repeatedly, in any version available, which by now I think I've got all of. :-D

[fragger]

I'll have to keep an eye out for that. Das Boot is an excellent movie and I do have the director's cut on DVD, but haven't heard of the serialised version :-X

[mandru]

I'm away for a day or two and a whole favorite topic slips right past me.  :(

Cool :-X I'm also a quantum physics freak - not that I can get my head around a lot of it. I certainly don't profess to be any kind of authority on it, but I can get to a certain point of understanding until my brain simply boggles out. But then some of the best quantum researchers on the planet get boggled out too, so I don't feel too clueless :-()

I won't be a stickler for it though come movie time, however. I promise not to let my scientific pedantry get in the way of a good yarn

Tech and science has always been fascinating for me.  My earliest memory is of a black wall plate pearl push-buttoned light switch next to a doorway beside a kitchen stove that had a very old portrait of a bearded man hanging above it.  I also remember the frustration of not being able to convince either of my parents to stand there and hold me close enough to reach it long enough sate my curiosity.  Recounting that memory with my mom (a few years ago) from my description of the stove and portrait she recalled the setting and said that I was 18 months old when we'd moved out of that apartment.

When I was 14 the scout troop I was in had an evening where a physicist from Seattle's University of Washington come and spoke to our group.  One of the other guys had tossed out the standard question about somehow sneaking past the speed of light which was met with the stock answer to shut down that line of questioning.  But how often do you get a chance to pump a real scientist for information?

I pushed on by first phasing my understanding of our situation of existence "So each of the natural laws including the speed of light became set in place as the initial heat and turmoil of the Big Bang dissipated for the bubble that is our universe."

His eyebrows raised, he nodded and responded "That's a very good description of the way most of us in this field of study would explain how the natural laws were formed."

Then I tagged him with "So in our bubble (our universe) nothing travels faster than light but what about the next bubble over?  Is it possible that there are universes where everything is moving faster than the speed of light?"

He blinked several times and quietly said "I can't say it's not possible."

As I recall he seemed somewhat distracted for the rest of his time with us.



On Kip Thorne.  At one point I was spending probably five hours a day commuting by bus to w@&k and back so I would spend the time reading.  One of my favorite books through that time period was Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps.  After buying it Mrs. mandru spotted it on my bookshelf and said that she had gone to college with Kip's younger brother who had been part of a circle of friends at that time.  She had recognized the name Kip from times that the younger brother had spoken of him.

There is one issue I have with a model that he establishes (and frequently later repeats it adding detail to demonstrate his expanded understanding) in explaining the conditions of a collapsing super massive star into black hole state.  It's a 4 dimensional representation in 2D (on the printed page) so I recognize the difficulty in achieving that for the purposes of the book.  But his model persists in showing the size of the event horizon as being established before all of the matter from the collapsing star has been gathered within the event horizon!

Wow! That bugged me every time I came across it.  I don't think mass outside the horizon can be counted in as mass inside the horizon even if it's headed in that direction.  Yes, later in the book the model was correctly used to show the merging of two singularities as they became one but the representation of the initial collapse is still part of the model.  :-\\

I may not be able to get my head around the numbers involved in the science of it all but I'm pretty good at that old puzzle book game "What's wrong with this picture?"  :-D

I'll need to check out Interstellar once it becomes available on Blu Ray.  :-X

[fragger]

Entertaining read, mate ^-^ I wish I could have been in your scout troop! But I was never a boy scout - in any sense...

...But his model persists in showing the size of the event horizon as being established before all of the matter from the collapsing star has been gathered within the event horizon!

That's just one of those aspects of quantum physics that brings my mind to the boggling point. Not being a mathematician of the calibre of some of these researchers I have to take their word for their assertions, but according to them the behaviour of things at the sub-sub-atomic level involves principles that tend to rub a "rational" mind the wrong way, one of those behaviours being that in effect, events can precede causes. A particle may not have the energy level required to get through a particular barrier, but can use the energy from a future, more energetic state of itself to get through the barrier and kind of get away with it on the principle that "A future version of myself is on the other side, ergo that future version of myself has had the energy to get through the barrier, ergo I must in fact have the energy to get through even though I don't, but since I apparently do because my future self is on the other side, I'll use that energy now to get through". It's a bit like flying internationally on an aircraft by using a ticket that has been bought in the future and applying it retroactively - I live in Australia, I can't afford a ticket to fly to the U.S., but I know I'll be in the U.S. tomorrow, so I must have the money to buy the ticket, so I'll go because I know I will be there and thus I am able to afford it. How or whether this type of principle actually does operate in the quantum realm I can't confirm for myself since my brain can't crunch advanced numbers the way the boffins can, but those who are proficient at what I think of as esoteric math claim that said math indicates this possibility - or maybe I should say probability, since they also claim that the quantum-level universe operates largely on probabilities, e.g. a particle moves from point A to point B not because the laws of physics dictate it's movements but because its arrival at point B is simply the most probable outcome. This sort of thing was what bugged Einstein and drove him to comment, "God does not play dice".

Whether that kind of apparent violation of what we consider normal causality relates to an event horizon forming before all the mass is in to form it, and whether that has anything to do with Thorne's model, I don't know, but it generates the same level of bogglement in my head ???

[mandru]

There were lots of elegant formulas in the book provided to support his arguments.  I simply adopted the attitude "Sure, I'll take your word for it" and hopped over them to get to the good stuff.  ^-^

[fragger]

That's pretty much my approach too :-D

[JRD]

Indeed an interesting read guys!  :-X

fragger, you may be referring to the principle of uncertainty described by Heisenberg. According to his ideas, one can tell, with a high level of confidence, either the momentum (the product of mass times velocity) or the position of a given particle - either or - given the dual behaviour of quantum particles that possess both characteristics of matter and energy at the same time. Heisenberg postulates that the more confidence you have in one measurement, the less confidence you have on the other, so if you want to know where a given particle is, you cannot describe how it is moving and if you want to determine it's velocity you will never know where it is.

Mind boggling as you say since our understanding of the world around us is based on our observation of said world and we can only see the physical world described by Isaac Newton many years before quantum physics was born. In our observations we instinctively assume a simple example: if you want to know the speed of a moving car you just measure the time it takes from one point to another where you klnow the distance between those points. Knowing the variation of space over time gives you the velocity of the car. In that sense we know where the object is and how fast it is going at the same time. It so happens because in our scale of events, we cannot see quantum events so mater behaves like matter and energy behaves like energy. This is where Eisntein proved to be a genius. He simply refused that idea when observing events in the sub atomic scale. Once his assumption was made he managed to understand light as a string of energetic particles - photons - that could behave as energy and as matter, depending on the experiment designed to measure it's characteristics. It enabled him to describe several events otherwise unexplainable by Newtonian physics and promote a major breakthough in modern physics. A huge leap forward in science.

Guys like Thorne and Hawkings have Einstein's papers for breakfast and are now expanding his ideas to an universal scale using latest technolgy is astrophysics. It is indeed something that seems to come from science fiction and that was (to get back to the start of this discussion) one of the reasons I enjoyed watching Intertellar. Knowing that Thone is behind the science portrayed in the movie only makes it more atractive... pretty advanced physics turned into entertainment!!! I whish my physics teachers could be so entertaining back in the days!  ;D

[fragger]

Cool post JRD :-X I love some of the discussions we get into here 8)