Recent content by Tim Gerdes

To each their own, but that sounds like the musical equivalent of fan fiction. As a lifelong Beatles fan I've always been amused by the notion that the Beatles had a singular "sound," and I'm glad they chose simply not to mimic their earlier work. The Beatles, and pop music as a result, evolved...

For anyone else as obsessed with this film as I am, I was curious about the scene in the film where George Munn (Haas) has persuaded Jack Conrad (Pitt) to appear in an all-star musical and perform Singin' in the Rain only to discover it was a real MGM film, Hollywood Revue of 1929. I found a...

Part of my personal calculus on what makes a great movie is a sense that the filmmakers got away with something. I find it worth celebrating, particularly in this age of IP driven franchise entertainment, when a filmmaker manages to make a film that by all accounts had no business being made...

I've been a fan since 1977, and this has been a problem for the franchise at least as far back as Anakin's slaughter of the sand people in AOTC, if not longer. It is very difficult to reconcile Vader's slaughter of innocents with the redemption I've never quite believed he earned in ROTJ...

Having now compared the 4K UHD discs to the 4K iTunes transfers, I find them significantly different. To my eyes the reds are far too oversaturated in the iTunes transfers. In the scene in Sicily where Michael is taking to Apollonia's father, on the iTunes transfer the older man's face is a...

Thank you, Mr. Harris. That is my hope, but I am awaiting the arrival of these discs with a good deal more skepticism than before. And as always thank for for sharing all of your insights and knowledge with this community.

I'm glad your experience was more positive than mine. If you're indulge me for a moment, these films are incredibly important to me. When I was quite young my parents, who were public school teachers, often had one of their colleagues, an art teacher, over to our house. One night the three of...

I am reserving judgement until I receive my 4K UHD set, which should arrive today, but I did see the films had been updated to 4K in my iTunes library and sampled them last night. I was profoundly disappointed. The skin tones appear oversaturated and can only be described as "tomato red." I am...

I didn't realize this was coming until I stumbled on this thread, and I'm grateful that I did. While I'll concede these are merely passable transfers, the previous releases of some of these films are terrible, early DVD transfers. To me $50 for 8 Woody Allen films that look much better than any...

I thought this was fantastic, with two minor quibbles. The flashbacks seemed clumsy. I understand why they felt the need to do this but they disrupted the story for me. My only other complaint, I wish they had done an entire 4th season. I wanted to see more of everyone. As it stands it was a...

While it is true that the show has heaped abuse on its characters, it has also saved its most masochistic endings for the characters who have been the most unrepentantly awful, most notably Joffrey and Ramsay. I don't have any real sense of who will end up on the throne on the end but I can't...

I wasn't intentionally avoiding his point. To be clear the reaction would be different, sure. But I think we also both know why the reaction would be different and the history and context that would inform the ensuing controversy. Speaking as a white male over 40, I can't say I am at all...

Historically, female characters have been so under-represented in film, and in fiction in general, that there was actually a system designed to determine whether a story had a strong female character (see: Bechdel test). One could argue, persuasively in my opinion, that no white male actor...

I saw this last night. Went into it with zero expectations and almost no knowledge of the character's backstory. I loved it and felt that it was another great entry in the MCU. For me these films are all so intertwined and self-referential that they've become harder to weigh as individual...

As I see it, Yoda is a religious leader in political exile, much like the Dali Llama. Luke is in self-imposed exile because of a crisis of faith. And to invoke Obi-Wan, from a certain point of view, Luke is right. The Jedi were arrogant elitists and their blindness to what was happening...