boojam

Ciarán Hinds is in only one episode! Gezz that's weird.

I didn't exactly predict that! Ending!! Neil Marshall gets a 10... but I was hoping he would be back next week. Next week should have been 90 min. long!

Round up of other ratings and reviews of S4E8. Over at Rotten Tomatoes* read , if you have the time, to read the reviews and see if you would assign a 1 or 0 to the review: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/game-of-thrones/s04/e08/ (I note that ,outside of fine episode essays , here on this very web site, I do like Myles McNutt's essays per episode of the show, http://cultural-learnings.com/category/Game-of-Thrones/ . His critical analysis does not occur in Rotten Tomatoes list, that I know of. If anyone knows of similar essays on the web I would like to know about the.) Over at IMDb (wonder why there is a lower case 'b' there) I see this: 11479 IMDb users have given a weighted average vote of 9.7 / 10 Why I had not noticed 'weighted average' before I don't know. IMDb says: "IMDb publishes weighted vote averages rather than raw data averages. Various filters are applied to the raw data in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at 'vote stuffing' by individuals more interested in changing the current rating of a movie than giving their true opinion of it. The exact methods we use will not be disclosed. This should ensure that the policy remains effective. The result is a more accurate vote average" Hmmm..... I guess so. *I do know where the terminology 'Rotten Tomato' comes but it's odd someone must not have been thinking because people threw both Fresh and Rotten tomatoes at a bad oration or stage show ... but I think they are stuck with trade mark madness!! It happens.

You actually place Spartacus with The Wire, Sopranos and Breaking Bad!? That's like lumping Plan Nine from Outer Space with Lawrence of Arabia!

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER has the news that GOT is just a hair behind THE SOPRANOS for total weekly hours. 18 million per week vs 18.2 per week by 4th season of the Sopranos. I am willing to bet it's going to break The Walking Dead 18.4 million record.

HBO's series format of fitting both series and mini series into ~1 hour episode formats. HBO's recent and excellent mini series PACIFIC , a 200 million dollar production, followed this format. They are showing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey which runs 169 min., yeah I know movies and series are different. However why can't a series episode be , say, 70 min.? I mean they have to adjust scheduling for anything from a 90 to what a 180 min. movie. Money has to play a role , but 10 more min...... ?

Have you read A Dance with Dragons? There really need to be some subplots in the Meereen story, and this is fine with me. They have not introduced several characters from that story , it's gotten down to about three maybe four people she talks to... in the book a lot inner thoughts... which aint gonna work as narrative drama.

I agree , the writing has remained consistent, with slippage now and then, one can tell when D&D are whooping it up, tho. The Tavern scene in episode 1 is a gem of dialog exposition and interestingly D&D's direction of it , is an action sequence to make Akira Kurosawa or Sam Peckinpah proud, a sword fight that is like a REAL SWORD FIGHT! If someone is trying kill you , NO FENCING!, Sandor must punch three guys or more , for a count, then they get him down and are kicking him, that's a brawl! It reminded me of Richard Lester's The Four Musketeers (1974), Lester said he had watched the earlier versions of the story on film, and said something like "If you are really trying to hurt or kill someone in a sword fight, you don't stage it like an Olympics controlled fencing"! When I saw the brawling dirty play in that film, I thought "Yeah!". I do think this last episode suffered from some compositional problems that a really great editor with a good eye could have fixed... but , in general, they and their editors do a good job with this odd Jaunting about narrative drama.

I also factor in music and VFX. Ramin Djawadi has done a lot of work on film and TV and he is a more than above average film and TV composer, not an Alex North , but very good. Has been nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards but not for GOT. In my mind it's scandalous the show has some of his best work to date and the TV Academy seems oblivious , it is really a puzzle about why no nomination. I have to say D&D seem to have him write only one new 'theme' (well maybe 1 and some fractions) per season since season 1 , he does rework , with some invention closing sequence backgrounds , he does do a lot of other work, but this show has made him sort of famous. I have in-laws who are musicians (of the classical music kind) and they always remark on the quality of the score. So I don't know what goes on. I also factor in the CGI-VFX ... this one is subtle... because I am not talking dragons here(which are so different form the multitude of cgi dragons out there right now), but I did not realize , until after the first season that there was a TON of 'landscape fill in' and it all looked good! This kind of thing is below the radar of the casual viewer. Those are points that's been steady on for four seasons now. (I wish they would put, I don't think they do, the VFX featurette on the DVDs , I don't think they do.)

By now, after due consideration, I always give 2 points for the cast, 2 points for production value (sets and costumes) and 2 points for cinematography and music and misc. stuff like that, they are always first rate. So that's 6 minimum right there. Writing, structuring , editing composition, direction get my attention for the other four points.

Posting the Rotten Tomatoes data is for informational purposes only , no appeal to authority intended. In fact there cannot be. I can't find on RT what their criterion is for their scoring. Someone reads the reviews and gives it a 1 or 0, so to speak. I don't know how much weight to give to their reviews, but at least all of those are reviews. There are, to some extent , some more expansive than others , an analysis and reasons for aesthetic judgments are given, some better than others. (It's not some visceral opinion , mostly!, as I see in the voting elsewhere.) For instance for this episode only 30 reviews are given there must be more media outlets than that which have TV critics? For instance they have David Malitz's review at the Washington Post , but not Alyssa Rosenberg's at the Washington Post for this very same episode. Nor do they have LA Times critic Alan Eyerly's or Erik Kain's in Forbes. Or who knows how many others. Oddly in the only solidly rotten tomato by Jake Cole at Slant ... he liked the Meereen parts the best! Had harsh words for Alex Graves's staging of the duel, which I think were right on... but his criticism of the Ramasy - Roose interchange makes no sense. I do like reading reviews , don't take their 'ratings' seriously , they are just a 'windage' meter. I don't know what your take on the IMDB users poll is? It it similar to here, mostly there is just a number and no rational , but there are , as of today, 10387 votes, I sure would not want to read 10,000 reviews. I do like Myles McNutt reviews at Cultural Learnings, as are your alls, they a long , careful and elaborated , I like seeing that. This forum circumscribes , well at those that comment, a special community , but there are other views, some by people who take a special interest in this visual dramatic narrative adaptation of ASoIaF. In the end there is a loose but important arbiter of the show, that is how many viewers there are.... 7.2 million first viewing last episode, 8.2 million for the evening. That's a pretty solid endorsement, those are votes by paid subscription , some way or another. (I don't think pirate viewings are counted!) (By the by Entertainment Weekly sure is great sources of views and information about the show, I guess James Hibberd is quite a fan.

Yeah first Sam was a 'babe in the woods' then he wises up, then Jon must have told him his idea was bad. Yeah but the Asah/Yara, Moles-Town, ... such like that are standard whirly gigs to keep the causal viewer 'place-and-character' gouged. I don't know about D&D but I can see the 'studio' HBO in this case, have a template for that kind of thing, less the Bank of America Collar people forget what's what!

Sometimes George does trump the show runners, some other times too. In the novel Mole's Town IS warned , logical, and they escape to CB. We don't know from the show if the whole town was wiped out.* (They did not go into the tunnel thing.) Anyway most survive in the book and return to Mole's Town. When Jon sent someone to ask their help, for the big attack on the Wall.... turned out the place had been deserted. Which makes sense. Sometimes logic fails the show's flow chart that scops out the drama from the novels. *I repeat again, if a Mole's town whore can sniff out a wildling... Would one not think that a Wildling , Ygritte could not sniff out another wildling , Gilly? ...and I think spare her? Maybe not but makes sense.

I doubt that, but it's funny. I did notice another nod to GRRM when Tyrion says to Oberyn "You should wear a helmet"! (What ever happened to the word Helm?) Yeah I agree. One reaches a point where BITTER SWEET become a SHAGGY DOG STORY. (Maybe that why George has a Dire-wolf named that way?)

This is scruffy lot for sure! Over at Rotten Tomatoes season 4 is running at 98%, as judged by TV critics 46 votes counted, these are accompanied by reviews , not all are as incisive as others, and RT makes the judgment call on how to score them. Still if one factored in a margin of error , it would be at least ~ 1.0 to ~ 1.5 times higher than here. AT IMDB from 584,374 user votes it is 9.5 , the margin of error there is probably bigger, hard to tell, but that's a large sample size, so one might guess an approval of about ~9.0. For those who vote with their remote with their HBO subscription (even taking into account pooling) 8.2 million (Ep. 8 total) (see Hibberd at Entertainment Weekly) is not a bad metric. We don't know what their rating vote is , but they do keep watching. GOT has matched it's 4 season's high 3 times this season. (Is this still the most pirated show around the world?)

O yea of little cinema history.

I guess you read the spoiler? :wacko:

Did you see the ‘Inside the Episode’ for E8? Dave and Dan explained that they wrote this dialog: Tyrion: See that cockroach? Tomorrow morning, I'll be dead and it'll be alive. It'll have more contact with Tommen and Cersei than I will. I'll be nothing, and it'll be alive. [Jamie smashes the roach] Jamie: Now you got the edge on him. But, Peter Dinklage and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau ad-libbed something else.

You know how to adapt Dany's chapter's in Dance? I have read them,... as visual drama, I don't know how to do that in 10 one hour episodes. I leave that up to the show runners, we shall just have to see. It's odd that GRRM has a whole army of emasculated men... low or no levels of testosterone lessons aggression not exactly something one wants in a soldier. But castration or total emasculation can be imperfect leaving even the possibility of minimal generation of testosterone. But hey this is an alternate universe 'Earth'! We already have George appealing to Valyrian homozygosity as producing extreme psychological disorder , which in this world rarely leads to mental illness, but is most likely to produces physical defects. Not on Planetos. We know that sexual attraction or just erotic attraction can originate in brain function apart from testosterone level , that's true both in this universe and possibly GRRM's universe. I don't remember reading in ASoIaF that the Unsullied absolutely had no desires of any kind.

Actually there can both affection and sexual desire between a man and woman that adds up to Agápe with unfulfilled Éros , a Platonic bitter sweetness. So I agree with you the bolded part needs explanation.

The 'aging up' of the Stark kids WAS required by UK and USA child actor employment law, that is if one wanted them to be even on the edges of ADULT material, that was dictated before the show started. Even if they did not engage in the Adult stuff ,as GRRM does period-wise in the books. We have been thought this a 100 times. They absolutely had to do it for Dany's story or everybody on the production would have been arrested on the spot! Since they did away with Dany's Dothraki handmaidens, it was a dead cinch Missandei would become that. (I am still mad they don't still have Dany's Dothraki ladies!) but they did keep Missandei. So how you adapt those Dany chapters from Dance? You have read the Abelard and Heloise letters?, well the ones loaded with passion, that was after the castration event. You have a different take?

Remember BLADE RUNNER? Nope that didn't look real either.

I am too. In Dance there are what? ~ 14 Daenerys chapters, if one counts the Quentyn Martell ones (something like that) , on the page I enjoy George's 'looping' around . I know we get Barristan Selmy's POV interjected into the story... all this works on the page, for me,... but when I think of Dance, and we are into it now, besides the BIG scene and Quentyn's story what does one translate to a visual narrative at Meereen? Inventing a , what seems to be (can only be) Platonic relations ship between Missandei and Grey Worm is a great subplot, since have had an age up (forced by law) of Missandei , so use it for drama... I like it. It's not quite the same, but anyone around here know the Héloïse - Abélard story? I agree with the analysis of this as given by the captains of this forum...

It will be interesting to see what season 5 brings, I mean HBO (well Time Warner) must be raking it in if the USA numbers stay at 6 million. Must have twice that many non USA viewers as the a season goes out into the world as the year progresses.

I think this is true. Donnel Waynwood is he 'Ser Donnel Waynwood"? (that's Alisdair Simpson). Tho he makes no big deal out it, you'd think any Knight of Vale would know all the High Born of Westeros , there not that many, a lot of vassals , knowing all of them, I don't know. But one of the top 7 (there may be 8!) ...'Click!', "Thats odd.".... he thinks. I know in the 15th century news did not travel fast, but, it's gotten around that the former king is dead and Robert's Hand was executed.. Would think the guardian of the gate would need to know a lot of things. So why didn't he perk up he would have known that Arya is of both Stark and Tully blood? That would have been important in the Vale. By the by Arya has NOT been taken for a boy since season 2. The Arry thing is done with. (I think this was true in the books too.)