UK Watercooler Thirty-Three (and a third) : Revolutions Per Minute

how business minds work, I'll give you.

Well, there's so much more to a film than acting - there's the script, there's whether the sets/locations are convincing/appealing, there's the editing, the story pace, etc. etc. I kind of understand how these things are *supposed* to work.

But, human beings being what they are, and responding most obviously to human cues, if everything else in a film is good, but the acting is terrible, it's more likely to seem like the whole film is bad. I think people are more willing to sit through a bad film with good acting, because their imaginations can fill out the rest. While good film/bad acting is quite hard to filter out - UNLESS (as in the case of Rude Boy) the actor is not the bit that is the hook of the film - no one watched Rude Boy to watch him act, they watched the film to enter the world of The Clash. And it was fairly effective on that score.

There was so much more wrong with Factory Girl than just Sienna Miller's lack of acting ability. But the film I saw lsat night, oh god, I can't even remember the name of it. It was about Beatrix Potter. It was a really stupid film in a lot of ways - especially the sub-Disney animation bits - but the actors managed to pull it together and make the whole thing seem charming rather than crap.

Um. I know nothing about film, really. It confuses me in general. I'm really floundering in trying to describe it.

yes, ok, Mark G, you're right.

I now have to disappoint all my customers by telling them that no development got done on their sites yesterday coz it was the somewhat ironically named Labor Day (it is also coz all of Greece goes on holiday at once, but I'm not telling them that).

.. I mean, how many 'pitchees' you think "Well, the drags didn't go for it, but they will succeed anyway..."

xpost I am? about what?

I know how business minds work! They just want to make as much money as quickly as possible with as little risk. They do not care what they are selling.

Hence why their eyes lit up at UNBELIEVABLY BAD ART when they found out how much it sold for.

Ha ha, labour day. Time to stop wearing white shoes. Or something.

oh, and Kate, you are right, the acting will make people at least work through a bad film, but the aftertaste can still be "I just wasted two/three hours of my life there" and the blame ends up with the actors, if they are the central hook of it.

Really, blame should be apportioned to the director. Or the casting agent!

Just because someone *looks like* the subject of a film does not mean that they will be the slightest bit good at portraying them.

Morning all. I've spent all week getting stressed over minor shittinesses - seem to be getting a cold, as does everyone else here, and that doesn't help my sense of proportion - and now mr spacecadet is being made redundant the day after a positive performance review because the company panicked over economic doom-mongering and realised they weren't going to make their already wildly unrealistic targets. I am worried about him but I suppose it's made me think "um, ok, everything else was not that bad, really." Ho hum...

I often think reading ILX threads about films and TV where someone's acting skills are slated or praised that I have no idea what good acting involves. In particular the non-ILX people I talk to about Dr Who have exactly the opposite opinions to the ILX Who thread about the acting talents or otherwise of recent assistants, and are just as voluble about them.

I have been thinking about "acting" as well recently and have come to the conclusion that the reason I don;t like a lot of British cinema/tv is that there seems to be too much acting in it. I haven't really formulated what I mean by this but watching Helen Mirren as the Queen seemed to be sum it up nicely.

Take, for instance, the sitcom that had Davina McColl in it. Now, I thought her acting was OK, but the TV show was terrible. But the received info was basicaly that her acting was terrible and the show was sunk because of it.

Now, there's a great school of thought amongst actors that goes "how dare anyone who is not a qualified actor get an acting job of any kind" which may well have sunk critical appraisal.

But, take the first series of "Men behaving badly" with Harry Enfield, who is a great comedian, but is no comic actor, and was terrible. Did it sink the series, well, nearly. But, I found out, he was only on the show to allow the prog to get made in the first place as they could not sell it to the BBC without a sufficiently big name in it. As the BBC were committed to the new series, HEnfield left to allow them to make the programme they always wanted to.

Oh, I am sorry to hear about Mr. Spacecadet! That is a rubbish thing to happen. :-(

There are so many different types of acting - Shakespearian, Method, etc. - that I don't know if it's a question of taste, or a question of fit.

What do people mean by "bad acting" - do they mean overblown, too obviously ACTING - or do they mean not bothering to act at all, being too much "themselves" rather than the character, or being too wooden, as if unable to forget there is a camera there? There is bad acting, as in "cannot act" and there is "inappropriate acting" as in overblown epic acting where something more personal and naturalistic is required.

I think, WRT Dr. Who - sci fi often needs really overblown epic, almost Shakespearian type acting in order to deal with the massive themes that sci fi writers like to write about. However, the point of the Assistant in Dr. Who is to provide an everyman/woman in there to react as the audience would to the epic events around them. So you need a balance of quite over-the-top ACTING Doctor and naturalistic assistant.

Then again, I don't know what I'm talking about.

The problem with Factory Girl was that I never for once moment thought that I was watching Edie Sedgewick. I thought I was watching Sienna Miller prancing about dressed up in various outfits. While halfway through the Potter film, I forget I was watching the derrided Zellwegger and just thought I was watching an eccentric Edwardian squabbling with her parents.

"Zoolander" is very funny! I like the bit where he does the "blue steel" face at the end, and stops the blade in its tracks. Also, in the extras, all the bits of whats-her-name who plays katinka keeps cracking up laughing.

Milla Jovovich.

I so love Zoolander, it helps keep me sane at work, but a lot of people go straight by the irony barrier and LIVE IT.

Question: Is hot chocolate the way forward this afternoon?

Yes. Hot Chocolate Milano from Cafe Nero.

No, nothing that fancy. I get it from the free machine by the watercooler.

You know, it used to be, if you send an HTML file in an ordinary email, it would, annoyingly, display as part of the email no matter what you do. Now I can't get an HTML attachment to display inline for love nor money. ARGH.

Surely it depends on your mail-client?

Can you muck around with the MIME headers directly? Attachments have a "disposition" setting; if you set that to "inline" it should obey.

Somehow, whatever job I've been in in the past, I've always been lumbered with the job of spamming the customer list. So now I take a Perl script from job to job that does the heavy lifting. If you can install Perl on your PC, it might be what you're looking for - it takes a file with a list of email addresses, and a file with the text of your email, and sends the latter to the former, one at a time, waiting x seconds between each mail so you don't make your server grind to a halt.

I'm not doing any of those things. There exists an application to do it, I'm not f*cking about with it.

Turns out that it didn't need to be in blue at all - the woman just made it a different colour so I'd know which bit to send and which bit to strip out. ARGH.

It's really hard not to just shoot back I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS. I DON'T WANT TO KNOW HOW TO DO THIS. I AM AN CRYSTAL DEVELOPER!!! but that would be counter productive. They're just sticking me with all the unpleasant bits because they think I can't quite get working on reports yet because the db isn't finalised yet. And no one else wants to do them. :-(

Aww.

Today, I am mostly concerned with: trying to track down information about a very obscure mid-80s Childrens Film Foundation movie which scared me to death as a child. It was about a haunted Cornish mine. When I was in Cornwall I visited somewhere which reminded me strongly of one of the locations - an engine-house on top of a cliff, with a mineshaft by it which was grated over rather than covered, so you could drop stones down the shaft. Cornwall does have lots and lots of clifftop engine-houses, though, and this film is particularly obscure, so I am having trouble finding out if it was the same one.

(the place in question, though, definitely *is* the engine-house on the front cover of the Rough Guide for the area - see http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/images/1843538075/ )

I have got TEH PH34R about this thing. I just have an awful feeling that I've totally set it up wrong and it's going to spit out 20,000 garbled emails to annoy all our members and I will get sacked - for doing something I was never really hired to do! Argh!

I have seen a horror film with a Cornish tin mine in it, but it was some dodgy Hammer Horror thing about a man who was killing girls by embedding them in wax? Probably not the same thing at all.

found it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087389/

I get that fear every time, too. So I put myself at the start of the recipient list - that way if it's sending out rubbish I can kill it before it's sent *too* many.

That's the film I meant - the IMDB link, not the Hammer-type thing - but I can't find much info about its locations on the net, only that the engine-house in the film is "in North Cornwall" somewhere. But I remember, at the start of the film, one of the characters dropping stones down the disused mineshaft and hearing the sea at the bottom - this mine is one of the few where you can do that.

Here's some more pictures of it: http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=towanroath&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2

more info here
http://www.horrorcornwall.co.uk/

mine in the film was this one http://www.cornwall-calling.co.uk/mines/st-ives-st.erth-zennor/ding-dong.htm

(Please don't interrupt the mine discussion)

Erm, I know that the email is fine because I have tested it on mine own account. But I have no idea if I'm sending it to the right list! There are a bunch of queries lying around on the db that I've cobbled together - they want members and students. So I've started with the members and practices query, deleted the practices and stuck in a union with the students query.

There's no reason that shouldn't work. But knowing this system... I'm sure something will go horribly wrong with it! Like the Members query won't actually be a members query, but every damn person in the DB or something. It is filtering for various things that I am assuming are taking out DNC persons. I hope.

xpost: I read that too.

The film was set in both working and abandoned mines - I assume from that page that the Ding Dong mine was the one they used for the working mine scenes. The abandoned-and-haunted mine is annoyingly, the one that the writer of that page had forgotten the name of. "On the north coast" fits, though.

Kate: aah ok, I see what you mean. I've had problems like that before too.

(The descriptions I can find of Ding Dong's location are a bit contradictory, but none of them are on the coast)

It's all gone horrible wrong. Of course.

And because I changed two lines of code (which I commented out with my initials and the date on so I could change it back) it looks like I broke it.

it is supposed to be sending out batches of 350 emails each in the bcc field. Instead of doing that, it is only sending out an email every 350 records. ARGH.

That sounds like a better way for it to fail though, could have gone the other way and each member gets 250 mails.

AAARRRGGGHHHH. You are right, that would be even more nightmarish.

I have made my colleague take a look at it. He now thinks that I broke it. :-(

I told him before I did it, that I didn't know what I was doing, and I was essentially just poking it with a stick.

Oops. It was me that broeked it after all. It was then me what fixed it.

GOING OFFLINE FOR A WEEK??!?!?!?

My god, I might actually get some work done.

not now thanks to ed.
Now you just need to get AIM and chatz with everyone

Hurrah I can finally changed my name!

I didn't get any more work done than usual after all. Hey, I gotta investigate this name changing business.

Will it show who people *really* are, as well as who they are claiming to be?

(Not that this helps with all those people who chose utterly random names I still can't recognise.)

I thought you might
x-post

New board, new thread:

UK Watercooler: Miracle On 34th Street