Film Discussion - Television Tropes & Idioms

Latest near the bottom.

Gus: OK, cool. Reminds of the way Anime looked on the first day of the site. ;-) I'm sure it will eventually end up with its own category button on the side bar. For now, though .. hmm. Let's leave it index-less, until it gains some momentum.

Looney Toons: It would appear that any text other than an entry name in a bullet entry breaks the nav bar. Check out Star Wars and note that the Film nav bar comes up empty. We're going to have to find a way around this.

Ununnilium: It's specifically any text before the entry name. Since I removed the "The" before "James Bond movies", the next entry in the Film nav bar in the Star Wars entry is James Bond.

Silent Hunter: Suggest we add the Alien Quadrilogy and WarGames to this category.

Ununnilium: Works for me. Film.Alien for the former?

Robert: Fine by me. Notable is a pretty flexible term. If they've been homaged, or they're rich in trope examples, they can go in. I'm sure you'll have plenty to say about both of them.

Seth: I say use the same vetting as we do on notable anime and the webcomics list. List anything and everything that the contributors feel like. If it gets big enough create a Cinematic Greats or Greatest Movies page like Essential Anime for the classics.

Ununnilium: ...are there any film-specific tropes? It seems like the vast majority of film tropes port directly to TV, except, I suppose, theater-specific ones.

Dark Sasami: While I can't think of any off the top of my head, logic says there must be. There are things you can do in a movie that you can't do on TV, and vice versa. Think of Engaging Chevrons — cool in the movie, filler on TV. What was the most common criticism of Star Trek: Insurrection? It was too much like an episode, not enough like a movie. I'm sure there are things out there; they just need to be found and nailed down.

Robert: We haven't got any TV examples of Everything But The Girl yet. Some of the current TV tropes may really be film tropes — they occur on TV, but they come from film and work much better there.

No doubt as people (not just me) add new film pages and expand the old ones, new tropes will become apparent. Once we've got enough, we can put all the predominantly-film tropes on their own page.

Seth: Film and Tv are basicaly the same medium. But one has a bigger budget and smaller run time. I dont think there are any Film Specific tropes that dont also apply to Television.

Robert: But there are probably tropes that are more at home in film than on TV, and vice versa.

Plural page names make for awkwardness. How about moving this page to film which works as a mass noun?

Ununnilium: Works for me.

Seth: No objections.

Faset Eddie: There are only two things in the Movies group now (Alien and Groundhog Day) — I'll move them into a Film group, so the context remains the same.

Paul A: You gonna go through the wiki and fix all the links you just broke, as well?

Ack Sed: Would Akira go in here or in Noteworthy Anime? It was many people's first exposure to 'adult' anime,after all. (We won't count Urotsukidōji,otherwise known as Legend of the Overfiend — too many tentacles)

Maso Tey: I'm going to be subdividing this by decade, going at it bit by bit over the next couple of days; anyone who wants to help is welcome. As for series (James Bond) and cycles (Hammer Horror, if if even belongs here and not in Film Genres), I'd like to list each film individually in its correct decade, with a link to the individual or series page as appropriate, using the following form:

1980-1989

~~Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade~~ Indiana Jones trilogy (there's redundant, and then there's redundant redundant)
Re-Animator

1990-1999

Bride of Re-Animator

2000-present

Beyond Re-Animator
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

That makes for a lot of redundant links, but I figure the better browsing makes up for it.

I'll be keeping these all on the same page for now; if we want to split it into multiple indices later, the groundwork will already be laid.

Janitor: Well, the notion of putting the most recent at the tops would work. Not that that is what you did. Beginning Film in the 1980's? Hell, Film was over for a lot of people by the 1980's. Recent-to-less-recent, by decade, should dodge some FlameWars.

Maso Tey: Kudos to whoever's been recasting this as a timeline/mini-lesson in film history. There are only two little problems:

The linkless years are making this not work as an index; they screw up the little navigation bars at the bottoms of individual movies' pages.
A lot of the movies listed don't have a lot of artistic or historical significance, and they integrate poorly into a structure designed around "highlights."

The first problem could be corrected by making the year part of the link (e.g., 1920 - The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari). But that would be a lot of work, as film names couldn't simply be linked with Wiki Words; it could be misleading, as clicking on the year would not bring up a page for the year as might be expected; and the uninterrupted blue might be hard on the eyes. Is there another workaround?

Anonymous Mc Cartney: We could divide the timeline even finer; after all, any one film will be in only one year. So, divide by single years, with an "unsorted decade" at the bottom of the decade and "unsorted films" at the bottom of everything. If we do that, it'll work as an index, and it'll still have much of the timeline feel.

Can't do much about that other thing. There Is No Such Thing As Notability.

Maso Tey: That's reasonable. My concern about less-notable films is not that they don't belong on the page itself, but that they eventually would not belong in the new, semi-narrative structure that's slowly being imposed on it. Perhaps we should have a separate Overview Of Film History or something?

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: What you are suggesting is the equivalent of the Essential Anime divide for Film. Since the Film page we are working on is Noteworthy, do we keep the timeline structure on it when we start "Essential"?

Philosophical rant: ideas of what's artistically and historically important change over time. In the Silent Film era, very few people tried to preserve films, and so 90% of silent films don't exist anymore. Modern film preservationists want to preserve everything, including educational films, commercials, and MST fodder.

Paramount burned Murneau's last film, The 4 Devils, because they didn't want to be storing a lot of negatives during WWII; the film doesn't exist anymore. Its A Wonderful Life was a footnote in cultural history until it left copyright (temporarily) and started airing on TV constantly. Plan 9 From Outer Space and the rest of EdWood's catalog didn't become historically important until the Medved brothers declared him the worst filmmaker in the world.

Maso Tey: That's not exactly what I'm suggesting.

Right now, the Film page seems to be vacillating. The items about early film fit awkwardly into a timeline structure, and would work better as straight narrative; but the later decades of the timeline contain far too many items to fit into a coherent narrative overview.

My idea is more to keep this page as a complete index of film, with minimum annotation and a focus on the links (like Noteworthy Anime, yes), but then to have a separate page which, instead of a list of "essential" or historically significant films, consists in a narrative overview of film history in more general terms, giving a broad perspective on technology, artistic trends, censorship, etc. (Particular films or filmmakers would be used to illustrate these subjects, but without a systematic attempt to establish those mentioned as a canon-within-a-canon or a list with significance in itself.)

Robert: That separation is a good idea, but I'd prefer to split the pages the other way round. Put a overview of film history, and film in general, on this page, and have the complete index of films on a different page. That's the way we did it for anime, and it feels more natural for a medium's top page to be more than a basic index. However, I'm not sure how feasible moving the index would be.

Maso Tey: I see your point, and personally I'm good with any arrangement as long as it accommodates as much information as possible. Alas, I don't know from indices so I couldn't help with the switch.

Is UHF notable enough to go here? I'm not sure the rules of series/shows/movies/whathavesyou on being listed on the wiki.

Maso Tey: The rule, as I understand it, is: If someone cares enough about it to write it up, it belongs.

Morgan Wick: There Is No Such Thing As Notability. We're not Wikipedia.

Rebochan: It would really make more sense to branch this page into something else and make a proper category listing of all the film pages on this site, so it matches the other media categories.

Restored Batman to long-running film series. Because it is. I really don't want to hear anything about reboot or different styles or anything else that is just short of claiming Nolan went back and time and killed Bob Kane, Tim Burton, etc. If Tarzan and Bond count in that cateogry, he does.

Bonsai Forest: This list is enormous! Should we do it in folders? If we did, and someone was just browsing through, then it might be better to separate films by genre. Someone could click the genre folder, get their large list of films, and maybe within the folder, they could be separated by year?

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