Sunday, 27 December 2015

expressions - wishing a happy week

There is nothing wrong saying "Happy week everyone", happy being an adjective and the week being a noun. But it will sound weird and out of the ordinary! something that the people are not used to hearing.



Being Native English speaker I would recommend saying "Have a good week(end) (ahead)" or just say "have a good one."



So, if you don't want to sound weird, don't use "happy week".

identify this movie - Spaghetti Western with a blind man

Could be Blind Justice (1994):




VHSSource



... a western about a blind gunfighter roaming the range with a baby in tow.



The enigmatic Canaan (Armand Assante) is a serape-clad vision in black, first glimpsed carrying a swaddled infant through Monument Valley



[...]



He gets sidetracked in a one-horse town, where a small band of federal cavalry is holed up guarding a ton of silver bullion. Meanwhile, evil bandit leader Alacran (Robert Davi) controls the only road out of town, , and has so far foiled all their attempts to send for help.



[...]



But Canaan surreptitiously outfits the casket with explosives, and manages to blow casket, church, and outlaw crew sky-high. Canaan loses his hearing in the blast, but he's able to identify Alacran by smell, and dispatches him in a final showdown.



  [Source]


grammar - stative verbs as gerunds

Stative verbs are used in the gerund form as second verbs, not in continuous tenses.



I love knowing that I've helped someone understand a point in English.



When two verbs are together, depending on the first verb, the second verb might be in the full or bare infinitive, a gerund, or to + gerund.



I want to believe it's true.



Let me believe in you, if no one else will.



I love knowing I've helped someone.



I look forward to understanding computers better, with your help.



Stative verbs as gerunds can start a sentence.



Believing in yourself is necessary to succeed in life.



From the source http://www.myenglishteacher.net/gerunds.html :



"Even stative verbs (those verbs that almost never have -ing) can be turned into gerunds. A native speaker of English would NEVER say I am believing you. However, a native speaker could say"



"Believing in God is important."



"Believing, here, is a gerund. It is NOT a verb. Believing in God is a gerund phrase."



http://www.myenglishteacher.net/gerunds.html



To qualify the source, because of a comment made, being a native speaker of English is no guarantee that the language will be used correctly. The obvious implication of the statement in the quote is a native speaker who speaks educated English.



Note: Some so-called stative verbs can be used in a continuous tense, but with a different meaning. For example: I see you now. I'm seeing the doctor tomorrow.

Is K unfaithful too his youth love / love interest from MiB in MiB 3?

In the first Men In Black movie it is made quite clear that K is still in love with the girl he left behind which he had to abandon to be a Man In Black.



But in MiB he flirts heavily with Agent O, even though the incident with the girl he left behind must not have been long ago. J even makes snide remarks about it.



From a narrative point, this plot line makes K look more human in MiB3 and adds a subplot with a love interest, but it completely disregards K's personality from MiB1.



Can it be assumed that the screenwriters just disregarded K's History to have a love interest in MiB3? Is K unfaithful too his youth love / love interest from MiB in MiB 3?

soundtrack - Is "The Merry-Go-Round of Life" from Howl's Moving Castle a song in the public domain?

The music was composed for the film by Joe Hisaishi (professional name of Mamoru Fujisawa), who was born in 1950. From wikipedia:




Another Miyazaki film, Howl's Moving Castle, for which Hisaishi
composed the score, was released on November 20, 2004 in Japan.




Here he is performing it himself. Very moving.

In Star Trek Into Darkness who was the saboteur?

They never implicated Carol Marcus during the film. She had the full trust of Spock, because she was the Admiral's daughter.



Kirk knew before anyone else that it was sabotage. When they are about to regain warp power and Chekov says "I take full responsibility for the failure". Kirk says "I don't think it was your fault." Or something like that.



The film states specifically that it was the Admiral. We could assume that he had someone do it for him, but his name is used to identify who did it. This is mentioned twice during the film. Once by Spock when he's talking to Kirk, and once by the Admiral when he's talking ship-to-ship with Kirk.



The Admiral's plan went wrong. The Enterprise was support to fire the torpedoes first before the ship broke down stranding them in Klingon space. Because it broke down first, Kirk takes a landing party to capture Khan. Kirk never intended to fire the torpedoes anyway.



They try to report back to Earth that they captured Khan alive, but they never get a response. Uhura says someone is blocking the signal, then the Admiral appears in his new ship to destroy the Enterprise.



The Admiral assumed the torpedoes would start a war, the stranded Enterprise would be destroyed by Klingon's covering up what the Admiral did.

game of thrones - In the title sequence, what is the strange futuristic noise/blinking effect?

I just got here, because I have to write an essay about this opening sequence. Here's what I wrote (hope it will be useful):
The opening sequence was designed by Santa Monica based Elastic design studio director Angus Wall working along with The Rock Paper Scissors group. Wall is an acclaimed film editor and title designer that rose to prominence during the 90's when he worked for David Fincher as his lead editorial consultant. The main function of the title sequence was to help the audience orient themselves within complex plots that affect and intertwine each other in the giant fictional world of Westeros and Essos. Elastic team was to introduce the world's maps and geography to the viewer, but also to avoid standard tropes for fantasy maps - aged parchment with Medieval-like inscriptions presented in the candle light. And although Tolkien maps of Middle-Earth was their starting point inspiration, whey had to move away from this kind of depiction.
The breakthrough happened when the design process moved from Middle Ages to more enlightened ones. Decorated initials and vignettes were exchanged for Da Vinci's sketches and models. The digitally created clockwork universe was born. To stay away from both – the archaic belief of flat earth and the illuminated spherical earth models – Angus Wall and his team created an inverted world that surfaces on the inside of a sphere. To marry helio- and geocentric models of the universe, the sun is placed in the centre of the world, within a celestial armillary sphere. What's surprising, the sun itself became a flat object – a disc constrained within the innermost ring of the astrolabe, rotating within the machine. Rings of the astrolabe are engraved with scenes from Westeros history that occurred prior to the action in the books and the tv series – three of those are shown – the Targaryen invasion of Westeros (burning city, dragon and an army), Robert's Rebellion (a wolf, a lion and a stag killing a three-headed dragon) and Robert's ride to power (a stag with a halo with other animals paying homage to it). "We cut to those three times in the title sequence, so you actually see a history of Westeros and Essos. The third time we see all the animals [representing] the different houses bowing down to the Baratheon stag, which brings us to the present, where there's a Baratheon king. We wanted to be very, very faithful to the book because we knew there would be a large fan base that will be looking at this very carefully," says Angus Wall.
In the digitally-created environment, the camera (or rather illusion of it) swoops down from the sun towards the surface of the map (speeded up with few lens snicks – another invention for the mechanism-themed opening). At the surface, a single cogwheel with a crest starts to turn and the whole clockwork model of a city emerges from the ground. The camera travels from place to place, showing more cities and castles, each being erected in the like manner. This part represents the ruling houses with their machinations being the propelling force of “Game of Thrones” world. Also, it informs the viewer where the action of the episode will take place. This creates an unprecedented result, as the opening scores animation evolves from episode to episode as multiple plots develop. In the first season alone there is four varying openings, or “map paths”. The rest of the map is a topographic representation in 3D, having distinct angular shapes (contour intervals are presented literally) and small amount of features, generalised only to main roads (lines), forests (green spiked pyramids) and rocks (grey polygons). Names of notable places are integral part of the map, the style of the font resembles quill and ink writing, similar one to the one used in Tolkien maps for “Lord of the Rings”.