Are people still bitching about Tiny Furniture even though Lena Dunham is kind of a big deal now? Or is it because she's such a big deal now that people are bitching about it?

I've yet to see it. I did want to though. Looked interesting.

Tiny Furniture is pretty awful but the CC Blu-ray treatment they gave it was stellar. I was surprised to see that there was an interview with Paul Schrader in there. He liked it a lot, obviously. Lena Dunham is one awkward looking chick and she should be the last person walking around in her big chones. Put some pants on!

/rant

I'll give Lena Dunham this much: She can act. She can act her ass off. She is beyond fantastic in her Girls HBO show, and I don't know if this is a positive for her or a negative against the rest of the cast, but I think she's the best looking of the four. The others look like high maintenance twats, pardon mine, and act that very same way, but Dunham's character is 3 dimensional, accessible, realistic, and far less of a horrible person than the rest of the cast. She looks like a NORMAL PERSON, and that's much more likable in my eyes than the traditional bullshit found in every fucking film.

Considering the standards for beauty in Hollywood and the studman69's of the world, that she's willing to throw off her kit and get ridiculed (albeit paid to be ridiculed) because of it, she also has more guts than anyone on this forum.

Compared to the DVD market, the LD market was absolutely miniscule. I don't know how they could've pulled it off in the LD market but not managed the same feat with DVD and Blu-ray volumes.

Today, BD players are $50 and fully compatible with non-HD TVs. You don't have to be an "hi-def snob" to be able to enjoy all the great Criterion Blu-ray releases you want.

I guess you could argue that they were fools to have ignored the VHS market, but I know plenty of people who were awoken to the value of quality presentation by Criterion laserdiscs. They would ask, "Why do you need a special player for this?" Then, they would watch and immediately understand. Criterion stood for more than great movies; it stood for exceptional presentation, as well.

As someone who has never seen a laserdisc before, how did the picture quality compare to DVDs? The same, or not quite as good?

It would have depended on the viewing source. Heavy ass picture tube televisions were still popular at the tail end of laserdisc and into the beginning of DVD. Depending on the software, it was pretty evenly split. There were some laserdiscs that looked great and there were plenty of shitty looking dvds, too. Criterions early DVDs were excellent, but not always anamorphic.

Yes, blu-ray players work just fine on SD tvs, but trying to watch Academy ratio blu-rays on a 4:3 tv would hardly be enjoyable given that they'd be heavily picture boxed. Considering that a large chunk of Criterion blu-rays are in that ratio, I don't think your statement rings very true. That said, owning an HD tv and a blu-ray player hardly makes one an HD snob.

Neither, it is because the movie is terrible. Sort of like why people will still bring up Armageddon as a "black eye" for the collection.

Tiny Furniture (or more Lena Dunham's Girls now) is a representative and well deserved poster child for a lot that is wrong with "hip" indie cinema (think the average mumblecore movie) today. It is just a bunch of overgrown adult-children of means whining about how tough their not tough life is b/c they lack any coping skills whatsoever apparently.

As for Lena Dunham personally, I don't mind her anymore than I mind someone else who seizes on the zeitgeist to make a career/money, good for her. She must have taken a day trip to Williamsburg from the Upper East/West Side or whatever part of Manhattan she is from and had the smart idea and industry/celebrity connections to say, "I'm going to make a show about all these twentysomethings talking loudly about last night's drunken sex in great detail at brunch right now" and then actually do it.

I'm not a huge fan of Dunham's, but you do realize that her work is very critical of these "adult-children" thing, right? What she does is basically paint them in an even worse light than they do to themselves, and sorta' makes fun of them, while also humanizing them.

At its best, a reference quality LD could look pretty close in quality to a non-anamorphic letterbox DVD. Most Laserdiscs were not quite that good.

Because the format was analog, Laserdisc picture quality was also highly dependent on the LD player used to watch it. There was a pretty wide disparity between entry-level and high-end models.

If that sounds like damning the format with faint praise, keep in mind that the competition at the time was with VHS, and we were all watching movies on much smaller televisions. In its day, Laserdisc was a pretty awesome product that introduced the concepts of letterboxing for OAR, audio commentaries and supplemental bonus content, chapter coding, and many more features that we take for granted today.

The Criterion Laserdisc CAV releases started at $100 list price and went up from there. Also, because the home video market was so small back then, it probably cost them a lot less to license the films too.

Don't forget that Criterion has their stuff on Hulu Plus, which can be viewed on objects as small as a smartphone. The fact that this library is available online is great but if their mission statement is about the best presentation (for their main line, not Eclipse), a small screen is not the way to go. Still a fan, but that is kind of weird. And yeah I understand that it's in keeping with the small nature of the company and streaming is part of the climate now.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/wKiIroiCvZ0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Exactly my point. Classic vid.

You can't watch a film on your f*cking telephone, Junior. Get real.

Most BD players have a 'zoom' function that should handle this issue just fine.

It's not that critical of these people or at least it is as critical of them as they tend to be of themselves. Maybe it is simply, "I'm too close to it" thing, but from conversing with/overhearing conversations between "these people" (aka hipsters/trust fund white twenty-somethings in Bklyn), the stuff Lena Dunham does is so accurate b/c it is so shallow.

For as bad as she may make them seem, there is no real criticism b/c criticism implies judgment/shame, neither of which her characters or these people ever really get. Everything is fair game to be shared from an ironic distance. These people's lives have no gravity, dramatic or otherwise whatsoever, it's just an extension of living in a dorm in college, only the bars/house parties are a hell of a lot better/expensive.

I appreciate her ability to so perfectly capture the subjects of her work and she is definitely amazingly self-aware b/c she is one of these people, but the few that even gets that she is one of these people and can articulate it. But, in terms of being interesting or entertaining, authentically rendered movies/shows about such inauthentic and vapid people does nothing for me.

You probably don't watch her stuff (which is fine), because it's HUGELY critical of them.
One example is how her character gets a big break for a writing job, something she's wanted for ever, but she neglects the work, blows her advance and might be getting sued as a result - all the characters do some stupid selfish shit, most which have huge repercussion, some of which they learn from, though mostly, they don't - and the show is very critical of her, and paints her in a more than unsympathetic light. And I'm not saying "you should like it", I'm not too big a fan myself, but there is more going on beneath it's surface that you're not seeing, for one reason or another.

^I don't watch much of her stuff. Bits and pieces of Girls here and there and Tiny Furniture until I had to turn it off b/c it was so bad.

I think a lot of it comes down to attitude about the things you mentioned. I think a lot of what you described is exactly what a non-hipster would criticize a "hipster" about. Poor work ethic, self destructive behavior, selfishness, etc. But, from knowing "hipsters" I realize that that is sort of what makes a hipster (not fashion or musical taste), but this complete detachment from/awareness of such things. Situations that could be easily avoided or should be avoided are gotten into and the takeaway is "awww a learning experience," when it should be, "you're 26! What the hell were doing in that situation to begin with? You're not 17 anymore!"

If Dunham has ever written about this, I'd be interested in reading her take b/c I tend to feel that she knows/is/loves the type of people she writes for the screen, which is what makes her stuff so authentic. But, at the same time, it's just a lifestyle I don't really need to watch on screen.

Seems a little on the nose for their typically vague clues, but it might be hinting at Boy A.

Or, perhaps more likely, Bergman's Persona.

bolded - sounds like 99% of sitcoms, even the "acclaimed" ones like Seinfeld.