Author Topic: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?  (Read 44702 times)

Offline Glom

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Re: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?
« Reply #45 on: June 17, 2012, 03:40:07 PM »
(The spinning room thing was done in a Fred Astaire movie once; it's cool, but there is only one way it was revolutionary.)

My nomination for groaner of the day. 

Yeah, you should be denigrating the one redeeming feature of that vacuum of a movie.

Offline Echnaton

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Re: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?
« Reply #46 on: June 17, 2012, 05:02:55 PM »
Yeah, you should be denigrating the one redeeming feature of that vacuum of a movie.

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Offline DataCable

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Re: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?
« Reply #47 on: June 17, 2012, 07:13:03 PM »
(The spinning room thing was done in a Fred Astaire movie once; it's cool, but there is only one way it was revolutionary.)
That's rotationary.
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Offline ka9q

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Re: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?
« Reply #48 on: June 18, 2012, 12:06:13 AM »
People do tend to go on about 2001, but it's on a list of movies where I have to say that it's revolutionary for its time.  Without that caveat?  The effects are in many places quite crude.
Indeed. Youtube Apollogist astrobrant2 made two excellent videos showing various mistakes and inconsistencies in 2001: A Space Odyssey:

(Part 1)
(Part 2)

Part 1 seems to have been taken down because of a DMCA complaint, and I can't find any mirrors. Astrobrant2 has been the victim of sustained (indeed, criminal) DMCA abuse by Jarrah White, and it can take a long time to restore videos that have been taken down improperly.

Neither of us had noticed most of these mistakes before, but you only have to look for them. Many are exactly the kinds of "anomalies" in lighting and relative object size that the Apollo deniers imagine in the Apollo photography. In 2001 they're real and often quite blatant. Ever since the movie first came out, my favorite "incoherence" has been the conference room scene, supposedly set on the moon. If they had walked like that on the real moon, their heads would bounce off the ceiling.

So why was everyone so impressed by 2001 at the time? I can think of several reasons:

1. It was so much better than anything before it, even if that isn't saying much.

2. Most of what passes for "science fiction" in TV and movies is actually fantasy set in space, e.g., Star Trek and Star Wars. Clarke, an accomplished "hard" science fiction writer, actually tried to adhere to known physics when possible. The USS Enterprise and countless other fantasy spaceships simply handwave artificial gravity into existence. Kubrick and Clarke actually tried to simulate weightlessness. When they do implement artificial gravity, they do it in a physically plausible way.

3. 2001 came out in 1968, just before the first Apollo landing. We did not yet know just how inaccurate those thousands of paintings of imaginary lunar scenes really were.

4. In 1968 we didn't yet know how real astronauts would move inside a large spacecraft. The big fear was becoming stranded, unable to reach a handhold. So Kubrick and Clarke implemented what was then thought to be a good way to move in such a cabin: Velcro on shoe soles and walkways. But when the first large manned spacecraft, Skylab, was launched in 1973 astronauts quickly discovered how easy it was to get around. You just push yourself in whatever direction you want to go and grab something when you get there. How do you get to the center of a large open space without velocity, and how could you then cancel that velocity to become stranded without touching anything? It should have been obvious that stranding was a non-problem, but worrying about non-problems is a time-honored tradition in the space business. The problem is that you often won't know if something will be a problem or not until it happens, and then it's too late.

Every manned spacecraft cabin also has a substantial ventilation system to prevent hazardous bubbles of CO2 from forming around astronauts, and that also tends to move things around.

So that scene of the flight attendant retrieving Dr. Floyd's pen is now just laughable. So is her full bathing cap. In the real universe, astronauts with long hair tie it down or just let it float. Of course, a cap neatly avoids having to simulate the behavior of long hair in weightlessness when you're filming a movie.

Everybody has now seen enough video from real spacecraft to know what true weightlessness looks like and how real astronauts behave in it. Any serious space movie with a pretense of realism now has no choice but real weightlessness, either in an airplane (like Apollo 13) or by actually going up there. Only the second option would make the astronauts themselves look right, where under sustained 0g fluid moves up in their bodies and into their faces. (I suppose you could simulate that on earth by hanging the actors upside down for a while before each scene.)

Thanks to old Apollo video, almost as many people know what real 1/6 g looks like, so again they're not likely to be fooled by anything but an airplane, and then you've got not only a limited duration but a limited volume. I suppose you could always construct a small vacuum chamber on an airplane, but that's getting pretty involved. Basically, faking lunar gravity in a movie is just so intractible that no one even tries. The fans generally understand and agree to suspend disbelief. Duncan Jones' "Moon" (2009) is a good recent example.

Regarding front projection, there's a very big giveaway in the "Dawn of Man" sequence at the beginning of "2001". A resting leopard is seen at twilight with glowing eyes. Cats, like many animals (but not humans) have a tapetum lucidum behind the retina to reflect light that would otherwise not be detected. We were seeing the reflection of Kubrick's front projector in the leopard's eyes. It was unintentional but the effect was so striking that Kubrick kept it.





Offline JayUtah

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Re: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?
« Reply #49 on: June 18, 2012, 02:02:00 PM »
J. Weidner is an interesting person.

No, he's a dishonest plagiarist.  He has blatanly stolen my original content from my site and has ignored all my attempts to contact him to talk about it.  He is absent by choice, not by accident.

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I would refrain from criticizing a person who is absent from the forum, it is simply good manners that shouldn`t allow any of us, gentlemen, to talk defamatory arguments of such people.

Nothing that has been said here qualifies legally as defamation against him.  However, your insistence on labeling Apollo astronauts and functionaries as frauds and liars does qualify as defamation under the law.  What do you say to that?

Further, Weidner has published his statements extensively and seeks to be published further.  Apollohoax is a public forum that anyone can read and contribute to.  He is therefore being criticized in an equally public forum.  I am not a member of Jarrah White's YouTube channel, yet on that channel is said the most vile and despicable things about me personally.  Where is your passionate defense of me?  Where is your vigorous condemnation that I am being vilified in a place I do not frequent?  Or is your one-sided defense purely hypocritical?

If Jay Weidner seeks public attention for his claims, then neither he nor you gets to limit what others may say about him in a public forum.  That's simply the way the world works.  If you don't want to be spoken about, don't attract attention.

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We know that S. Kubrick was a `detail whore`...

We also know from Tony Frewin, a correspondent of mine and Kubrick's long-time assistant, that he had nothing to do with hoaxed Moon landings, and that he regarded the people who tried to implicate him in one as nosy crackpots or worse.  He considered them extremely ignorant of his life and work, and really didn't consider them worthy of his attention.

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Unfortunately coincidences tend to be either accumulative or scattered.

Weidner can spend all the time he wants trying to trump up an "accumulation" of "coincidences."  But when he tries to say that this is what Kubrick really intended, we have contrary evidence from a much closer, much more reliable source than Weidner.  I can guarantee you that no one in Kubrick's estate pays the least attention to Weidner or considers him in any way an authoritative or even particularly knowledgeable interpreter of Kubrick's work.

Weidner is just another attention-seeking blowhard who carefully avoids any real test of his claims.  He wants to attach himself to famous men and famous things just enough to get a little for himself, without attracting so much attention that he's slapped down once and for all.  If you want to get me to pay attention to him, convince him he should talk to me about plagiarism.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline twik

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Re: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?
« Reply #50 on: June 19, 2012, 11:45:27 AM »
You know, the argument that Kubrick left clues in later movies refering to a "moon hoax" shows just how desperate people like advancedboy are to focus on any inanity.

Let's say there are, perhaps, references to rockets and the distance to the Moon in Kubrick's later movies. Why does this have to indicate he's saying "I really faked the Lunar landing footage" and not "Hey, I'm making a sly reference to that movie of mine about the Moon. Maybe you've seen it, it was called 2001...."?

But to HBs, it's entirely inconceivable that Kubrick could be referencing his own (very public) work. To them, it MUST be a clue to something nefarious.

Offline Jason Thompson

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Re: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?
« Reply #51 on: June 19, 2012, 03:28:01 PM »
I still loved the idea that Kubrick faked the Moon landings. In a studio just up the road from where I live here in good ol' England...
"There's this idea that everyone's opinion is equally valid. My arse! Bloke who was a professor of dentistry for forty years does NOT have a debate with some eejit who removes his teeth with string and a door!"  - Dara O'Briain

Offline nomuse

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Re: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?
« Reply #52 on: June 19, 2012, 03:34:31 PM »
Well, heck, I was just watching a few episodes of "UFO" over the weekend.  You can't tell me Pinewood can't do a lunar surface!

Offline twik

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Re: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?
« Reply #53 on: June 19, 2012, 04:19:41 PM »
I still loved the idea that Kubrick faked the Moon landings. In a studio just up the road from where I live here in good ol' England...

You heard the story of how they first tried to film Cleopatra in England? All the footage had to be scrapped because you could see the actors' breaths, and Elizabeth Taylor got pneumonia.

Offline nomuse

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Re: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?
« Reply #54 on: June 19, 2012, 04:30:41 PM »
Heh.  In the commentary to "Aliens" they talk about how filming in England really got them in the right mood for the scenes on Asheron -- cold, overcast, windy and always raining.  It is amusing to think that no matter how miserable the Marines seemed on the surface, when the actors left the studio that evening it was worse...

Offline Al Johnston

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Re: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?
« Reply #55 on: June 19, 2012, 06:25:29 PM »
I still loved the idea that Kubrick faked the Moon landings. In a studio just up the road from where I live here in good ol' England...

You heard the story of how they first tried to film Cleopatra in England? All the footage had to be scrapped because you could see the actors' breaths, and Elizabeth Taylor got pneumonia.

Well they would try filming it in summer... ;D
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Offline Luke Pemberton

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Re: Has anyone heard of this person - Jay Weidner?
« Reply #56 on: June 19, 2012, 07:04:02 PM »
Well they would try filming it in summer... ;D

That's funny.
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