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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:It's hard to impress upon someone how seriously "zombies don't run" was taken at the time, lol. Totally absurd discourse. One of the most annoying discourses of all time imo
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Aug 2, 2023 17:53
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They run now!? They run now.
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Aug 2, 2023 18:16
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So was it Left 4 Dead that made running zombies a "cool and good thing, actually" or did other big media things do that?
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Aug 2, 2023 18:58
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I thought the Cranks used consumer level DV ("they used cheap cameras so they could destroy them doing crazy stunts and fights!"), but I looked it up and although it was digital video they were pretty big professional cameras.
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Aug 2, 2023 19:45
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Aces High posted:So was it Left 4 Dead that made running zombies a "cool and good thing, actually" or did other big media things do that? 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead popularized it. By the time Left 4 Dead and The Walking Dead started to come out, it was beginning to be more accepted in the discourse iirc Didn't stop people from whining about it of course. Then we had the whole: there is too much zombie media discourse
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Aug 2, 2023 21:17
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The zombie craze led to Warm Bodies, which is one of the best adaptations of Romeo and Juliet ever
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Aug 2, 2023 23:24
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https://twitter.com/supermanenjoyer/status/1686137419320430592?s=46&t=yPIpoeD_1zo6-P4nl9Hh1g The voice coming from that scout ship is apparently Henry Cavill
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Aug 2, 2023 23:44
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Zombies running helped me enjoy zombie films since walking zombies are possibly the least threatening thing imaginable. Yeah, sure, there's an endless horde. How did that come to be? How did the first zombie catch anybody? It's odd that the 'tactical realism as applied to zombies' crowd hates fast zombies, since slow ones really only make sense on a symbolic level: You wake up one morning and everyone is hostile, you are no longer part of a crowd, and the crowd wants to kill you. It's a wonderful manifestation of 'in-group/out-group' fears but as soon as you think about how it gets that way without magic or something, it falls apart. Meanwhile, sprinting, highly aggressive zombies would certainly cause at least a couple of weeks of trouble. Probably not civilisational collapse but certainly long enough for a decent action film. On digital photography, Collateral doesn't look lovely, but it uses very specific digital photography to get a very specific look that is particular to that era of digital photography. Does that count? Public Enemies kind of does the same thing but just isn't very good. Pirate Jet posted:...arguable When there's a genre film that's set a low bar for itself and fails to clear it, like the Hobbit or something, she's good. She has a very workman/engineer like perspective. "You want this to pay off later so you need this set up here. You need less of this and more of this." Basically, for films that should be following a blueprint but fail to follow it, she can look at the blueprint and read it. She's the opposite of a film-troper. She absolutely understands conventions and structure, why both exist, and how to apply them. The moment it's anything more esoteric, that's aiming for any level of ambiguity, she struggles and cannot get away from the word 'supposed' as in 'this scene is supposed to (do a thing it's quite plainly not supposed to do) and it doesn't.'
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Aug 3, 2023 00:53
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Fast Zombies went hand in hand with single origin infectious zombies. Romero zombies had every dead body worldwide returning back to life and zombie bites kill rather than infect with a reanimation agent.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:05
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kilus aof posted:Fast Zombies went hand in hand with single origin infectious zombies. Romero zombies had every dead body worldwide returning back to life and zombie bites kill rather than infect with a reanimation agent. Also, by the end of the second day the zombies were being exterminated.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:58
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Snowman_McK posted:It's odd that the 'tactical realism as applied to zombies' crowd hates fast zombies, It’s cause all the out of shape nerds with zombie contingency plans know that they wouldn’t last 15 seconds in a fast zombie invasion. With slow zombies they could pretend their ingenuous plan of knocking out their parents staircase and chilling on the second floor playing Nintendo would actually work, and all the people with real world skills would somehow collapse in the face of this bizarre new paradigm. Fast zombies just win, the end.
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Aug 3, 2023 02:19
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My rascal can lap that zombie horde three times before they even notice me! Oh no... The battery's out! Quick, somebody push me to safety!
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Aug 3, 2023 02:24
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Lindsay Ellis seems like a nice lady who means well and I like her sense of humour, but lol, lmao that so many peeps think her hobbit vids feature any analysis beyond saying "this scene from hobbit 2 lacks tension, whereas this scene from lotr 2 is very tense, the end no elaboration" That save the cat idiot at least tried to explain the reasoning behind his rules!
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Aug 3, 2023 02:29
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Guy A. Person posted:It’s cause all the out of shape nerds with zombie contingency plans know that they wouldn’t last 15 seconds in a fast zombie invasion. With slow zombies they could pretend their ingenuous plan of knocking out their parents staircase and chilling on the second floor playing Nintendo would actually work, and all the people with real world skills would somehow collapse in the face of this bizarre new paradigm. Fast zombies just win, the end. Just thinking about trying to run from something that never, ever gets tired is terrifying. The opening scene of 28 Weeks Later shows this so well, when the camera shifts and you see that there are dozens of them closing on him from every angle like the world's hungriest linebackers chasing the ball carrier. He's panting like a desperately sprinting human and they're all just growling and roaring while still running full speed. Which they can do... forever. drat 28 Weeks Later is good, the way the outbreak gets re-started in Britain is loving ridiculous even for a zombie movie but everything else (especially the ending!) is just great.
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Aug 3, 2023 14:15
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JonathonSpectre posted:drat 28 Weeks Later is good, the way the outbreak gets re-started in Britain is loving ridiculous even for a zombie movie but everything else (especially the ending!) is just great. 28 Weeks Later just looked ahead and saw Brexit.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:03
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Both walking zombies and running zombies capture various aspects of the fear of one's fellow humans. Uniform hostility to outsiders, insensibility to harm, unsurpassable tenacity, the ability to make you conform against your will... there's a lot there.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:59
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Blood Boils posted:Lindsay Ellis seems like a nice lady who means well and I like her sense of humour, but lol, lmao that so many peeps think her hobbit vids feature any analysis beyond saying "this scene from hobbit 2 lacks tension, whereas this scene from lotr 2 is very tense, the end no elaboration"
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Aug 3, 2023 16:17
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Snowman_McK posted:When there's a genre film that's set a low bar for itself and fails to clear it, like the Hobbit or something, she's good. She has a very workman/engineer like perspective. "You want this to pay off later so you need this set up here. You need less of this and more of this." Basically, for films that should be following a blueprint but fail to follow it, she can look at the blueprint and read it. She's the opposite of a film-troper. She absolutely understands conventions and structure, why both exist, and how to apply them. My biggest problem is that the idea that a film needs to "follow a blueprint" is fake. In fact, genres are frequently created or pushed forward by unique embellishments or structures. This doesn't mean that narrative critique/analysis is worthless, but the perspective that there's a skeleton that the movie needs to be built on - determined by a nebulous "three act structure" or rules of "setup and payoff" - is bunk.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:17
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Bongo Bill posted:Both walking zombies and running zombies capture various aspects of the fear of one's fellow humans. Uniform hostility to outsiders, insensibility to harm, unsurpassable tenacity, the ability to make you conform against your will... there's a lot there. Running zombies tap into the primordial fear that you're definitely losing that race and everyone's going to laugh
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Aug 3, 2023 16:22
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Assepoester posted:She spends a whole video talking about how WB screwed over New Zealand workers, she's cool Sure, it's great that she brings that to the attention of her audience, although she makes the strange choice to downplay or ignore the head of wingnut studios role in all that (he was the one lobbying the government and media). She also never draws any connection between the irl production and the finished films, even though analyzing the latter is the purported point of the whole video series!
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Aug 3, 2023 17:18
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Assepoester posted:She spends a whole video talking about how WB screwed over New Zealand workers, she's cool This is unrelated to anything, but I'd 1000% watch a comedic "true crime" dramatization of the Omegaverse legal battle Lindsay Ellis documents, because that whole story is amazing. Her content was cool and good in general, it sucks that the internet eats people alive for extremely unnecessary reasons and she quit to prevent going insane or whatever.
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Aug 3, 2023 22:18
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:My biggest problem is that the idea that a film needs to "follow a blueprint" is fake. In fact, genres are frequently created or pushed forward by unique embellishments or structures. I don't disagree with this and didn't say otherwise. Megaman's Jockstrap posted:This doesn't mean that narrative critique/analysis is worthless, but the perspective that there's a skeleton that the movie needs to be built on - determined by a nebulous "three act structure" or rules of "setup and payoff" - is bunk. The idea of set up and payoff or story structure are not bunk, dude. They don't need to be followed as rigidly as the 'don't save the cat' (or was it save the cat?) or hollywood producers think they do, but structure and set and payoff are both good things to have in a narrative. Especially if you want the audience to have a good time, which is the goal of making a straightforward, crowd pleasing genre film. You can create something wonderful and unique by knowing the rules and breaking them intelligently, either adding things or cutting them out. Two of my favourite examples are Way of the Gun and John Wick, both of which are defined as much by what they cut out of the traditional structure as what they add in. That's not the films I'm talking about, though. I specified that it was films that set a low bar for themselves where all they have to do is follow the blueprint that is clearly laid out and they gently caress it up. This is what Ellis is really good at analysing. It's a low bar of analysis, but she's good at it. Essentially, there's a level of art that we can call pulp. There are lots of different kinds, including but not limited to romcoms, hallmark movies, Agatha Christie syle 'accusing parlour' murder mysteries, tournament based martial arts movies, movies where an action person has to get someone they don't like across the country while pursued...The audience knows exactly what they're getting and isn't watching it for inovation, just good execution of a formula. There's absolutely a skill to doing it well, as evidenced by the many, many terrible examples and the relatively few good examples. Ellis is good at talking about the bad examples and explaining how they could have been better examples. Sorry to go on, but I thought it was important to be clear so we could avoid disagreeing on something we don't actually disagree about.
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Aug 3, 2023 22:30
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What do you mean by "the hobbits set a low bar for themselves"? Expectations were extremely high for the prequels to LOTR, for everyone - cast, crew, audiences! The finished films definitely feature structures like set-up and payoff, so what?
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Aug 3, 2023 22:59
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Blood Boils posted:What do you mean by "the hobbits set a low bar for themselves"? Expectations were extremely high for the prequels to LOTR, for everyone - cast, crew, audiences! The finished films definitely feature structures like set-up and payoff, so what? Well, they aren't very tall
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Aug 3, 2023 23:04
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Wherever they set the bar, they really missed clearing it. Those three movies somehow made me like LOTR less. Everything went downhill after they ran into the Goblin King, who admittedly ruled with going around with his bare barrel chest and ballsack beard.
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Aug 3, 2023 23:06
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The 28 Days Later discussion reminded me of Sunshine, another Boyle/Garland collaboration, which is probably the first movie I ever saw that I loved way more than everyone else I knew. Man of Steel was the second. I'm a big fan of the Sun as a metaphor, apparently.
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Aug 3, 2023 23:14
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Blood Boils posted:What do you mean by "the hobbits set a low bar for themselves"? Expectations were extremely high for the prequels to LOTR, for everyone - cast, crew, audiences! The finished films definitely feature structures like set-up and payoff, so what? As in, it aims to be a very straightforward genre film. It's not trying to challenge conventions, narrative or stylistic. It's not a measure of quality. Bloodsport and Tekken are both pulpy martial arts films based around a tournamet. One executes the formula well and the other does not. Neither is what you'd call a good film, but Bloodsport does what it sets out to do while Tekken fails. Snowman_McK fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Aug 3, 2023 |
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Aug 3, 2023 23:15
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It feels like we're falling into the same old trap here where the genre label becomes prescriptive instead of descriptive. In my experience this ends in two outcomes: making approximately six thousand worthless sub-genres to explain why movies that share a few traits but are distinctively different from each other are still genre movies, or making a worthless overarching genre like "martial arts movies" that treats Enter the Dragon and Mortal Kombat '95 as functionally the same film. I don't believe the term "genre film" describes anything other than what the film experience focuses on; having said that there are many great films that pretended to focus on one thing while in fact doing another.
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Aug 3, 2023 23:24
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Snowman_McK posted:As in, it aims to be a very straightforward genre film. It's not trying to challenge conventions, narrative or stylistic. It's not a measure of quality. Bloodsport is based on the very real and very verifiable life of one-in-a-generation master martial artist Frank Dux. It's hard to miss on that.
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Aug 3, 2023 23:30
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:It feels like we're falling into the same old trap here where the genre label becomes prescriptive instead of descriptive. In my experience this ends in two outcomes: making approximately six thousand worthless sub-genres to explain why movies that share a few traits but are distinctively different from each other are still genre movies, or making a worthless overarching genre like "martial arts movies" that treats Enter the Dragon and Mortal Kombat '95 as functionally the same film. I think we're talking past each other. A film (or novel or tv show or video game or whatever) isn't bad if it doesn't fit the genre label. As we've both said, both directly and indirectly, plenty of great works are very squarely in a genre, except in the ways they aren't, either just doing the conventions better or by breaking those conventions and rules in meaningful ways. That said, there are plenty that aren't interested in that and are simply trying to be another entry in that genre, that are absolutely following conventions and rules. These are the ones Ellis is better at talking about. When she tries to talk about the former, she stops thinking about why they broke the rule or convention and merely points out that the diagram says they should have done it differently. It is funny that you chose the two examples you chose. It's actually a pretty good illustration of what I'm talking about. While they have their differences, on a meta level, they hit most of the same character and plot beats. They have set ups and payoffs that mirror each other beautifully. It's not one to one. Jax, Sonja and Cage are a mix and match of Roper's and Williams' characteristics and roles. Liu Kang doesn't pro-actively break the rules the way Lee does, he's more reactive. They're not the same film, but they're very much made off the same blueprint. It's a tricky thing to discuss since the kind of pulp I'm talking about generally has its examples forgotten. How many Westerns, for instance (a genre that absolutely has its conventions) are straightforward white hat/black hat films? There are undoubtedly thousands. How many can you actually name or remember? The ones we remember are more interesting than that. There's even a term for them: Revisionist Western. And the earliest examples date from about the beginnings of narrative film as a medium. Seriously, there's an example listed from 1904. I'll also say that this isn't a hard and fast line between 'challening' and 'pulp' it's more of a sliding scale.
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Aug 4, 2023 00:20
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Smaug was a cool dude who just wanted some gold and a good nap under a mountain. Sure occasionally had to burn a city, but for the most part he was a strong independently wealthy dragon. Then game of thrones came along and suddenly the dragons don’t want gold? Just sheep. And they let humans ride them. Hobbits movie gave us best dragon at least.
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Aug 4, 2023 00:31
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Smaug dragon best dragon? I'll not hear any more of this best dragon erasure! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgBXwxoQ98g
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Aug 4, 2023 00:38
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Bogus Adventure posted:Smaug dragon best dragon? I'll not hear any more of this best dragon erasure! I AM THE LASHT ONE. You've also reminded me of the incomprehensible gag in GTA 4 where, to mock endless franchises that keep having big entries with tons of merchandising, they had a parody of Dragonheart called Dragon-brain. This was in 2008, when it had had one follow up, 8 years earlier that had gone straight to video. GTA's writers are loving weird. EDIT: but not as weird as the actual Dragonheart franchise, which is barely a franchise. It has three new entries since 2008, none of which have any characters, actors and only two crew members in common. Snowman_McK fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Aug 4, 2023 |
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Aug 4, 2023 00:44
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The best dragon was the fat one in the D&D movie
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Aug 4, 2023 00:49
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Snowman_McK posted:I AM THE LASHT ONE. I'm still waiting for Dragon-spleen
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Aug 4, 2023 00:49
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Clipperton posted:The best dragon was the fat one in the D&D movie Themberchonk lacked the heroism of Drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrayco
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Aug 4, 2023 00:50
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It's Verminthrax Pejorative and I bet Zack Snyder would agree with me (I know that Guillermo Del Toro does) 
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Aug 4, 2023 00:56
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:It's Verminthrax Prejorative and I bet Zack Snyder would agree with me (I know that Guillermo Del Toro does) 
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Aug 4, 2023 00:57
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So you see, that's where the trouble began. That smile. That damned smile.
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Aug 4, 2023 01:01
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:So you see, that's where the trouble began. That smile. That damned smile. lol
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Aug 4, 2023 01:03
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