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I think the height of Smith’s artistic output was Chasing Amy. It seemed the most personal of his films, and genuinely seemed to be trying to say something beyond all the dick and fart jokes. But I haven’t seen Red State or Tusk, so maybe those are better.
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Feb 28, 2018 18:32
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I really like Zach Snyder even though I have zero interest in MoS and BvS. I am, however, drawing upon 300 thematically and visually for a portion of my thesis film in my graduate program.
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Feb 28, 2018 18:35
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Phylodox posted:I think the height of Smith’s artistic output was Chasing Amy. It seemed the most personal of his films, and genuinely seemed to be trying to say something beyond all the dick and fart jokes. Red State is a really compelling concept that is absolutely wasted in its execution. It was the first time I really felt Smith was exposed in being out of his depth, which is a shame because the set-up is extremely fertile ground, but its potential never gets capitalized on. The ending is particularly egregious because it toes the line of doing something really ballsy, but then almost immediately doubles back and plays it safe.
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Feb 28, 2018 20:08
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There’s a new kind of mean in him. He is angry and he’s hunting.
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Feb 28, 2018 20:57
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Mordiceius posted:I really like Zach Snyder even though I have zero interest in MoS and BvS. That's neat. I'd be interested in your application. Especially given the criticisms around 300s politics.
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Feb 28, 2018 22:52
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here's a fun article:quote:There is so much to adore about Black Panther that it’s easy for any piece about the movie to become a love letter to Ryan Coogler’s epic vision of Black empowerment. The costuming, the actors (Winston Duke out here proving thick thighs save lives), the writing: it’s all first class (not to be confused with X-Men: First Class, which is first class in name only). Black Panther is a near-perfect superhero movie, one that requires multiple viewings to fully appreciate in its incredible detail and nuance. And more than a great origin story, Black Panther also works as a jumping off point to open up conversations about equality and the legacy of colonialism. Can a movie full of Bugatti spaceships and magical power necklaces really be the venue to spark deep discussions about African colonization and the legacy of chattel slavery in the Western world? You’d better believe it. The headline: Marvel Is Turning The Blockbuster With A Social Message Into Its Brand
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Feb 28, 2018 23:19
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MacheteZombie posted:That's neat. I'd be interested in your application. Especially given the criticisms around 300s politics. Well the thing you have to understand about 300 is that everything up until the final scene is fiction. And I don't mean fiction in the way that all fictional films are fiction, I mean fiction in the way that all of the events with Leonidas and with Xerxes is all an elaborate tale told to inspire warriors. Note: This analysis and interpretation on the material is taking 300 as a stand-alone film. As the sequel tries to double down on the "no, this all actually happened" angle. Everything is just a story told by Dilios to make an army ready for battle. It is a tale of an unreliable narrator. Is Xerxes really a nine foot tall androgynous dictator? No. Probably not. But if you want to tell a David vs Goliath story, that's a good start. Do the Persians have what almost seems like magic on their side? Absolutely not. But it makes for a good story. Within the world of the 300 film, we don't actually know what happened in that battle or what Leonidas was actually even like, because the whole of the events are battle propaganda. Look at Leonidas's Christ pose at the end - he is being portrayed as a righteous martyr by Dilios. Both people who look at 300 and say it's a politically conservative piece and those "molon labe" conservatives that have wet dreams about being a Spartan are missing the forest for the trees. The entire film is a critique of using revisionist history to try to control the masses. The Spartans were massacred by a force that greatly outnumbered them. They held the area due to the geography, not because they were mythical warriors. But these facts don't inspire an army to fight invaders.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:20
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I do agree with the reading that the film is a propaganda yarn spun by Dilios, but it seems we're in the minority there.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:25
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MacheteZombie posted:I do agree with the reading that the film is a propaganda yarn spun by Dilios, but it seems we're in the minority there. I really don’t think you are. It’s the text of the film. I think the disconnect is between people who think it’s a condemnation of propaganda and those who think it celebrates it.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:28
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The thing that gets me is Snyder added the dead babies at the beginning. The comic opens with Leonidas and the Spartans marching to the Hot Gates, doing ooh-rah Spartan stuff and looking over the beautiful landscape. The movie opens with a pile of dead baby skulls and kids beating the poo poo out of each other. And you have to ask yourself, why? Why would he open it up with such reprehensible poo poo, such evidence that Sparta is a garbage pile?
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Feb 28, 2018 23:29
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:The thing that gets me is Snyder added the dead babies at the beginning. The comic opens with Leonidas and the Spartans marching to the Hot Gates, doing ooh-rah Spartan stuff and looking over the beautiful landscape. The movie opens with a pile of dead baby skulls and kids beating the poo poo out of each other. And you have to ask yourself, why? Why would he open it up with such reprehensible poo poo, such evidence that Sparta is a garbage pile? Seen from the point of view of "not a nazi piece of garbage" it's obviously going to make you think the Spartans are awful. However, if it's a sincere white power fantasy, then it's going to be unashamed about depicting the culling of the weak and impure. Personally, I think 300 is just a little bit too colossally absurd to be a sincere attempt at Triumph of the Will II - Man Meat for the Man Meat God.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:41
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Mordiceius posted:Note: This analysis and interpretation on the material is taking 300 as a stand-alone film. As the sequel tries to double down on the "no, this all actually happened" angle. It's pretty clearly the same kind of propaganda but told by Sparta's new queen as she tries to legitimise her right to rule.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:52
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sassassin posted:It's pretty clearly the same kind of propaganda but told by Sparta's new queen as she tries to legitimise her right to rule. I guess it's more that it is just kinda boring though. It's just more of the same, nothing added to the formula.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:54
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Phylodox posted:I really don’t think you are. It’s the text of the film. I think the disconnect is between people who think it’s a condemnation of propaganda and those who think it celebrates it. Try bringing this up in the internet critic thread or twitter or just about any place where film is discussed. Zack Snyder is absolutely reviled by these places for reasons unknown and any film he puts out is just some dumb fratboy jock appealing to his white nationalist fanbase, being a white nationalist himself (among other things). His film literally can't have themes or subtext because the perception of the man is that he's too dumb or racist or sexist to have any. It's an overdone joke on these forums but there are people out there who honestly think that.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:55
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Mordiceius posted:I guess it's more that it is just kinda boring though. It's just more of the same, nothing added to the formula. It's a fun girl power movie.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:58
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Have anyone tried doing this on the internet: pretend to be a white nationalist who is mad at Snyder for mocking Frank Miller and making Superman into a SJW, then read the response?
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Mar 1, 2018 00:10
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The MSJ posted:Have anyone tried doing this on the internet: pretend to be a white nationalist who is mad at Snyder for mocking Frank Miller and making Superman into a SJW, then read the response? that's totally unbelievable though, none of those people have enough self-awareness to realize their beliefs are being mocked. they just see totally badass violence and think "oh poo poo yeah this is loving awesome" see also: wolf of wall street. i've seen dumb people who love it because they love how jordan belfort lives, i've seen smart people argue about whether or not the movie's visceral depiction of his life is genuine or not, but i've never seen someone who believes that it's making fun of Belfort and hates it for that.
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Mar 1, 2018 00:19
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Jimbot posted:It's an overdone joke on these forums but there are people out there who honestly think that. They're on these forums. Guy Goodbody posted:Except the end bit is all done in the same style as the rest of the movie, and the dude looks the same, there's literally zero reason to doubt the in-universe veracity of the story. Your interpretation is totally made up in your brain and not supported by the text at all I have this saved because it's literally one of the dumbest things anyone has ever posted at me, it's a reminder to me to not talk film on other forums.
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Mar 1, 2018 00:24
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:They're on these forums. True that. But outside his fanbase's twitter, this is probably the most concentrated I've seen of his praise and like for his films. When everyone here gets called a special brand of bad (or snobbery) for liking and reading into his films, then you know you're in place whose opinion runs contrary to the general consensus, despite it not being the case. But I don't go digging around since I really don't care enough to seek out the general person thinks, be they like his films or not, so it's skewed for me. I have seen enough that some people think he makes bad films but doesn't ever elaborate why or just fall back on propagating this weird story about his personal life, politics or whatever without looking into it. I mean, the man has gone on record saying the biggest influence in his life is his mom in interviews but somehow people seem convinced he hates his mother. Jimbot fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 00:29
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It's interesting that getting kicked off Justice League has ended up doing wonders for rehabilitating Snyder's reputation. Everyone is imagining this mythical cut that we've been robbed of thanks to those meddling executives. The worst thing for Snyder would be anyone ever seeing that cut again, it works far better as an imaginary perfect movie snatched from us.
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Mar 1, 2018 01:06
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Mr. Flunchy posted:It's interesting that getting kicked off Justice League has ended up doing wonders for rehabilitating Snyder's reputation. Everyone is imagining this mythical cut that we've been robbed of thanks to those meddling executives. The worst thing for Snyder would be anyone ever seeing that cut again, it works far better as an imaginary perfect movie snatched from us. Like BvS has me convinced it'd still be a flawed work, just because of what the studio did to BvS But God drat if it wouldn't be nice to see what he DID get away with
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Mar 1, 2018 01:08
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Chairman Capone posted:Firefly is impressive in how it managed to get a lot of performatively-woke (albeit before that term got used) nerds fully on board with a standard Civil War Lost Cause narrative. But because it's set in space and there's a black woman in the crew so many people just could not accept it might be something valorizing the Confederacy. LOL as Orson Scott Card thinking Serenity is one of the best sci-fi movies. I really did not like how much of the show's personality was removed from the movie. (Sound in space, much less of a Western)
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Mar 1, 2018 01:34
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It’s hard for me to really see 300 as a criticism of Miller’s work, given Snyder has, to my knowledge, never really spoken against the themes and has openly lauded Miller’s work and spoken of the influence he’s had on him. Like, death of the author and all that, but that goes only so far as speaking towards the intent of the movie.
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Mar 1, 2018 01:46
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Frank Miller, on Snyder's directing of 300: "I realized that with this film there was only room for one director and that is Zack. I visited the set just to check it out and I got to see a combat scene and got to know some of the crew and cast, but this is Zack’s movie from start to finish." https://www.cbr.com/talking-300-the-movie-with-frank-miller/ There's some other interesting stuff in there. Frank Miller is disgusting and it comes through. Only thing I was able to find RE: Snyder and Miller was a clip from an interview: "I sort of used Frank [Miller]'s Superman to tell me what not to do, in a way." https://www.outerplaces.com/science...knight-universe
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Mar 1, 2018 02:06
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MacheteZombie posted:I do agree with the reading that the film is a propaganda yarn spun by Dilios, but it seems we're in the minority there. Even Cracked finally got their heads around that idea. McCloud posted:That probably would have been more critical of white people than what we got in the BP movie. So is virtually everything. God it's such a spineless loving movie.
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Mar 1, 2018 02:06
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The most significant difference between 300 the serial and 300 the film is the added subplot about the pacifist guy who was also a rapist taking cash from Xerxes, and it kind of summarizes the dialog between the texts. Despite its reputation, Snyder's film really only hues ever so superficially close to Miller's comic serial. Snyder and his co-writers actually excise certain elements from the beginning that make Leonidas and his men look even more cruel, while aesthetically realizing the Persian hordes in a manner far beyond the pale of what Miller illustrated. So the irony becomes that a reader is likely more apt to interpret the comics as being, if not satiric, at least more nuanced than Snyder's adaptation. One thing you notice reading 300 is how Miller's illustrations often render both the Spartans and the Persians into a flurry of abstractions that end up calling more attention to their similarities than what separates them. Despite Dilios's narration, it's easier for the reader to distance themselves from the page and engage with the work as an almost hands-off allegorical commentary. The characters in Miller's comic who get the worst depiction aren't even the Persians - it's the leprous Ephors, this wholesale fabrication on Miller's part in order to frame Leonidas ahistorically as a religious skeptic. The guiding ideology behind Miller's comic isn't a demonization of the Oriental outsider, but of the 'backwards' spiritual thinking that he sees as endemic to stagnation and corruption. Miller's 300 is a narrative of libertarian skepticism. The beauty of Snyder's adaptation is the same as Verhoeven's adaptation of Starship Troopers. It's not that the original text is some monstrous, fascist daydream and the auteur director needs to work to add 'nuance' in order to frame this as negative. It's the exact opposite: the adaptation takes away the nuance that allows 300 the distance of plausible deniability. There is now far more particularist emphasis on portraying the Persians as literal Frankenstein monsters and brides of Dracula and hunchbacks of Notre Dame and poo poo. It's the last stand of Western Civilization against the forces of the Monster Mash. And the conclusion of the film is that the Spartans are now coming at us! We are placed in the position of the orgiastic, imperialist monsters.
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Mar 1, 2018 02:09
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gently caress that's better than anything I've ever written about the differences between the two. I will add that the additional Senate scenes "stack the deck" for Leonidas even more. Opposing military action is reserved for literal traitors and honking idiots who need to have Xerxes's filthy lucre literally spilled onto the floor of their sacred institution before they react.
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Mar 1, 2018 02:14
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I’m just saying, that in a conversation where Orson Scott Card liking Serenity is considered an apt indictment, the esteem Miller and Snyder hold for one another at least feels relevant? I’m not really trying to play “gotcha” with anyone here. I’m just trying to use a similar context to clarify my perspective.
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Mar 1, 2018 02:33
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Oliver Stone's Alexander is a pretty dead-on antecedent to 300, in that both are clever allegorical revisions of history that use the mythological opposition between Western civilization and the Orient to satirize the rhetoric of contemporary U.S. 'foreign policy.' In each film, however, there's this also very earnest, overtly sensual fantasy of the Greek hero actually being a defiantly 'progressive' - Alexander wants to completely assimilate his empire so that he can make a world for him and Hephaistion of freer love; Leonidas doesn't want religion to check reasonable, collectivist opposition to imperialism. Baby steps. What both films fetishize is precisely this self-sacrificial discipline, with Alexander as a much better sequel than Rise of an Empire depicting how this same mythology and rhetoric leads to the trudging death cult that Alexander inspires, and eventually loses completely.
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Mar 1, 2018 02:53
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Jimbot posted:Try bringing this up in the internet critic thread or twitter or just about any place where film is discussed. Zack Snyder is absolutely reviled by these places for reasons unknown and any film he puts out is just some dumb fratboy jock appealing to his white nationalist fanbase, being a white nationalist himself (among other things). His film literally can't have themes or subtext because the perception of the man is that he's too dumb or racist or sexist to have any.
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Mar 1, 2018 02:55
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https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/969012865263853568?s=19
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Mar 1, 2018 03:09
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...huh?
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Mar 1, 2018 03:12
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Mr. Apollo posted:The ironic thing to me is that a lot of these critics have degrees (PhDs even) in film, literature, etc. Yet when you point out the themes and subtext they claim that his films are meant to be taken at face value and any other interpretation is just excusing his fascist beliefs. I agree that there's a lot of that, but then a lot of people probably just digging in when exposed to interesting readings instead of re-evaluating. I know there's that study that shows that when people are exposed to facts and data contradicting their political beliefs they don't think "oh maybe I'm wrong", they just dig in further. It's that, but compounded by these being opinions about art, which aren't as "provable" as some political discussions. Like, Folding Ideas is never going to go, "sorry I'm gonna take the L I was definitely wrong about my take on the MoS neck breaking scene". Art opinions are "politicized" and it seems that people think that to give an inch is to give over some part of your identity or something like that
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Mar 1, 2018 03:16
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Kristin Wiig owns. However, Wonder Woman sucks.
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Mar 1, 2018 03:35
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Mr. Flunchy posted:It's interesting that getting kicked off Justice League has ended up doing wonders for rehabilitating Snyder's reputation. Everyone is imagining this mythical cut that we've been robbed of thanks to those meddling executives. The worst thing for Snyder would be anyone ever seeing that cut again, it works far better as an imaginary perfect movie snatched from us. Even if the mythical "Snyder cut" existed, it still wouldn't be the same film he envisioned making as of two years ago. By multiple accounts, the script was heavily rewritten on-set in response to BvS' reception.
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Mar 1, 2018 03:45
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:...huh? She’s actually not a terrible dramatic actress, surprisingly. No idea who she could possibly be playing, though. Cheetah, maybe? I can’t quite see it, but who knows? There was a time when it was pretty hard to see Chris Pratt as a strapping man of action, too.
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Mar 1, 2018 03:56
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Fart City posted:There was a time when it was pretty hard to see Chris Pratt as a strapping man of action, too. That time never ended though.
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Mar 1, 2018 04:09
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Waffles Inc. posted:Art opinions are "politicized" and it seems that people think that to give an inch is to give over some part of your identity or something like that
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Mar 1, 2018 04:21
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Doctor Spaceman posted:That time never ended though. He’s a ridiculously popular, charming beefcake who’s the latest action blockbuster darling. I can’t really parse your statement to the contrary.
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Mar 1, 2018 04:22
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DC Murderverse posted:here's a fun article: hooooo boy yeeesh
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Mar 1, 2018 04:30
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