|
Shageletic posted:300 achieved what it set out to do, a glistening ode to manliness and retro masculinity. I think its a good movie. I cannot disagree more. Unless you think Zack Snyder literally believes in eugenics and fascism, you have to assume 300 is meant to be satire in the vein of Starship Troopers. It absolutely don’t think it works as that, though, lacking any of Verhoeven’s subversive elements. Zack Snyder tried to make a film satirizing propaganda and ended up just making straight up propaganda. I think that’s a problem a lot of people have with his movies. Zack Snyder knows what Zack Snyder is trying to say with his movies, but he gets so involved in the spectacle that the message frequently becomes either muddled or completely lost.
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 16:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 17:22 |
|
|
A talking coyote posted:I too hope that he grows into the man that I love, and by “man” I mean Miles Morales and by “grows into” I mean is replaced with.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 16:13
|
|
|
Phylodox posted:I cannot disagree more. Unless you think Zack Snyder literally believes in eugenics and fascism, you have to assume 300 is meant to be satire in the vein of Starship Troopers Yes, and? That doesn't at all conflict with being "a glistening ode to manliness and retro masculinity." I think it's fair to assume that Verhoeven thought ST's space ships and military gear kicked rear end, even as the film itself critiques the ideology that built them.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 16:24
|
|
|
Schwarzwald posted:Yes, and? That doesn't at all conflict with being "a glistening ode to manliness and retro masculinity." I'm disagreeing that that's primarily what the movie was trying to do. Paul Verhoeven undoubtedly invested a lot of time, effort, and artistry into the visual style of Starship Troopers, but that wasn't the film's central thesis. If he had succeeded at depicting kick-rear end military fetishism but hadn't managed to imbue it with a viciously satirical message, then I'd say the film had failed at what it was trying to do, too.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 16:32
|
|
|
Veotax posted:I'm wondering if Evan Peters Quicksilver is going to stick around in the MCU after this, depending on what the show does with him of course. With the MCU moving into multiverse stuff they could bring over any characters from the older films they want to it seems. I don't have Disney+ and don't even want to consider it until the entirety of Wandavision is available to watch, but it's impossible to avoid spoilers so I wanna just jump in and say I'm disappointed it looks like they're ignoring MCU Quicksilver. How exactly did they handle this? Just Wanda just acknowledge him as being her brother and we're all just supposed to accept it? Or does Wanda go "Hey, who the hell are you?" and Petersilver goes "I'm Quicksilver. But a different one. I was in a really lovely franchise and I ran away from it so fast I ended up here I guess."
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 16:56
|
|
|
Fangz posted:I can see that point of view but I'm of the mind that the finite resources of the movie industry should be spent on making good new things than trying to fix bad old things. When big name creatives get another chance at "their vision", to a large extent it means someone smaller just fails to get a shot at the big leagues at all. Shageletic posted:(and honestly hard to discern) This isn't a universal thing, so it means nothing. bushisms.txt fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Feb 5, 2021 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 16:58
|
|
|
Jamesman posted:I don't have Disney+ and don't even want to consider it until the entirety of Wandavision is available to watch, but it's impossible to avoid spoilers so I wanna just jump in and say I'm disappointed it looks like they're ignoring MCU Quicksilver. How exactly did they handle this? Just Wanda just acknowledge him as being her brother and we're all just supposed to accept it? Or does Wanda go "Hey, who the hell are you?" and Petersilver goes "I'm Quicksilver. But a different one. I was in a really lovely franchise and I ran away from it so fast I ended up here I guess." One of the characters literally says "Oh, my God, she recast Pietro?!?"
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:05
|
|
|
Jamesman posted:I don't have Disney+ and don't even want to consider it until the entirety of Wandavision is available to watch, but it's impossible to avoid spoilers so I wanna just jump in and say I'm disappointed it looks like they're ignoring MCU Quicksilver. How exactly did they handle this? Just Wanda just acknowledge him as being her brother and we're all just supposed to accept it? Or does Wanda go "Hey, who the hell are you?" and Petersilver goes "I'm Quicksilver. But a different one. I was in a really lovely franchise and I ran away from it so fast I ended up here I guess." Darcy sees it and says something to the effect of "Did she recast Pietro?", so in Universe this Quicksilver seems to not look like the MCU one as characters acknowledge the difference. He is also dressed like the Fox Quicksilver, which was a fairly specific look that tied into that version. The implication I think is that she has pulled a Quicksilver from another Universe as opposed to them just recasting it as the Fox one and pretending that was the case all along. This will presumably lead into all the multi-verse shenanigans in Dr Strange 2 Karloff fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Feb 5, 2021 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:05
|
|
|
...What? None of this makes sense and I think I hate it. Edit: To be clear, I'm pre-judging this based on never seeing the show and it not even being fully released yet. It's just an initial response to limited information. Jamesman fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Feb 5, 2021 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:06
|
|
|
It's really not an either/or decision, and if it bothers you to think of it that way then just keep in mind that the Snyder Cut os essentially a completly new movie. Not a single bit of footage that Whedon shot is going to be in that four hour longtime. I can't help but assume that this would be a different story if it was a less controversial director. For instance, if we had found out that Edgar Wright's Ant-Man was basically done, just lying in a vault and needing some finishing touches. Or Lord and Miller's version of Solo.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:07
|
|
|
Phylodox posted:I'm disagreeing that that's primarily what the movie was trying to do. Paul Verhoeven undoubtedly invested a lot of time, effort, and artistry into the visual style of Starship Troopers, but that wasn't the film's central thesis. If he had succeeded at depicting kick-rear end military fetishism but hadn't managed to imbue it with a viciously satirical message, then I'd say the film had failed at what it was trying to do, too. Well that's just it, isn't it? You can go onto any review aggregate website and find any number of contemporary criticisms of Starship Troopers that claim exactly that. Richard Schickel writing for Time, for example, wrote, "Maybe the filmmakers are so lost in their slambang visual effects that they don't give a hoot about the movie's scariest implications." So while 300 might not have Verhoeven’s subversive elements, by this measure neither does Verhoeven.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:14
|
|
|
Jamesman posted:...What? It's an end of episode cliff-hanger so the full context and explanation is still to come, but it does seem that across the board people are looking to use multiverse concepts to expand what they can do with crossovers. There's gonna be very likely a whole bunch of this kind of stuff in MCU Spider-Man 3, Dr. Strange has the Multiverse in the title and I wouldn't be surprised if the focus for post Endgame MCU is multi-verse stuff. On the DC side the Flash film is gonna be used to potentially re-order the DCEU to whatever direction WB wants to take it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:16
|
|
|
Schwarzwald posted:Well that's just it, isn't it? You can go onto any review aggregate website and find any number of contemporary criticisms of Starship Troopers that claim exactly that. Richard Schickel writing for Time, for example, wrote, "Maybe the filmmakers are so lost in their slambang visual effects that they don't give a hoot about the movie's scariest implications." I'm looking at what the films do, not how some people see them. I mean...Starship Troopers ends with beloved American child actor Neil Patrick Harris dressed up as a Nazi crowing over a quivering, vulnerable mound of flesh while barbaric soldiers cheer and cavort. The film constantly engages in a tug-of-war between getting you to feel sympathetic towards its characters through their personal tribulations, then viciously reminding you that they're fascists in service of a fascist war machine. It's very effective, not very subtle. Contrast this with 300, that front-loads all of its fascist and eugenic imagery, then spends the rest of the film's run-time justifying those horrors. The final, clear message of Starship Troopers is that jingoism and dehumanizing your enemy makes fascists of us all. The final message of 300 is that for freedom to persist, hard choices must be made.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:28
|
|
|
Earlier in the episode Wanda said she can't bring people back from the dead to her sons (her pregnancy kinda appeared out of nowhere and lasted two days, then the kids aged up to about 10 years old in a similar space if time), apart from Vision who probably doesn't count since he's a robot. I'm guessing Wanda, the boys, or someone else tried to "revive" Pietro, couldn't do it and then somehow pulled this one over from another universe. His appearance was the cliffhanger so we don't know if Wanda really recognises him as looking different. But then she is in deep denial about Vision so she might not. But Darcy who is watching things from outside the sitcom recognised that it's not the same Pietro
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:30
|
|
|
Garfield is literally the absolute worst interpretation of Spider-Man. Yes including that one you're thinking of. He's powerfully unlikable and I do not understand how I'm meant to get "hero" vibes off of him flirting with Gwen while her father's body hasn't even gone cold yet. Like yeah the sequel can pick up with the story of him feeling guilty and conflicted. That's a fine beat. But none of that is in that scene in the original and it's always stuck with me as gross. Plus the cranes are dumb.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:31
|
|
|
Jamesman posted:...What? Yeah there’s really not enough established yet to fully know what’s going on. They acknowledged both exist, but that’s about it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:38
|
|
|
Karloff posted:It's an end of episode cliff-hanger so the full context and explanation is still to come, but it does seem that across the board people are looking to use multiverse concepts to expand what they can do with crossovers. There's gonna be very likely a whole bunch of this kind of stuff in MCU Spider-Man 3, Dr. Strange has the Multiverse in the title and I wouldn't be surprised if the focus for post Endgame MCU is multi-verse stuff. On the DC side the Flash film is gonna be used to potentially re-order the DCEU to whatever direction WB wants to take it. The movie that dealt with the aftermath of the Infinity Saga, Spider-Man: Far from Home, ends with the first tease of the Multiverse (JK Simmons as JJJ). So yeah, buckle in for more multiverse capers.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:54
|
|
|
SonicRulez posted:Garfield is literally the absolute worst interpretation of Spider-Man. Yes including that one you're thinking of. He's powerfully unlikable and I do not understand how I'm meant to get "hero" vibes off of him flirting with Gwen while her father's body hasn't even gone cold yet. Like yeah the sequel can pick up with the story of him feeling guilty and conflicted. That's a fine beat. But none of that is in that scene in the original and it's always stuck with me as gross. I think it was the Cosmonaut Variety Hour that pointed out that Garfield and Roberts were dating at the time and it works against the film because all their flirting scenes felt like extended adlibs.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:54
|
|
|
Fangz posted:I can see that point of view but I'm of the mind that the finite resources of the movie industry should be spent on making good new things than trying to fix bad old things. When big name creatives get another chance at "their vision", to a large extent it means someone smaller just fails to get a shot at the big leagues at all. Zack Snyder's Justice League is something of a special case. I don't think it would have happened had there not been a pandemic slump resulting in VFX studios not having enough work.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 17:56
|
|
|
Phylodox posted:I'm looking at what the films do, not how some people see them. I'm pretty sure Richard Snickel was looking at what the films do and not how some people see them, too
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 18:22
|
|
|
Lt. Danger posted:I'm pretty sure Richard Snickel was looking at what the films do and not how some people see them, too Okay. I’m not him. If you’d like to discuss his take on Starship Troopers, you can look him up. I’m talking about my opinions.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 18:28
|
|
|
Phylodox posted:I cannot disagree more. Unless you think Zack Snyder literally believes in eugenics and fascism, you have to assume 300 is meant to be satire in the vein of Starship Troopers. It absolutely don’t think it works as that, though, lacking any of Verhoeven’s subversive elements. Zack Snyder tried to make a film satirizing propaganda and ended up just making straight up propaganda. I absolutely don't believe that Snyder was satirizing anything in 300. And I absolutely believe, like many a director of reactionary bloody 80s action movies, he just wanted to show big strapping men showing whats up to ppl that deserve it in particularly overblown ways.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 18:28
|
|
|
SonicRulez posted:Garfield is literally the absolute worst interpretation of Spider-Man. Yes including that one you're thinking of. He's powerfully unlikable and I do not understand how I'm meant to get "hero" vibes off of him flirting with Gwen while her father's body hasn't even gone cold yet. Like yeah the sequel can pick up with the story of him feeling guilty and conflicted. That's a fine beat. But none of that is in that scene in the original and it's always stuck with me as gross. But Garfield picks up his high school degree on a skateboard???
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 18:33
|
|
|
Adapting things 1:1 from the source material isn't satire.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 18:36
|
|
|
Phylodox posted:I'm looking at what the films do, not how some people see them. Since Starship Troopers ends with a victory over the bugs, one reading might be that jingoism and dehumanizing your enemy makes fascists of us all: and that kicks rear end! After all, the humans won. Since 300 ends with Dilios using the story of the Spartan's defeat to get himself his own army, one reading might be that demagogues will exploit nationalist fervor to their own profit: and that sucks! After all, who wants to give away their life for that guy? Now, for my money one of those readings is much better supported by the films in question. But then again, what would I know? That's just how I see them, and not an objective look "at what the films do." Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Feb 5, 2021 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 18:42
|
|
|
Veotax posted:Earlier in the episode Wanda said she can't bring people back from the dead to her sons (her pregnancy kinda appeared out of nowhere and lasted two days, then the kids aged up to about 10 years old in a similar space if time), apart from Vision who probably doesn't count since he's a robot. Yeah they lay it on pretty thick earlier in the episode with the dead dog that as much as she has power to alter reality she can’t revive the dead. She’s clearly been pining for her dead bro but she couldn’t bring him back. It is to be seen wth is up with Fox Quicksilver.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 18:45
|
|
|
Phylodox posted:I cannot disagree more. Unless you think Zack Snyder literally believes in eugenics and fascism, you have to assume 300 is meant to be satire in the vein of Starship Troopers. It absolutely don’t think it works as that, though, lacking any of Verhoeven’s subversive elements. Zack Snyder tried to make a film satirizing propaganda and ended up just making straight up propaganda. I only know what I do about Zack Snyder from his bits of presss and his movies, but nothing short of him coming up to me in person and swearing on a copy of Atlas Shrugged would convince me that it's anything other than a really surface level read on Miller's comic about how cool it is to be a bad rear end white soldier dude who doesn't take any poo poo or abide any pussy diplomacy, getting to kill some freaky brown queer weirdos from nutsoland until some freakazoid fucker who's probably jealous of how sweet ripped you are commits a treason (THE worst crime) and forces you to make a heroic sacrifice but it's okay because you'll take out a couple of thousand of the scum on your way down so you can save blessed Western civilization from those savage oriental maniacs
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 18:47
|
|
|
Miller might have been writing satire. Snyder was just tracing it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 18:49
|
|
|
The interpretation of art should be used to seek a better understanding, not to stifle it. Certainly the goal should not be to put the work or its artist into some moral category once and for all.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 18:51
|
|
|
Phylodox posted:I'm looking at what the films do, not how some people see them. In 300 we have a king who keeps extolling the virtues of a noble death, then cries in despair at the "noble deaths" around him at the moment of his own, talks about how stupid it would be to assassinate him and then tries to assassinate the godking of the persians, the spartans are shocked at persians barbaric treatment of the dead but have no problems desecrating the corpses of persiens dead themselves, ephialtes wants to fight alongside with them but they insult and spurn him causing him to betray them, etc etc The film is full of these kinds of contradictions that keep showing how the spartans are assholes. The "message" of 300 isn't about hard choices, it's about propaganda. An example I've grown fond of pointing out is that there's a scene where the spartans literally fight actual strawmen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0xSqLrG-ow It's quite difficult to argue there isn't a satirical intent when that scene exists. Did people miss the satire and take it at face value? Sure. But they did that with Starship troopers, Robocop, The Matrix, Fight club etc etc... Fangz posted:I can see that point of view but I'm of the mind that the finite resources of the movie industry should be spent on making good new things than trying to fix bad old things. When big name creatives get another chance at "their vision", to a large extent it means someone smaller just fails to get a shot at the big leagues at all. Well first of all, If it hadn't been for the Snyder cut, WB would have laid off huge chunks of their vfx departments due to lack of work. Because of the cut, people got to keep their jobs. Second, i don't think for a second that them spending money on the cut means that some other film creator got robbed of making their film. If WB believes they had a good idea that'd be successful they'd still invest in it because ATT is still one of the biggest media companies in the world and 70 million is loving chump change, and I quite frankly feel this kind of discussion is disingenuous. By that logic we don't need the 65 spin off star wars series either, they can use that money to fund indie filmmakers instead. And do we really need another spider man film? How about instead we get some new talent to make good movies?
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 18:54
|
|
Phylodox posted:I cannot disagree more. Unless you think Zack Snyder literally believes in eugenics and fascism, you have to assume 300 is meant to be satire in the vein of Starship Troopers. Well the thing with that is...
|
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 19:08
|
|
|
Schwarzwald posted:Since Starship Troopers ends with a victory over the bugs, one reading might be that jingoism and dehumanizing your enemy makes fascists of us all: and that kicks rear end! After all, the humans won. I'm not making an appeal to objectivity. Discussing only what's objectively true about any given movie is dull and stifling. Admittedly, maybe I worded that poorly. What I meant was that I have no interest in having some kind of argument-by-proxy with film reviewers. I never said it's impossible to ignore Starship Troopers' very clear and blatant satire, I said that I think its handling of the subject matter is much, much better. And (and I don't think this should be a remotely controversial opinion) I very, very much don't believe that Zack Snyder is either a eugenics proponent or a fascist. I think it's possible that he thoughtlessly regurgitated Frank Miller's comic onto the movie screen, but I think that's kind of a remote possibility, too. Something I think is somewhat more likely is that things like 300 and the intro sequence to Dawn of the Dead, wherein praying Muslims are equated with death and inhuman violence, might be emblematic of an internal conversation Snyder was having with himself at the time about things like war, nationalism, etc. in the wake of 9/11. Phylodox fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Feb 5, 2021 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 19:25
|
|
|
quote:Sarah Polley, who worked with Snyder on his remake of Dawn of the Dead, suggested I ask him about his politics. “Just for the freak show that it is," she chuckled. “You’ll be like, ‘People like him actually exist?’” She claimed he once brought a blown-up photograph of an American soldier with his boot on Saddam Hussein’s neck to the Dawn set, with his own face plastered over the Marine's. “It wasn't a joke. He’s like, ‘Is that cool?’ That's f****** psychotic.”
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 19:31
|
|
|
Yes, that. Honestly, though it is kind of shocking, I'm predisposed to cut him some slack about it. It's fitting that his next film was adapting the work of Frank Miller, a man whose mind entirely snapped after the events of 9/11. I like to think he's come to terms with that turmoil, though, given that his portrayal of Batman at his most self-destructive and nihilistic has him quoting Dick Cheney.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 19:36
|
|
|
Jamesman posted:...What? lol worth posting about it then it works, if you know, watch the thing before judgin it
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 19:45
|
|
|
FWIW, I've never been terribly enthused by "it is satire" as a be-all-and-end-all. Satire to me says a piece of work has a message, and a successful satire needs to convey that message. This is one of the reasons why Starship Troopers never seemed to be successful satire to me. It's one thing to dress characters up in Nazi uniforms, but what does Starship Troopers actually have to say about fascism? I think the best case you can make for ST being satire is that it actually satirizes contemporary mass media depiction of real and fictional armed conflict, and argues that with very little modification it is 100% compatible with fascism, that it is pretty easy to get audiences to cheer handsome young men in gestapo outfits.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 19:50
|
|
|
Phylodox posted:Okay. I’m not him. If you’d like to discuss his take on Starship Troopers, you can look him up. I’m talking about my opinions. I believe Scharzwald brought up film critics like Schickel not to argue by proxy but to illustrate how people were very confident that, in their opinion, based on what what they saw in the movie Starship Troopers wasn't satire and Verhoeven had no deeper intentions than bang-bang-pew-whiz spaceships... and yet now we are all equally confident that it definitely was satire and Verhoeven is very clever and devoutly anti-fascist. we won't get fooled again, though! personally I have to demur with Ebert, Shageletic and the broader conversation: trying to divine what an artist intended to do is a fool's errand that denies our role and responsibility as readers in understanding the text. the work is the work - not some platonic construct that (we imagine) the artist was trying to recreate. meaning is constructed by the interaction between the work and the audience - it's not Verhoeven and Snyder that make Starship Troopers and 300 satire, it's us
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 19:52
|
|
|
Fangz posted:FWIW, I've never been terribly enthused by "it is satire" as a be-all-and-end-all. Satire to me says a piece of work has a message, and a successful satire needs to convey that message. This is one of the reasons why Starship Troopers never seemed to be successful satire to me. It's one thing to dress characters up in Nazi uniforms, but what does Starship Troopers actually have to say about fascism? The MST3K guys who went on to do RiffTrax did a live show for Starship Troopers and they encountered a lot of pushback because 'it was satire how dare.' The response from one of them, I believe Kevin Murphy, was something along the lines of, "Yes, we get that it's satire. You have Neil Patrick Harris in an SS uniform. It's beating you in the face. It's just not good satire."
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 19:56
|
|
|
Lt. Danger posted:I believe Scharzwald brought up film critics like Schickel not to argue by proxy but to illustrate how people were very confident that, in their opinion, based on what what they saw in the movie Starship Troopers wasn't satire and Verhoeven had no deeper intentions than bang-bang-pew-whiz spaceships... and yet now we are all equally confident that it definitely was satire and Verhoeven is very clever and devoutly anti-fascist. we won't get fooled again, though! Which is what I’m discussing. The conversation is about whether a film succeeds at what it was trying to do, so inferring the filmmaker’s intent is kind of inextricable from the conversation.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 19:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 17:22 |
|
|
Schwarzwald posted:Since Starship Troopers ends with a victory over the bugs, one reading might be that jingoism and dehumanizing your enemy makes fascists of us all: and that kicks rear end! After all, the humans won. Starship Troopers ends with war still going on. In fact the whole movie shows how inept the facists are at actually going to war. They lose every battle until they're pushed back to another planet where they win a minor victory.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2021 19:58
|
|
