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A few years ago I became really disenchanted with American movies and the critical establishment. I couldn't quite figure out why. I just sort of lost interest in it all, even though I really enjoyed film and discussing film tropes. I ended up taking a job in South Korea and not even really thinking about losing that, because that was how indifferent I'd become. The story of how I got involved with Korean film isn't really relevant to the thread, so I'll just get into how you guys influenced me. I found out about Current Releases some time after moving here, and combined with my exposure to a very different approach and attitude toward filmmaking, it really seriously changed the way I look at movies. I used to think the tomatometer is important- now I realize it's garbage. It's all either empty praise or pedantic complaints. No one really gets into how or whether a movie works holistically. It's either a sum of its parts, a relation to extant material, or looked at under the assumption that it should be some specific thing. I love that Current Releases actually takes the broader view seriously. I disagree with you guys a lot- but I respect your opinion and I think you make good arguments, and that's all you really owe me as a film critic. Whether you're trashing a movie widely seen as good or praising a movie widely seen as bad, there's an honest consistency in your pieces that makes it clear you respect my ability to think and assume I can synergize your opinions with my own. Like, I guessed from your review of The Lincoln Lawyer that I would not like The Lincoln Lawyer. When I recalled this memory several months later after watching it with someone else, I was surprised to find that it had actually gotten a really positive review. It had just been described in such a way that I correctly guessed I would not like it. It's been very influential to me. Next week I'm stopping the English teacher racket and going into media criticism full-time, and I'm keeping your reviews in mind as I do so. I saw a movie last month that was really critically panned, but I gave it high praise. I thought about whether my opinion was justified, and thought about the Current Releases rubric. I ended up with Satanic Allegory, Bad Sex, Creepy Puppets, Ironic Humor, and Unsatisfying Ending. And you know what? I'll defend that opinion to anyone now. Which is pretty much no one, since this movie won't have English subtitles for several months, if ever. I found someone who had actually seen it and hated it last week and was so psyched because I was able to explain to him why it didn't suck! One other thing. The Ruby Sparks review ruined the movie's big climactic moment for me. Thanks, jerk! Although I probably wouldn't have seen Ruby Sparks at all without the review, so I guess it evens out. Fun fact- Zoe Kazan, the writer of Ruby Sparks, actually really hates the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl and resents the way it's been used to describe the movie. I don't blame you for making that assumption, though. I probably would have too, going into the movie blind. Alas, we are but men.
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Jul 12, 2013 13:59
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I am disgusted that Grown Ups 2 exists, yet placated that there is a Current Releases review for it. One advantage of living overseas is that nobody bothers importing lovely American comedies so I don't have to see advertising for it. Smurfs, on the other hand...Vargo posted:As honored as I am by this, where the hell are you guys getting these primo film jobs? Korean film criticism has a shallow bench. I'm the only one who watches and reviews movies without English subtitles. It's still a really niche field that doesn't pay that much and has to be supplemented by other work for the site. Vargo posted:What is the media criticism project you're working on? We love throwing love and shout-outs to our friend's projects, so tell us more, and we'll help if we can. I write movie reviews for HanCinema. Lately it's just been one a week, with four drama episode reviews, but my work's going to get a lot more intensive soon now that I'm making the switch to full time. I've been bugging my editor to make a master list of all the reviews, and I'm going to update the OP of the South Korean Film Megathread once that finally happens. I've slowly been linking all my reviews in that thread in weekly installments. Your shout-outs would be welcome. Korean film criticism in English tends to be dominated by academic critiques and orientalist explanations. I got into the field to try and change that, and while I'm making decent progress, right now it's pretty much tied to the relatively mainstream HanCinema audience. I covered an entire film festival earlier this year in over a dozen articles only to belatedly find out they have relatively little interest in film festival coverage. Bloodnose posted:Sometimes I'll see a local or Chinese movie and think about how ProfessorClumsy or Vargo might review it. Can I send you a BluRay? The last time I went to the States I brought a bunch of DVDs of movies that aren't well-known stateside. I'd love to share, too, except I don't know anyone's address and I don't have PMs either.
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Jul 15, 2013 00:20
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Jay Dub posted:Are you Darcy Paquet? No. Actually from my perspective he's part of the establishment. He's not a bad reviewer (his stuff easily beats the hell out of most of the tomatometer), but his writing requires a lot of cultural assumptions to really understand very well. I happen to agree with Current Releases that films need to be reviewed independently from a film politics context. Keanu Grieves posted:Also, my review was intended as back-handed. Pacific Rim might be one of the best-produced spectacles. I'm starting to wonder if we should even bother with plots and treat blockbusters like porn. Speaking of which, I was actually surprised to see Pacific Rim get such a high score. I thought about The Avengers review, which seemed to take the position that special effects don't matter when everything surrounding them is completely pointless. Granted, you're not Professor Clumsy. I think this might be the first review that really made me think about how the different staff members actually do write different reviews, even if the general style is the same. Of course, the main takeaway is to remember that the points don't actually matter anyway. They're more like a parting joke than anything serious most of the time. Was it intentional that the numbers add up to 46 but it's labelled as 36?
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Jul 15, 2013 06:15
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Keanu Grieves posted:I'm not seeing how they add up to 46... You're right, I was doing too much math-related activity when I wrote that post and kind of bamboozled myself. axleblaze posted:My problem with The Avengers politically is that it seemed to want to appeal to every sensibility. Every time I thought it was saying something, something would come along in undermine that idea or they'd have something that took the opposite stance. It seemed calculated to to make it so everyone could think the movie shared their political ideals but by doing that it made it so it made no stance on anything and ended up being confused and wishy washy. I never would have attached the term "wishy washy" to a masculine power trip like Avengers but that actually fits really well. DumbWhiteGuy posted:Maybe it's just me but this sounds like an interesting Ask/Tell thread Maybe later when we have more experience. This job might end up turning me into a gibbering psychotic, for all I know right now.
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Jul 15, 2013 21:43
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Bad phrasing on my part there. I don't mean literally film politics, but more like inter-industry jockeying that you can only really know about from reading the trades. I also considered "gossip", but that makes it sound like I'm discussing Mr. and Mrs. Smith style hooking up on set. I can't come up with a good word to describe "the complex personal backstories of the actors, characters, and production department". I do think messaging is important and something that needs to be taken into account, whether intentional or unintentional. Just on the textual or subtextual level rather than the meta one. It's frustrating how so many people, even film critics, adamantly refuse to acknowledge that the messages in movies do affect us. You don't have to get too far in racism or sexism discussions before someone defensively states "it's just a movie with (special snowflake situation) so who cares?" One the things about Korean film criticism that annoys me is that "because Korean culture" is constantly used as a qualifier whenever something non-standard shows up. By my count, there is way more weird stuff in American movies that can only be explained by American culture than anything I've ever seen in Korean cinema. Professor Clumsy's summing up of Lady in the GI Joe Sequel really nails just how completely bizarre that whole character archetype is, and I can't think of any reason why someone would unironically put that in a movie except due to Hollywood's weird relationship with pseudo-feminist messaging. Vargo posted:Sorry for the rant, it was just a good opportunity for me to lay down some points that have been on my mind and are never really addressed. I was actually kind of disappointed when I'd finished reading this thread that it hadn't come up yet. It's really obvious that you guys have a mission statement but lack the opportunity to ever explicitly mention it since you normally just write reviews.
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Jul 15, 2013 23:21
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I was looking forward to the reviews of Turbo and Red 2 this week as well, because ever since I started seeing ads for these I just sort of blankly thought "well these are ideas that...uh...exist I guess". I was maybe hoping these movies had actual edges, but nope, looks like they're exactly as advertised. I'm kind of disappointed that the Helen Mirren / Byung-Hun Lee stuff was actually entertaining, since that just begs the question of why we can't have movies where upper-class Englishwomen and highly motivated Asian guys beat up everyone. That actually sounds like a novel idea that hasn't been done a million times already. So, I'm at PiFan (Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival) right now, and got a chance to see Sightseers. It may interest you to learn, Professor Clumsy, that Steve Oram confirmed that this film was intended to be a slightly more exciting version of an actual British holiday. The guy was chomping to give a decisive answer to my question before I even finished it. I'm surprised he didn't direct it, too- he had a lot to say about the movie in a lot of expansive detail. It's up for the competition award. I gave it four stars (out of five), but I'm curious what score you would give it on a scale of "how much do I want this to win / how likely is it that something else will be better than this one". Fun fact- the Korean word they used for the film is also commonly translated as "tourist". So now when I think about xenophobic horror films like Turistas I'm going to think of Sightseers and think, hey, there's a much more interesting take on the same idea without the horrible social implications. You guys know anything about Cheap Thrills or Resolution? I decided to pencil in time for these movies based on the arbitrary fact that I've met and spoken to their directors.
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Jul 23, 2013 07:06
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I really loved everything right up until the ending. I was expecting a better twist than the monster was filming the found footage. It makes sense, but that much just seemed kind of obvious. Although I was wondering throughout the entire scene with the French guy why he kept going on about infinite space and images but the mirror clearly wasn't creating an infinite image even though it was facing another mirror. Fortunately everything up until the ending was so solid that it doesn't ruin the movie for me or anything. Was a little surprised to learn that it's easily watchable anywhere. Granted it was made last year, just never occurred to me that films easily available for home viewing could still move around on the festival circuit. The directors said they're going into production for their next film in a few months. Already have a thrice-revised script, though I don't think they have a title yet. On-topic question- why hasn't Current Releases reviewed it? What is the basic criteria for selecting movies anyway?
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Jul 25, 2013 08:06
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So, watched Prometheus a couple nights ago (in a theater- lucky me! No 3D, though), and remembered that Cinema Discusso had a ginormous thread devoted to it, I decided to wade through. I was very surprised to find out that major plot points for that movie had been spoiled months in advance in the trailer. This is mainly because Professor Clumsy's review was uncharacteristically spoiler-free and explained almost no literal facts about the movie except who the characters were. I have to agree with the general thread consensus of "good, not great and easy to nitpick" but I did appreciate the vagueness of the original recommendation. Most of the fun in that movie was in the build-up, which was effective mainly because I had no idea what was going to happen next. Anyway, since no has mentioned the Smurfs review yet, I have a couple of questions. At the end of the first movie Gargamel has become a real world celebrity because he's a wizard. So, in the second movie, why does he care about the Smurfs at all? I know Jay Dub was being facetious with the whole "create an infinite energy source" thing, but seriously, why does any of this matter to Gargamel anymore unless he wants to do something that's impossible with all the technology he now has access to? I was also surprised to find out that the movie apparently pays close attention to Smurfs canon, by referencing the actual Smurfette origin story. Was that even in the show? And who cares? Outside of Smurfs purists (do these even exist?), no one bothered to ask why there was only one female smurf because it's an entire genre convention that there's exactly one girly character and everyone else is a guy.
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Aug 8, 2013 01:16
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I wondered which of the eight reviews could have provoked this many replies. And of course, it had to be Planes. Why does it always have to be the dumbest possible complaints? Isn't harassing front page writers a probatable offense?Fat Lou posted:I have a site to recommend to you. I hate you for putting that link there because I went ahead and clicked it, then I saw "2015: Greatest Movie Year Ever". Damnit, Hollywood, stop trying to make me excited about crap about which I know absolutely nothing except which arbitrary franchise tag is attached to it! Every movie on that list could easily be a cash-in pile of poo poo! Granted, it will probably be fun reading from Current Releases. But no, I'm not excited that apparently the entire release schedule for the year after next has already been completely cluttered with sequels and remakes of decades old franchise. That information just makes me glad I don't primarily follow American film anymore. So, why no review for Kick-rear end 2?
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Aug 19, 2013 08:47
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Jay Dub posted:You have no earthly idea how much this still bothers me. I emailed their submissions editor like five times asking about the application I submitted. When he didn't respond, I started emailing RT/Flixster corporate. Still nothing. I looked and looked and looked for the right email to contact, thinking if I just submitted the right query to the right person they'd figure it out, but never found anything useful. Not even a phone number to call. It's clear to me that Rotten Tomatoes does not want to be contacted for any reason about anything. We petitioned to get on the Tomatometer too, and got the same reaction. Granted, HanCinema is not as big a site as Something Awful, and we were skirting closer to the minimum requirements, but it still smacks of suspicion to me that they don't even have a courtesy rejection later. I think their page about submitting to the Tomatometer is just for show and in reality you get on the Tomatometer by someone at RT corporate asking "hey do you want to be on the Tomatometer". Just another reason not use the site, really.
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Aug 21, 2013 01:10
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I'm curous whether it's the style of the reviews or just the Something Awful moniker that's keeping you from getting in. Television Without Pity and AV Club are on there, but I tried actually reading some of their reviews and they were...well, kind of bland. Not bad, exactly, but not what I'd expect from a blurb that mentions those sites as the source.
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Aug 22, 2013 03:16
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I only just realized that Mortal Instruments: City of Bones was supposed to be a mainstream release. The reason? There's been lots of promotion of it in Korea, but here the title is Shadow Hunters. I don't mean that it translates into Shadow Hunters. It is, in fact, those exact same identically pronounced English words just written in the Korean alphabet. Apparently whoever was in charge of the localization here decided that people would be more likely to watch the movie if the title bore some resemblance to what the movie was actually about. Someone with even elementary English will get what a Shadow Hunter is. I'm a fluent native English speaker and I have no idea what the hell a Mortal Instrument is supposed to be.
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Sep 1, 2013 02:28
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So, wait, do you just provide the words and then Professor Clumsy arbitrarily arranges the editing, layout and minority reports and you don't actually find out what the articles look like until they're posted come Sunday? Or were you just chomping at the bit to write that because Marty's statement is funny and you only care that your fellow goons know whether or not you like A Serbian Film?
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Sep 15, 2013 09:13
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All right, you all are the closest thing to film critic friends I have, so I'd like to discuss shop for a moment. Have you ever been in a situation where you're watching a film and generally taking stock of the flaws for the sake of writing a review later, only to realize at the end with a really subtle shot or line that you'd actually been reading the entire situation completely wrong and it fundamentally alters your notion about what had previously seemed to be an obvious flaw? I don't mean a situation like "Breaking the Girls", where it's a textual plot twist. The situation I'm in is that I had assumed a film had a weak underdeveloped romantic subplot, but then when the ending came around I realized the character was more of a metaphorical representation of the possibilities in the protagonist's life than an actual love interest. And that this narrative thread runs through every part of the film's broader storyline, so that a film I had thought was well-made but scattershot in its narrative implications was actually much stronger than I thought while I was actually watching it. It's making me feel ambivalent, because while I obviously have to discuss this in my review, it's hard to disassociate this from my own personal feelings and the way I read movies. Theoretically this should result in a review that will prevent the situation I went through (since I'll be giving the readers clues as to what they should be watching for), but still. I'm supposed to be a professional opinion-haver but it taking that long to figure it out makes me doubt my analytical abilities, since a lot of what I thought were good critiques I now know to be completely wrong and missing the film's actual point.
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Sep 26, 2013 01:32
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I really wish the "how easy is it to describe the plot without mentioning any female characters" test could become the new Bechdel Test, because the latter encourages lots of nerdish nitpicking but it's very easy to just do basic summaries of a movie and go "I can't figure out why this movie has a female lead except for the sake of having a female lead". Unfortunately it will probably never happen because there's no catchy name attached to it.
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Sep 30, 2013 01:12
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So, just finished watching Short Term 12, and I really would just like to emphasize- listen to Vargo on this one. This is a film that is absolutely worth your time to see if the opportunity is available to you. Which maybe it's not. I'm at an international film festival. Regardless it's without a doubt the best American movie I've seen all year. On the subject of film festivals- do you Current Releases guys go to them? I get the impression that you do visit them as guests, but I mean, have you tried getting a press credential? Different festivals have different levels of hierarchy- of the three internationals I've been to, two gave them to me without question. It's worth your time to at least send out applications to see if you get past the filter or not. Not everyone knows what Something Awful is and if you flash enough impressive-sounding factoids at the coordinators there's a decent chance they'll just decide they're better off letting you in than risk pissing off someone with important connections.
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Oct 8, 2013 03:59
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Keanu Grieves posted:I discussed this with my girlfriend partway through the movie Oh, that's allowed? I've done that a couple of times and felt like it was unethical or something. Why I have no idea, since there's always easy contextual stuff that can be missed by someone working alone. Especially since I normally review films in a second language. quote:and apparently Carrie is conventionally attractive in the book, but instead of having that beauty hidden behind glasses, it's hidden in her awful homemade dresses and her horribly shy demeanor. Ugh, I hate how fiction always does this. You know who gets bullied in real life? People who are actually ugly! It doesn't matter if your story is a deliberate obvious slam against bullies, when it re-enforces one of the main social beliefs that justifies this kind of behavior, the metaphor is too mixed to be at all useful.
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Oct 22, 2013 02:01
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Did anyone else get the impression that this week's reviews make Bad Grandpa sound like a more interesting movie than 12 Years a Slave even though the latter is movie of the week? I'm not sure whether it's the writing that makes me think this or just my own opinion. Personally, the idea of a Borat without the smug elitism sounds awesome to me, but I already saw the Avery Brooks version of 12 Years a Slave and it sounds like this version just does most of the same stuff.
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Oct 28, 2013 01:38
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That's probably for the better. Remembering would probably be traumatic. Free Birds is the second time I saw a review for an animated movie and assumed it was a completely different movie. Instead of Planes, we got Wings, a Russian movie about anthropomorphic planes- not that it's easy to tell from the poster, since I naturally assumed that Planes would be to planes what Cars was to cars, not some grotesque monstrosity of arbitrary racism and sexism. And there's also another movie called Free Birds, from Argentina (Plumiferos) that didn't exactly sound great but I'm guessing it's not as stupid as the American version was. All sorts of weird random international movies get theater time in South Korea- I don't know if anyone's heard of Echo Planet, Rodentia, or The Jungle Bunch, but for whatever reason they have higher priority than bottom-feeder American animated features. About Thor- I saw the first movie after Avengers and was really confused why the straightforward evil-for-the-sake-of-evil bad guy in Avengers had a much more compelling sympathetic story than the the actual hero in Thor. It sounds like the sequel takes its cues from the first movie rather than the mash-up so I guess that's good. The most prominent scene in the promotion here is Natalie Portman slapping Loki in the face saying "that's for New York!" and the decision to highlight that specific part is just really strange. Oh that crazy Loki trying to commit genocide against the human race! So Vargo, you're a mod now. That seems appropriate, given how the lot of you don't seem to do much posting in Cinema Discusso even though you obviously read it. I'm curious- was it always like that, or did you tone down your posting time once you started doing front page writing? Or am I just reading the wrong threads?
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Nov 4, 2013 01:43
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I'm just gonna come out and say it- I wasn't terribly satisfied with the reviews this week. Except for Delivery Man, but I think the satisfaction that comes from learning a terrible dull-sounding movie is exactly as terrible and dull-sounding as it looks is kind of an empty one. The Catching Fire review was unusually Front-Pagey and I'm not actually totally sure why Jay Dub liked Dallas Buyer's Club. Or maybe you just didn't describe anything that clearly sounded appealing to me, I can't really tell. I had the same feeling of ambivalence after reading Vargo's review of 12 Years a Slave so it's difficult to guess the exact cause.
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Nov 24, 2013 09:35
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Keanu Grieves posted:I'm sorry you weren't satisfied though. Please don't leave us, Some Guy TT. Ha, you kidding? After all those reflective posts about review quality? Last time I criticized another critic about criticism they got annoyed because the concept sounded too ironic.
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Nov 25, 2013 01:53
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Ooo, can I ask a delayed question? Why wasn't there a review for Now You See Me? I had thought that was a major release. Also, About Time has just come out here. Vargo's review already gave me a negative feeling about it. But seeing the poster is incredibly aggravating because it communicates absolutely nothing about the movie except that it stars Rachel McAdams' breasts. I, too, can get angry about things that sound really dumb.
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Dec 2, 2013 03:14
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Weird...usually big releases come out at or near the same time in South Korea as they do everywhere else but this one was delayed by a few months. Doesn't help that the movie also sounded pretty boring coming right after After Earth and The Purge. I will forever wonder whether it is legal to get gay married on Purge Night. Frozen's release date is also a big question mark right now, which seems weird considering that's it's a Disney Princess film. But I'll actually be paying attention for that one, since it sounds interesting.
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Dec 2, 2013 03:38
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I'm curious Vargo (and anyone else who's seen both films), what makes Frances Ha fundamentally different from Inside Llewyn Davis? I'm not a huge Coen brothers fan- I mean I like their movies but I don't nerd gush about them, so it seemed to me like the main difference between the two is that Inside Llewyn Davis is better made and more self-aware, which to me honestly isn't much of an endorsement on its own. Nebraska sounded like a much better movie to me simply on the grounds that its characters didn't sound as pretentious. On a more general note, a truism about criticism I've heard a lot is that you can't criticize a movie for having a bad message, but rather on its intrinsic value (Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will being obvious examples). But the way Keanu Grieves directly attacks the apparent rape in Contracted (something Current Releases does a lot) has made me wonder whether this is an inherently valid idea. If critics can't attack this kind of stuff, who else is there? Where are we supposed to find someone who can point out that lesbians do not regularly shack up with guys and this idea shows up in movies way more often than makes any kind of logical sense? TV Tropes? Speaking of lesbians I guess I'll probably have to watch Blue is the Warmest Color, since I'm just hearing too many good things about it to ignore it on general film lesbian problem principles. Also, Keanu Grieves directly pointed out the Male Gaze problem but still seemed to think the positives clearly outweighed the negatives there (see how that kind of direct criticism can help establish credibility?). I must admit the title annoys me. On the festival circuit it was just called Adele: Chapter 1 and 2 and that title seems way more appropriate for the kind of story it is.
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Dec 22, 2013 09:39
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Professor Clumsy posted:We've considered it before and it can be nice to write about old films with the benefit of time. I was quite pleased with my review of Phantom Menace for its re-release, but it's a kind of a drop in the ocean to even bother writing about Star Wars on the internet. What about older movies that have more-or-less been forgotten by the sands of time, but still have something about them that's kind of historically notable aside from sounding terrible? When I have no new stuff for the current week I tend to just review older movies at random, looking at films which seem to have some sort of pedigree, given the cast and crew, but which today have basically been ignored in retrospect. I personally find doing this kind of work to be a lot more fulfilling than reviewing famous things like Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, simply because aside from my reviews very little information on these older films even exists. The equivalent of that in American movies..? I don't know. Timer comes to mind as a movie which received almost no critical attention upon release, and only limited reviews once it got popular on Netflix. But I think that's the kind of film that could benefit a lot from critical analysis, positive or negative, because it's at least trying to accomplish something even if your mileage may vary on how well it's executed.
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Jan 11, 2014 02:21
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Y-Hat posted:[*]Supernatural romance where the supernatural creature has some minor physical blemish, which instantly makes him (and make no mistake, this character is always male) "hideous." You caused this, Stephenie Meyer. Hey come on, be fair. They've been doing this crap with the Phantom of the Opera for decades. It's not like we went from Lon Chaney the repulsive movie monster to Gerard Butler with a bad sunburn overnight.
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Jan 27, 2014 03:32
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I was laughing pretty hard at the I Frankenstein review. I don't think there's a better way to write a funny review of that movie than to just describe what's actually happening, which is something most serious critics seem averse to.
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Jan 28, 2014 01:26
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N. Senada posted:Did you catch this one? OK, now that it's been two months since I've seen Catching Fire and I'm not looking for analysis of it anymore, I have to admit that was pretty funny. edit: maybe in May I'll have a similar reappraisal of the one for August : Osage County. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 09:35 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 09:33
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Regarding Jay Dub's reviews of The Wind Rises, I like the idea that Miyazaki wrote a film about how he kind of hates anime even though he loves writing about it. However, I think making the metaphor only about anime is a bit limiting. I regularly read Animation Magazine, because one of the libraries I go to stocks it and I'm probably the only person who can read it so I do. This is a trade magazine for animators, so basically all the articles are fluff pieces for new animated films. Like, the filmmakers will brag about the creative process behind the Nut Job, praise the family driven morals of Despicable Me 2, and talk about how good a job they're doing engaging children for Walking With Dinosaurs 3D. It was right after reading the article for the last one (the only movie mentioned in this post I'v actually seen) that I got to the piece on The Wind Rises, and it just sort of hit me. These people are Horikoshi. They love animation, and they love making animated movies, even if they're not very good at it, and they're just doing their darnedest to hide or obfuscate the terrible messages these narratives actually have for children by cloaking it in creativity so they have a nice protective bubble for when the critics get around to panning it. Assuming they ever do. It's a movie I really need to see, because the review has convinced me this is a movie about the dark side of what the creative process actually produces. Which is something nearly everyone seems to hate discussing in movies. And I doubt that many people are actually going to read it that way because of course none of us are as terrible as Imperial Japan but still. I think I'd really like it.
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Mar 3, 2014 02:16
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I think it's probably worth noting that in the original Peabody and Sherman cartoon, John Phillip Holland couldn't figure out how to build a working submarine because the version he had just flew around in the air instead of going underwater properly. Every episode was a variation on that joke with a different historical character. I have absolutely no idea how they were able to get bootstrapping and gay adoption allegories out of that. Maybe they read the TV Tropes page for inspiration.
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Mar 9, 2014 09:26
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All right, I'm wondering now- how exactly is the society in Divergent supposed to be a dystopia? The trailer was really vague, and the review...doesn't seem to mention anything all that bad. So people are separated into castes by personality tests, but they still get to pick which caste they go into in? And divergents are bad because..? What? To keep Harrison Bergeron from taking over the world? I'd also like to cite the paragraph about the high school freshman for excellence. That's the best explanation I've heard yet for where those bizarre clique tropes come from.
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Mar 24, 2014 20:59
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Yesss...more weeks like this please. I love reading about weird obscure movies because half of the time they're the only ones I have access to. Also, uh, the reviews are totally funny and awesome. I wonder what took Cheap Thrills so long to become available. I saw it last summer and it wasn't even playing in competition.
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Apr 7, 2014 17:05
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That seems more like an American culture thing than something specific to the Marvel movies. I had pretty much the exact same reading from Zero Dark Thirty and I still have trouble seeing how that movie is supposed to be anti-torture in anything but the most superfluous way.
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Apr 9, 2014 05:04
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Sheldrake posted:The only way you can say that the film blindly endorses torture is if you also read the film as a victory lap about how awesome America is. But, hey, if you have blinders that big on, congrats on your rich fantasy life, have a good day in Narnia or whatever. I take it you weren't in the United States when they announced bin Laden's death. That's really important context (as was the framing of 9/11 at the movie's start), and it's really not reasonable to interpret the movie like these are abstract events. This isn't Moby Dick. Zero Dark Thirty is about current events and rhetoric that shaped the entire political landscape of the previous ten years. Everybody who watched that movie brought a lot of a baggage into it, for better or worse. And given that we've since grown into a society that tolerates drone assassinations, I'm inclined to think it was for the worse. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Apr 9, 2014 |
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Apr 9, 2014 06:19
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If you can't see it how are people watching it? Pat Robertson said it made over forty million dollars this morning. That's probably not the most reliable citation.
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Apr 22, 2014 04:30
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They take it out of theaters just when nonbelievers start hearing about it, and aren't putting up any VOD options either? I don't think they're doing evangelism correctly.
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Apr 23, 2014 01:35
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Jay Dub posted:Every review I've read for it talks about a scene where a dog takes a CGI dump on someone's carpet. So literal dog poo poo is more expensive than CGI these days. Interesting.
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Apr 29, 2014 23:22
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That sounds like a job for Not So Current Releases. Although it would probably be funnier in 2016 than if they reviewed it right now.
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Apr 30, 2014 16:13
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So am I the only one confused about why they decided to give the new Spider-Man movie three villains again? Villain overload is really the main obvious problem that sunk the first iteration of the franchise so I have no idea why they'd jump right back into that. Particularly considering that the review makes it sound like Osborn doesn't even matter, and doesn't even mention Rhino at all. I haven't seen the movie, but they're highlighting this information all over the promotional material. Personally I would have rather seen hints about the eels. (also am I the victim of a mass avatar bomb or something because I have no idea what that's supposed to be)
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May 5, 2014 06:33
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 12:42 |
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You know, originally, that wasn't a spider power. Peter Parker was also a total whiz bang kid genius who invented white sticky fluid to go with his actual spider powers. Apparently, at the time, it was considered more plausible to have Peter Parker be super smart than to have him get spider web powers from a radioactive spider. I mean geez how's that even supposed to work super strength and stuff makes total sense but how could someone get webbing powers from a radioactive spider that's just crazy.
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May 8, 2014 01:03
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