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Lord Krangdar posted:How come there's no thread on film theory, since it seems to come up so often in various threads? People who bristle at subtext-based readings don't show up in threads about film theory, they show up in the Comic Book Movie thread, the Prometheus thread, etc., so that's where the arguments happen. The people who would participate in a more general thread about analysis already tend to be on one side of the argument.
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Dec 7, 2012 19:25
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Pioneer42 posted:There's definitely a time-and-place for both. Spectacle just won out more as all the shows went on. It didn't hurt that, even when they were still using models, computer advances made it easier to do non-model effects like weapons fire, damage, and compositing multiple effects together into the same shot. Tension is often the fallback when you can't afford to do spectacle.
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Dec 7, 2012 22:06
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Cingulate posted:Spaceships anyone? Not to get all male-gazey on the Enterprise, but the spaceships in this movie weren't nearly as pretty on-screen as the spaceships in the last one.
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Jun 26, 2013 20:09
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Cingulate posted:Getting gazey on the Enterprise is what I watch these movies for! The Vengeance streaking in behind the Enterprise in the warp tunnel and sending it spinning is gorgeous, but that's about it. It's a shame, because gorgeous shots of objects in space are the primary thing I liked about the last one (that and how funny Nero is). I felt like this movie lost that and didn't give anything in return, so didn't much care for it.
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Jun 26, 2013 20:13
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Cingulate posted:I don't like the Vengeance. She's lazy. She's the Enterprise, but bigger. Look at WoK, the Reliant is really creative. She's the Enterprise, but upside down, how about that! Yeah, I didn't care for the design of the Vengeance in general, but the way she comes up on the Enterprise and the red of the torpedoes against the blue of the warp tunnel was really striking. Since Khan designed it, it would have been nice to see his psychology in action in that instead of just a more menacing version of the classic layout. Lord Krangdar posted:I particularly liked the look of the planet at the beginning; it was a nice nod to the low-budget surrealism set designs from TOS. The sequence itself was a neat throwback, and Spock's graceful acceptance of his impending death was my favorite character moment in the film, but I thought the planet itself was sort of ugly. Tastes vary, of course, and I appreciate that they went for something stylized instead of just a random forest. I just didn't care for how it actually looked, though I can't really put into words why. I liked the stark blue and red contrast in the warp tunnel sequence, so it's not just the BLUE and RED thing, but it just didn't look good to me.
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Jun 26, 2013 20:25
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Lord Krangdar posted:Well, yeah. But it was ugly in the same way the old TOS sets were but brought to life in a way they couldn't do back then, which I appreciated. It's neat that they were able to nail that in a way which worked for you, but I'm not such a huge fan of the original series that I want to look at something ugly just for the sake of the reference.
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Jun 26, 2013 20:31
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This second, contrasting scene is presented very differently and makes many people very uncomfortable because the woman is nearly breaking the fourth wall and saying "I know you're looking, and I reject you." Yeah, I thought the Alice Eve bit was a nice subversion of the sequence in the first film where Kirk spies on Uhura getting undressed. Neither of them are embarrassed by their bodies, but there's a transition to the idea that Kirk should really have moved past this juvenile horseshit. It's not cute anymore. The pair of cat girls, on the other hand, I did not care for. They didn't even receive the basic characterization that we saw out of the Orion woman in the previous one, nor was there the same basic equality that we had between her and Kirk (e.g. they're both scantily clad, they both have their bodies shown off for the camera, they're both overtly promiscuous).
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Jun 26, 2013 21:09
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Ferrinus posted:If a movie criticizes the male gaze by, literally, using the male gaze and hanging a lampshade on it, oops! It's still going to cop criticism for using the male gaze! I can appreciate what the scene is trying to do while thinking it's undercutting itself at the same time. The film doesn't use the male gaze and then hang a lampshade on it since the shot in question isn't an instance of the male gaze. As far as I can tell the only evidence for it being an instance of the male gaze comes from the fact that it contains a scantily-clad woman, and the idea that "scantily-clad" automatically means "male gaze" is the "game over" that SMG is talking about. If you think there's more to that shot that makes it male-gazey than just Carol Marcus's attire, Alice Eve's attractiveness, and the fact that these are visible I'm curious what that is.
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Jun 26, 2013 23:21
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Crappy Jack posted:Our point of view in that shot is right next to Kirk. Like, the camera's standing maybe three feet to his left. It is quite literally a male's gaze. We are seeing what Kirk is seeing, and the character is reacting to Kirk looking at her. I mean, I guess we're not like watching a Being John Malkovich inspired view through his literal eyes and hearing his thought process, sure, but the camera is straight up from Kirk's vantage.  I saw the movie and I'm pretty sure Kirk wasn't crawling around on the floor in that scene. Whether or not you think moving the viewpoint to the left is meaningful, moving it downwards definitely is. This change in vantage is significant to how we perceive Marcus, making her tower over us, reducing our power respective to hers, which directly speaks against it being an instance of the male gaze.
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Jun 27, 2013 01:02
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Helsing posted:The amount of flailing going on in this thread is genuinely funny. I can just imagine what some of you guys think the writing process for this movie must have looked like. Well, yes, if you completely misinterpret how people are interpreting the scene, it is hard to see how it could have been written that way. But in reality, it could have easily involved whoever wrote the scene deciding to make a contrasting scene to the one in the 2009 movie where Kirk spies on Uhura changing - which is actually played with boys-will-be-boys lightness - but changing the tone to chastise Kirk because now that he's in the protector role as the captain of a ship he should know better. Which is to say, it's still sexist. Because, yeah, the movie doesn't do a great job with women, and even the best interpretation of that scene still has Carol Marcus's character only being relevant as she relates to Kirk. But it's not some loving mystery how it could have been written as anything but cheap pandering. Helsing posted:I get that some of you guys liked the movie and I guess want to defend it on principle or something, but I just cannot fathom how deluded you'd have to be to seriously think that the inclusion of this scene was motivated by anything other than some producer going "Hey Abrams, we need more tits for the trailer!" I disliked this movie, found plenty in it to be objectionable from a sexual-politics angle, but the criticisms of that shot are misreading it.
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Jun 28, 2013 18:17
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Ferrinus posted:she explicitly asks us not to look at her What the gently caress are you talking about? Did I miss some fourth-wall breaking dialog? Even if you think there's an implicit rejection of the audience, that's not an explicit request prior to the shot.
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Jun 30, 2013 18:47
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Cingulate posted:Well, did it feel like a sacrifice to you? It didn't to me. Yeah, I found it significantly less moving than Spock's own attempted sacrifice at the beginning of the movie. I appreciate the parallel, but it's hurt by the comparison.
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Sep 22, 2013 18:19
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:You tell me, you're the one who went out to see a loving Star Trek film in 2013. Are you really upset that it's not retreading literally the exact same ground from 1982 as though this is new and exciting, and instead takes all that poo poo as firmly established and tries to build on it? What does it try to build on it?
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Sep 23, 2013 17:46
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PeterWeller posted:An allegory about the militarization of America in response to the threat of terror. Starfleet militarizes in ST:ID in response to, depending on whether you're talking about internal motivations or the public show, a looming threat from a foreign state (the Klingons) or in reaction to a domestic terrorist (Khan). The United States militarized in response to external non-state actors: drug cartels and religious/cultural extremists. It's a very sloppy allegory and not a particularly interesting one. Tubgirl Cosplay posted:The new movies just take the creaky old 70s/80s narrative conventions of Star Trek itself for their goofy power imposing arbitrary rules that must be puzzled out and overcome. At what point do the characters puzzle out the 70s/80s narrative conventions, and what is their method for overcoming them?
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Sep 23, 2013 18:48
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:Well for starters they phone up the guy from the original Wrath of Khan and ask him to tell them the ending. Y'know. Subtle stuff like that. Is that them puzzling out the narrative conventions or overcoming them? Because those conventions still seem to be in full effect after the phone call.
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Sep 23, 2013 18:52
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PeterWeller posted:You're right of course. There's no American parallel to using a terrorist attack by non state actors to justify starting a war with a tangentially related nation. The last decade never happened. I thought the allegory was about "the militarization of America in response to the threat of terror." The militarization of the United States wasn't in response to the Iraq War and the Iraq War is mostly limited to being related to that in being a training ground for military-style police once they come home, in direct contrast to the drone-like Vengeance. But perhaps I'm just confused. Can you clarify what you mean when you say that the United States was "militarized"? Tubgirl Cosplay posted:Not really? I mean it's a movie about how the plucky underdogs handily beat the unstoppable moustache-twirling schemers with their brilliant plans pretty much solely because they read ahead in the script and know exactly what they're going to do, what they want, and how they're supposed to get beaten. Khan kicks them around for a little while anyway because he's a superman but he and the Admiral spend the second half of the movie fumbling and watching their script go off the rails and the unstoppable killing machine winds up getting his rear end kicked in a fistfight by a skinny pissed-off Vulcan. Yeah, that's overcoming the previous narrative. How do they overcome the narrative conventions? Because using time-travel information to overcome an enemy seems right in line with those conventions, not an example of overcoming them.
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Sep 23, 2013 19:11
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:I don't know what you even want here if "asking how the movie ends and what the plot demanded to take down Khan, then doing that but better" isn't messing with a narrative convention. Starfleet officers sending information back in time in order to let their former selves know how to better solve a situation is an actual narrative that has occurred in Star Trek before. How does this instance of doing so differ from previous instances so as to make this an instance of overcoming a convention as compared to the previous examples being, presumably, instances of conforming to it? euphronius posted:The Patriot Act et al lead to an increased militarization of police in the US. Further there was a cultural militarization as the entire nation "went to war." I think the US is still at war, who knows. Yes, I know these things. I appreciate that there is a vague resemblance between the events of ST:ID and America post-9/11. I'm suggesting that they have been recombined in a manner that loses so much of the actual cause-and-effect as to make the allegory useless.
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Sep 23, 2013 19:21
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:How about you explain why you think it is they have Kirk kill himself for all of like fifteen minutes No thanks. I was curious enough about your theory to ask for clarification, but if you're not interested in going into more detail that's fine. Cheers!
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Sep 23, 2013 19:45
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PeterWeller posted:I mean the broad-reaching militarization of American culture and hegemony following 9/11. This may extend farther into political debate than necessary, but I didn't really see 9/11 as causing significant militarization in regards to our external use of force. The state surveillance and internal-security apparatuses got a real shot in the arm, but American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't particularly more indicative of a militarized nation, as far as I can tell, than American involvement in Vietnam or Korea. It's just the sort of poo poo we do. I'm not suggesting that none of the parallels are there. That would be insane. But I don't think it holds up enough to actually serve as an allegory for post-9/11 America. For it to be emotionally satisfying (to me) to see the America-analogue turn away from that path, I think the path would have to be more analogous. At which point I'm left with a movie that I didn't find as fun, exciting, or visually striking as the previous one. Where this still sort of works for me is that the movie is, in part, reacting to the fact that the Federation was always less humanitarian and more imperialistic than it was willing to admit - particularly when viewed from the perspective that the other movies and TV shows all occurred before this one in reality, even if not in the in-universe chronology. But that strikes me as being more relevant to America having gone the wrong way during the Cold War, with our modern state the ugly outgrowth of that paranoid mentality, than 9/11 being a breaking point. Which actually fits in pretty nicely with the time-travel narrative and the Klingons historically being analogous to the Soviets. I might have to watch it again from that perspective to see if it holds up, since I'd assumed it was a more conventional 9/11 reaction movie the first time through, which I found to be an unsatisfying reading for reasons explained here.
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Sep 23, 2013 21:33
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Snak posted:IN the film they say that the fuel was removed in order to put the cryotubes in. It does prompt the question: if these torpedoes will work totally fine without the fuel, what was it for? They didn't actually fire any of them, right? Maybe they wouldn't work.
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Sep 25, 2013 15:34
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Snak posted:But then Admiral Robocop's plan is even stupider. Now it only works IF he assumes that Kirk is a good boy and won't shoot the torpedoes before telling Khan he has them. Actually that was the only way it worked ever, so I guess the entire thing is a bluff... I thought Admiral Marcus didn't know the bodies were in the tubes, but it's been a while since I saw it.
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Sep 25, 2013 17:34
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:Picture if, like, the Space Shuttle or any Arctic exploration boat had a battery of missiles capable of taking out a city as a matter of course. The Space Shuttle isn't a a space exploration vessel, it's a space exploitation vessel, basically a truck into low orbit. We already know what's up there, we can see it from the ground. There is nothing done by the United States, or any country in the 21st century, that is particularly analogous to the non-military functions of Starfleet. Historically, it was common to take military equipment along on the initial explorations into places that might have intelligent (in the real world, human) inhabitants back when there were unexplored inhabitable places. The ships that brought explorers to the Americas had cannons on them. Robert de La Salle explored the Mississippi on what was basically a warship. Lewis and Clark were members of the US Army and traveled with dozens of armed soldiers. That isn't to say that Starfleet, as an agency tasked with exploration, should behave the same way. But if that's the analogy it's more appropriate to talking about the mistakes of the past than of the present. That's how it was treated in TNG: they still had the guns but had a greater tendency to avoid making exploration simultaneously a show of force. To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with your (Tubgirl Cosplay's) basic point, that the Federation is obviously militarized. But so is every modern nation. What I'm not clear on, and this isn't necessarily directed at you, is what exactly Starfleet is supposed to be where it isn't obvious and natural that they'd carry weapons with them? What, specifically, in ST:ID is "too militarized" and needs to be wound back, and what is the purpose of that organization? Because in the United States it's primarily the police and federal law enforcement agencies, who don't have counterparts, as far as I can tell, in ST:ID. Sir Kodiak fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 19:27
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:Note that these were explicitly missions of imperial conquest, aimed at scouting out the New World in preparation for depopulating it, and they used those guns, which are all things I think we're supposed to take at face value that Starfleet isn't doing. When packing for an expedition, then as now, you don't waste weight on a bunch of weapons unless you're planning to start a fight when you get where you're going. That presents the Lewis and Clark expedition as being more belligerent than I think is fair. If the goal of that expedition was to make preparations for bringing the area under the control of the US government, we sure took a long time to actually do so. A show of force was part of it (as I mentioned), but does history really support the idea that Thomas Jefferson commissioned the expedition with the plan to eventually exterminate the Native Americans? To turn it around, what historical examples are there of significant government expeditions into unexplored but inhabited lands which weren't seriously armed? There may well be examples, I have a modest depth of knowledge here, but I personally can't think of any. Tubgirl Cosplay posted:And I don't think STID has a thing to do with police militarization, you're not exactly using your imagination if you think that's the only aspect of America someone might think is too bellicose. It doesn't take imagination to see that America is far too bellicose. "Bellicose" is not a synonym for "militarized." A drunk looking for a fight is bellicose, a nation with a massive military purely for self-defense is militarized, and neither is the other. Tubgirl Cosplay posted:It's addressing pretty plainly the American maintenance of its position through force and military power and how that butts up against the official narrative that it does so through diplomacy and trade, and from my reading incorrectly ascribing the former as some sort of new development that started with Bush. Anyway it's trying to claim that it's some kind of drastic reversal in its original pacifistic base nature, when it's plain as day both for Starfleet and America that it's been a military empire was all along, hence the incoherence of the message. The new torpedoes are aggressive and evil because they're not the same torpedoes we always shot at people; the new Enterprise is a sinister and terrifying perversion because it's got all the same warmaking apparatus as the old Enterprise but in greater quantity; vaporizing foreign villages with drones is inhuman when we should be using good old bomber planes and cruise missiles. Yeah, I agree with all of this.
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Sep 25, 2013 20:22
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:I'm not trying to paint the Lewis and Clark expedition as moustache-twirlers purposely and primarily bent on genocide, but it's worth noting that they did wind up using all those guns on the locals, and it was in an arms deal gone south. That's fair. But I still think it's relevant to ask whether there are any examples of government explorations - something at all analogous to the mission of Starfleet - where there was any chance of running into hostile resistance where the explorers didn't take guns. The answer might be that there isn't because humanity essentially doesn't explore without an eye for expansion, so the lack of an example wouldn't undo your point, but it would be much cleaner if an example existed. We didn't take rocket launcher to the moon because we already knew there were no moon men to use them on (Apollo 18 excepted). Tubgirl Cosplay posted:They weren't there just because Meriwether Lewis liked guns and thought his army buddies would make great surveyors. All that Prime Directive poo poo wouldn't have meant much to a Westerner prior to decolonization, and still nothing like it has ever come close to actually being practiced. Again, fair enough, but I think all this makes Starfleet a really lousy analogy for anything the United States does if we want to interpret it as anything but a military organization. It seems like you basically agree with me, but I'm curious if others who were pushing the "we're too militarized" analogy disagree. Tubgirl Cosplay posted:So is a nation with a massive military permanently looking for a fight bellicose, or militarized? It's both.
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Sep 25, 2013 20:44
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Timby posted:No, that was Marcus' whole plan. He got what he needed out of Khan (the design for the Vengeance, the design of the super-torpedoes), but then when he realized that Khan put his people in his new torpedoes, he knew that Khan intended to one day unfreeze them, and he realized that one Khan was dangerous enough, he didn't need 72 more running around and raising hell. That's why he was so explicit about ordering the Enterprise to just launch at Kronos -- it would kill Khan and his people, and he wouldn't need to worry about them anymore (and he'd get the war he was itching for). Seriously? Why couldn't he have just had one of his minions kill the 72 unconscious people and used weapons with actual fuel in them to kill Khan? What am I missing here?
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Sep 25, 2013 23:56
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pigdog posted:I've noticed plenty of people hate this one, and as I understand it's because they're offended with all the liberties they've taken with the original Star Trek universe, but as I really couldn't care less about that, I really enjoyed this one. I'm not saying that wasn't an issue for some people, but there's plenty who just didn't like it as a movie, its relationship to existing Star Trek aside.
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Dec 19, 2013 17:44
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Lord Krangdar posted:What's an example of a scientific science fiction film? This is not the basis for my issues with Into Darkness, but... Europa Report and Moon.
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Dec 24, 2013 18:44
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Hbomberguy posted:The ability to 'do magic' has in storytelling often been an arcane and mysterious thing (at least to an outsider), usually a product of a wizard doing some deep thinking and arriving at a conclusion that looks, to the outside observer, like magic. The point is that it's improbable, but gainable with some supreme effort of intellect or will et cetera. The point of magic is its mystery and improbability. I'm not going to argue that FTL travel is more plausible than the spontaneous creation of fire through pure will, but you miss a lot of interesting differences if you dismiss them as "literally the same thing." The difference isn't that FTL is more plausible, it's that the justification for its existence is predicated upon science and engineering, not the corruption of nature, a connection to the divine, etc. (various standard associations with magic). Professor X using his telepathy because of evolution and The Shadow clouding men's minds through mystical "eastern" techniques are equally implausible, but the differing explanation for them gives them different meaning. The Shadow came back from his travels a different man; Professor X was "born that way." Tony Stark inventing the Iron Man power armor instead of wishing it into existence tells us something about how his trials should be interpreted in relation to the real world. I'm not saying you necessarily disagree with this. I'm not arguing the same thing as enraged_camel so your post may not be inclusive of it, but I thought your language was universal enough that it deserved addressing.
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Dec 26, 2013 18:51
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Hbomberguy posted:I guess what I'm trying to say is the differences are purely tactile, you can postulate anything happening in either because it's still all fiction, it's fine to have a preference for one over the other but I'm not a fan of 'Hard Sci Fi' fans who seem to think they're special (this isn't aimed at Camel, I'm really using his posts as an excuse to engage with a sentiment I see a lot in my own spheres) because, in a ridiculously farcical direct comparison, they find one implausible thing is 'more realistic/likely/probable/accurate' than another implausible thing their ideology has deemed 'impossible'. Yeah, there's nothing you can do in fantasy in terms of what the characters are capable of that you can't do in science fiction by writing it a little differently. In terms of "hard sci fi," though, I think there's value in that sort of element. 2001 benefits from having both the trippy big-think sci-fi and the grounded gravity-wheels. Plausibility can be leveraged to interesting effect.
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Dec 27, 2013 05:11
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Helsing posted:I realize that this isn't a direct contradiction of anything that anyone else has said Well, yeah, that's precisely the issue with what you're saying. Like, yeah, it's a common message, because filmmakers keep reproducing that message. Yeah, it's built to make money, and it's a message that makes money because audiences respond to it. The millionth painting of a bowl of fruit, painted to be sold cheaply to hang in motels, is still a painting of a bowl of fruit. Even if we care about intent, the screenwriters, directors, etc. may be comfortable with derivative, predictable messages, but they're not so stupid that they literally don't even understand what they're saying.
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May 26, 2016 03:32
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Helsing posted:All I'm really saying is that we should maybe de-emphasize plot and focus more on marketing when analyzing films like Star Trek Ino Darkness. Can you clarify what you mean by this? Are you talking about how the film itself is made to be appealing, or do you really mean we should place, say, the trailers as having higher primacy than the film itself when figuring out what the point of the film is?
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May 26, 2016 06:56
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Helsing posted:There is a tendency to talk about the political interpretations of the film to the exclusion of all other ways of analyzing how a film gets made. Of course it's valid and important to talk about what a film says politically but there are other ways to think about how a film is constructed. In the context of a film like Into Darkness what really strikes me isn't the cliched message about the Federation's corrupt Deep State. I'm more interested in the way the film feels like it's plot elements and characters were assembled and fabricated into a final product in an almost industrial process.I feel as though starting with that perspective changes the way you think about the film and de-emphasizes the significance of the plot itself. Sure this is a film about Space Hitler being put in charge of the CIA, but is that really particularly noteworthy or significant in analyzing the film? What about viewing the film's elements as marketing ploys designed to attract and retain an audience? Yeah, I think you're just going to run into the issue that we have very little visibility into the actual decision-making processes of the corporations making these products. Whereas analysis of the film as it stands on its own can be done exclusively using public information – the film itself and the surrounding bodies of real-world information and related art that film draws on – most of the time, anything more complex than "well, yes, the film was made to make money," comes across as more a just-so story than an actual analysis. It would be interesting to read, but there's simply not usually the information to get at anything but the obvious. And, yeah, when there is real information, it's fun to get that insight. For instance, there's a guy kiimo in the movie posters and trailers thread who works in film marketing and has been able to talk about specific ad campaigns and why they are what they are. And it turns out that people's instincts about these things, the guesses they make from the outside, are often completely wrong. So it's hard to be too enthusiastic about the ad hoc analyses that're all people are usually able to do. And that said, if we really want to dig into Star Trek Into Darkness in this regard, it was pointed out to you that Roberto Orci, one of the screenwriters, is a notorious 9/11 truther. Given that, that the movie features a demonic intelligence operative carrying out a false-flag attack to drive a state to war would be a hell of a coincidence to have been purely based on marketing considerations. Which also means that when we have evidence of what a writer deeply, personally care about, it turns out it came through loud and strong in the product.
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May 26, 2016 16:57
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Snak posted:Yeah, but you can still kind of look at it in terms of context without actually trying to assert authorial intent. Uh, yeah. I'm not sure how you're getting that I'm not up for this, considering I specifically talk about the advantages of "analysis of the film as it stands on its own... the film itself and the surrounding bodies of real-world information and related art that film draws on." What I'm hesitant about is our ability to determine "why a product was designed the way it was."
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May 26, 2016 17:25
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Helsing posted:I don't think it's any more speculative to discuss the film as a business enterprise rather than an a piece of art (and even that is a bit of a false dichotomy). Really I'm just arguing for a slightly change in perspective. We may not have as much information as would be ideal to discuss marketing instincts but quite often people discuss script and direction in these films without even acknowledging the commercial aspect of film making. Ideally there would be at least some acknowledgement of the fact that the film's artistic vision is specifically sculpted and tailored to appeal to a mass audience, and when discussing why certain artistic decisions were made it's necessary to at least speculate or discuss what the commercial instincts of the creators were. Your example is a good one for how limited this type of discussion often is in practice. Like, there's a million ways to incorporate a titty shot, and they went with a particular one. The next step is to examine how that particular one works in the context of the movie. I don't think anyone denies that attractive people in revealing clothing are included to drive up ticket sales. What people aren't willing to do, that you implicitly seem to be asking for, is to just stop there. Think about your 9/11 comment in reverse. Sure, addressing contemporary issues may have been a studio mandate, leading to Roberto Orci addressing the contemporary issue he's particularly devoted to. But if we accept that, you have to accept that a desire for a titty shot, even if it's a top-down mandate, was then processed by artists into a work of art. The studio may have mandated contemporary issues be addressed, but they probably didn't mandate a dramatization of 9/11 trutherism. You're presenting these as a contrast – "supposed to somehow be about empowering her character, as opposed to, you know, providing a titty shot that can be put into the trailer" – rather than things that work in combination. You ask for people to "entertain other ways of thinking about or analysing film." Well, if you think that's a compelling way to think about things, I think lots of people here would be happy to be entertained by you providing us with an interesting reading that incorporated that. Where you will be poorly received is if you try to use it to shut down discussion. Because this sort of analysis does already happen in this forum. It's happening right now in the Star Wars thread regarding possibly Disney-mandated reshoots for Rogue One to bring the tone more in line with The Force Awakens. It happens in regards to how studios mandates influences the Marvel and DC films. It's not like we ignore the commercial aspects, we just don't stop there.
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Jun 1, 2016 21:52
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