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I read through most of the PDF over the course over a few hours just now. I'm happy to have read it and it will be mulling in my brain for a while. I think the saddest thing is what these ideas are encroached it. It's really telling that the OP had to skip through a significant chunk of the second movie because it was just plain stupid/useless. I wish these movies weren't assaults to my senses so that the story of Megatron could have been more well presented.
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Dec 8, 2013 07:17
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 03:43 |
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Lord Krangdar posted:The film is not mocking people of color through the Twins because the twins are not people of color, neither literally/diegetically nor symbolically. Diegetically they are alien robots acting out human stereotypes, and symbolically they represent the stereotypes themselves. If "minstrelry" is mocking black people then mocking minstrels is mocking the oppressors, not the oppressed. I'm sure someone who is better with words than I am can explain in detail why that line of thinking is entirely wrong.
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Dec 9, 2013 05:54
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Lord Krangdar posted:Hey, good addition to the discussion! That's all this is, after all. It's the more the idea of "This racism is okay because it's criticizing racism" that is entirely wrong.
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Dec 9, 2013 06:45
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Sorry, give me a moment, I'm still twitching after reading you saying that the twins are in no way racist. They are stereotypical depictions and safe ones at that. They push racism away, in a way of "haha look at this funny thing". They are on the side of the good guys, so even though they speak their mind and are brash they are still subservient to Optimus and whoever else, gently caress, pretty much everyone is above them. They are on the lowest totem pole. Even that thing that humps Megan Fox's leg arguably gets more importance, as far as characters that can actually be recognized in the film as more than a cameo. If it is, as you say, a comment on minstrelsy, it's hard to see. This is a movie that is known for low brow humor, barely makes any attempt to set the bar higher than that, and frankly is not a fitting place for that type of commentary at all. It serves no purpose and has no point. Again, the movie hardly deals with this. We get a few throwaway lines in the first movie about them learning the language through satellites broadcasting god knows what media, and in a movie that talks down to people as much as this they then expect the audience to carry that point forward and apply it in such a manner that they should clearly take this as bashing their own culture? Maybe, I can certainly see that line of reasoning. Again, the issue boils down to it still being racist because in the end it offers no further point. In fact, the film is so embarrassed by them that after that film, they are never seen or mentioned of again. It's like their entire reason for existing never got explored. The movies you listed off have points to them, the racism depicted in them is a central tenet of the entire goal of the movie, instead of useless joke characters that made everyone cringe. It's bringing minstrelsy into the present for no god drat reason. Again, I admit I'm not the best with words, some of that is rambling, but there is a reason Terry kept ending entire blocks of text throughout the analysis with, "And yet people on the internet claim the twins aren't racist."
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Dec 9, 2013 07:06
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Some Guy TT posted:Incidentally, I saw a random Transformers scene at a mall yesterday, and it really is striking how impossible it is to tell the difference between the good robots and the bad robots in fight scenes, They're both equally brutal. About the only thing that could be reasonably be called an out-of-context clue is that the Autobots tend to be more colorful. I guess the take away to this is if you want to believe that the films were made badly in order to show off fancy CGI with no thought of how it should actually look, or if it it's trying to tell you that all the violence is barbaric and there are no real differences between the two sides.
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Dec 10, 2013 01:23
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Some Guy TT posted:I'm kind of tempted to start a thread about the conflict between abstract film discussion and the potential harm commonly misread films can have in corrupting the population. It seems like this exact same argument seeps into random threads all the time and the only real difference is the specific movie being discussed. Can we include this batshit crazy thing I ran into? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afzq0tg22EM
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Jan 25, 2014 06:58
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 03:43 |
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Based solely on that teaser, this actually kind of looks like the Transformers film I wanted in the first place. For one thing, the transformers themselves seem to be easier to distinguish at a glance.
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Mar 5, 2014 03:48
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