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That NC Matrix review is pretty lame overall and really reaches for things to complain about, but the gag of him saying that nothing's changed since 1999 while dozens of white cops beat Laurence Fishburn is pretty funny. Even though he probably should have noticed that race has thematic significance for the movie.
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Jan 16, 2015 18:04
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Homicide holds up pretty well. I'd actually recommend it as good.
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Jan 18, 2015 22:52
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Infamous Sphere posted:That Maroon 5 song was utterly ridiculous. Also...it might just have been that I worked in a butcher's once, but I couldn't help noticing that those sides of beef looked really plasticky. Maybe I just didn't want to look at Adam Levine's weird, rippling back. Wait a minute...Adam Levine...Ted Levine...oh nooooooooooooo........ That was great. Picnic at Hanging Rock has stuck with me for a long time, and I think you've got the reason in the haunting atmosphere and total refusal to resolve anything--not just the disappearances, but how we're to take apparent fixation or romance between students, and how we're to understand what happens to Appleyard. It's like all those shows about unsolved crimes and disappearances: the actual answers are likely very mundane or not at all remarkable, but if you remove just a few pieces of evidence then the stories haunt the popular imagination forever. Because I saw it at the same time as The Last Wave, I guess I always saw it in a more metaphysical way, like it's telling us that these English people are in a place that is so fundamentally different to them that they can't understand it or live there in the way they're used to--that they're an invasive species that will be killed off by weird magic rocks and nonlinear spacetime until they change themselves rather than imposing English logic on a place with its own rules. I saw that in terms of the supernatural, like Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where transgression gets us a glimpse of this terrible, indifferent world behind the natural curtain of appearance that nobody can understand or navigate safely. But your review is great because as somebody who knows Australia you can cut through the bullshit and just explain that the movie can operate just fine on a purely natural level: the English don't respect the place where they live, so its heat and drought kill them. That makes so much sense.
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Jan 19, 2015 06:33
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Robert Denby posted:AHHHH! It's different now! I can't handle it! There used to be super-fans who dressed up and stuff. I knew a guy in college who dressed up as Neo for Halloween and spent months anticipating the new movies, so much so that he put together another costume as one of those white dreadlock guys from the second movie before it even came out. After he saw the sequel he said it wasn't very good and that was the last time I ever heard him mention the Matrix. I think the sequels downgraded it from a sci-fi event franchise to a decent movie, although the years of bullet time saturation for the next five years really didn't help. Remember, back when it came out people were comparing it to Star Wars and explaining how the franchise that follows would be amazing. The franchise died the summer of 2002 or whenever the first sequel and those middling computer games hit.
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Jan 21, 2015 00:59
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Benny the Snake posted:In the context of gun-heavy science-fiction action films with the hook of an esoteric, highly variable setting. In the Matrix there's only in the matrix and outside. You got your green filter and your high-contrast white light.
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Jan 21, 2015 03:46
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BigRed0427 posted:Do you guys think the Matrix was one of the first franchises hosed over by the studio trying to milk it completely? It had two squeals, The Animatrix, a MMO plus a video game that had exclusive live action cutscenes which filled in gaps between the squeals. Let me tell you about a little thing called the Star Wars Holiday Special. After, I'll give you milk and cookies and show you the empty box millions of kids got for Christmas.
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Jan 21, 2015 04:26
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Neddy Seagoon posted:The original premise was hooking them up for processing power, but the story goes that the producers were too dumb to understand this and wouldn't sign off on it. What would they need more clock speed for anyway? Like, what does an eternal machine empire do with itself after it takes over the world? Just keep killing Zion over and over because that's all there is to do?
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Jan 21, 2015 04:42
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Tatum Girlparts posted:Yea basically. I think Boyhood is a good movie, not Oscar good but for sure a good movie. That said Mike and Jay just never letting up in their absolute hate of it is really fuckin funny so rock on Mike and Jay. Why do they hate it so much? The original review boiled down to it being a neat gimmick that turned out boring. Did their fans jump down their throats about it or something? Or are they just infuriated that other people like it?
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Jan 28, 2015 05:15
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Jimmy Carter was a good man who tried his best. He tried to get America to grow up and in return they summoned Reagan and he began the end times.
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Jan 31, 2015 20:22
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Beefstew posted:3234, 423, AND These men are PAWNS.
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Jan 31, 2015 22:52
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Was Dick Tracy the last movie Warren Beatty was ever in?
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Jan 31, 2015 22:53
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Kunster posted:Gavin McInnes, the founder, writes for VDARE and is somewhat horrifying with transfolk. McInnes is a white supremacist but hasn't been with Vice since 2007. He is scum.
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Feb 1, 2015 19:14
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Max Wilco posted:Out of curiosity, are Patreon donations taxed? Apparently they are taxed quite heavily.
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Feb 9, 2015 03:30
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Zedd posted:That's lower then the lowest bracket in my country, so for me that sounds pretty decent. Our taxes seem cheap, but they really only pay for drone strikes abroad and the ongoing privatization of our school and prison systems. Libraries are next.
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Feb 11, 2015 01:03
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Tracula posted:That's what bothered me in a way too. Can we just do something loving new and not rehash old ideas or pseudo-remake classics? Part of me feels that when/if there's a third JJtrek film they're gonna somehow cram the Borg into it because of brand recognition. The problem with Hollywood is that it's purpose is to provide a return to investors. It's run by business school graduates trained for an economy founded on moving paper towels and deodorant, and they have no idea how to sell stories. So until the human sciences provide reliable modes of controlling our economic choices far beyond what's currently possible, the money men are going to go with brand awareness because it's the best way to get a return on investment. Try anything new that doesn't make bank and they tear you apart. There's a basement out there somewhere where the guy who agreed to make Speed Racer is being waterboarded nightly.
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Feb 15, 2015 19:46
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They were going to have Shatner in there somehow last I heard.
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Feb 16, 2015 01:42
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Hbomberguy posted:Part of the joke of STID is that the institution has always been super racist - Khan is a genetically-manipulated superhuman from the Federation's dark past, and the punchline is he's the whitest guy ever. It's riffing on how despite the unity of humanity and the federation is a happy smiley postracial wonderland we promise, it still has higher ups mostly consisting of old white dudes and is mostly preoccupied with how it's going to start a war with The Space Foreigners. The joke is that Hollywood is outrageously racist, and it's played on everyone who isn't white.
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Feb 17, 2015 19:09
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Hbomberguy posted:There aren't enough roles for poc, on that everyone agrees. I'll even go one step further and claim that revising Hollywood enough that more nonwhite people are cast in roles, or even a close to proportional split, wouldn't actually do enough to counter the actual problems that lead to institutions being like that in the first place. The problem is systemic. Much like how, after the end of feudalism, the class system remained - just now the poor could theoretically enter the class with the power. I bring this up because this is exactly the problem we are seeing here. No-one on the star trek team is racist as far as I know - Benedick Cumberbinch was just big at the box office. This primary motivation is a lovely self-perpetuating cycle that must be combated directly, not by simply trying to make all ethnic faces equally profitable or complaining on the internet about a movie you probably still gave people money to see. Jesus Christ it absolutely is racism to cast a white man because that is economically expedient, and to use economic expediency as an excuse to avoid thinking more carefully about your choice. Why was there no mexican who "just happened to be popular at the box office"? Nothing "just happens." Everyone involved in casting Star Trek is racist because they use their lack of race hatred to justify perpetuating a racist system as "just the way things are." That is racism and they are responsible for it. You can stop being a part of the problem by acknowledging the stupid things about your favorite movies instead of justifying them. You don't even have to stop liking them. Just say, "that's stupid" when the movie does a stupid thing.
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Feb 17, 2015 21:23
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Hbomberguy posted:You are saying the same thing that I am saying and recognising the same problem. Perhaps I should have put 'not formally racist'. I simply attribute the problem to the larger system that allows these problems to continue, rather than the actual views of any participant. The real failure of our current society is that its problems persist in spite of almost no-one wanting them to be there. It would almost be a relief if it turned out the STID crew were all klansmen or something. Well yeah, but you seem to be using it to ignore the big problem with race in the movie as not meaningful. Your argument that Khan is part of a sly critique of his movie-specific culture comes off as a little disingenuous if it's premised on the claim that American racism in 2015 is so complicated that we have to wait for some kind of systemic solution to address it. A big part of colorblind racism is that the lack of good roles for nonwhite actors becomes a self-fulfilling problem: casting more nonwhite actors helps to make nonwhite people more visible and seem as normal a presence as white actors. Systemic causes don't disqualify human action, and human action can be as simple as not explaining away a racist thing when you find one.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:05
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Sephiroth_IRA posted:Like, yeah even though I'm not a racist it would be pretty racist of me to move into a predominantly white upper class neighborhood so my kids can go to a good school. No, it would be racist of you to vote against a millage increase that would give more of your taxes to schools in poor neighborhoods if you justified your choice by saying that the people in those poor neighborhoods had just as much of a chance to be rich as you and so must just be hopeless causes who deserve their poverty.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:11
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Hbomberguy posted:I didn't say anything about Khan being a sly critique. I said Khan, the villain, is literally a product of the 'good guys', the federation, trying to create a 'more pure' version of itself, and he is played by the whitest man in the world, and offered a link between these two things: Much like how 'standards of beauty' will make editors photoshop a woman to be whiter, the Federation sat down and made a superman who looks like that. I wonder who came up with the designs for this artificial man? Could they perhaps be like all the old white men who run starfleet? Yeah, Khan is literally the creation of the Paramount accounting department though. No reading of the movie can ever adequately explain that because readings of the film only address the world inside of the film instead of the real world that made it. Reading racism in the fictional Federation is always ignoring the problem because American racism is what actually made the Federation racist. The entire problem with institutional racism is that you can be a basically good person and still make things worse by not paying attention and just always doing the easiest thing. It's silly to think that people are evil or bad for participating in a racist system, but it's perfectly reasonable to hold them accountable for doing an easy thing that's lazy and bad instead of doing something more thoughtful. Whether the movie turns out good or not--whatever metric you want to use for that--isn't even the issue when you're talking about issues of race in film, but for what it's worth I really don't think JJ Abrams' Khan is helping anyone think critically about racism. And I don't get that Khan and his people are a race at all in the American understanding of the term because they're exactly as white and beautiful as everyone else. It's not a critique of Captain Kirk to point out how he's pretty like Khan: it's a critique of the system that makes these lovely, thoughtless movies.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:55
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Plus on a plot level Khan predates the Federation and was I guess the result of eugenics? Which means that he's the result of a bunch of people in the movie universe's version of the 1970s deciding to select for certain traits when choosing a spouse. Does that say anything coherent about why he's as beautiful as Chris Pine, who's a regular American in 2200-whatever? I don't know, but Khan still seems like a megalomaniac who cares about keeping his people together because as their king he owns them and loves their devotion. Not exactly a great claim for the value of multiculturalism imo.
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Feb 17, 2015 23:04
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Hbomberguy posted:Apart from refusing to take part in a reading of the film's actual content, you are mostly agreeing with me. No amount of talking about Star Trek will change anything about anything. I objected to your reading because it's silly in its refusal to acknowledge historical reality and its tendency toward close-reading of a text to challenge the cultural conditions that produced it. No amount of analysis can make Star Trek into Darkness antiracist because racists buy and sell the movie. Your argument is exactly what Frederic Jameson complained about 30 years ago. But I'm not fixing anything by disagreeing with you and you're not fixing anything by reading Star Trek. I can imagine any system I want, but it will take more than the enjoyment I find alone in the dark to find it. Jesus, I don't want to be mean, but it's a loving awful film. It was made to be sold and now that it's been sold its been forgotten for an equally assembly-line Part Three. Resistance through pop-culture junk is impossible because pop culture is the problem.
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Feb 18, 2015 04:09
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Nostalgia Critic reviews are extremely surface-level and forced, though. RLM really shows him up as the amateur he is.
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Feb 19, 2015 21:33
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"I mean, human emotions? What, are we all supposed to be comfortable with breaks in our carefully planned routines so that we can scrutinize facial expressions to infer mental states? No thank you. I'll just go back to my train journal instead!" [crosses arms in front of chest and glares cartoonishly.]
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Feb 20, 2015 03:44
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BobbyK posted:Let me tell you what I think about that girl who shoes up on Best of the Worst sometimes based off the time I heard her for a few minutes on twitch. I don't know why you'd think this is weird. I think she's pretty funny. I like those two Canadian guys too. They should get that beard guy's spot if they ever move closer to the studio.
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Feb 20, 2015 07:18
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WickedHate posted:It's hard for me to accept ignorence as an excuse in 2015, especially for someone who's been an internet celebrity for years. I know I brought up the thing where he made a horrible comment about an actual hate crime victim before, but seriously, that was hosed up. He might as well have just posted a video that's just four minutes of him saying racial slurs over and over. What was this thing he said about a hate crime victim?
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Feb 21, 2015 18:10
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Video games can't be art because they are vehicles for the wish fulfillment of the player. It's like if every movie were Indiana Jones or Star Wars. The medium is inherently juvenile which is why all of its most vocal defenders or advocates are giant weeping babies who throw tantrums every five minutes.
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Feb 22, 2015 07:00
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Tetris isn't a video game. It's the only video game.
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Feb 22, 2015 19:15
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INH5 posted:FEAR 2. Though I haven't played the game myself, so I don't know how it actually handles it. Does this mean that Jehovah exists in Lord of the Rings World? That seems even worse, theologically speaking, than just making it a heathen Viking world.
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Feb 23, 2015 00:00
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Hbomberguy posted:You've got very interesting ideas about what constitutes 'art': Fine, Immanuel Kant: art is everything that doesn't have a purpose. It includes poems and decorative jars and the ceramic cow your mom bought at the craft fair and Jackson Pollak and Tetris. Is that what you want? Is it? But if you're talking about art as narrative that engages human possibility, narrative video games are always going to give you way less of that because video games with narratives usually have you driving somebody around as a prosthesis to interact with the fictional world, which makes them about things other than engaging a narrative of fully-realized characters like a novel or whatever. It's like how on Star Trek they think the future of narrative is pretending to be Sherlock Holmes or whatever, but really the only thing it can do is help teach the autistic robot about social cues because when you act out a story you're being yourself from inside and everything is constructed around you. That's boring as poo poo from a narrative point of view, which I guess is ok because most video games seem like they're mostly about fun or challenging mechanics that the story serves up. There's nothing about the form that might not allow for something else, but somebody will have to make a choice between video games being challenging mechanics and narrative. Also most of the people who make video games seem like big reactionary babies deeply in love with escapist fantasy, which is why they apparently argue so much about whether video games are art or not.
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Feb 23, 2015 00:47
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boom boom boom posted:I was just wondering. No harm in wondering. Pizza roooooollllllllsssssss sent from this webspace.
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Feb 23, 2015 00:50
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Like a lot of gamers and developers, you're falling into the trap of separating game mechanics from narrative. Even the simplest video games have narrative tendencies. Gameplay mechanics are the dominant narrative element of video games. LIke how GTA games pretend to be crime epics when then their dominant mode is actually anarchic violence. Yeah, I don't know, I may have committed myself to an untenable position, but that still seems like something you're doing and not a narrative you're reading. Like, I could say the same thing about tic tac toe or that cup-and-ball thing or any other children's toy. Just because there are ways of reading the dynamic of a child's interaction with a toy, that doesn't make the toy narrative. There's a phenomenological relationship between me and a narrative in a novel, too, and sociological/economic relationship between me and the book as a commodity, but those are distinct from the narrative inside the book. Am I saying that narrative is something I associate with other forms? Yes. Am I saying that just because I think video games are boring and really unsatisfying in narrative terms? Maybe.
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Feb 23, 2015 03:53
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Spiritus Nox posted:Yeah, Gladney, this is really all you're saying. Like, a two year old playing with a simple toy totally does have a narrative. I mean, sure, it's probably not going to teach that kid some earthshaking truth about identity or capitalism or something, but there's still a simple story going down in that interaction between a little kid and a simple system. Art's a tricky thing to define, but saying that just because a thing is juvenile it isn't art isn't a terribly meaningful or useful assertion - and saying that a medium as a whole is not art because it includes a lot of simple or juvenile works is even less so. If you want to think something is badly made or has a bad message that's fine, but this hemming and hawwing about what is or isn't art period just isn't really useful. Art is purposiveness without purpose, like I said earlier. Narrative art, though, is not the same thing as making a narrative about a child playing with a toy. Like, you can read my interaction with an episode of television or a novel or whatever and make a narrative about my interaction with the text, but the text is itself also a narrative. The narrative is a text to read, and also an object to narrativize in whatever terms we like: anthropological, economic, historical, biographical whatever. A busy box or an Optimus Prime doll is a thing in the world that a child manipulates, and the act of manipulation can be read in a number of ways: biographical, developmental, cultural, economic, whatever. But Optimus Prime is an object that the child engages. I don't see how Tetris is any different from Optimus Prime in that dynamic: any narrative that follows from Tetris is the narrative of my manipulation of Tetris. If the narrative is always about my engagement with the game, that seems very different from the kind of narrative we typically assume when we talk about narrative. Like, stories are also things out there in the world but they are also stories about the world, but I don't get how a video game is a story and not just a thing out there in the world.
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Feb 23, 2015 05:55
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Arcsquad12 posted:D&D with Porn Stars, collaborators with the Escapist to make "I hit it with my Axe", have declared they will never work with the company again after they hired transphobic douchebag Brandon Morse. Why is BOB from Twin Peaks playing with them in the last photo?
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Feb 24, 2015 03:50
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The problem with being funny is that most people think that they are. Also, do people really look at who they're quoting or posting to? The only people I notice are SMG if it's about Lacan and Dickeye because he used to go out to GBS to be reasonable like a hero and I learned about him that way. It makes things much easier to just post post post and treat the internet like the perfect utopia of shifting identities that the early 90s expected. gently caress web 2.0
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Feb 24, 2015 20:36
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Foma posted:Not sure if this fits with the theme of the thread, but this essay struck me as correct and changed the lens I see the world through a little bit. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ Why are Margaret Thatcher and Osama Bin Laden opposites? The Vosgian Beast posted:No this wretched bit of Golden Mean Fallacy is not internet criticism. It's good to know that if you say I ate twelve babies and I say I ate none, the most reasonable response is that I must have eaten six.
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Feb 25, 2015 03:49
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Honestly, the whole notion of a food chain as a body politic is really confused however you do it.
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Feb 26, 2015 15:39
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You can see what happened on her kickstarter. She asked for a pretty modest amount of money to do something like 5 videos, and after 4chan first went after her and the story was picked up, the kickstarter got something like 100 times as much money as she requested, so she expanded the series to use up all the money--she hired an intern, planned more videos, made them longer, and maybe got better equipment. As far as I know, she hasn't gotten or asked for more money since the kickstarter ended and has sunk all that money back into her video series, for which she has released financial records. Do kickstarters have to document how they spend the money, or have there been scams where people pocket some of it?
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Feb 28, 2015 03:25
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That seems like something that will eventually destroy kickstarter. I'm shocked there haven't been more high-profile frauds. I actually can't think of a single one.
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Feb 28, 2015 03:33
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