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Ok, I'll do it. I was Peaseblossom in Midsummer Night's Dream when I was nine and Gaston's awful goblin from Beauty and the Beast when I was 16 so I've got the chops.
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Jul 31, 2019 19:00
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site posted:the only trans woman in the marvel comic universe is Sera, the wife of Angela, so she would be the obvious choice. unless this is someone brand new There's also, uh, Tong the moloid child, an adorable character from the Fraction/Allred FF. And, a quick google search unfortunately turns, up, two rapists who "turned trans" after being castrated by the Vulture, thanks a million Ron loving Zimmerman.
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Jul 31, 2019 20:49
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The Question IRL posted:Bear in mind, Marvel could decide that a non-trans character will be trans in their film. There's that bit of writing about Jean Grey's arc as a trans narrative that floats around, but I personally think the idea of a trans reboot of Emma Frost would work really well. I certainly admire the character and her core modern conceit-- a stylized and highly refined model of femininity, with the twinned powers of being able to and having to "read" people and the impervious diamond shell-- a lot more, and find it a lot more fascinating, as an out trans woman reader than I did before.
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Aug 1, 2019 16:57
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Wasn't there some alternate reality or possible future storyline where she used her telepathy to look permanently late-20s while her body aged normally?
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Aug 1, 2019 17:37
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Beachcomber posted:Do you really want a "transgender 'woman' tricked cyclops into loving him*" meme floating around? If hypothetically I were to plot this out I don't see why there'd have to be any suggestion of her tricking him. Cyclops can love an out trans woman, and I don't see why the idea of using her powers to look more youthful or whatever is any more deceptive than a real person putting on make-up or a push-up bra or product in their hair or any number of completely quotidian things. Case in point, if I put on a little bit of foundation and concealer and put on a skirt, I can go out and run errands and be in the office and most strangers will see me and perceive a woman. However, even with the benefit of a year of hormones, if I decide to go three days without shaving, cut my hair short, wear a baggy flannel shirt and jeans, slouch a bit, adopt a slightly different gait, etc., they might just as easily see me as a man. I'm not trying to trick anyone by "dressing up" like a woman-- I'm just making lots of little day-to-day decisions to communicate to the world the message I want to communicate vis a vis my identity. Everyone does this-- if they didn't, deodorant companies would go out of business. I like how the Witcher franchise deals with this, if I'm remembering right-- many of the witches in it look magically young and in some cases more beautiful than they initially did, but it's treated as just a fact of life, one sort of glow-up among many. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Aug 1, 2019 |
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Aug 1, 2019 17:59
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eke out posted:on the other hand, it's a result of what's implied to be painful magical plastic surgery that they only go through because their particular culture demands women mages look a certain way (and men don't have to do the same, nor do women in other societies with different traditions surrounding magic). for me, at least, it seemed like more of a metaphor for unfair gender standards and the need to perform femininity in a particular way that society enforces Oh for sure, and I admit I was being a little glib about it. I think the Witcher stuff, for whatever flaws it has, is good at really thinking through the cultural politics of its setting..
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Aug 1, 2019 18:26
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Lurdiak posted:I think we're well past the age of metaphors for the lgbt experience in superhero media being enough, we need actual representation. I don't want to read the way Wolverine was treated by his family because of his parentage as a metaphor for being a gay teen in the early 1900s, I want Wolverine to make out with Hercules. I agree? Maybe I was being too circumspect in my phrasing but I wasn't trying to say "Emma Frost resembles a type of queer experience," but "whenever they next re-do or revamp Emma Frost she should be queer."
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Aug 1, 2019 21:06
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ImpAtom posted:I seem to recall Jay from Xplain the X-men making a very similar argument abouT why Emma would be a good choice. I should jump back on that podcast, a few years ago when I was studying for comps I'd listen to a couple episodes of back catalogue a night and really dug it, but just dropped off for whatever reason. This is like the third conversation I've seen it pop up in in two weeks though, and each time I've been like, mm, sounds like Jay is correct again.
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Aug 1, 2019 22:41
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Even though Morrison's run ended with more of a whimper than a bang, I think (except for the parts where he actually appears) he does a really fascinating thing with Magneto. In death he becomes mythical-- his ideas are allowed to disseminate without the untidy indignities of the living, fallible person who may fail in his schemes, or get turned into a baby, or get his rear end kicked by the Avengers. He remains-- perhaps digested imperfectly or with, as in the case of Quentin Quire, profound bias-- a creature of distilled utopian drive, the pure product, having, at last, purged himself of the hang-ups and hesitations that, maybe, held him back in life. He has a gravity and an urgency as a face on a t-shirt that he hadn't commanded in decades of lackluster post-Claremont stories, and I think that's something we might learn from here. I think to dehisce Magneto from the context of the Holocaust is a mistake. There have been way too many genocides and ethnic purges in the decades since then, sure, but as BrianWilly notes, Magneto's Judaism is, at this point, a tremendously significant and visible part of his identity in the public imagination, and isn't a part of his character that can be gracefully removed or replaced. I also think just making him mad old is a clumsy solution. I mean, sure, why not, but it's an extra moving piece in a conceptual apparatus that already has enough moving pieces. My unrealistic idea, then, is why not just have mutants emerge on the scene post-Magneto, post-Xavier? Spider-Man movies have only gotten better, trimmer, and more fluid since realizing that everyone in the theater has heard of Uncle Ben and there's no reason to rehearse the same little bit of stage-setting every time. I think enough people will be entering the theatre to sit down for an X-Men movie familiar enough with where the broad lines are drawn. So just start without them. Have characters who have read them, have maybe known them, and have passionate opinions about them-- I think that would be enough. I think my favorite portions of Claremont's run happen well after all the classic bits that people adapt into other things-- stuff like the Outback period or the post-Seige Perilous mutant diaspora. Stories where he trusts the readers enough to know the formula well enough that when he dispenses with it they'll still follow along with him-- that a plot without Magneto or Xavier physically present can still center around the ideological disputes they represent.
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Aug 8, 2019 06:40
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Ice Man is one of Marvel's most visible queer characters, if they were doing an origin story about the X-Men, especially the original five, and swapped him out that would be an extraordinarily bad look. I'm not saying they can't make other characters queer for the sake of the movies-- they absolutely should make every mutant gay except Cyclops-- but conspicuously shelving Bobby is a bad idea.
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Aug 12, 2019 17:25
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Rhyno posted:Maybe at the start? They've gotten pretty far away from that. I don't know, a lot of bits from the MCU Spider-Man have more in common with early Miles Morales than early Peter Parker. The younger May, Ned/Ganke, the shift from a sort of generic public highschool setting, etc..
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Aug 12, 2019 20:00
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The narrative contrivances that were settled on to get Iceman out were deeply dumb but now that it happened I'm happy that an X-Men character with a not insubstantial profile in popular consciousness is gay. Angela and Sera and Koi Boy and Northstar are great but my in-laws and students and who knows, probably my dentist and therapist have heard of Iceman, and that kind of cultural penetration is valuable.
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Aug 13, 2019 00:26
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site posted:This post is makes me want to literally reach through the internet and kill you, but im gonna try to be nice about it. Does Bobby identify as gay He does, yeah. Sina Grace's solo run was not my favorite thing on earth but it generally told decently down-to-earth, believable stories about a guy who definitely identifies as gay coming to terms with being out for the first time as an adult. The initial Bendis story about him coming out was dumb but he's been gay since then in stories of a much higher caliber so I'm not sure what people are fretting about. He's a gay man, full stop, and the character is better and richer for it. If you really want a bisexual male character, and who doesn't, Wolverine and Hercules are right there doing their beautiful thing.
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Aug 13, 2019 04:26
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Rudolph Herzog wrote a book a couple years ago about humor and satire in Nazi Germany. The standard line for decades of historiography was that satire was a dangerous, subtle weapon in an authoritarian regime-- telling the wrong joke at the wrong place could get you killed. Satire was a form of resistance and a courageous one. Herzog's thesis is different and bleaker and I think more accurate. Jokes against the regime could get you in trouble, sure, but most people ostensibly imprisoned or executed for satirical writing or performance were in fact persecuted largely for other things. Comedy movies continued to be made, even "subversive" ones. Newspapers and book gently-- gently-- poked fun at nazi stuffiness and stiffness. People chuckled to each other knowingly about the evil going on around them, and, their consciences sated, went home and did nothing. In fact, Herzog argues, it made those evils easier to swallow by making them look ridiculous and petty. A problem for another day, a cozy banality. My point is that evidence suggests that time and time again satire is a useful therapeutic tool and an ok way to pass the time but it's not a lever for social change. It's not an unqualified public good. The 19th century was saturated with satirical writing-- about abolition, suffrage, temperance, and a million other things-- but satire didn't get us abolition or suffrage. I'm tired of seeing "but it's satire" trotted out to elevate or excuse crummy or regressive art. I'm sure this Joker movie is finely and precisely focus-group tuned to hit all the winking satirical notes, but that doesn't make it interesting or appealing to me. I'm not saying somebody is going to watch it and think "shooting someone as a clown sounds rad, I'll do it," which I think is the somewhat reductive point some critics are gesturing towards and which some fans are hyperbolically taking from them, but like-- it is saying something about gender and entitlement and probably race in 2019, and it is pitching the sympatheticness of its character at a ~~**certain demographic**~~ and I don't think it's moralizing or school-marming to say "this looks like it will probably suck poo poo." I teach a lot of young straight white men and a lot of them are hurting. They don't have good apparatuses for dealing with or finding support for depression, anxiety, a whole host of other things. I don't want to say "the depression of young white guys is boring" because I'd feel monstrous, but I think as the popular camera's favorite thing to linger on with sickly fixation-- especially in this tediously defeatist "society did this, no choice, sorry" way-- it's time for something else. Fetishizing their alienation isn't going to help them, and force-feeding them a media diet of darkly romantic/bathetic pictures of themselves isn't going to help them either. I don't know. Let's have a movie about Toni Ho. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Sep 2, 2019 |
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Sep 2, 2019 17:45
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Vince MechMahon posted:No art needs to consider its audience. This is not a requirement of any art. It is not the point of art. What you’re thinking of is commercialism. Or maybe advertising. Those both need to consider their audiences. Art, including some lowly comic book movie, can be as subtle and complex as it’s creators want, regardless of people not getting it. Arts job is not to cater to the lowest common denominator. I'm a literature professor and this is complete nonsense. All art "considers its audience," that's what art is, an intentional object designed to be the object of some audience's regard. One way or the other it hails the viewer or the reader or the audience to say "hey, I'm here on purpose, pay attention to/enjoy/think about me." It doesn't just wind up in a theater/bookstore/gallery by mysterious happenstance. This is to say nothing of the absolutely crucial point that art is made by people who have biological person needs and consumed or interfaced with or regarded by an audience also made up, one presumes, of people. When I get something published it's because I want to get paid, I want readers to think highly of me, I want to communicate a point, etc.. By the same token, when I as an editor am deciding which work by other people deserve to be put forward to some minor public, I think about a number of things-- how good is this piece according to my own tastes and inclinations? Is it coherent? Is it polemical or didactic in a fashion not in accordance with my beliefs or the beliefs of whatever organ I'm editing for-- ie. I wouldn't publish a neo-nazi poem in a leftist literary magazine. I'm functioning as an intermediary between the text and the reader just as the text is in a way an intermediary between the reader and the author. At every step in the chain-- an author sitting down to write, an editor reading and evaluating a piece, and a reader encountering it at last-- the primary concern is expression, which is a trite word, but an important one, because you don't put that message in the bottle unless you want someone to find it, even if only unconsciously. A movie's not any different-- especially a major studio blockbuster movie. The Joker movie didn't manifest like ectoplasm into theaters out of nowhere. It got pitched to executives, it went through however many drafts, it was presumably focus grouped and edited and privy to endless discussions about every fine technical point. Again, at each point, the unspoken end goal of these decisions was the audience and how to get this movie, this text, to elicit the reactions its creators desire for it to elicit. It's a loving movie about the Joker, it's not worth rewriting the entire concept of signification and sign in order to write it a free pass.
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Sep 3, 2019 10:16
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Vince MechMahon posted:I haven't. And the thing that started this argument in particular was a positive review of the movie saying it was complex and subtle, and some dumb rear end saying that because there are people who don't understand complexity and subtlety that it was DANGEROUS. I don't think anyone is saying that it should be banned or censored, so much as "this looks and sounds tedious and stupid in the same way a million other drably 'serious' movies about white guys with anger issues are tedious and stupid." Irresponsible art isn't criminal and nobody is saying it is. To wit, afaik BSS consensus on Heroes in Crisis is that it was boring, incoherent, poorly paced, and, on top of that, told a muddled and arguably ethically icky didactic fable about mental health that, while it certainly wasn't encouraging violence or discouraging troubled people from seeking treatment, used ugly and inaccurate ideas about treatment in a fashion that felt ill-considered. Does this make sense? It's not "Heroes in Crisis causes bad behavior, so it should be pulped." It's "one of Heroes in Crisis' many problems is a troubling and unconvincing ethical position." This is how critique operates, by parsing out how a given piece of art slots into the world the individual critic actually lives in. It isn't and couldn't be done in a vacuum. Remember how silly the Gamergate "objective reviews" people were? So, like, perhaps in a world where alienated young white guys without a safety net didn't routinely kill people it would be possible to approach a movie like this without any degree of concern or alarm. And perhaps in a world that isn't in the middle of a decades-long and seemingly endless media saturation of very serious movies and shows about very serious and sad men pushed to their limits, accompanied by very serious and sad covers of pop songs, it would be harder to write this movie off based on it's embarrassingly terrible trailer. But we don't live in those worlds, and so critics and audience members have to make their decisions about this and every other text they encounter on the world we do live in. As for your Rotten Tomatoes bit, the 2004 Crash has a 74% fresh rating from critics and an 88% fresh rating from audiences. It won an Oscar for Best Picture. It was made with nothing but lofty and well-meaning intentions. But it still sucks, and it largely sucks because of how stupidly wrong-headed its politics are, and how shabbily they're conveyed. It seems strange that given the rest of your argument you find the snap judgements of critics to carry so much weight. Edit: Again, there's a spectrum of critical and practicable responses, and that you're unwilling to grasp this is baffling to me. Many people walked into The Dark Knight Strikes Again or V For Vendetta or 300 and left with bad ideas and dangerous notions, despite those being, to greater or lesser degrees, good-to-ok movies. Stuff like American Sniper or God's Not Dead explicitly set out to promote value systems and beliefs I consider dangerous and corrosive but again, is anyone trying to stifle these movies other than taking the absolutely normal prerogative to not buy them or screen them or whatever? Whereas, like, most film classes and film channels have tacitly agreed to quietly, for the most part, phase The Birth of a Nation out of curriculums, Disney has kept Song of the South under embarrassed lock and key for decades, and nobody is sitting around streaming Leni Reifenstahl documentaries for fun because they've so successfully and rightfully stigmatized and are impossible to watch without being drenched in their context as nazi agitprop. Saying that I think the Joker movie looks lovely and boring and irresponsible isn't saying I want every copy of it burnt and thrown into the ocean for god's sake. I'm sorry some of us don't want to watch some miserable mope slouching around hurting people for two hours. We've al already seen that one. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Sep 3, 2019 |
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Sep 3, 2019 16:58
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Vince MechMahon posted:Name another. What do you do with it if it's "irresponsible" if not ban or censor it? Are you serious? What do you think the work of criticism is?
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Sep 3, 2019 17:37
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Vince MechMahon posted:Do you have anything to add other the pearl clutching about how a movie is going to make people kill and "think of the children!!!" nonsense? Yes! In fact we have a lot of posts about it, you should check them out!
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Sep 3, 2019 17:47
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I'm sorry we're not being nice enough to your favorite clown, but so much of your posting presence on here is getting extremely furious at people who disagree with you about art. If you're not seeing a therapist you should consider it, and I'm being totally serious here, because you're acting legitimately alarming and if this was a real life conversation I'd be backing slowly to the nearest exit.
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Sep 3, 2019 18:07
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Sgt. Politeness posted:You know if they had just given the role to LaKeith Stanfield half the arguments against it would have been avoided. Sure, because I don't think the argument is "don't make movies about the Joker," it's that this particular narrative, about a white man specifically being pushed over the edge, is boring. A sad, minor key version of a popular tune played over slow-motion meandering is boring. There are lots of ways to spice up the character, and some of them I'd even probably be interested in watching a movie about. I think a black Joker would be one of those, because then the character's fundamental rejection of normalized relations to power looks a lot different. That character loudly saying no in the way that the Joker character typically would definitely signify something other than "Bartleby but fucken twisted" as too many recent Joker takes have done. On a similar note, and I won't spoil much, but the recent Mariko Tamaki OGN Breaking Glass has a really great take on the Joker, again precisely because she hones in on the elements of the character that have become tired or rote and just gets rid of them. So he's familiar enough to be legible, but novel enough to be exciting, and one really basic change in his backstory lets him play a really fresh role in the story.
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Sep 5, 2019 15:58
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site posted:someone get ahold of margot robbie and tell her if shes gonna have ivy in the third harley movie, she should have her be non-white like tamaki did in the new breaking glass ogn. real smart change for the character imo Yeah there are a lot of sharp decisions in the OGN. I think it's a really great take on the Joker too, and one which keeps enough of the basic structure of the Harley/Joker dynamic to be recognizable, while dropping a lot of the ugly chaff. In particular, in relation to the upcoming movie Joker, I think the character works much better as a figure of privileged boredom and anomie than as an underdog, it feels like a much more timely and honest approach to how violence works in 2019.
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Sep 11, 2019 03:01
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The movie is about her debunking the Cottingley Fairies once and for... and this time, it's personal.
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Sep 18, 2019 22:25
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Everybody, he stalked a woman for months, moved to Connecticut to creep after her when she went to college, and slid incredibly ghoulish poems and letters under her door, I can't believe I have to say this but John Hinckley was not cool and he was not shooting at Reagan for woke or even coherent reasons. He'd intended to shoot Carter but dilly dallied too long.
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Sep 21, 2019 23:51
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Big Mean Jerk posted:Basically, Rebel Legion is the only morally correct SW cosplay group I'm sure someone out there right now is smiling cheerfully in their black turtleneck and polishing their big plastic alien head, getting ready for a wholesome evening of jizz wailing.
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Sep 22, 2019 22:43
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I don't think many people (in this thread) are literally saying "The Joker movie is bad because it will make people violently imitate the Joker." In many cases being ethically bankrupt can make a movie bad on its own. Like, how come people don't sit down with a bowl of popcorn and watch Birth of a Nation anymore? It's not because they're worried it will brainwash them into joining the KKK. It's because it isn't fun to watch something morally repugnant. I don't think, "Oh, Manhattan is well-made but I just don't want to risk being turned into a pedophile." No, I just don't want to watch a movie about an adult sentimentally loving a child, and even if I don't think it would, like, flip some evil switch in me, I still don't want the icky residue of sitting through it on my soul for however many days. There are so many others, even little elements that profoundly damage otherwise inoffensive or even good movies! The yellow-face in Breakfast at Tiffany's, the white-savior stuff in Avatar, dozens of movies with racist and misogynist topoi like the "magical negro" or "manic pixie dream girl" that just became easy shorthand for decades because thinking clearly and honestly about race and gender is more difficult than just picking a lazy stereotype off the rack. None of these movies had the legitimate miasma of moral panic that the Joker movie does, and I think some of the takes that really seem convinced that this dumb-looking film will inspire real-world violent are coming from kind of a Puritan-prurient place, a kind of lusty frenzy for moral grandstanding. But I do think it looks completely boring, like its ideas about marginalization and violence come from the most banal and mopey places possible. I think it looks like bad art. I don't think people are silly putty idiots who let the last thing they watch indelibly imprint on them and command them to do whatever. I also don't think art is a neutral presence in the world, and I think any encounter with art, good or bad, leaves some trace on the viewer-- you know, part of why representation and diversity is good in casting, and padding scripts with homophobic and sexist jokes is bad. Art's a primary vector for how people encounter the world, and a valuable one in which they get to see conflict and ambiguity modeled for them. So I do absolutely think art has some sort of ethical dimension, albeit a complicated and not at all unambiguous one-- my favorite poet spent her life insisting WWI and WWII were worth it because the trauma she incurred during them helped her understand telepathy better, which is a monstrous position, but she also writes beautiful, true things, and posits fascinating and complex new ways of imagining sexuality, so you know, very often you can't just dump things in the Good Bin or the Bad Bin. That's why criticism manifests itself in essays and not bar graphs. That being said-- nothing about this Joker movie looks interesting to me. It looks like an undergrad final project borrowing the most superficial schticks from Martin Scorcese and using it as a vehicle for adolescent petulance. I guess I'll wait and see but I think it's totally fair for people to look at what we know about this film and say "this looks like garbage." Anyway, as for the nazi punching thing-- I don't know, I've been punched by nazis and sort-of punched a nazi (elbowed their nose pretty hard) and I think both sort of sucked. This was at a counterprotest that got feisty and tbh I'm pretty cowardly and probably would not have gone if I'd known it would have gotten violent. I saw blood pouring out of the guy's nose and felt pretty nauseous, and soon I was sitting in a little coffee shop feeling really weird and too much adrenaline, like I was going to have a very melancholy heart-attack. I'm glad I punched and I'm even sort of glad I got punched-- I was acting on reflex and adrenaline at the time but I also think I had an ethical duty to fight back in that situation. But again, I don't know. Psychologically and emotionally I don't think it feels good to do violence. It's insane but I found myself worrying about the guy, wondering if he had to go to the hospital, if he could pay his bills, which is the most chickenshit soft-lib response to have, but that's where my head was at. A few years later-- just a little while ago actually-- I got jumped by a bunch of teens who didn't like seeing a trans-woman around and got socked pretty hard in the mouth. It was fine for a few months until I bit down on a burrito and one of my teeth just crumbled apart and the dentist confirmed, yeah, I had some bad physical trauma on some of the teeth there. I sat there looking at the bill-- thousands of dollars over months and months-- and wondered how the teens would feel if I appeared and was like, you don't remember me but I let you feel macho for a few minutes in the summer. Anyway I don't get to go on vacation this year, and I get to live on ramen and yogurt for a while, so I hope it did something good for your senses of masculinity. I don't think they'd actually feel good. Again, I think meeting fascist violence with violence is necessary and ethically fine, but I don't know, I wouldn't ever crow about it. In a weird way it sucks to now know for a fact "I can hurt another human being, I can damage their body with my body."
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Sep 27, 2019 15:01
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site posted:Hoots isn't wrong The legal historian James Q. Whitman has a pretty chilling book about this: Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law
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Sep 27, 2019 15:38
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Fangz posted:This Joker conversation is just going around in circles here. In the interest of good faith, here's a question: Centuries of religiously-based literature are functionally about encouraging or goading the audience into moral edification. For large swathes of Western literary and artistic history in fact I'd say that to greater or lesser degrees people understand the primary purpose of art to be that kind of moral mirror, and that's fundamentally a lesson they got from their somewhat fragmentary reception of the Greeks--and, you know, Longinus, Plotinus, etc.-- and that question of, like, "ok, we have this very specialized species of lying and dissimulating we call art and the array of affective responses it can generate, how can we justify this horrific conceptual weapon" and coming to the idea of using the abstract form of representation as a way of modeling states and situations for the audience to either replicate in their lives or to provide them with a rarefied blueprint to absorb. Hence even profoundly Christian texts-- the Roman de la Rose or Pilgrim's Progress or The Somonyng of Everyman are predicated on what's fundamentally a pedagogical premise: the text as a moral handbook, with the allegorical structure as a kind of mnemonic for the just and virtuous navigation of a universe far more complex than the flattened, didactic world of the allegorical form. The "correct" reading of Bunyan, as Bunyan would have it, essentially would come down to identifying what characters stand for what and ascertaining the "right" ethical imperatives as a result. If a reader in Bunyan's lifetime read his book and said "hmm, yes" and murdered his wife, Bunyan would not be happy! And moreover, that would probably be taken as either evidence of the murderer being mad, or as evidence of Bunyan's failure (extremely failure in this fictional scenario) to clearly and concisely do his job as a writer of moral texts, that is to say, as a writer of literature. A lot of this holds true even well after "canonical" writers ceased seeing themselves as first and foremost crafters of moral mirrors. Throughout the 19th century novelists in particular, when they weren't adopting realism as an avenue for explicit ethical and political agitprop (Harriet Beecher Stowe certainly thought opposing slavery was morally good, and certainly wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin with the goal of persuading an audience of the same, and dozens and dozens of penny-press serials took it upon themselves to boost or demonize the political bogeymen and lions of the moment), for sure saw the novel as a mode of "moral philosophy by other means," a laboratory for, again, modeling ethical conundrums, placing characters of different moral beliefs and degrees of conviction within those conundrums, and showing their readers what happens next. Even in the wake of modernism and its attendant vanguard movements which ostensibly set out to dethrone the moral yardstick as the arbiter of artistic merit (that's super reductive), we see this, in, if anything, an even cruder and more direct form-- go to your nearest bookstore and open up a bunch of contemporary poetry and literary fiction and check out the blurbs. Note how often reviewers cite the "humaneness" or "empathy" of authors-- in other words, their skill and faculty in promoting and cultivating humanistic values of connectivity in their readers. I mostly teach contemporary stuff, and I publish a fair bit and have many author friends and, like, yes, even if I am uneasy putting it in such blunt terms, I do try to teach things that I think will make my students better people. It's one of many reasons why I like to teach texts by PoC and queer people and refugees and prisoners and this and that, because for all that I occasionally scoff at the rhetoric of empathy as a critical short-hand, I do think representation and empathy are legitimately useful instruments for making people less insular and hard-hearted and morally small. And, you know, I would feel terrible if I found out someone used something I wrote as a justification for killing someone, just as I feel nice when I hear from someone that something I wrote moved them or that one of their students said something, again, "humane/empathetic" about it. It's considered mawkish but deep down, sure, I want to think that people read my work and become in some marginal way better, and I think most artists if pressed would admit to the same. As an example, when I write about an author with a complex and ambiguous body of work-- let's say Hilda Doolittle-- I am forced, in many cases, to confront elements of her beliefs that are reflected in her poetry and prose, which includes things that look very foolish or very bad in 2019, or things which seem prescient or courageous. I don't write about these elements as moral problems per se, and I'm of course careful to historicize her beliefs in their proper contexts because I don't want to get yelled at by editors or committee members. But all the same-- when she describes the inhabitants of urban cities as grubs and ants I'm morally repulsed and on a gut level I consider her art a failure, and when she describes the love between two women in a time when lesbian relationships and especially lesbian philosophy were far less permissible and legible as the content of literary writing, I find myself opening up to her, and finding her art to be successful. Is this stupid? Sure, a bit. Does everyone do this, even if their critical models are predicated precisely on doing the opposite? Yeah, I think so. Because H.D. for better or worse was a person with convictions and aversions of a moral dimension, and so am I, and the text is only an imperfect conduit between us. Of course I want to leave the text a better person than I was when I entered it, and of course part of my visceral and reflexive aesthetic and critical judgement proceeds from those lines.
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Sep 29, 2019 04:02
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I've seen a lot more of his filmography than I expected, largely because in college I'd just tag along to movies without asking a lot of questions. I'd say Borat is probably pretty good at doing what it was trying to do even if I profoundly disliked it, and A Star is Born is actually pretty competently put together even if it doesn't rise much higher than "competent." Phillips didn't actually direct either of those-- the stuff that he did direct is, as far as I'm familiar with it, really rote dumb schlock. I guess if one is a fan of that kind of comedy there are probably hierarchies within it, good directors, bad directors, but I don't know, I never saw the appeal. It just always feels like a lot of leering, like the camera invites me to be a not very good person.
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Oct 4, 2019 18:00
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Again I don't know why people are conflating "this movie looks bad/boring/politically and ethically gross" with "this movie should be banned." You're citing NWA and Midnight Cowboy but like, The Birth of a Nation has gone from canonical to buried because nobody in 2019 wants to watch KKK agitprop. Ditto Manhattan-- even if we didn't know a thing about Woody Allen's biography it's still a movie about a lovable underdog and his endearing attempts to gently caress a child. You can't roll into a Barnes & Noble and buy The Turner Diaries because the audience for novels has largely decided, rightfully, that The Turner Diaries are repulsive. When Silence of the Lambs, an exquisitely technically well-made movie, came out, it was picketed by LGBTQ+ groups for what are now very obviously appalling and offensive representations of queerness-- and watching it in 2019 is very uncomfortable indeed, and quite arguably not worth it! And you know what--? I think the picketers were on the right side of history, because Buffalo Bill did inform cultural receptions of trans women for decades. Again, none of these involve the movies in question being banned-- obviously one can easily go find and watch The Birth of a Nation or any number of ghoulishly racist comedies and dramas from the early days of cinema-- but rather just audiences exercising their critical faculties to draw attention to ethically dubious elements of texts being distributed on a mass scale. This thread keeps getting close to saying that any critique or response to art with a moral valence is flawed or reactionary, which is loving absurd. To take an example close to my heart, there are hundreds if not thousands of offensive and reductive caricatures of queerness in mass media and to suggest that my proper reaction should be to just sit down politely and "vote with my wallet" is ridiculous. It's telling marginalized people to give up. Racist topoi in media are reduced by the vociferous activism of POC audiences and creators, sexist topoi are combated by elevating and amplifying the critical voices of women, and homophobic and transphobic content is countered by queer art and by queer audiences and ally putting their feet down and saying "gently caress this." And like, obviously I presume the Joker isn't explicitly sexist or homophobic, although from reviews it seems like it has some pretty idiotic ideas about race, but these things exist on a spectrum, and I think noting that it seems like a dull and vacuous exercise in a kind of angst already overdetermined and well-rehearsed in mainstream narratives doesn't exist on the same level as storming into a PTA meeting or whatever with a bull-horn in one hand and a Bible in the other. It seems boring-- it seems like its ideas about violence, and power, and isolation are just boring, and icky, like the little vaguely dusty black licorices from your grandma's candy dish. Distaste isn't censorship, and neither is critique.
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Oct 5, 2019 18:57
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Nodosaur posted:And yet, it's yet another movie where the natural conclusion of those things is violent murder. In this day and era, we don't need yet another story about how the endpoint of mistreating the mentally ill is them becoming the perpetrators of mass violence. Considering what is tacitly implied to be the final fate of Zazie Beetz's character, it's not as if Arthur's victims are all the 1 %. It's another monster movie where the mentally ill man is the creature to fear. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is part of what bothers me about it, but I hadn't really zeroed in on it. A movie leveling a good-faith anticapitalist critique shouldn't need to mitigate and hedge its bets about violence by having it perpetrated by a caricature of mental illness. And it's not like he bones up on his Mao and organizes for the first hour and a half-- the movie doesn't have that coherent a political agenda. After all, he also shoots his coworkers, his idol, his mom, and again, quite possibly Zazie Beetz. It's a way of enjoying a frisson of transgressive timeliness while maintaining a fairly craven form of plausible deniability. Perhaps the audience likes seeing a bunch of finance bros get shot, but they can leave saying "but the shooting was done by a crazy, pathetic guy, so, it's not like the movie wants us to actually do anything or think anything other than 'tut tut.'" Edit: To be clear, I did go and see it this afternoon because I thought, hmm, I'm getting awfully judgy about a movie I haven't seen. So my wife and I went out and caught it. I... did not like it at all and her take was "please don't let the internet talk you into seeing a movie ever again." How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Oct 5, 2019 |
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Oct 5, 2019 23:18
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Vince MechMahon posted:I don't recall the spoiler part at all. Also I think if the violence is against greedy pigs who care about profit more than people then that violence is just, but you keep on hoping for the system to change from the inside if you want. It's silly to accuse people who don't like The Joker (2019) of being directly isometric with centrists. I hope you can recognize why that's silly and disingenuous. Vince MechMahon posted:The Joker hasn't been the villain in a live action movie since the sixties. He's Burton's self insert misunderstood artist crushed by the authoritarian system in Batman 89, and Dark Knight has Batman as the Bush administration so he's not the villain by default in it. The Heath Ledger Joker blows up a hospital and puts two entire boats full of people in a really sadistic psychological torture match in which, in all likelihood, a ton of people who had nothing to do with much of anything would have died! That's pretty bad! If you believe in carceral abolition you should also be opposed to a boat full of prisoners exploding! The Jack Nicholson Joker also murders and attempts to murder a ton of people for, essentially, just kicks! I don't even want to get into Jared Leto! I'd call all these Jokers pretty lovely people and even if some of these films represent ethically dubious or disturbing Batmen that doesn't make indiscriminate mass murder very admirable!
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Oct 5, 2019 23:56
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I don't want to sound rude but I've taught literature classes for half a decade, including a good handful of film studies courses, and I have no idea what you're talking about. Of course the fictional actions that authors decide that their fictional characters will do to other fictional characters is germane. If I were to say "Superman is nice because he saves people" and you were to say "well, not real people" I would be very concerned indeed. I could say "Leopold Bloom loves his wife Molly but is conflicted about her behavior" and you said "well he shouldn't be, he's just a character in a book" that would kind of be a not very productive end to the conversation! I think there are certainly a variety of effects that authors can elicit by showing their audience bad people or bad actions in close detail-- and effects they can elicit by making those bad people look appealing or charismatic, or sympathetic. Mads Mikkelsen is an incredibly magnetic and seductive Hannibal Lecter, and like, Shakespeare was masterful at exposing the self-justifications of bad deeds and making them look eloquent and persuasive. That doesn't mean "Iago is ok because he only killed characters from some old play." I guess you could look at something like Moravagine or Les Chants de Maldoror or I don't know, Ubo Roi and say "ok, these texts are languouring in monstrosity and cruelty, and by doing so, are inviting us to think about bourgeois morality in a different way, and maybe asking us to dehisce moral judgments from aesthetic judgments" and that's fine. The Story of the Eye is a very game attempt to write an earnestly erotic novel about monstrous acts, because Bataille had something urgent to say about violence and metaphor. But these are all, to greater or less degrees, fundamentally absurd texts-- they don't mimic the grammar and structure of real life. And they definitely don't hew to the essential morality-fable narrative structure of the superhero story, a structure that, for all their differences, all of the Batman movies mostly do. The Joker in the Tim Burton movie kills people because the makers of the movie decided to have him do that. Why? I suppose for a number of reasons, but largely so that the audience would feel relieved and happy when Batman defeats him. If all the Joker did was jaywalk for the first hour of the movie and then Batman came in and kicked his rear end we would all be unnerved and confused, but no, he's a mass murderer, so we're happy to see him fail at mass murder. If you're arguing that fictional crimes don't have any import on fictional characters because they're committed against fictional victims, I don't know, why even talk about fiction? Who cares if the 2019 Joker kills Wall Street guys, they aren't real Wall Street guys. And Joaquin Phoenix isn't actually the Joker, so geez, I should have stayed home I guess. Fiction works because as an audience we agree to consent to the premise that the made up people we're about to hear about matter, and that the things they do and feel have consequences. I think you're, like, rejecting the basic premises of fiction in a way that seems... unhelpful? Second of all, I don't know if you've known many performance artists, but I have not found them to be particularly heroic figures! And I'm certainly not primed to be sympathetic to "this performance artist is not allowed to do whatever he wants" because the last time I saw a performance artist restricted from doing whatever he wanted it was because he wanted to bring his own cum into the classroom. You're writing apologia for Kenny Goldsmith.
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Oct 6, 2019 00:42
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Madkal posted:I used to think every young white guy in the 90's was Chris Klein. This lead me to think that Chris Klein was actually in some good movies. I recently watched The Sopranos for the first time and was astonished to realize, several seasons in, that Sylvio and Paulie were two different guys.
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Oct 25, 2019 03:48
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Alan Tudyk would have been perfect.
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Nov 6, 2019 18:08
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Alfred's backstory/basic characteristics were really up in the air for a long time. When he first appears in Batman #16 he's a much more portly guy, with a clean-shaven face, whose only explicit history is as a music-hall actor. He's depicted as kind of a goofy dipshit, and already middle-aged, so obviously there's no WWII vet angle at that point. His last-name doesn't even land on Pennyworth until the late 60s, ambiguously shifting, instead, between Jarvis (his father's presumed surname early on) and Beagle. The earliest reference to his espionage/military stuff is in Detective Comics #501, from 1981, in which we learn about his Resistance activities and tie them into the Mlle. Marie comics from Star-Spangled War Stories. I don't know though-- when Batman learns about all this in that issue he seems remarkably non-plussed by his butler having been in the French Resistance, and it isn't at all framed as a big plot twist or revelation, so perhaps it was established earlier and I'm just not looking hard enough.
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Nov 14, 2019 15:27
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I like Jupiter Ascending because I totally relate to that experience of having an existing body of work that people look at one way, then transitioning and just wanting to create something completely and unapologetically femme. Slim Goodbody and Nessus hit the nail in the head-- it's such a girl movie and even if its super clunky and goofy it radiates joy and vitality in a way that really appeals to me in the same way that Speed Racer does.
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Dec 12, 2019 01:14
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John Wick of Dogs posted:Anime nerd girls want to fall off buildings a whole lot? Hell yeah baby!! Big Mean Jerk posted:Sean Bean saying with deadly seriousness that he is part honeybee. Hell yeah baby!!!! Arist posted:Why did I say "fight," jesus, it's a race Scott Pilgrim has aged very poorly as both a comic and a movie but I liked the idea Brian Lee O'Malley float somewhere about realizing that the musical set pieces in musicals served the same structural role as the fight scenes in action movies. They move the plot forward in very similar ways, they slow the plot down in similar ways, and they use similar methods to heighten and play with the audiences' emotions. Speed Racer (and I guess other car movies, from like, The Italian Job to The Fast and the Furious) chases and races work in a similar way, so yeah, I can totally understand the mix-up! I think they're scratching the same itch to want to see conflict resolved in a spectacle of beauty and choreography. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Dec 12, 2019 |
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Dec 12, 2019 18:23
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edit: oops, poo poo. The new mod buttons shifted quote/edit one space over and I got too riled up about Sean Bean.
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Dec 12, 2019 18:25
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Me being completely annihilated ITT: I have not read Scott Pilgrim since the colorized editions came out and I haven't watched it in two or three years so maybe I need to give him a second chance. I loved the comics as they came out-- the second volume came out one day before I moved away to college-- and reread them during a lovely period of my life so yeah, who knows. This'll be one of my Winter Break projects.
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Dec 12, 2019 18:37
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I started rereading the comics today and I have to say: 1) I sort of stand by my initial position-- they aged weirdly if not poorly. I think the time it takes for O'Malley to dig into Scott being an odious guy instead of a lovable slacker, tonally I mean, wouldn't unfold so luxuriously in 2020. 2) I forgot how funny it is, and how good O'Malley's comic timing is. Everything about Wallace's psychic boyfriend as well as every vegan joke lands 100%. So I don't know-- it's a good comic but one that's very firmly of its moment. I'm happy to be reading it. I'm looking forward to revisiting the movie because I remember being the only person I saw it with who wasn't completely charmed by it, but I've become a lot less fussy about movies since the early aughts.
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Dec 14, 2019 01:15
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