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KVeezy3 posted:It’s more than just the physical act of sex… Yeah, I actually do think Nolan is pretty sexless in most of his output, but every Batman evokes some reading of his sublimated, unrealized sexuality. It’s kind of an elephant in the room: this handsome billionaire playboy never fucks, but is really primed for psychosexual interpretation over why. He’s an adult obsessed with his dead parents, who’s unmarried and only has performative relationships in public, and constantly finds himself in these extremely suggestive dynamics with lady supervillains who go real horny with it. On top of that, he lives with a singular teenage ward half the time, where the vibes are always weird as gently caress. Bruce Wayne’s sexuality is an unavoidably strange but prominent detail of the character, vs. Superman or Flash who typically just have partners and aren’t that weird about it. It’s the MCU I’d describe as truly sexless. Because not only do almost no characters gently caress, sex feels like an irrelevant detail even in concept. Tony Stark, introduced pre-Disney as a gleeful, arrogant womanizer, quickly becomes team dad. Black Widow, implied to be a femme fatale who was essentially sex trafficked, has instead become characterized as the team mom; her worst trauma is that she can’t bear children, not that she faced horrific sexual abuse, which is never discussed at all.
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Jun 10, 2023 09:24
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Alexander Hamilton posted:Dick Grayson/Nightwing is a nice contrast to this, since he’s “Batman who got over his parents’ deaths,” and he’s the most Down To gently caress dude in the DC Universe. Daredevil is also a nice contrast, whose motivations and general energy are pretty similar to Batman, but he’s so horny all the time. His relationships are all doomed, but he’s constantly trying to lay it down. The Netflix shows now bleeding into the MCU are probably a good thing, because the former didn’t shy away from horny Matt Murdock, so his first real Disney outing still saw him gently caress She-Hulk. Ghost Leviathan posted:BvS even plays with the contrast as Superman fucks, and Lois Lane is all down for it (and frankly, who can blame her) while Batman has an anonymous woman in his bed no one draws any attention to, sex is just another bland background vice he's trying to drown his failures in. I liked this detail. Because in the Nolan movies, his dates with models or yacht excursions are presented as pure theater. For everyone else’s benefit; there’s no sense that he actually cares about it. The random lady in his container home highlights some failed attempt to self-soothe. He’s miserable, alienated, locked into his trauma, and obsessed with Superman…and literally trying to gently caress the pain away, unsuccessfully. In general, I love that movie for leaning into how broken Batman is. Like, not in a cool brooding way; he’s a weird and pathetic psycho who’s unpleasant to be around. He doesn’t need to fight crime, he needs to go to loving therapy.
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Jun 10, 2023 19:55
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Neo Rasa posted:It makes Everything Everywhere All At Once even more impressive to me because weren't the effects in that notably done by beginners teaching themselves as they went along? As I understand it, most of the effects in that movie were done through After Effects, using complex compositing and other (comparatively) lo-fi trickery, rather than rendered 3D models/environments like a studio tentpole. It also looks like A LOT of the effects shots for EEAAO were, in part, conceived practically: lighting and costume changes on set, roto'ed shot transitions, tracked split screens and stuff. So, it may never have had to enter the gauntlet of VFX grind to begin with. Rightly or wrongly, it seems to me that - in addition to turning over 1000+ VFX shots - these movies make as few choices on set as possible. I'd be surprised if they knew what Flash's suit was going to look like when they wrapped. What...anything was supposed to look like in Ant Man: Quantumania. Better to drop the entire burden of your movie's aesthetic style onto a team of underpaid VFX artists who are inches from total breakdown, and give them less than half the time they'd need to make any of it look right.
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Jun 20, 2023 22:16
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Neo Rasa posted:At that time especially if it was the EXACT same movie but Superman said "You're a real pain the neck!" before snapping Zod's neck people would have loved it. For all the hand-wringing about not saving people or whatever, it’s obviously this kind of poo poo. This argument is done to death ITT, but the Snyder movies are hated because they deny the power fantasy aspects typical of these stories. They’re interested in how a Superman would gently caress up world politics, how unlimited power can’t fix everything, how humanity is its own worst enemy. They’re not very interested in how awesome and fun it would be to be Superman or how a magical space-boy could totally solve every problem if only he was raised in America. It’s because Snyder remade Watchmen, not Iron Man. Batman is the same way: the alpha masculine ideal of this genius billionaire vigilante is instead painted as a violent maniac who’s motivated by trauma, in a way that feels debilitating and sad and not deep or badass. It’s no less “dark” or “grounded” or “serious” than the Nolan movies, it’s just that those portray Batman as fundamentally cool and right.
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Jun 28, 2023 02:08
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Guy A. Person posted:…the Anti-Life Equation is effectively super high level mind control… I was never deep into DC lore, so Anti-Life always sounded like peak goofy comics bullshit. But it’s…a literal mathematical equation, that hypnotizes you into obedience? My semi-formed assumption was that it’s Lovecraft poo poo, like reading the Necronomicon. It’s God knowledge that drives a human reader insane by exposing them to some nihilistic and unchangeable horror behind reality, thus shattering whatever naive and irrelevant ideals or identities they used to hold.
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Jun 28, 2023 20:50
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ruddiger posted:Should've replaced Hunnam with Travis Fimmel Maybe change up his character to be a space colonist who worships a sun deity and drinks a lot of milk and is insane.
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Jun 30, 2023 19:24
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GoldStandardConure posted:What a tremendous waste of Ben Foster and Ruth Negga that movie was. That was part of the issue, too, though: every human character, including the king and the Saruman-ish traitor, read as under 40, recently groomed, and fairly-to-extremely attractive. It felt like cosplayers doing a fan film. The CG orcs worked because they were the only part with any texture or gravitas at all. I like the WC games fine, but I loved Diablo 1 & 2 more than anything as a kid. The WC movie was so off-putting and lovely, I never want to see Blizzard adapt Diablo to anything, just to preserve its memory.
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Jul 3, 2023 09:00
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It’s not a great show, no. But it’s hilarious in its messaging: the Skrulls, introduced in the MCU as a displaced ethnicity who barely survived genocide, were granted sanctuary on Earth…but they’ve since bitten the hand, and hatched a nefarious plot to take Earth for their own. So, thanks Marvel for a story about how the Space Jews who are explicitly reptilian shapeshifters seek to infiltrate and destabilize our institutions.
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Jul 7, 2023 07:07
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They did work for the CIA. But now they’re working against it. That’s why poor Nick Fury feels so blindsided.
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Jul 7, 2023 11:54
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Schwarzwald posted:Our boy Zack kept the film respectable, but we all know what's going on with those clone machines! Men like Zod whose martial prowess is inarguable has won the right to beat off into the fetus lagoon. Clark, a sad failure like his passive father, refuses to fight and instead merely destroys a man’s truck. He later debases himself by loving his human girlfriend.
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Jul 21, 2023 23:25
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Neo Rasa posted:I still can't believe how hyped Firefly was vs. how not into it overall I was. It’s interesting to think on a time when people were so thirsty for media that feels vaguely like more Star Wars that a low-budget space western starring kinda-Han Solo was hot poo poo. An episodic sci-fi western about a crew of space cowboys/pirates is still a solid premise. It’s just too bad a few dozen anime series did it already by 2002.
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Jul 22, 2023 22:40
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:It's hard to impress upon someone how seriously "zombies don't run" was taken at the time, lol. Totally absurd discourse. Equally stupid is the "infected aren't zombies" argument. Like, cordyceps or Rage virus make them not zombies because the explanation is biological. Are they former-humans who've been turned into feral, ego-less bodies who swarm together and kill everything? Are healthy people worried about being bitten and subsumed by the horde? They're zombies. I'm convinced it's an outgrowth of the absurd tactical realism that a particular audience puts on zombie stories. They aren't just horror/action genre exercises, they become some weirdo personal statement for this deeply self-serious group of (mostly male) viewers to obsess over - over "what they'd do," or "what the characters should've done," or "what the rules are." Suddenly changing some parameter feels like cheating or stacking the deck in a game, because these aren't stories with characters or themes, they're a kind of survivalist fantasy football for libertarians. I'd guess there's strong overlap of the dudes breathlessly raging over zombie media, and dudes who earnestly call normal people NPC's and watch Andrew Tate kind of poo poo.
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Aug 1, 2023 21:35
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Assepoester posted:She spends a whole video talking about how WB screwed over New Zealand workers, she's cool This is unrelated to anything, but I'd 1000% watch a comedic "true crime" dramatization of the Omegaverse legal battle Lindsay Ellis documents, because that whole story is amazing. Her content was cool and good in general, it sucks that the internet eats people alive for extremely unnecessary reasons and she quit to prevent going insane or whatever.
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Aug 3, 2023 22:18
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Tarantino has foot shots. Snyder has shots of women with super cut-looking traps swinging a gigantic maul.
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Aug 21, 2023 20:43
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Bogus Adventure posted:And I know that it'll be written by someone who routinely binge-watches whole TV series in a weekend Probably, yes. I don’t agree with people who bitch about length for features as a general rule…a movie earns its length or it doesn’t, Avatar justifies 3 hours while Cocaine Bear was torture at 95 minutes. But I also think a 4 hour movie is not that same as 4 hourlong episodes of TV. The story structures are different, they’re designed to be consumed as one thing or four things. I think those are qualitatively different experiences regardless of overall runtime.
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Aug 27, 2023 05:53
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I tried watching the B+W version, and it didn't seem worth the effort. I feel the same way about the Black & Chrome version of Fury Road...it's fine, at best, but not preferable. Especially for Fury Road, the color treatment is a huge part of the appeal, a post-apocalyptic wasteland that's actually really vibrant and colorful. Snyder's aesthetic for JL was already really unique and pretty great-looking, so dropping the saturation and crushing the blacks kinda...adds nothing.
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Sep 5, 2023 22:20
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Ghost Leviathan posted:People mock TVtropes for having a blatantly incomplete and broken theory on media but they genuinely seem to have a more coherent grasp of it and ability to explain tropes and formulas in clear language than academia seems to most of the time. I went to film school and was very immersed in academic film crit circles while there, but have been in the professional media production world since. I have former classmates who went on to graduate programs, became professors and other kinds of career academics. And...yeah, I was able to communicate with them about media in undergrad, but the drift since is appreciable. There's a very in-the-weeds way that academics have to discuss film, and IMO it becomes incoherent when you're trying to apply that framework to contemporary commercial films made for mass audiences. Like, you can discuss Barbie in the context of postmodern semiotics or relate it to the male gaze in silent Hollywood or to oil portraiture of the early Baroque period, but are those texts Greta Gerwig was engaging with; is that a conversation anyone outside of this very insular film academia world is having or needs to have? Just because the author is dead, does it make any angle of approach relevant for interpretation? As an example, I think about a movie like Into the Spider-Verse, which is heavily conversational with comics as a medium, with the odd canonicity of Spider-Man narratives, with modern franchise filmmaking in a broad sense, etc. There's a lot about it that feels rich for discussion, and being immersed in the specific commercial context that movie was designed around seems important to make meaning out of it. But if some adjunct professor just spent years writing a dissertation on Polish art films 1945-1979, and comes at Into the Spider-Verse with whatever energy that required...who cares? Does it matter?
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Sep 19, 2023 01:07
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The obvious error you're making here is placing certain things "beneath" philosophy, like as if pictures are outside the scope of human understanding once they have little word bubbles incorporated into the composition. You're the guy still saying "it's not supposed to be Shakespeare", as if it's gonna pop their monocles. ("Bwuh?? It's not???") You're the one assuming a value judgment here. I'm not actually making any point about high or low culture in the arts, I'm making a point about academics de-contextualizing media to fit it into a framework that suits their area of interest, very related to your issue with their tendency to depoliticize Leftist media. Of course there are people using comic books and CG blockbusters or whatever in their work; there are people using Tumblr memes and pornography and underground 90's zines in their work. My issue is when the people in these narrow fields of study discuss other media with similar authority, when the specificity of their knowledge might be irrelevant or misapplied. If the comic book CG blockbuster guy you suggest had something to say about Spider-Verse, it'd probably be relevant. Ghost Leviathan posted:Also it's almost been overdone but Shakespeare absolutely was doing the blockbuster movies, romcoms and action movies of his time, complete with quips, puns and fart jokes. Yeah, that dig is stupid. Shakespeare was pretty widely popular and not very esoteric or intellectual at all. Popcorn movies are pretty much exactly Shakespeare in that sense, and reference to Shakespeare is obviously still ubiquitous in modern media.
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Sep 19, 2023 19:55
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"Rebel Moon prequel comic by ultra-woke pro-transgender creator who threatened people with a bat," as if I needed to be sold even more on this movie. Sounds great.
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Oct 20, 2023 21:51
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MJeff posted:Zod chose violent, indiscriminate genocide over the thought of a coexistence that included any discomfort, no matter how temporary, for Kryptonians. And chose Earth for largely symbolic and kind of spiteful reasons. The world engine could probably have turned Venus or Mars or just literally any random suitable exoplanet into New Krypton, but it had to be this particular inhabited world because reasons.
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Nov 16, 2023 22:37
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I mean, yeah, the reasons are "these are the themes present in this story."
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Nov 16, 2023 22:38
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Space Fish posted:Funny how the same social media circles that always preach "let people like what they like" and "there are no guilty pleasures in art, be earnest" always loudly decry Snyder, including and especially Sucker Punch, as objectively terrible and worth negatively judging anyone who liked it. It's honestly pretty weird, the vehemence of it. I don't consider myself a huge Snyder fan in general, but I find him incredibly interesting. I've voiced this extremely tame opinion elsewhere, and people will still be like "NO! NO HE ISN'T!!" Naturally, Snyder's movies - which people still actively discuss years or decades after the fact - are valueless and bad and have nothing to say. BvS came out 8 years ago, there's been a very successful Batman solo film since, but boy let me tell you how bad that Batman v Superman movie was. I barely remember the details, but it made such an impression on me I still have a multi-paragraph rant about its character choices already in the chamber. That's how inept and boring that movie was.
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Apr 10, 2024 21:20
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