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Zagorath

@ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Posts
121
Comments
782
Joined
3 yr. ago

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • What successful or popular movie that many loved you just HATE?

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  • I really don't like this sentiment. First of all because it doesn't match my experience on the ground, where many of the most highly-regarded superhero films do take themselves quite seriously. The first two Toby Maguire Spiderman films. First two X-Men films. (And, the third of each of those trilogies also takes itself seriously but is not as good. But the point isn't that being serious is automatically good, but that being serious is in no way a detriment to being a good film.) The Nolan Batman trilogy and The Batman, as well as The Penguin from a live-action TV perspective. Logan received widespread critical acclaim even outside of the comic book world. Or we can leave the live action realm and look at cartoons like BTAS, whose excellent dark tone basically defined what the title character should be like, and whose early crossover with STAS often received favourable comparisons to the far inferior Batman v Superman live action film two decades later.

    But even if there weren't good counter-examples, I wouldn't like that sentiment, because it's essentially admitting "it's impossible to make a superhero film that is also good". And I fundamentally do not agree with that defeatist message. The superhero genre is one that is capable of a great range of tones and subject matter and of instilling a wide range of emotions in its audience.

  • What successful or popular movie that many loved you just HATE?

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  • Yeah, but a lot of the point is how despite being mentally disabled, he's supposed to have deeper insight into things. That's certainly how the cultural perception of the movie is. The problem is that the "insight" he has and which both the movie itself and the cultural memory of the movie treat as genuinely meaningful is actually fucking dumb.

  • What successful or popular movie that many loved you just HATE?

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  • Literally everything Taika watiti touches turns to shit

    Apart from the two Thors, the only Waititi I've seen was Jo Jo Rabbit, which I thought was incredible. It's a shame someone capable of touching that subject in such a sensitive yet humorous way could turn around and be supportive of genocide elsewhere. But yeah I don't like either of his Thor movies.

    As for Abrams, I completely agree that his mystery box style is terrible. I actually was hopeful when it was announced he'd be doing Star Wars though, especially when it was going to be only the first film, and we didn't know that there was no planning ahead. I thought that the studio as a whole would rein in his mystery box style by insisting on a plan across 3 movies. And as much as I hated Abrams' Star Trek films, I thought that their action style might work well for Star Wars in a way it didn't work for Trek. So I was reasonably hopeful, and I don't even think I was too let down by the first movie per se. The problem came when he returned for the third movie and revealed that there were no good answers for the mysteries set up at the start (which, admittedly, itself came about because the mysteries had been set up in the first one without thought for how to resolve them). Fuck mystery boxes.

  • What successful or popular movie that many loved you just HATE?

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  • Sorry, and you're entitled to enjoy what you enjoy, but it's just not good. Fundamentally undermining your own characters within your own story, let alone undermining arcs that have built up over multiple movies before you, at the climax of those characters' arcs, does not a good movie make.

  • What successful or popular movie that many loved you just HATE?

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  • I didn't see it, but IMO based on your description the appropriate thing to do would be to make the best movie she could, or to have refused, even if that meant them making it without her. Taking up the offer of making the movie and then deliberately doing a bad job is a giant "fuck you" to everyone who bought tickets.

    (If they did make it without her, it might still have been bad or even undermined her intentions with the franchise, but at least her name would be clear. And fans are very good at saying "yeah no we don't consider these corporate-made extensions of the auteur's world to be very good. We consider it a separate canon." Look at Star Wars, or the Dune novels after Frank Herbert's death, or how people were reacting to Netflix's Avatar after Mike & Brian left the production even before it released.)

  • What successful or popular movie that many loved you just HATE?

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  • Oh I have another one. Thor Ragnarok. People loved it because they liked the Thor character and found his earlier films too dull or something, but I loved that they were unapologetically serious about themselves, using comedy in ways that felt very authentic to the characters.

    But Ragnarok? It came out later the same year as this excellent essay about bathos, and it was dripping in it. I was hyper tuned to the problem with bathos, and it leaned even harder into that took than nearly any other MCU film did.

    What sucks so much is that it had the bones of a really good dramatic story. The Bruce Banner/Hulk storyline had built up over multiple previous films, and come the climax of this film it's established that he's in Bruce form now and has enough control to stay that way, but if he transforms into Hulk it'll be a big deal and he may never be able to be himself again. So they arrive in Asgard at the climax of the film and it's pretty urgent. In a dramatic moment you can see him steel himself to make the sacrifice; he jumps out of their aircraft onto the rainbow bridge, clearly intending to transform into Hulk to fight Fenris.

    …and he splats. Faceplants on the bridge. Still in human form. It's played for laughs. The ultimate conclusion of Hulk's story in this movie and probably the most important moment of his arc over the entire MCU to this point, and it's undercut by a joke. Not even a very funny one. A slapstick joke that would make Charlie Chaplin cringe.

    And it means nothing, because the very next shit, he's transformed anyway and throwing Fenris around like a doll.

    Not to mention it undermines the verisimilitude of the movie. I can suspend my disbelief in these movies pretty hard, but Bruce Banner, in human form, is meant to be painfully average, physically speaking. He should have died from that fall, given he didn't transform. That's certainly not the worst thing about the moment, but it is was the sprinkling of salt on top of the wound that just made it that little bit worse.

    That moment was the worst bit, but the film as a whole was full of lazy humour and bathos, and it was really just the worst example of what was wrong with a lot of MCU movies at the time. I was shocked to hear so few people came away disliking it in the same way I did.

  • What successful or popular movie that many loved you just HATE?

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  • The movie did ruin the Iron Giant, though.

  • What successful or popular movie that many loved you just HATE?

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  • Forest Gump. The 1994 Best Picture nominees were some of the most highly competitive the Academy has ever had, and they went with the one that was just a straight-up terrible fucking movie. It has no value except as nostalgia bait for Americans and propaganda for those who want to believe in the myth of American individual exceptionalism.

    Its musical score is also probably the worst thing I've ever had the misfortune of performing in an orchestra. Dull and repetitive.

    And its most famous line is straight-up bullshit. I've heard the book does it differently, but the movie puts "something that kinda sounds deep to a 14 year old" over a level of rationality that stands up to 20 seconds of thought from an average person. A box of chocolates tells you precisely what you're going to be getting.

  • What successful or popular movie that many loved you just HATE?

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  • It's funny, the one thing you specifically called out is the one part of it I did like. The connection to the beginning of A New Hope is great. But I didn't like pretty much any of the rest of the movie, including the rest of the final sequence. Especially that nonsense with the non-jedi Jedi.

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  • Plant some friendly audience members to ask some Dorothy Dixers.

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  • and also substitute P(you are likable) for P(she likes you)

    That seems like a pretty wild leap of logic. Being likeable in general isn't a substitute for a specific person liking you. Though there's probably a correlation related to your overall "likeability score".

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  • Yeah this looks like a stupid degree of shrink wrapping of the neck.

  • YouTuber Johnny Harris’ lens on Eastern Europe is distorted and irresponsible

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  • The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect...

  • Jet Lag: The Game — Ep 2 — We Played Hide And Seek Across Japan

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  • Yeah I was thinking the same thing. Seems unfair that he couldn't nominate a spot and go back to there, since his reason for being out of position was doing the seekers' questions.

  • YouTuber Johnny Harris’ lens on Eastern Europe is distorted and irresponsible

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  • It's funny, prior to this video I would have said Harris had quite a neoliberal status quo bias. But then he puts out a video almost word-for-word parroting Kremlin talking points and it seems more likely his problem is less bias and more journalistic skills (or lack thereof).

    As someone on Reddit said, it seems like he's naturally skilled at doing human interest stories that tie in to greater world events, similar to Rare Earth, but his trend recently has been trying to do grand sweeping narratives focused on world events. And he's just not that good at it.

    He's since taken down the video in response to criticism and put out this response video. Sadly that video isn't on Nebula, and if I hadn't randomly been viewing Reddit to go see comments about the latest Jet Lag just 1 hour after this same article was posted to the Nebula subreddit, I probably still wouldn't have seen this retraction.

    It's good to see Harris respond like this and say he'll do better. He's certainly saying all the right things. The problem is that this is not the first time he's run into problems with journalistic quality and responded by saying all the right things.

    Incidentally, one particular YouTuber who responded to Harris's take is mentioned by a lot of the comments under his retraction video. I strongly do not recommend bothering to watch that. I did, and it was pretty obviously at least as biased in the other direction as the video Harris produced was towards the Russian view. There were maybe one or two genuinely good points in it, but most of it was either rather obvious or extremely biased.

  • Jet Lag: The Game — We Played Hide And Seek Across Japan

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  • What an incredible opening to the season this was.

  • Jet Lag: The Game — Ep 2 — We Played Hide And Seek Across Japan

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  • Damn this was a fun episode. The whiplash from the seekers being almost completely lost to almost accidentally stumbling across exactly the right spot, in part because of Adam's own foibles, was just brilliant.

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  • I can't say I've noticed that.

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  • Butcher birds do do this, but that's not a butcher bird that's depicted.

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  • “People called cancer the wolf, because it 'ate up' the person.” But this wasn't just a linguistic quirk. The idea was actually translated into practice. “Some doctors would even apply raw meat to a cancerous ulcer, so that the wolf could feast on that for a while instead of 'eating' the patient.

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