Last night's holiday movie viewing was "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes". I thought is was excruciatingly bad. Terrible plot, incredibly long and poorly paced, and incomprehensible characters whose behaviour made no sense. In the original movies I was able to imagine Katniss Everdeen as a coalminers' daughter from the struggling working class regions. But the latest heroine, Lucy Gray Baird, is a country and western singer from the flyover states, pitted against the sneering elites of the Panem equivalent of Harvard and Yale. They come across as Jan 6 insurrectionists rather than working class revolutionaries,
Re: Movies
Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2024 5:54 pm
by MissGreen
I just watched fury which is about a ww2 tank team.....and fucking grim in that way thar war movies that try and have some realism tend to be. I also heard heard the first starwars movie with a woman directing and women as the lead is of course " delayed indefinatly" but the show thats last season was audience and criticaly panned the mandalorian has a movie on the way.
I feel a bit silly actually thinking it would happen. It's a long established fact that even money makers like the star wars sequals flaws are judged by "too many women, being characters" and not the actual flaws.
So when they choose the movies for their arcane but legal tax fraud it's always like batgirl or whatever. never the 70th tom cruise movie i cant even remember.
Re: Movies
Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2024 6:32 pm
by pipbarber
MissGreen wrote: ↑Wed Jan 17, 2024 5:54 pm
I just watched fury which is about a ww2 tank team.....and fucking grim in that way thar war movies that try and have some realism tend to be. I also heard heard the first starwars movie with a woman directing and women as the lead is of course " delayed indefinatly" but the show thats last season was audience and criticaly panned the mandalorian has a movie on the way.
I feel a bit silly actually thinking it would happen. It's a long established fact that even money makers like the star wars sequals flaws are judged by "too many women, being characters" and not the actual flaws.
So when they choose the movies for their arcane but legal tax fraud it's always like batgirl or whatever. never the 70th tom cruise movie i cant even remember.
In terms of women's representation in cinema, I still apply a variation of the Bechdel Test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test. The test i use is whether there is a minimum of ten minutes of dialogue between female characters that isn't about men or romance or how terrible women are. It seems to me that what gets spewed out of Hollywood is failing the test even more often now than it used to.
Anyway, while i'm on Hollywood, i did finish Scorsese's Killings of the flower moon, after pausing halfway through. God i fucking hated this movie, not as much as poor things, but it was bad. I read that the first nations people that were the background to yet another scorsese organised crime film are divided in their assessment of it. However, for me it smacked of exploitation, even though that may not have been the intent, in fact i'm sure it wasn't, but in the end it was just another white savior of noble savages because obviously they can't tell their own stories so Hollywood royalty has to do it for them, and maybe win another oscar along the way. And how much did this scorsese wankfest cost? How many resources did it use up? What was its carbon footprint?
Sorry, but i'm really detesting hollywood at the moment. Have i reviewed Napoleon yet? That falls somewhere between Poor Things and Scorsese effort.
MissGreen wrote: ↑Wed Jan 17, 2024 5:54 pm
I just watched fury which is about a ww2 tank team.....and fucking grim in that way thar war movies that try and have some realism tend to be. I also heard heard the first starwars movie with a woman directing and women as the lead is of course " delayed indefinatly" but the show thats last season was audience and criticaly panned the mandalorian has a movie on the way.
I feel a bit silly actually thinking it would happen. It's a long established fact that even money makers like the star wars sequals flaws are judged by "too many women, being characters" and not the actual flaws.
So when they choose the movies for their arcane but legal tax fraud it's always like batgirl or whatever. never the 70th tom cruise movie i cant even remember.
In terms of women's representation in cinema, I still apply a variation of the Bechdel Test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test. The test i use is whether there is a minimum of ten minutes of dialogue between female characters that isn't about men or romance or how terrible women are. It seems to me that what gets spewed out of Hollywood is failing the test even more often now than it used to.
Anyway, while i'm on Hollywood, i did finish Scorsese's Killings of the flower moon, after pausing halfway through. God i fucking hated this movie, not as much as poor things, but it was bad. I read that the first nations people that were the background to yet another scorsese organised crime film are divided in their assessment of it. However, for me it smacked of exploitation, even though that may not have been the intent, in fact i'm sure it wasn't, but in the end it was just another white savior of noble savages because obviously they can't tell their own stories so Hollywood royalty has to do it for them, and maybe win another oscar along the way. And how much did this scorsese wankfest cost? How many resources did it use up? What was its carbon footprint?
Sorry, but i'm really detesting hollywood at the moment. Have i reviewed Napoleon yet? That falls somewhere between Poor Things and Scorsese effort.
Fuck i go with will two women talk about anything other then men. The answer is no mostly, i don't bother with trans characters. We don't get to tell out own stories and we shouldnt even dare to be involved. It upsets too many cis people you see. Case in point, some folks from netflix wanted trans comedians to have a go too.......in responce dave chapelle got a victory tour and we got mocked. "Cancelled" they scream in our faces while i cant exist in cis society.
MissGreen wrote: ↑Wed Jan 17, 2024 5:54 pm
I just watched fury which is about a ww2 tank team.....and fucking grim in that way thar war movies that try and have some realism tend to be. I also heard heard the first starwars movie with a woman directing and women as the lead is of course " delayed indefinatly" but the show thats last season was audience and criticaly panned the mandalorian has a movie on the way.
I feel a bit silly actually thinking it would happen. It's a long established fact that even money makers like the star wars sequals flaws are judged by "too many women, being characters" and not the actual flaws.
So when they choose the movies for their arcane but legal tax fraud it's always like batgirl or whatever. never the 70th tom cruise movie i cant even remember.
In terms of women's representation in cinema, I still apply a variation of the Bechdel Test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test. The test i use is whether there is a minimum of ten minutes of dialogue between female characters that isn't about men or romance or how terrible women are. It seems to me that what gets spewed out of Hollywood is failing the test even more often now than it used to.
Anyway, while i'm on Hollywood, i did finish Scorsese's Killings of the flower moon, after pausing halfway through. God i fucking hated this movie, not as much as poor things, but it was bad. I read that the first nations people that were the background to yet another scorsese organised crime film are divided in their assessment of it. However, for me it smacked of exploitation, even though that may not have been the intent, in fact i'm sure it wasn't, but in the end it was just another white savior of noble savages because obviously they can't tell their own stories so Hollywood royalty has to do it for them, and maybe win another oscar along the way. And how much did this scorsese wankfest cost? How many resources did it use up? What was its carbon footprint?
Sorry, but i'm really detesting hollywood at the moment. Have i reviewed Napoleon yet? That falls somewhere between Poor Things and Scorsese effort.
Fuck i go with will two women talk about anything other then men. The answer is no mostly, i don't bother with trans characters. We don't get to tell out own stories and we shouldnt even dare to be involved. It upsets too many cis people you see. Case in point, some folks from netflix wanted trans comedians to have a go too.......in responce dave chapelle got a victory tour and we got mocked. "Cancelled" they scream in our faces while i cant exist in cis society.
Re: Movies
Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2024 5:58 pm
by stylofone
There are some bad lists out there, but I thought this one was OK. I've seen most of these, but in the to 10 I haven't seen "Stalker" or "Under the Skin".
"Children of Men" deserves to be up there IMO.
For various reasons, "Barbarella" and "Fantastic Planet" are high in the charts for me personally, but I understand why they drop down to the lower reaches of more conventional rankings like these.
I've recently gone down an enjoyable rabbit-hole of watching old movies, viz.:
Sabrina (1952 - monochrome) starring Audrey Hepburn, William Holden, and Humphrey Bogart.
Roman Holiday (1953 - monochrome), starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962 - monochrome), starring Gregory Peck.
Jeremiah Johnson (1972 - colour), starring Robert Redford.
It seems that for those decades, leading women/men had to be incredibly attractive (apart from Bogart). It also seems that stories, albeit sometimes somewhat corny, could be told without blowing shit up, car chases, and computer-generated images!
Re: Movies
Posted: Tue Apr 09, 2024 11:25 pm
by stylofone
I watched Dune I last night and Dune II tonight. I really enjoyed it: amazing direction, great cast. In a way it didn't quite hang together, but I also have this sense of a sort of Dune meta-narrative, that every iteration of Dune is about the way the creators perceive it: how much they love it, how much they were obsessed by it, how their vision succeeds and fails in different ways depending on the corresponding viewpoint of each audience member. It's like I've had a snort of spice and I'm having this vision, I can see Dune in four dimensions at once: the book, Jodorowsky's unfinished vision, the David Lynch version, and Denis Villeneuve's latest effort.
I can hardly even imagine what it is like to see Dune as a non-geek. However there are limits to my own geek authority, I only read the first book quite late in the piece, i.e. I was over 20, and I didn't like it enough to read the sequels. Also, I am ignorant of the 2000 TV series.