BadAtGender

My biggest takeaway so far is that @chasmmi needs to see more films. Or perhaps any films.

Arrival feels like the most likely winner. While it's pretty clear the nominees often get a lot of big blockbuster types, the winner tends to be something that has more academy appeal. They want films that look good, yes, but they also want them to be good, in an important way. So if the nominees are, oh, Strange, Rogue One, Jungle Book, some other blockbuster and Arrival, well, Arrival is the one that hits the right buttons.

The other thing about Spirited Away was that John Lasseter was pushing it (and Miyazaki in general) very, very hard at the time. (If you watch the Disney release DVDs of the Ghibli films from around then, several of them have him doing a little introduction where he is super excited to show you this great film.) Lilo & Stitch was well liked, but it didn't have any sort of push that was equitable. Plus, the entire nature of how Spirited Away was released probably means that the normal rules for animation winners don't exactly apply. In general, the biggest DOM box office film wins, because many academy voters probably aren't particularly interested in seeking out all the nominees, so they just go with whatever their kids/grandkids like the most. But Spirited Away had a domestic push that was much more akin to an indie sensation film. So it's more likely that they'd be exposed to it directly than because it was the chosen film for a family weekend.

That's the plan, although I'm not entirely sure when I'll have the time to do all the write-ups. NaNoWriMo is coming up fast, and that's going to eat up my November. Plus I need to get my Winter Game predicts and stuff done in the next couple weeks. So it might have to happen in December.

More people need to see Watership Down.

I think the problem with Rise of the Guardians is that while it has a lot of great elements, the film as a whole is just kinda weak. This is pretty standard for William Joyce. If you describe what the film is about to me, I'll be nodding along and going "yeah, yeah, that sounds great!" but after watching the film itself, I'm just sorta "it's okay," and other than the base concepts there isn't anything that gets me excited. I wanted to like Guardians and Epic and Meet the Robinsons and Robots a lot more than I actually do.

Clearly this means more people need to see Ernest and Celestine.

Netflix' market cap is currently about $45 billion. Disney's is $150 billion. So in order to acquire Netflix, they'd probably have to pony up and equivalent of a quarter to a third of the value of the entire Disney company. Netflix is over an order of magnitude bigger than what Pixar, Marvel, or Lucasfilm were valued for their acquisition. And, as you say, Netflix doesn't seem to want to be acquired, so it's not like they're willing to give a discount. I'd hazard to guess that even if Disney might WANT to acquire Netflix, it can't. To put it another way, Netflix is about as valuable as 21s Century Fox, two thirds as valuable as Time Warner, and three times as valuable as Viacom. Actually, given the rights issues with X-Men, FF, and Star Wars episode 4, it seems more likely to me that Disney would acquire Fox than Netflix. But in either case, it'd probably be a company merger.

The great thing about the Marvel Netflix Universe is that it has some amazing casting. On occasion the character beats are one-note, but the actors they choose can generally hit that note every single time, so it makes for some very enjoyable TV. Plus, they seem quite willing to tackle some topics that you wouldn't expect from a superhero property. The downside is that their plotting and pacing leave a fair bit to be desired. Daredevil has two straight seasons that started strongly and then hit a meandering middle that took the wind out of the sails, such that the endings don't happen at the right point. Jessica Jones is better, mostly because it's arrow-focused on being about a character arc, but even so there were a handful of episodes that were filler. If they cut down each season to 8 or 10 episodes, instead of thirteen, it would improve things dramatically, IMO. Also, with DD season 1, we had a strong exploration of two character dynamics, with Matt discovering how to be a hero and Fisk seeing what lengths he'd be driven to. The second season... lost that, and even with the strong Punisher character, and a good plotline for Foggy and Karen, it didn't have anything to really hold the show together. Everything with The Hand felt intrusive and eventually boring, such that it's difficult to care what happens to Electra, even if Elodie Yung is great in the role. I worry that Jessica Jones season 2 is going to run into the same problem, because her story is largely one about coming to terms of what happened to her and then taking action against Killgrave because of it. Where can it go that doesn't feel like a weak afterthought. (In the comics, it's notable that she hasn't really had anything major to do except have a baby since the conclusion of Alias. I haven't had a chance to check out Luke Cage, and my hopes are high, but I also expect that it's going to start off very strong and then lose its way a bit, just based on past MNU history. (The other problem with the MNU besides pacing is the one that plagues all non-movie parts of the MCU: while they take place in the same universe as the movies, the movies do not take place in the same universe as them. So at this point I just choose to believe the Netflix shows aren't connected to the movies at all.)

It says a lot that Depp is probably the least exciting member of the cast.

I need to read Tele's rant. Which page is it on?

That wasn't even the best joke in the Madagascar 3 trailer.

Oh, no. Didn't I say it's a good joke?

I realized last night I'm debating the inclusion of one movie on my list because of a single joke. Like, the rest of the movie is fine, but that one joke is just amazingly great.

Which movies effectively killed their studios when they failed? Or, if we're looking at risky successes, which could have seriously harmed the studio?

Am I supposed to be bragging more? I don't know how this champion thing works.

Quite aware. It's still racist casting.

Also did Tele really have the same reaction as me? I haven't read the thread, so it's amusing if we came to that independently.

It doesn't matter what they want? Like, this might be exactly the thing that they wanted to make, but that doesn't mean it will be a good thing. There are some great science fictional concepts here, but many of them not only don't need a movie screen to be realized, but are served in a lesser way because of them. The past... forty or so years has warped the perception of science fiction as being this grand scale thing that requires the cutting edge special effects to be made, and while that's nice and all, by doing so it ties the beats of the story directly to the technology that can be used, because the needs to pay off the massive budget come by doing these crowd-pleasing gestures. The only way to get around that is to go indie. And doing that comes at the expense of doing the other thing that sci-fi does besides grand scope, which is being the genre of just picking hard into an idea. The latter can be equally exciting, but it isn't necessarily cinematic, which is why many, many sci-fi films don't work as well with concepts the way something on the page would. None of this means that Passengers isn't going to be good, it's just that with the ideas they're apparently pushing, I can't help but think it'd be a better novel than a movie.

I've got fifty or so in order, another couple dozen that need to be placed, and a growing list of "does this make it?" which should easily get me to 100. I'll probably spare myself the agony of trying to figure out what to cut and just list everything. Though I won't be posting the list here. I think after all's said and done, I'll start a countdown of my own.

Seems okay, but I don't feel that excited. I think if it was a sci-fi novel that I'd probably enjoy it a lot, but I don't know if a movie is doing the story concept the best justice. Invariably, a movie, especially in this market, requires a big, explodey climax, and that doesn't seem to be the way to go if you're doing an introspective character piece or a mystery.

What's weird is that after watching Rebels, I find myself quite a bit more excited about Star Wars, digging into the history and little plot points and such, but TFA still leaves me cold, even if I can find a lot of things in TFA to be exciting and interesting. I think it's because there's a way it could have been something that both acknowledged and felt true to the history of Star Wars while not enslaving itself to that history, but it really didn't try to be anything other than a nostalgia cannon. What's fun though, if you watch the "theory about film music" video, is you see that Lucas himself was fueled by nostalgia. Not just the music, but also various other things. Kurosawa's an obvious one (plot taken from The Hidden Fortress, and all), but then you get into the classic science fictional concepts, like Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter stories and such. The thing is, he was using that nostalgia as fuel for his own creation, however derivative all those elements are, the made-up whole is something invigorating, if not exactly new. But now, nearly forty years on, you get TFA, which is only fueled by the nostalgia of the original trilogy. So even if there are a few fresh elements, like a female and POC main characters, the actual execution feels like little more than regurgitation of the, well, delight that someone felt watching one of the OT films in the theater for the first time. And while that's momentarily good, it doesn't have that element of synthesis that was present before. Lucas, for all his later career troubles, was still attempting to do something new with the prequel trilogy. He misstepped, sure, and needed someone to tell him no on occasion, but he was pretty strongly dedicated to expanding the world and creating new layered, context to it. So the PT very much felt like it was taking place somewhere different than the OT, except for the direct connection scenes on Tattooine. Naboo, Coruscant, Geonosis, and so forth were all different. But what do we have in TFA? A desert planet that is not Tattooine, a forest planet that is not Endor, and a snow planet that is not Hoth while also being a Death Star that is not the Death Star. Was there any particuarly story-driving reason that Jakku had to be an equally barren, sandy wasteland rather than, oh, a rugged mountain-scape of archeological adventuring a-la Machu Picchu? So it's frustrating, but at the same time, there are all the non-movie things that are showcasing how good Star Wars can be. I'm becoming convinced that Ahsoka Tano is one of the greatest characters in the entire franchise, full of pathos and tragedy, but not mired in in. Some of the stuff with her in Rebels season 2 sent legit chills down my spine it's so good. Plus, man they do some great work with lightsabers. Part of me would be overjoyed if she actually showed up in one of the films, but part of me is like, no, I want her story to continue without a spoiler reveal. But, to bring it back around, I don't think the problem is that Star Wars gets a free pass, I think it's that dedicated fans of pretty much any property are willfully blind to the faults in that property. Star Wars isn't unique in that regard, it's just bigger so the effect is magnified.

I'm up to 73 or so definites. A handful of question marks that may make it. And about half a dozen to watch. Still some films that I won't get to in time, sadly.

Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed most of the Marvel films when I saw them. But they're still pretty bad as films.