Ipickthiswhiterose

Absolutely. That they genuinely tried to get a PR boost out of Beauty and the Beast for it's, what was it?, 'exclusively gay moment'? was an utter sham. I do think there's this unfortunate situation where the studios and the sheets egg each other on in order to have something to write about sometimes, so more is made out of it than is intended by the filmmaker - but when it's in contrast to the stark absence of same-sex relationships that feature in high-profile movies. It blows my mind that Four Weddings and A Funeral featured a completely normalised, unambiguous, long term same-sex relationship in 1994 in a movie that was immensely popular and made a fortune, and yet Disney (and other mainstream US production houses) would still be here, in 2022, thinking a peck on the lips in the background deserves a badge and the adoring appreciation of the progressive community. Definitely hoping that if, as it sounds, Valkyrie is going to be a in a love story, that it provides unambiguous out-and-out representation in Thor: Love and Thunder. Both Endgame and MoM came across as tokenistic, but an improvement of sorts in that there was no furtively fudging around it.

I think this is a bit of a stretch. I'm not sure that applies when the Is due to

One thing that seems to have gone rarely commented on and yet absolutely blows my mind about the mis-marketing and mis-positioning of Lightyear is that they do not make one scurrock of an attempt to do a single thing with the 'made in the 90s' conceit. A central premise of the entire film is it is from 1995. Why did nobody think of that as a gift? Why at no point did anyone sit down and think about the potential of that, or indeed go "Hmmm, what would that look like" If this was truly a replication of a 1995 live action films why not use actors from the time? Why not, y'know, CAST the film AS IT WOULD HAVE BEEN? Surely this would help achieve both: - Being obvious from the start as to what the film actually WAS, AND - Provide a really interesting concrete gimmick to hang the film on and guarantee articles about, and have fun promos with. Brendan Fraser is literally *right there* to do a voiceover, would have been perfect casting as Buzz in 1995 and - oh - is literally one of the internet's favourite people Angela Bassett (Best Friend) Lisa Bonet (Granddaughter) Christian Slater (Sox) Kathy Bates (Criminal) Geoffrey Rush (Antipodean weirdo) Alicia Silverstone (BF Wife) Andre Braugher (New Boss) ...align perfectly with the cast that we got (and blend and adjust according to your preferences), along with many others would have been perfect to represent what the cast of this movie *would have been*. Heck, get Macauley Culkin to cameo as the rookie at the start. Get Wynona Ryder or Sean Astin in there and feed off Stranger Things. Am I mad or was this not the obvious thing to do?

This is it. This is very much it. Badly marketed in terms of making it appealing Badly marketed in terms of making the purpose of the movie and its relationship to Toy Story clear to audiences Badly marketed in terms of the movie that exists not being the movie that was advertised Badly executed in its second act Badly executed in terms of some of its secondary characters and voice casting Badly executed in terms of consistent tone It's not the worst movie Pixar have put out. But it is definitely the most poorly positioned. Thing is of all the things it IS, it ISNT a cash in. It looks like it is. Heck, a cash-in - with silly adventures, wacky Zurg and aliens being mischievous and cameos from the other toys - would have been better than what this is and certainly made more money. It's a walkthrough of a think piece sci-fi film. But Disneyfied enough that it doesn't even get the benefits of good think piece sci-fi. The fabulousness that is Sox didn't deserve this. Heaven knows how bad bad things would have got without him.

Even if this was hypothetically true (I'm not sure and am not in the US) Turning Red I think would simply have done better due to much stronger word of mouth, positive vibes and a lot of identification with the characters and themes. And also, as intangible as it is, that it is simply a considerably better film in use about every way. I think this is a pretty good point actually. I'm distanced from culture wars in many ways, especially those of the US and the idea anything in this film was anything other than milquetoast and is actually risqué in any way is bizarre. To be honest outside of Sox, the main character involved was the best in the film and her (brief) romantic story one of the few engaging things in it. Fair. I think it would have been expedient to be clear about Allen's connections to Santa Clause 3 and being clear about his place in Disney. I also think it would have been fun to commission Pixar's first live action film about a prima donna actor Chris Evans who refuses to do voiceovers for toys and plucky unemployed voiceover artist Tim Allen who fills in and they solve a toyline related crime together with hilarious consequences. That would have really staved off any aggro. And been a far more fun film than Lightyear. Hmmmmmmmm. I think some of the female character issues have merits - Charlie's Angels being a good example where good, well defined characters at the start of the film became weirdly homogenised in a 'you can do anything' motif. HOWEVER I think it's massive overstated and comes with these rather unfortunate perennial caveat examples of Ripley, Sarah Connor and Princess Leia. Thing is, Ripley and Connor come from horror-aligned genres which is the one area where there has been a template historically for male viewership engaging with female characters - for the simple fact that corporeal threat is universal and non-gendered. Yes men can empathise with Laurie Strode or Sidney Prescott not wanting to get stabbed to death, or Sarah and Riply not wanting to be mutilated or eaten, but that's not engaging with any of their experience as women. Leia on the other hand is, in the original trilogy, a main character but not a figure of identification. Luke is the specific solitary over-the-shoulder figure in the Star Wars OT. I think male empathy with female characters IS an important development at the moment: and usually if people play the Ripley/SarahConnor/Leia game with me I acknowledge that some of their critique of contemporary female 'hero' characters might be correct but challenge them instead to name 5 good female characters *from outside of horror or horror-aligned films* that *they directly relate to the experiences of when watching the film* before proffering them mine.

I should have added "an not in a good way"....to that. That said I wouldn't be surprised if there are some who would have dismissed this film who actually like it. But it's not "If A24 did a Pixar sci fi film" so much as "if A24 did a Pixar sci fi film and a member of the Cars division of Pixar head office kept an eye on it the entire time to make sure it still fulfilled the requisite brief" It's not that it's actively *bad*. I mean, it is in places. I would hope this is the moment everyone realises that for all his skills as a director Taika Waititi is a highly niche actor who is abysmal outside of VERY specific kinds of projects but if that didn't happen after Jojo Rabbit, Free Guy and The Suicide Squad I don't know that it's gong to happen. He is horrendous in this.

Just come back from Lightyear. I'm writing my thoughts before reading anything else on the thread. It is one of the most tonally bizarre films I've ever seen. It's a film with a talking cat and yet it's closer to Solaris, Ad Astra and Moon than any other films you'd ever see with a talking cat. Sure, some of these are Sci-Fi themes, but geez, they needed to be tempered with some actual fun. This is a miserable, dank film. I have been in the movie theatre watching Sonic 2, Bad Guys, TGM and JW:D and seen enthusiastic kids in all even though I didn't love the first and last of those one bit. There were no enthusiastic kids in this showing. Just glum faces, which is all this movie seems to want anytime Sox isnt on screen. The only save I'll say is that I feel somewhat similar about Wall-E and that was embraced. Albeit embraced in the absolute premium era for Pixar. I just dont get it. I don't get what the thinking was when of all the ways they could have done a Buzz Lightyear movie they chose THIS. And I certainly wouldn't be surprised if numbers and estimates for this just go. down and down

It counts, but the big elephant in the room here is that it's a very finite resource. At this point in terms of guaranteed hits they have, at best, Pinocchio, Little Mermaid, Peter Pan, and Snow White left. Two of those are out imminently; most big live version of Pan have been disasters; and Snow White is out of copyright and anyone can do it - and indeed did not that long ago. After that they're either down to non-sure things (which of course would actually likely provide the best movies but are far less likely to be greenly) and remakes of remakes.

Fast and Furious? Mission Impossible? Jumanji? Bond? Sonic? Bad Boys? Ghostbusters Afterlife? Illuminaion Studios Entire Output? Pacific Rim? The Whole Monsterverse? Disney Remakes? I think if there's anything we're swimming in now, it's pure-entertainment blockbuster movies. Sure, SW and Comic books have interconnected worlds, but none of the rest do. This seems to be hearking back to a different era in some way. But in the 90s there were 3ish blockbusters a year (at best 2 per year that 'defined the summer')

I think there's definitely some truth in this, but there will always be a marked difference because, as said by the poster you quoted, the theory comes from assuming Republicans and Democrats have equal access to movie theatres, which they very definitively don't give the urban/rural trends of voting patterns - conservatives will on average live further away from a theatre. Yes Hollywood product is more popular at the coast because it leans liberal but higher population densities also lean both liberal and *being near a coast*. However I think the success of TGM: a film that manages to appeal to conservatives *without non appealing to liberals* does show product is currently not that broad. However Father Stu, a fairly sedate conservative-appealing film didn't do particularly well very recently despite a big star. I'd argue it's quite hard to balance the trend. I'd also suggest suggest that there have been a lot of films this summer like Jurassic World: Dominion, Uncharted, Sonic 2, The Lost City and Doctor Strange 2 that hardly lean liberal at all. That is, unless by *lean liberal* is just to mean 'be set internationally, not be overtly/specifically patriotic, and use a range of demographics'. Which is the concern because of course even if you ignore ethics and just work pragmatically - all of those things are going to then reduce film's abilities to play abroad. Big budget conservative megahits got a big double whammy in the 90s with Forrest Gump and Braveheart, I think aiming for a version of those two films might be something to consider perhaps. The only thing is that in the 90s Forrest Gump and Braveheart didn't overtly alienate liberals...while I think they probably would today in a world where social media means you can check notes.

My 10 most ridiculous things in Jurassic World: Dominion, ranked: Whimsy aside, I think it was the best of the trilogy as it has more fun value from the production design elements (the paleontological dig, the cave scenes, the parachute scene were all lovely and tactile and made me feel invited into the environment) and an extended action scene early on that while rather silly was certainly well choreographed and a good action sequence. Lots of sequences at the beginning of Act 3 felt like a fun theme park experience. The narrative though was a mess, and most of all from my subjective experience is the series has simply never recovered in the human area from having such blandly designed lead characters and casting a pair with so little chemistry. Owen and Clare are the problem with the trilogy for me, not the dinos or even the logical issues. JP: A+ Lost World: C JP 3: C- JW: D+ FK: D Dominion: C-

I've wondered this. Especially given most of the marketing hasn't been particularly clear about what Lightyear 'Is'. Every single trailer and every single spot should have been clear about the 'Andy's favourite film' thing. The vast majority have just gone out there without that explanation and therefore with 'wait, so Toy Story was low key set in 2050?' logic. It's hard to see it totally crashing and burning, but I think we might be in for a Mary Poppins Returns type deal. Maybe. I'd like to be wrong.

The Bad Guys. Really enjoyed it. But then what any dino sequence is to you lot in terms of enjoyment, sequences in which characters disguise themselves incredibly badly and yet somehow it works and everyone falls for it is to me. It has a snake with a monocle and a moustache. That's takes it to at least a 6/10 minimum. the shark pretending to be pregnant adds another 2. This is my weakness.

I dislike Trevorrow's work and I've just come in from a film of his that I didn't like, and have read the treatment of his that was self-evidently not very good. And yet I STILL think he's have been a much better choice for ROS than JJ Abrams. Abrams was UNIQUELY unsuited to the task. I might mock Pratt's magic hands, but it doesn't hold a candle to "somehow Palpatine returned" and "Rey Skywalker".

I mean surely it's just an overexposure issue. And that he's been seemingly quite dissonantly cast in some things recently. He had a moment and then it passed and he's suffering the same way Seth Rogen and Melissa McCarthy, for instance, suffered. His skills were a little overstated (the second coming of Harrison Ford monicker didn't help) and then there's been an overcorrection.

Just got back from Dominion. I have been mean about the series already here so I won't go on any more. I am glad that people who enjoyed it did so. My showing was fairly full, only surpassed this year by TGM (ie more than MOM). I will give it that I found it better than Fallen Kingdom. I think I might even think it's the more entertaining of this trilogy (albeit for me is an incredibly low bar: a C- rather than a JW:D+ or FK:D). But if Morbius was worth weeks worth of trolling memes, the Jurassic-World-magic-hands-move surely deserves the same. I hope that the series shifts towards the enclosed and tension-driven tale again when it next surfaces. Smaller scale (no pun intended) mano-a-mano isolated type situations.

Many different types of horror fans, but I get what you mean. They don't support Men, Firestarter (which I understand is supposed to be rubbish), Northman, Midsommar, X, Studio 666 and other releases that have some variation from the template. But the execrable Nun made gazillions, the Halloween franchise keeps pumping out moneymaking lumps of coal, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and It Chapter 2 were not remotely called out to the degrees they should have been. It's hard work being a horror guy. Thing is, while it seems they're ever positive....they're ever negative as well. Hence it's almost impossible to create a canon of new classics without them basically be at the point where they're straddling other genres enough to barely be horror films any more. For every fan who wants to canonise Hereditary, Suspiria or Witch as a modern masterpiece there's another who refuses to countenance either as anything other than garbage because no jump scares and bit weird = boring.

Setting off to give JW: Dominion a chance in a few hours. Saw Men earlier in the week. Absolutely fantastic, but not a surprise that it had no mainstream mileage even if it was perhaps a liiiiitle more conventional as a horror film, in terms of jump scares and uncanny beats, than things like Hereditary and mother! Interested to see what Maverick will do across the bows of JW:D. Also, I can't help but blurt out that when pitching Top Gunnesque 80s revivals last week I remember someone pitching a Big sequel with Tom Hanks. But surely the natural sequel to Big would be with Elizabeth Perkins and Colin Hanks. Obviously neither are stars and it wouldn't be a star vehicle but as a low budget ultra-cringe comedy about a woman meeting the grown version of the kid she unknowingly hooked up with it might have potential. Anyway, that's a tangent. Also cheering on The Bad Guys' attempt to get to 100. Will hit the x4 OW this weekend!

I'm the one who brought up TFA in this thread. I didn't doubt its gargantuan resounding popularity on release one bit. Or its immense success. If anything my point was based on it - its immediate popularity despite being such an incredibly flawed movie was, in the long run, a very bad thing. In my opinion. I would proffer Rise of Skywalker (and the divisive response to TLJ) as the evidence of that.....ultimately JJ Abrams proposed, and mainstream audiences immediately accepted.....a vision of a franchise that involved no forward momentum. Nothing new. More insulting in fact: A literal repeat presented as an evolution. A vision of Star Wars that unlike any other previous version of canon or non-canon Star Wars, good or bad, had not a scurrock of influence of anything other than itself: Star Wars. I said that in decades from now I suspect that we will perceive TFA (and JW) the way we perceive Jaws 2 today. Please note that Jaws 2 was also a resoundingly successful film on release. Mainstream audiences resounding accepted Jaws 2 just as they accepted The Force Awakens, and just as the former of those films marks a historic landmark in franchisification and pointless sequels that harmed the movie industry irrevocably, we see the same with that one-two whammy of TFA and, to a lesser extent, JW. In my opinion. Neither of those films are as bad as the Lion King remake. But their success paved the way for that movie: a film that sits in the top 10 biggest selling movies of all time despite being the most artistically dead-behind-the-eyes entity that it is possible for a film to be. A film that epitomises this aspect of contemporary filmmaking.

Notice. Not nitpick. Notice. The silliness of everything involving the I-Rex in JW was not something one actively had to nitpick for, it was flagrantly noticeable and only maskable if you really wanted to work hard to suspend disbelief. As was the fact that we were meant to ignore that Clare was functionally evil, and just accept that she was 'a bit misguided'. Of course it was a well-liked movie that was gargantually successful. Minions, Despicable Me 3, the Lion King Remake, the Burton Alice in Wonderland, the Force Awakens, Pirates 4 and the Sing films are also all gargantually successful movies that are well-liked. That doesn't mean they aren't all bad films by many, if not most, measures. A franchise that started with one of the greatest blockbuster entertainment movies ever has been reduced to being the spiritual successor to the Transformers franchise. They were well-liked and successful too. ---- BUT In all that discussion about whether things have been good or not I do want to make it clear that I value your (and others') enjoyment of fun dinosaur adventure films. I think the franchise has lots of potential which is why I think it's interesting that it's really struggled to live up to that potential creatively for so much of the last four and a half films. And to reiterate and really add to the opinion of the last few pages: I concur that the BIGGEST reasons for the love-where-it-existed and success of JW was that genuinely well done realisation of the park in full operation. And that was a one-time cash in. --- I think that these films always were going to struggle outside of closed and isolated environments due to the problem I laid out earlier - as cool as dinos are and as scary in a limited capacity, once the actual contemporary human world with weaponry and logistics are involved, the answer of "how can humans and dinos coexist?" while it sounds cool is just....."because modern humans have the capacity to control them and as a last resort, blow them up". If you have to level-up the dinos to the point they are credibly challenging a lot of weaponry, then they aren't dinos anymore - and especially when put into an urban setting it just becomes barely distinguishable from a kaiju or alien invasion or zombie movie. Which is why I think the ideas mooted around post-apocalyptic, third-world environments, island environments, seafaring environments - anything that gives credible reasons why the army doesn't turn up and blow everything up or why people can't just shot them and pretending that reptiles are bulletproof - are the best ways to go with future instalments. Or why there just shouldn't be a different franchise that comes up with ways of putting dinosaurs into older historical environments so that there is a more reasonable even match. That could be fun.

The thing is EVEN IF you give the I-Rex credit for having FULLY HUMAN-LEVEL INTELLIGENCE, its still doesn't explain: - How it knows what electronics are - That it understands what a tracker is - How it knew not only what a heat tracker is but that they didn't have the heat tracker with them at that moment - How the mechanics of its pen work - It knows the psychology of human beings - How it predicts that the humans would be stupid enough to think it had gone - That it though the humans would be stupid enough to leave the compound open - Why it thought there was anything interesting outside of its compound where it gets fed every day - Why it had never turned invisible in its entire existence until that one moment it decided to execute *the escape plan*, so that the humans wouldn't know it could turn invisible. - How it could create scratching marks convincing enough to make everyone think it had escaped while being so subtle the one (one!) bloke who was watching its pen didn't notice. - How none of the scientists who had operated on this animal for its entire life had any idea what it could and couldn't do. - Why the supposed big massive future attraction and biggest experiment had approximately 20x less attention and security on it than the velociraptors. The I-Rex wasn't some 'plot hole' or anything. It was just magic.

She didn't redeem herself. Remotely. What she was responsible for was not redeemable by feeling bad and trying to save children. That, as you know perfectly well, was not a normal death scene. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. It was a death scene for a big boss villain but the film didn't have the context to do it to a big boss villain so gave a vile, sadistic yet cartoonish death to a side character. Richard Schiff's death in the Lost World was 'raising the stakes'. So were SLJ and Bob Peck's in the original. This was 'pointless sadism imported from a different genre'. Neither of those things is true. One of them was annoying from the perspective of Dr Grant, which was deliberate and directly tied to that character's arc. Doesn't make sense in a world where the military's power is overwhelmingly larger than anything the monsters are capable of. It was a trope from a time where that wasn't true. Presented in a contemporary environment (especially when taken to the actual notions of its application) it's ludicrous. I actually argued the nostalgia element of JW was part of the element done right in the film, or at least in terms of relationship to the original. It wasn't in TFA (an even more egregious film IMO, but that's a different argument). We have seen however that the follow ups followed decent nostalgia usage to shoddy, lazy nostalgia usage in 2 and, likely 3.

????????? Sadistic spectatorship like this is what slasher films and monster mash movies like Piranha are for. Not family popcorn blockbusters. Where on earth was the precedent for this kind of spectatorship in the first movie? Or even any of the first three movies? Or even any era of mainstream filmmaking?

Jurassic World did two things very well - the realisation of the Jurassic Park itself and what that looked and felt like. And it judged the relationship to the first film extremely well. Plus the third dynamic of picking Chris Pratt before he was overexposed and while he was a genuinely inherently likeable and charismatic presence. Those were only two things. But they were pretty massive things that gave the film a lot of its popularity. I also think the velociraptor pen was well done..... ....except the sort-of-credible high security velociraptor pen only served to highlight how ridiculous, dumb and contrived every single stage of the escape sequence was. And the subsequent reduction of any pretence of animals to monsters (exemplified by the IR killing everything for 'sport') The entire rest of the film is pretty awful. The failure to acknowledge or realise BDH was the villain (and giving what should have been her death scene to a side character in what therefore became one of the most obnoxious sequences in a family movie) was bizarre, the characterisation was non existent, the kids annoying and the eternal ridiculous notion that "dinosaurs in the military" is a viable plot point. I maintain the argument that Jurassic World and The Force Awakens being the ultra mega hits they were have been responsible for a lot of the more negative trends we've seen since then and, in the long run, will be seen in later generations the way we look at Jaws 2 (also a massive hit) today.

No Jurassic World film will ever be as good as the Sam Neill Jurassic Park/Event Horizon crossover I have in my head.