Ipickthiswhiterose
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Posts posted by Ipickthiswhiterose
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6 hours ago, excel1 said:
meh what similarly sized budget film doesn't have the occasional suspension of disbelief requirement?
Most? other than Batman Begins, what else is even comparable?
But your first point demonstrates the issue, doesn't it. It wants to have its "I'm a superhero movie and therefore am just silly fun and don't need to adhere to logic and have a villain that is essentially magic" cake and eat it in a manner that says "I'm a gritty realistic crime drama like Heat".
And you can go with that, or not go with that. But the same people who try to claim it's sophisticated on moment, then turn round when it's held up to scrutiny and say "ah, come on suspend your disbelief it's a blockbuster".
As for comparability: X2, Unbreakable and The Incredibles were all superhero movies released before The Dark Knight and for differing reasons were more thematically rich.
The Rocketeer, Spider-Man 1 & 2, Batman and Returns, Blade 2 and SMTMP were all superhero movies released before The Dark Knight that have a smooth, consistent, efficient vision without the dissonance at the core of TDK.
But I think the best comparison is Jurassic Park. Specifically Michael Crichton in general. He managed to sell "here is some completely made up bull science that I'm pretending is a deep and rich cultural issue but is actually just kind of some hokum to make it feel like this hugely fun populist stuff is actually a lot deeper and closer to 'proper' sci-fi than it actually is." and he did it perfectly. IMO a lot better than Nolan does, but it's very much the same trick that Nolan employs in TDK. It becomes a matter I suppose of how much do you think that trick is genius and how much do you think it's cheap.
So I experience Jurassic Park as being much, MUCH better at pulling that similar trick than TDK (and also at providing the outright-fun part, but that's personal). But is that cause it's better or is because I watched Jurassic Park for the first time when I was 11 and Dark Knight when I was 26?
Oh and...for someone who really, really went hard at James Bond for 'ripping off' beats of The Dark Knight you spend an AWFUL lot of time waxing lyrical about how brave and original it is for TDK to kill off it's Damsel in Distress......given that Casino Royale had come out two years earlier (and PS not a Bond fan and there are other examples as well, just thought your oversight here is particularly indicative of not very objective claims).
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Amadeus would have been an easy top 10 and likely top 5 for me too, but sounds like it was ineligible. No harm.
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3 hours ago, Liiviig 1998 said:
The takes we are seeing are probably just the nostalgia and gimmick waring off and some realizing it's an "A" movie and not " A+" it was upon first viewing and release for some. And ofcorse it being the internet negative hot takes are more pronounced.
The takes you are seeing are because the entire plot of the film hinges on firstly, one character agreeing to something totally at odds with everything previously established about that character; and then secondly, another character randomly pulling a skill (that it's been established takes months if not years to learn) from his own backside in a crunchingly clunky manner.
Those aren't two tangential things that happened. That's not nit-picking. Those are literally the two primary inciting incidents of the film.
Also as pointed out elsewhere the film has 5 antagonists, but only has any function for one of them.
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2 hours ago, SchumacherFTW said:
Nah, it's more simple, it's a mediocre movie but an all time great opening night theater experience
This is very accurate as a summary of No Way Home and also sums up an understanding of something so few really get in critical evaluation: heterogeneity of spectatorship is not just about personal subjective taste but about context of the very first viewing.
Everyone who had that first weekend experience of NWH saw one thing. Most likely an outrageously awesome blockbuster with memorable shared moments.
Nearly anyone who ever watches NWH and certainly everyone who watches it outside of its specific series of cultural contexts will see a completely different, ok at best and frankly outright bad at worst, movie.
And this differentiation won't go away just by the first group watching the film again but out of context. All the explanation and repeat watches in the world won't rub away the experience of that first viewing - that person's still going to think it's awesome.
And this to some degree applies to just so many films...but No Way Home was a particularly distinct one.
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12 minutes ago, Jonwo said:
Strays was downright rejected by audiences.
Would it be outrageous to suggest the widespread audience disdain for Sausage Party might have contributed to the Strays failure?
Feels like it was the film that really hit home that "Things saying things but with Frat boy humour added" had had its day.
Happytime Murders maybe a strong warning sign for this movie also.
Can't shake the sensation this exact film would have been a massive hit a decade/fifteen years ago. It's just the epitome of a film whose time it most decidedly isn't.
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7 hours ago, PlatnumRoyce said:
Those sorts of takes annoy me (it's always year zero and the new film in theaters is the most important thing in the world) and I was inclined to dunk on it but when I crunched some numbers...she kinda had a point. Hunger Games very clearly . Sure, you need to adjust for inflation and market growth but Hunger Games pretty clearly causes a spike in female lead action/action&adventure genre films.
Yeah, this little minor internet controversy was years after "the internet" had turned on JLaw
It is correct that she had something of a point (how much is to her credit and how much to Susan Collins is perhaps contestable, nevertheless...)
It points to one of the more annoying arguments of the online types when it comes to female characters. Because the same names always get trotted out as the supposed excuse for disliking the female characters du jour: "It's not a general thing, I LOVE x female characters!" when x characters are.... Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, maybe Leia, maybe Lara Croft etc.
Pretty much all those "But I like female characters" can be fit into two categories:
1. Horror and horror-aligned characters: (Ripley, Connor, Laurie Strode etc) - the threat of physical mutilation and death is universal. It isn't gendered. As such, primarily identifying with a character on the basis of fear, threat and the dynamics of death/survival isn't especially representative of being empathetic of the female experience, just of the universal survival instinct.
2. Well executed two-dimensional and non-empathetic characters (Leia, Lara Croft, The Bride) - Characters that are not really meant to be empathised with in the first place and are just well executed versions of standard storytelling functional characters. Leia is very well done, but Luke is the only over-the-shoulder character in the OT and the only character not just based on a standard 2-d framework.
Katniss does outstrip both of those types even if there is a touch of both those elements in her character design.
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8 minutes ago, Ozymandias said:
wheres that money in that bro?
I get that, of course, but there's far more money in not making a movie than making a movie that loses money because it doesn't know what it is.
All of this is happening because Disney have blown their BATB, TLK, Aladdin and TLM sure-thing, renaissance cash cow wad and are now left with properties that clearly involve rolling the dice much more.
Depp-as-Mad Hatter and Jolie-as-Maleficent are performances I absolutely hated, but I could still 100% make sense of in terms of iconography. Stone-as-Cruella made the trifecta of films where they hung actors on roles above featuring the branding of a remake. That approach was also reasonably successful. Maybe that's what they're going for.
But that's where the Gadot casting really comes in. Whether one likes Depp, Jolie or Stone they are at least very seasoned and established actors. Gadot seems like an icon-casting attempt. But it's an icon casting attempt with someone who has never appeared to have anything like the chops required.
I mean she's getting the Cleopatra thing at the same time. Maybe she drastically improves very quickly - such things have happened before. But it seems like a hell of a gamble.
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I think elements of the personal aside, it does sound like they're struggling to know what to do with this film and what identity they want it to have.
Tale of Terror had a very clear identity of being Snow White as spooky.
Mirror, Mirror not quite as much of an identity but still really leaned heavily into it being a teen drama.
Huntsman obviously leaned hard into nature iconography and certain elements of the aesthetics.
But none of them were saddled with the Disney film tag and were working with the Grimm template.
This is still trying to be the 'Disney Snow White' while also not being the Disney Snow White. I mean, other than the visual of the costume what does it sound like they still have that's still Disney Snow White and not just any generic Snow White - or even something that isn't Snow White at all?
I think it's Dan Murrell who says....You can just not make the movie.
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7 minutes ago, Jake Gittes said:
Middlebrow biopics are a plague and the Academy sucks for always taking the bait but Denzel wasn't doing a rigid impersonation and didn't have prosthetics and dramatic visual changes to hide behind. The degree of difficulty for him in portraying Malcolm at so many stages of his life and still keeping him a coherent individual was very high, like Peter O'Toole in LOA it is exactly the kind of biopic performance that is worth the plaudits.
Great perspective, thank you.
There is a variation, of course. I hear so much special pleading for the genre due to the big names - Day Lewis for Lincoln is a typical one that I have no time for. But yes maybe Denzel was an exception (perhaps Downey jr in Chaplin too).
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32 minutes ago, SchumacherFTW said:
You must be fun at parties
I have perspectives and I give argument and justification for them. I don't like giving perspectives without saying why I have them.
You can disagree. I'm sure many do. Thats fine. Would be happy to hear you argument against. Certainly love to hear a justification for half the Best Actor and Actress awards since 2000 going to the same minority niche genre. Or to hear your perspective on the difference between subjectivity of the viewer's choice to determine value of art, versus subjectivity of art itself.
Either way, dont see the need to be agressively mean spirited about it though.
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11 minutes ago, Liiviig 1998 said:
Lots of young women musicians, celebrities etc .... say dumb shit on the internet and are fine.
Anne Hathaway??
I get what both sides are saying here with Anne Hathaway.
She got a massive backlash and there was a couple of years where bashing on Anne Hathaway was cool.
However on the other side of that I'd say, that was arguably less a douchebag-talking-head-dudes-on-youtube thing and more of a mean girl, female-led Twitter thing. Where she was being positioned as 'insincere' and distanced compared to the 'relatable' new figure of Jennifer Lawrence (it was the Hunger Games /Twilight/YA crowd mostly responsible IIRC)
The only genuinely silly thing Anne Hathaway ever did was talk about "getting overweight" and "putting on padding" for her "fat self" in The Devil Wears Prada. Which was right at the tail end - indeed probably after - the worst excesses of the 90s/00s "any woman who isn't stick thin is fat" era and so she copped it a bit for being behind the times and anti-woman with that. But she never did anything worth getting flamed the way she was for a couple of years.
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2 hours ago, baumer said:
Judging someone's performance is completely subjective though at the same time.
It isn't completely subjective though.
What you choose to value in a performance is subjective, but the elements of the performance themselves aren't.
A pretty good example of this is when people use stills to supposedly evidence an actor's transformational brilliance in replicating a biopic role, when all they're actually doing is evidencing the quality of costume, makeup and hair - nothing to do with the acting at all.
And 'replicating the pre-existing behaviour of another' is very literally the simplest thing you can ask an actor to do.
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8 hours ago, DAR said:
For my money it’s the best acting performance ever.I've not got time for this today so I can't justify this with the long post I'd like. Which is probably for the better for everyone as I'll likely still ramble on at unnecessary length to a one-line provocation.
But I'm firmly in the camp that says biopic performances are rarely, if never, worthy of awards.
Replicating the behaviour of an established person simply isn't in the same category of collaborating with a writer to make something original.
There are exceptions: expressionism-style biopics where replication of behaviour isn't the point (eg The Favourite) and hidden-figures style stories where generally the story is what's replicated, not the person (eg Dallas Buyer's Club) are fine. But in general biopics are a wildly overlavished and overpraised genre, that mostly gets the accolades it does because it's easy for non-specialists to decided whether an actor is doing 'good' acting or not because it's like that person. And because they have the sense of being 'worthy' and have a misguided sense of being somehow on a higher plain of art than other genres since the stories of biopics often relate to those of important people.
Until last year, half of the Best Actor and Actress Oscars since 2000 had gone to Biopics. Including two the previous year in Smith and Chastain that were just preposterously Oscar-pandering bait.
Obviously the Malik Oscar was the apotheosis of this (actually I'd argue Zellweger was, but Malik's is more obvious) where quite literally let's be honest Freddie Mercury won an Oscar, along with the costume and wardrobe departments. But the trend has largely been allowed to go wild unfettered because so many of the Biopic awards have gone to widely-accepted greats: Oldman, Seymour Hoffman, Streep, Blanchett, Bullock, Brody, Day Lewis, Mirren. It's hard to argue against these actors but they all got Oscars for performances that were in none of their personal top 10 (heck, Streep's Thatcher impression is probably not even in her Top 25).
I'm not saying Malcolm X isn't a very good film and Washington isn't good in it. It is and he is. But the inherent "Worthiness" of the subject matter shouldn't - as is what happens with Oscars an Biopics - cloud the fact that the acting performance is easier, not harder, than something like Man on Fire.
Washington is IMO ironically one of the very few who got his Oscar for the right film, rather than the wrong one. Training Day is his best performance. I'd take Mo'Better Blues and John Q as his second and third, but there are lots of options.
Is this an irrationally long post for this? Yes. Do people care about this? No.
But lordy something in me snapped three years ago when Same Rockwell (who is one of my favourite actors) got nominated for a freaking Oscar for giving LITERALLY A 10 MINUTE SNL GEORGE BUSH IMPRESSION. And it's never recovered.
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15 minutes ago, MovieMan89 said:
Of course it’s outdated, why would anyone give Zegler crap for that?
L-i-t-e-r-a-l-l-y written two extended posts explaining exactly that.
It's not about arguing the original isn't outdated. How many times do folks have to say that? Do we now just permanently live in a world where people are only capable of hearing others say or write what they pre-assume they're going to write?
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1 hour ago, WittyUsername said:
I mean, there is an argument to be made that Snow White in the original film is too passive a protagonist.
See my last post.
Princesses as rendered in fairy-tale stories tended to be passive from 1935ish-1955ish.
Which is why they were restlessly critiqued from the 30s onwards, and especially from the 60s onwards and why there are several remakes of those stories, including one notable one literally of Snow White, that makes Snow White have much more agency.
But the makers and stars of the film are acting like giving Princesses more agency is something they themselves are the first people to notice and do something about.
When Princesses with plenty of agency have been around since the 60s and have been the norm since the 90s. And also had agency in the original stories that the 30s to 50s were mere adaptations of.
As grim identified above, this dynamic is so silly and so played out that the Beauty and the Beast film tried to take Belle - who is so fundamentally designed as an outsider who has her own agency and doesn't care how she's perceived that it is the LITERAL CORE DEFINITIONAL TRAIT OF THE CHARACTER - and give her "more" agency by some of the most arbitrary nonsense you can imagine.
It's not that nobody agrees Snow White was too passive in the 30s. Everyone pretty much agrees on that. It's that there's nothing interesting there because everyone has agreed on that for half a century and now, if you listen to some of the statement, there is also increasingly an unhelpful conflation between "is passive" and "is feminine and has some traditional feminine goals". Which is what I think Valonqar was pointing out.
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1 hour ago, vale9001 said:
I mean the fact the prince Is a totally faceless character is not that great. They all were in these animated movies, so if as It happened with Cinderella and TLM they make their characters with a personality and the relationship with the princess changes what's the problem?. It's not 1937-1950-1989 anymore.
As said 2 millions times: some people act as the animated movies were respectful of the source material. They were already "politically correct" movies...corrected for their age.
I understand.
But it's also not 1998 when Ever After: A Cinderella Story came out with the selling point being the princess had increased agency and while romance was included it didn't have old fashioned relationship dynamics.
Or 2004 when Ella Enchanted did the same.
Nor is it 2012 when Snow White and the Huntsman came out with the same thing in terms of dynamics.
Nor is it 1998, 2009 and 2010 when Mulan, The Princess and the Frog and Tangled all came out with Disney themselves identifying and emphasising princess characters with drastically different degrees of agency to the past and to their love interests.
Not that all these movies can't co-exist with new ones that do similar.
But in terms of self-commentary regarding "The Formula"..."The formula" was neither the original formula (as you say) not has it been "the formula" for the last 30 years.
So at some point it seems as though the only people obsessed with what "the formula" was from about 1935-55 are people who want to be for some reason. And among those reasons is just pretending that a critique that has existed for nearly a hundred years, about a narrative format that been actively away from the norm for decades, is still somehow a fresh critique that *this new movie* is the first, or nearly, the first to have ever addressed.
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How is it even worse than my mentally prepared "well at least it can't be so bad that....."?
And then it makes you double think. Like, why is Dog Day Afternoon the one that made it through?
I mean, I like Dog Day Afternoon, it was on my list and it's one of the only films that justifies its place but like ----- what is it about Dog Day Afternoon that it was spared where East of Eden and The Mission and the Devils and The Public Enemy and McCabe and Mrs Miller all got shunned?
What's the Over/Under on Joker v Casablanca by the way. Anyone want to predict?
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Just now, baumer said:
I never did get my list in but the Matrix and The dark Knight were 1-2 on my list and I'm 52 years old.
Naturally.
People over 40 are allowed to have suspect taste too.
(Joke)
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4 minutes ago, grim22 said:
There's zero use in complaining about movie placements. The list will be very reflective of the forums demographics than the actual history of WB.
Which is a roundabout way of saying, the top 2 will likely be The Dark Knight and The Matrix in whichever order.
1. Think it was pretty clear there that my post about Scooby Doo versus Zombies was quite sardonic in nature.
2. Also think it's pretty clear it's a trade off: the main demographics of the forum get to validate their love of The Matrix and The Dark Knight etc and ongoing beliefs that these are all time great films, with the trade off being that the rest of us get to clown on both the relative recency bias and banality of those choices.
3. It even pays off perfectly nicely because we get to have our fun and feel superior while they get to win in the end where despite whatever carping we do their movies are obviously going to dominate and so as much as I or others can make fun of "Batman V Bugs Bunny but we pretend it's a piece of gritty realism" and "The Truman Show but a year later and nowhere near as clever or relevant", they win. And we lose. And are officially stamped as being Wrong (TM)
It's a good system for everyone. I think it works. So long as it stays playful and we acknowledge that Eric has taken all the time to do this and the hard work involved and is not personally responsible for the wider tastes of the forum.
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2 hours ago, WorkingonaName said:
Creed placed 60 spots higher then Once Upon a Time in America.
Scooby Doo on Zombie Island came in 2 spots higher than The Elephant Man.
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Unless Gal Gadot improves her acting incredibly quickly this one is going to be a disaster.
You can use perfect looking, icon-aesthetic folks as heroes like Superman, Wonder Woman and so on if you do everything right around them.
But giving the gun villain role to someone who has never shown any range at all is quite the choice.
Gadot was even found out as Wonder Woman the moment they gave her the exposition function in JL.
Seems like this movie is a weird mix of 'Well, if you're going to do Snow White that differently, why are you even doing Snow White?'; and a bit of a PR disaster as Rachel Zegler is a very talented young woman and I would cast no aspersions on her IRL personality, but she is obviously extremely limited in her interactive experiences into a Hollywood and social media Gen Z bubble.
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5 minutes ago, Cap said:
The fact she had Jeremy Brett eating out of her hand and just didn’t tap that. Giiiiirl.
I will say the one scene in that movie, which always gets me, is when they come back from the party. And he’s taking credit for all of her successes. The way Audrey Hepburn just kind of like shrinks her body and tries to become one with the wall is so gut-wrenching. Such a good piece of business. Gets me every time.
Jeremy Brett is INCREDIBLE in My Fair Lady.
The role could so easily be a nothing romantic male lead. So easily. He fits so many dimensions and so much likability into that screentime.
Always watch him like a hawk as he was my Drama School tutors long-term answer for GOAT alongside Alan Howard. And this was a guy who had acted alongside Olivier, Dench, Wanamaker, McKellen and every other 20th Century great you can name.
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Also a small note with Mary Poppins having been brought up to take a moment to acknowledge the utter joyfulness it is that 4 of the main cast of Mary Poppins, the 1964 Best Picture Winner, are still alive and kicking in 2023!!!!
JA, DVD, Glynis Johns - the original Desiree Armfeldt - still with us at 99, and Karen Dotrice.
Of course tragically that was offset somewhat by the sad loss of Matthew Garber at just 21.
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2 hours ago, Eric the Turtle said:
Audrey Hepburn was great, but tbh, if Jack Warner wasn't such a pigheaded idiot and gave us Julie Andrews as Eliza, it'd be a whole other story.
(Although I did have problems with the Pygmalion backdrop, which granted will always be problematic. But in this, I feel like Higgins was never really confronted or combatted against with his misogyny and that his "growth" wasn't earned. When Eliza came back, it was a touch too gross for me. If anything, I think Pretty Woman handled it better, even if that one is also problematic)
Yes, and the beast is its own dynamic away from Pygmalion, ultimately saying much less about class.
Interesting isn't it. Ultimately in the UK, Academia as represented by Higgins was in some ways accepted as kind of SIDEWAYS from the class system rather than being itself inherently upper class (even though objectively that's what it was). To some British analysts, especially of the time, Higgins naturally comes across as the outsider in comparison to the Colonel and Freddy's upper class. Especially as his mother is a hummingbird socialite (and therefore coded as a regressive Neo-Rich rather than having 'proper' heritage). Of course to Americans and indeed the more contemporary eye in general Higgins reads more of the institutional elite than anyone else.
But my perception is if we still celebrate The Wizard of Oz which made some of the most regressive alterations to the source material and worst endings in movie history (the plot essentially ending up as "Woman dreams of a better life, gets knocked on the head, wakes up with that silly idea having been smacked out of her good and proper") then something as cheekily regressive as "Where are my slippers" has some charm within it at least. And I do think that it helps for that to have AH rather than JA - whose Eliza the world was robbed of but gave us Maria and Poppins in the process - for that slight submissive element. Though one certainly hopes at the end the return is simply a cordial visitation and resumed friendship rather than anything more.
But some of those scenes are sumptuous, the performances electric, the sequences some of the best musical theatre adaptations made. Yes, the musical genre was already at its peak of popularity but it made sure the boom stayed around a few more years.
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Whilst it happens at the end of the movie I would actually argue that Young Sherlock Holmes is the most surprising 'actually kills the love interest' movie moment. And is one of the more legitimately early ones of the modern version of the trope (1985).
Really captures out-of-nowhereness, callousness and pointlessness. It's only just within the tone of the movie, but because it's only just within the tone of the movie it works brutally well. Takes advantage of the fact that up to that point Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone, whose styles it clearly emulated, had never gone for the gutpunch ending despite having styles that seemed like they might.