AngelheadedHipster wrote: ↑Sat Dec 04, 2021 8:44 pm
Happy that we can agree Blade Runner 2049 sucks. Recently watched the Blade Runner movies back to back and it's baffling how some people think of 49 as a sequel on par or even better than the original. Apart from the massive, Vangelis shaped hole right in the center of it, it's such a dull and lifeless movie, both in terms of writing and presentation.
I understand what the movie is going for. It's basically a retelling of pinocchio, the wooden puppet who wanted to be real, with some religious overtones about old testament vs new testament logic.
My problem with it is that I don't understand why the movie is so dedicated to wasting my fucking time with senseless worldbuilding and why it looks like trash.
The villain of the movie, Jared Leto, a thinly veiled yahweh allegory making men out of clay. He's the richest man in the galaxy, not the world but every known off world colony. So obviously, the solution for each and every one of his problems, is to send his kung-fu dominatrix underling to have fist fights with rian gosling, WTF!?
If you need something from the police morgue and you have limitless money, you bribe someone. That's not just the movie's logic, that's real world logic that is so basic, that even children understand it.
If we're going for fairytale logic, where things don't necessarily have to make literal sense because it's just a morality tale, then there's no reason for all the senseless corporate worldbuilding then. Everyone fills their mouths with meaningless drivel about "Hope" and "change" almost like an Obama speech (LOL!), the original movie opted to ditch the horrid narration from the theatrical cut to make the visuals speak for themselves. 2049 just has a virtual chola miku waifu substituting for the narration.
It's just so fucking bad, and it's a glaring example of a director who thinks himself smart, that is actually retarded. Every shot is held for minutes but there's literally nothing to see.
Directors like Kubrick or Lynch have very long and slow takes because there's a lot of detail to take in, and they give you enough time to consider what's going on in the movie and take it all in.
Villeneuve and many like him, being retarded, assume that long takes are a shorthand for "intelligent" filmmaking. It's almost like a new movement in american cinema, where they will shoot MCU-level scripts but stretch every shot as long as possible to imply some depth.
I felt the same way about Joker which put me to sleep lol. It has the pretension of being a smart movie for human beings, but they go through the trouble of spelling every single minute aspect of its titular character in exposition, going as far as to have a flashback sequence where you are shown AND told that the main character (who is established as being insane since the first scene) was not actually fucking the shit out of his hispanic neighbor, and was having delusions.
It's actually an evolution of Christopher Nolan's style of filmmaking, which I affectionately call "bad", where the script is written out exactly like a book. What would have been narration in the novel is relegated to tertiary characters sitting down and spouting exposition, and there's absolutely zero visual storytelling going on in what is supposedly a visual medium. But nerds loved it because "he finally took batman seriously!" so now you're stuck with it because every piece of media in the USA is made for twitter nerds for some reason lol.
Nolan's style of filmmaking (and by proxy his imitators') is so antithetical to cinema that his actors don't even get to act, unless they improvise, because everything you know about his characters is told to you in exposition by tertiary characters sitting down.
It also makes things so predictable because since everyone lacks any human emotion or personal history, you can predict every single plot point because everything that isn't exposition sticks out like a sore thumb. Like Muh Cocaine's speech in TDKR, which was obviously setting up an ending twist because that character never had another human moment in three movies.
It got to absurd lenghts in Interstellar when even the main character feeling love for his children was just a set up for a final twist where love is a fifth dimensional language that transcends space and time.
Say what you want about the Lynch movie, but at least there was a degree of creativity to how it interpreted the book, sure, Lynch didn't seem to take the worldbuilding very seriously, but at least he brought a certain life to it were Villeneuve's movie is this colourless, textureless brutalist monolith of people expressionlessly reciting dialogue from the book.
Yeah I think the Lynch movie is fine. It would have been better if he actually got to edit it because I think its main problem is that it doesen't flow very well (though I haven't seen it in years.)
Obviously it doesen't hold up to the rest of his filmography but it's fine as some popcorn entertainment. Hell I wish modern popcorn entertainment were as good as Lynch's Dune.
I haven't seen the new one because I don't really go to the theater with people anymore, and without anyone to drag me I had no incentive to see it. I have a friend who keeps begging me to watch the new spider-man movie but I told him I would sooner end my life
Aside from that, it's not like I consider everything short of arthouse stuff to be beneath me. If anything, when it comes to movies I've started appreciating stuff that's mainly just concerned with the spectacle of itself. The kind of thing directed by people like Michael Bay, the Wachowski's or Zack Snyder, action fare that puts iconography and spectacle first.
Yeah I actually like Zack Snyder's capeshit movies even (which is another thing that's considered "right wing trump nazi" now) because they are just action movies that dare to have some pathos and stakes, instead of constantly winking at the audience reminding them that they're "in the joke". I mean looking good should be the first pre-requisite for any watchable movie (since it's a visual medium) and Snyder is really one of the few people who has developed a visual style around CGI.
The funny part of course being that the way they direct action owes a lot to (mainly Japanese) video games and animation. Mainly for how absent actually pleasing visual direction is from shit like the MCU or modern Star Wars, those might as well not have directors at all. Hell, Pain and Gain is one of the best movies from the last decade and it was critically reviled.
I had no idea the movie was critically reviled, WTF?!
"I'M STRONG! I'M BIG! I'M HOT!"
I actually heard Armond White say (I'm paraphrasing) that the movie was one of the best satyres of American exceptionalism and that the wolf of wallstreet paled in comparison, which I agree with.
I still don't understand why Armond White became a meme online when most of his opinions on movies are actually sound. Though I don't much care for his political rethoric. (Not that I disagree. I know most movies pushed by hollywood are just "political", for that is what they call it, propaganda for the mindbroken slugs. I just think at some point it's worthless to just go into it every single time. It's like those youtubers constantly making 4h long "video essays" on how the new star wars movies are god awful. Like yeah I agree but that's not really productive lol.)
His opinions are certainly more well informed than some "classic" movie reviewers like Roger Ebert, who was essentially cinematically illiterate.
Whenever I happen to find out the consensus on a movie that I watched I'm always flabbergasted. I recently found out that 8mm by Joel Schumacher is supposedly "bad". All that tells me is that george lucas was right, and film critics are subnormal.
I grew up on a lot of popular mainstream media. Like most of my generation, Harry Potter was part of what taught me to read. Unlike a lot of my generation, I eventually moved on from it. There is nothing wrong with enjoying popular stuff but that attitude of not only carrying it into adulthood, but constantly insisting on its artistic merit beyond just entertainment and basically treating it as modern mythology has become a fucking pandemic. Not too long ago, that was the attitude of harmless weirdos, now its become normalized.
I actually didn't much care for Harry Potter as a kid. I grew up on the Hobbit and I actually found the story of this gentrified fat ass being forced into an adventure and discovering himself along the way to be way more relatable than this victimhood fantasy presented by Harry Potter. I did read the first four or five books though, probably because it was sort of expected of me by then, and when I was a kid you could just put shit in front of me and I would read whatever.
Potter, like most western literature, is just a reflection of "christian" (no need for me to get into why I don't consider that real christianity all over again) victim morality where your power fantasy is actually to be oppressed & victimized by everyone around you, and eventually "prove your bullies wrong" by virtue of your righteousness. It is reflected in many things, such as how nerds are constantly fantasizing of being oppressed by chad thundercock (all of the bullies in my school growing up were actual nerds. "Jock" types were usually very nice to me lol. Rake told me he had pretty much the same experience.), "feminists" think they're being oppressed by male patriarchy, "egalitarians" think they're being denied pussy by "feminists", blacks think that they're oppressed by white supremacy, whites think they're being bullied by the wokes, so on and so forth.
Harry Potter really inadvertedly (?) captured the zeitgeist of its target generation, even down to the fact that the main story is actually about fucking nothing, absolutely nothing, a worthless husk, a placeholder of nothing.
It's also MI6 propaganda but that's just all english entertainment since day one lol.
I like to assume, maybe a bit optimistically, that the main target audience for shows like Rick and Morty or movies like Sausage Party are Teenagers who haven't had much exposure to to media that actually explores unconventional ideas. Of course none of that is provocative, even by the standards of its own genre. American comedy has been wallowing in that cheap, nothing is sacred, vulgarity for vulgarity's sake nihilism since at least the 90's (And even that was mainly revisiting, and neutering, what underground cartoonists have been doing since since 60s/70s). Never moved on from it and what's worse, never even improved on it.
I don't actually have a problem with vulgarity. I actually wrote several raunchy comedies myself.
This specific book is full of farting, burping, vomiting, nose picking, drug usage, alcohol abuse, magical creatures getting fucked in the ass and all sorts of shit. The spin off book even employs the verbiage “negroid of undiscernible ethnicity” to describe a side character LOL!
What grinds my gear so to speak is that most comedies I see coming out of the USA actually seem to be pushing some thesis against a non-existing strawman, as if they were “dunking” on… who? Sure there really are retards around the world who think of God as a giant space alien, but those people are nowhere near the majority, and are influencing society at the same level of Vikings, which is to say not at all.
When Cobra Kai has jokes on modern SJW verbiage it lands because you actually get to meet people in day to day life which will bother you over inane shit like that.
(Yeah that’s the only clip I could find, sorry)
Granted it might just be a cultural bias on my side. Jack actually did complain about random evangelical Christians stopping him in the street to preach at him, so maybe it’s more prominent than I realize. It still comes off as pretentious though, considering that the ideas posited in stuff like rick and morty have been thoroughly discussed 3000 years ago in much more depth, while the show still has the gall to act as if it’s dumping some universal truths on you.
Italian comedy (outside of what I write which is A-mazing) is also terrible but at least it has no pretension to it. It’s just the same exact cuck jokes being repeated since the latin era. (I’m not exaggerating here btw. Latin, as in ancient roman satire was full of cuck and fag jokes, and those same jokes are still in modern Italian comedies virtually unchanged lol.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyricon
