karphead posted:about to watch a fertilizer plant blow up live
goongrats on the successful direct action
then I looked up where they shot it and
.......quiet part loud i guess lol
Ironically, it’s this movie, the U.S.-made one, that institutes a radical change in Godzilla’s position as a hero or villain. The Legendary movies’ most awkward move has been to fast-forward Godzilla to the savior-of-earth role during its very first appearance in 2014, which I think has less to do with voiding the creature’s implicit harsh critique of the U.S. (as none really exists in its revised origin) and more to do with the purely toyetic: movies where Godzilla fights other monsters are worse movies, but they offer more must-buy merchandise to sell to kids and, today, a certain sort of adult. In this case, though, presenting Kong in his near-natural role as hero requires rolling back Godzilla’s status as the same, which in turn requires the backwards application of pre-Marvel-Studios superhero logic, implying that Godzilla’s city-demolishing battles to this point caused zero collateral deaths. Godzilla killed some people this time, so we’re rooting for the ape.
More interesting is that the new movie is a stealth remake of the Mechagodzilla movies, where humans or human-like aliens build in secret a robotic anti-Godzilla, a cold mirror image bristling with superfluous external weaponry, as a means of killing its own template. (This dubious method is an easy sell to U.S. viewers now; if they’ll buy tickets to Pacific Rim, they’ll buy anything.) There’s a bit here that’s only evident in context most everyone is missing, but that was key to the movie’s initial publicity.
In a bid for support from the sliver of the intended audience that knows or cares about Toho’s movies, few in proportion or number but outsized in their voice online in the context of deeply deflated COVID ticket sales, the early “reveal” of Mechagodzilla in the movie’s advertisements was meant to dovetail with the presentation of Godzilla as a killer and presumptive villain. The “versus” element of this movie was hyped and, as with the 1962 movie’s U.S. release, purposely racialized among Western audiences, but Mechagodzilla promised that no matter who won, everyone won. It did more than that, though, in the context of those existing “hype-machine” fans.
Because Mechagodzilla first appeared on screen as… a false flag operation. 1974’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla had intelligent-ape(!) aliens, themselves masquerading as humans, wrap their robo-Godzilla in a Godzilla costume. That way, Mechagodzilla’s initial anti-Earth rampages would be blamed on a sudden heel turn by Godzilla, by that point long established as a hero and team player. One of Godzilla’s classic monster pals reveals the ruse, and a visually hero-coded Godzilla, plus a presumed-toyetic new friend, appears to take down the nasty-looking copy.
The implication for the early-adopter, Wikipedia-addict superfans of Legendary’s franchise through Godzilla vs. Kong’s advertising was that Godzilla wasn’t really a killer; Godzilla-as-villain must actually be Mechagodzilla in disguise. Of course, the movie didn’t follow through on this, because, even moreso than the recent Star Trek series, that would make Godzilla vs. Kong a blatant 9/11 truther movie. In fact, the movie seems to go overboard in compensating for its very 1990s, pre-9/11-Hollywood presentation of a domestic corporate CEO as the real villain, coding him explicitly as a foreign enemy in our midst and and introducing a weird, goes-nowhere connection between his Mechagodzilla and both(!!) a Japanese pilot out for revenge over the last movie and a space-alien pilot out for revenge from the last movie.
Godzilla and Kong, as anyone over the age of four can predict, team up to stop this insider-but-really-outsider menace, without too much of a chance for criticism of big-time real-world CEOs, and salute each other wordlessly before parting ways. There is also a podcaster in the movie. Everyone gets to be an AmeriKKKan in Godzilla vs. Kong, except the dead, who, the movie suggests, probably all deserved it.
I now realize intolerance is wrong.
My politics in 30 seconds: pic.twitter.com/E5baOEc64n
— Mokawima (@mokawima) March 14, 2022
tears posted:panos cosmatos's film "beyond the black rainbow," which is exactly the 2 hour long synthwave music video you would expect from a nerd whos father made rambo first blood part 2
i watched this.
your reddit user comparison is apt, especially concerning the humor and quality of the writing.
sidenote, but, since my friend drove us to the theater, i had a few beers beforehand
🍺 Ithink those helped soften some of the blows.
unrelated, but i've been watching the documentary the battle of chile. i finished with part one of (i think) 3. it's great so far. i'll try and write something more fleshed out or coherent about it after I finish the trilogy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Chile
Edited by radical_dave ()
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
colddays posted:I watched the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) a little while ago, going in completely blind and I hated it. It was absolute unoriginal trash with the aesthetic sense of an ad agency targeting 20-35 year olds on instagram and the personality of a reddit addict. Looking it up afterwards, it seems like almost everyone else loved it for some reason. How about you? What are your thoughts on this divisive film?
Besides the repulsive aesthetic it's an advertisement for post-Trump liberalism, where being an upper middle class liberal is the most traumatic thing in the world and "existing" in the suburbs is a revolutionary act. Liberals have become increasingly desperate in their attempt to reduce the entirety of society and history to the personal, this movie might be the end point for film since it attempts to take the history of film itself and turn it into an apolitical object of "emotional support." It doesn't really do this in an interesting way because it's poorly made, tributes to In The Mood For Love and The Matrix only work if you've never seen the films or seen them as gifs but it's interesting that it exists and is so popular. What used to only require a romcom or melodrama plot now requires 2 hours of nonstop references and convoluted narratives.
cars posted:just watched Greenland, it's about the dim-bulb normal for a fash propaganda movie showing the United $naKKKe$ military secretly selecting its chosen agents (British guy) as the sole survivors of a global natural disaster
then I looked up where they shot it and
.......quiet part loud i guess lol
its too much when the directors of these movies start saying 'mission critical' and 'point person' to describe the making of their films lol
gay_swimmer posted:I think it's interesting how we've had three movies just come out (Shang Chi, Turning Red, Everything Everywhere All At Once) where the far-out fantasy premise is Asian parents apologizing for being hard on their kids
the unpardonable sin with these movies is that they ask the forbidden question: what if hong kong action movies, the coolest movies ever made, were actually dogshit made by the people who brought you the 25th iron man sequel?
lo posted:extremely long cultural revolution documentary called 'How Yukong Moved the Mountains'
this movie is extremely GOOD
many are asking me for the scene from "The One" that tpaine was always posting so here is that scene
cars posted:the scene where "Last Resort" by Papa Roach plays
this movie also features "Bodies" by Drowning Pool AND "Down with the Sickness" by Disturbed
zhaoyao posted:vintage youtube clips,
str_el_boi posted:this movie also features "Bodies" by Drowning Pool AND "Down with the Sickness" by Disturbed
lo posted:i've been thinking about watching the extremely long cultural revolution documentary called 'How Yukong Moved the Mountains'
i rarely watch visual media, but this was extremely interesting and i would think it a good companion to your reading of shenfan/etc. the slow pacing and minimal mediation allows for a sense of the relational, affective, embodied nuances of revolutionary society at the time. particularly good are the moments of group discussion. feels like the difference between reading a piece of music and seeing it played.
colddays posted:I watched the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
i only saw the trailer, but imagine it's similar amalgamated trash as ready player one.
"That's right, doctor"
"But now you're saying that you thought the multiverse movie was fine?"
"Yes"
"Fine like attending a six year old's birthday and being relieved that it didn't cause you active pain? Or fine like something pleasant and inoffensive?"
"...I guess the second one?"
*doctor furrows brow and furiously scribbles on notepad*
Everything Everywhere All At Once: 14 minutes
Fantastic Beasts Dumbledore Whatever: 4 minutes
Doctor Strange In The Mega whaddayacallit: 3 minutes
The Northman: 50ish minutes. Paused on the exact scene where the blonde lady got her bush out and went to sleep
cars posted:i have Poster's Brain, so when someone described Everything Everywhere All at Once to me, i thought of the James Wong movie with the same plot, "The One", and the scene where "Last Resort" by Papa Roach plays as the most evil version of Jet Li kicks people off a pyramid in CG hell, which is a clip that tpaine always used to post in threads here. And i laughed and when my friend asked why, I showed them the scene on my phone. They laughed as well and my posting crystal recharged to full, and I used 0.1% of that energy to make this post while my friend got Fail AIDS and died. gay Sora Sora.
Im not sure this is the movie where Jet Li kicks a guy into an industrial laundry machine, slams the door closed, and turns it on, but it might be.
swampman posted:Im not sure this is the movie where Jet Li kicks a guy into an industrial laundry machine, slams the door closed, and turns it on, but it might be.
I think that's Kiss of the Dragon
so i decided to use the free trial & im watching all the new trek shows. i think they are fine, am having an easy time compartmentalizing & dissociating them away from old trek
I also think it's kind of fun and ironic because it's on Showtime, which also had the reality docu-series Gigolos, which was amazing but will now never come back because one of the gigolos on that show actually did murder a woman.
zhaoyao posted:so i decided to use the free trial & im watching all the new trek. i think they are fine, am having an easy time compartmentalizing & dissociating them away from old trek
actually picard is dreck. maybe it's just that i ran out of painkillers and an not so easily amused as i potentially may have been several weeks ago. i will have to ask the doctor to renew my prescription