Petrol posted:

i saw the new star war. its good. not as good as last jedi but thats to be expected. a lot of people are, predictably, Caring about it too much one way or the other. newsflash: its possible to enjoy thing without making it a central part of whatever is dysfunctional about your identity

also, during the Finn-has-a-secret-to-tell-Ray part, i just imagined Finn straight up telling Rey that he thought the Jedi were bourgeoisie scum and saying he'd lead a proletarian revolution. but hey they can save that for episode 10

Edited by Synergy (Dec. 23, 2019 01:26:43)

pogfan1996 posted:

rewatching party down, i wish this exiled article stopped being accurate but the film industry continues to be garbage

http://exiledonline.com/american-movies-are-dead-so-party-down/

Hollywood needs:

– Get rid of happy ending. Serious, sometimes you need to kill somebody to make the whole story have sense, sometimes it’s the main character even.

– Get back to the we work in making movies here ethics. Just like when Ford got a van, a camera, 50 cans of virgin film and 100 bucks for expenses and was told: I wan’t material for 2 movies with that in two months. Deliver or there’s an Hungarian ready to do your job for half the pay. No more marketing dictatorship.

– Massive executions and forced labor for those 40something ex-nerds, now industry executives, vindicating that reading comic books back on their adolescences was not for losers.

– Acting talent would be fine, but not really necessary.

trakfactri posted:

"Acting talent would be fine, but not really necessary," is true though as clearly demonstrated by the hit 90s sci-fi show, Babylon 5.

lol yeah... i guess you got Bill Mumy, you got... skyrim lady.. Boxleitner is only as good as the script but considering what happened with that role they must have done something right or they'd have been cancelled in year two

one thing i have to grant brand Y is, they gave Andreas Katsulas a character. it's such a shame to waste a solid actor with a voice designed by cigarettes. Katsulas described his recurring role on star trek as, he drove in, sat for two hours for makeup, sat in a different chair to read his lines into the camera and went home. he played a four-time villain on the best-rated show in franchise history, he even clocked in for the series finale, but he's said it before, it was impossible for anyone to enjoy that guy. there was no character behind his lines, because he only ever appeared on the giant TV inside the TV show, except for one episode where he had to actually come on set and hit his marks and everything and it was exhausting for him, it was his third time in a year playing this guy and he had no idea who he was, he fucking hated it. this from a man who had his head wrapped in green petroleum gum and his eyeballs flayed with 1990s costume contacts for five seasons to play a space lizard Yassir Arafat written by a Spider-Man comic book writer consulting Usenet for his scripts. but for an actor that sort of steady makeup hell has to be better than, In this TV role, you play a guy on a TV. brand X wasted so much good talent with crap like that, though it was usually guest stars or future superstars who just liked star trek for whatever reason and agreed to be suckers.

tears posted:

someone should make a good movie

Children of Men is better now than when it came out. if you need a good movie, this "is it"

jansenist_drugstore posted:

the only cool scene in children of men is the opening scene, where a group of radical marxist-leninist-maoist university students suicide bomb a chic hipster cafe in an up-and-coming neighborhood. otherwise the movie is orwellian garbage

It portrays a fascist Britain locking up Muslim refugees in camps, not an anti communist depiction of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Petrol posted:

just thinking about how

the Plinkett ghostbusters 2016 review was great especially in the specific ways it pissed a bunch of people off, they praised Leslie Jones and Kate MacKinnon and said the movie didn’t give them enough to do, said Kristen Wiig should have been hired to write the script, said the movie should have had a gay love story in it, and obviously ghostbusters is sci fi. This forum continues in its honor towards departed posters

swampman posted:

this one movie "the laundromat" starring meryl streep is good for a while. its about offshore money and how rich people hide it. then at the hour mark it turns into falun gong propaganda and shows chinese police abducting people one by one from an innocuous falun gong ceremony and then harvesting their hearts, corneas, and kidneys

yeah that part sucked but i guess they had to put that part in otherwise that section would be about xi jinping successfully addressing corruption

usufruct posted:

jar jar is a jungian symbol- the amphibian is adolescence, the transition from tadpole to frog. boy to man. he represents anakins innocence, a vaudevillian tramp. as anakins innocence turns to evil, as the liberal democracy of the republic turns to facism, the innocent dullard jar jar casts the deciding vote for order 66. jar jar rules

isnt jung that guy who gave allen dulles the idea for mkultra

cars posted:

lo posted:

it's extremely 'cool' that tvtropes and wikis and other stuff like that have destroyed a bunch of people's ability to engage with art and understand the concept of metaphors and so forth and so on.

yeah TV Tropes is kind of a disease infecting a ton of non-bourgeois-born/non-"literary" writing in the English language IMO... nowadays, in the rare circumstance where a popular writer of around my age or younger in the U.S. or UK wasn't born to billionaires in a NYC or Saint-Germain penthouse or sired by some tenured creative writing professor in the Ivy League, they probably came up through some fan-centric writer's circle online, and so they talk and think in terms of sites like that one. You read young genre writers and wannabe writers from outside the bourgeoisie going back and forth on some place that's exposed to others, Twitter or whatever, and so many of them are just wrecking their critical thinking with this stuff. And even if they go into academia or get shamed by some decrepit Saussure acolyte into stepping up their game, they still feel it necessary to pay homage to this stuff as faux-populism, especially since self-examination isn't why you win the lottery through Amazon self-publishing or whatever and become the next thing everyone has to have an opinion about as a pop-culture-writing freelancer.

For anyone who hasn't read it, and stick to that policy if you haven't, the idea behind TV Tropes is that every single thing in every single story in every single medium, Ovid or Joyce or Star Wars or Mario or whatever, every character or event or description or theme, is a "trope", that is, a significant motif, simply because it exists, and it can be yanked out of the story and encased in lucite along many, many others like it in a single category with no attention paid to whether it really fits or to the value of the story it's from, or in three or six or ten categories like that, all named by some Online rando after some kids' cartoon they remember.

These "trope" categories then become the ways that writers and wannabe writers in these circles, mostly focused on schools of "genre" fiction, talk down to each other, and, eventually, describe and even plan their own stories: this character is kind of This Trope and a little of That Trope engaged in The Other Trope, please click the links to TV Tropes to see how my character is a lot like Darth Vader, Luigi and Piers Plowman. And if they expect to see a "trope" in some story somewhere—and they do, because they've trained themselves to expect the most hackneyed and predictable element from every single story they read or write—and it doesn't appear, they still put the thing on the page, they just say it's "subverted". So they create and enforce these crowd-sourced rules under which every single story must be the most hack dumb predictable shit possible or must be subordinated to it as commentary on the "trope".

TV Tropes isn't analysis, and it isn't the analysis-free cauldron of the "natural" writer or outsider artist or even of the slavish "fandom" itself. Instead, it's the crowd-sourced hypertrophy of "murder to dissect", a cargo cult of analysis by people who learned the term "MacGuffin" and decided that everything needed a name like that, a secret password to the Burger King Kids Club.

I doubt reading Saussure has inspired much fiction worth reading, so imagine reading something from a LISA-style chatbot that was trained on Bartlett's Quotations from the guy. Not that the TV Tropes-style school of young writer would be anything but shocked and offended by that edgy new kid Saussure, because this school of pseudo-analysis really just repeats a time before "Turn of the Screw" was written, a sort of 19th-century paleontological taxonomy of fossils. (Far right genre babies probably blame this on "post-modernism" somehow since their particular shit isn't allowed on TV Tropes.)

I probably care more than I should but it's just degenerate and sickening to me as a reader, because for the next writer to get their work published, they either need to have a bunch of NYT bestseller writers and literary agents at their christening, which is like 90% of successful "literary" writers now, or be a TV Tropes cult member who panders enough to their peers' expectations to get noticed, first by some pop-culture-sewer-dredging "news" site, then by someone willing to exploit that article's topic. And that's the work that everyone's going to hear about, the work that's going to get recommended to me by people in my life for the foreseeable future and because they're good people, they're going to explain that yeah it kind of sucks too.

quoting trhis great post for the new year !