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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Anyone remembers (or even heard of) the Insidious? The supernatural series that hasn't made one good movie since the original, like most horror/slasher flicks since the 80s? Well, they just released another movie, one that I didn't even know existed until I went to watch Across the Spiderverse with a friend last night. And guess what, despite the teetering reputation and C+ reviews on Cinema Score, it managed to become a commercial success and knocked the Indy Jones finale with a much bigger domestic box office opening.

This fad has been going on for years but (to me, at least) it never stops being remarkable how big tentpole entries that raked hundreds of millions in the past just manage to fall flat. These franchises tend to be somewhat bulletproof, there's more room for failure and these brands usually wouldn't take a hit due to a few bad entries. Yet, here we are. It seems like Indiana Jones Dial of Destiny might not make back its PRODUCTION budget, let alone break even, that's just out the window. How do you get handed the keys to the most beloved IP's there are, with passionate fandoms falling over themselves to rain cash on you for merch, something that's effectively been a cultural icon for decades, and turn it into a hot pile of steaming crap that no one wants to get 10 yards within? They could make the Crystal Skull (which still raked good money btw) and get away with it. Now, all of a sudden, DoD is the final nail in the coffin.

Every time we pointed out the warning signals, the /r/IndianaJones circlejerk simply kept dismissing us as bigots still continue to defend it like it's some misunderstood masterpiece and the only ones who hate it are incels that can't handle strong women. It's the same theme every single time. We knew Disney was BS'ing nostalgia when it brought back Palpatine, not coming up with something "daring and creative". It hasn't been a full year since RoP, the excuses went from "they've only revealed the casting, we haven't even gotten a first look yet" --> "it's not even out yet, you've just seen the trailer" --> "you've seen one episode, how can you gauge anything from it" --> "most shows don't get good until the 2nd or 3rd season, give it a chance!" You just can't win here. It turns out exactly as terrible or even worse than what we'd expected, to the point where the brand name gets reduced to the same tier as any other obscure brand like Insidious. Yet, we always have the very same passionate circlejerk defending these movies on every fandom on social media. Nor will we ever see Kathleen Kennedy lose her job. I used to think it was plausible it was a grand conspiracy to fuck over the middle class by subverting our culture and values, then I thought it was just Hanlon's Razor, now I'm not even sure.

I mean, this isn't really that unusual. Horror movies are low-status even compared to schlock like Indiana Jones, but they always make very good box office returns for low budgets, which is why there are like ten Insidious movies.

It's not really obvious to me that the failure of this latest offering really has anything to do with Woke, either. Crystal Skull didn't flop, but it wasn't a smash hit and it burned a lot of the goodwill the series had. And now? Most young people don't know Indiana Jones or care about him.

Most young people don't know Indiana Jones or care about him.

Most young people's PARENTS would care, so you can bet that the gamble here was that these parents would make their kids watch the originals, which are of course enthralling, and then drag the kids to the theater so they could hook them on sequels with new characters into the future, thus sustaining the series as a possible ongoing franchise.

The IDOL seems to be the opposite effect where it’s hated by the online types but I loved and seems like a lot of other people loved. It broke too many rules of the online left and was attacked. Showed a violent black man, a manipulative women with rape fantasy’s, false rape accusation at the one moral character in the show.

More than that, formerly shelved and sold Disney projects like "Sound of Freedom" were outdoing Indy. Considering Disney's apparent cavalier attitude towards money, seeing that kind of ideological adversary gain a win at their expense has to speak to someone. Or maybe it just further cements the idea that these stupid peasants deserved nothing good to begin with.

It’s branding, they see a lot of value in being the company that woke parents can take their kids to or let them watch. It does leave not-woke parents behind, but until some other company can produce good antiwoke content it’s still the kids company by default.

I mean the flaw in that is that there are not so many woke parents, but I suppose that’s a filter bubble issue on the part of Disney.

Ultimately if Disney stock continues to plummet, you’d expect activist investors to clean house. The question will become is the brand so damaged that it can be recoverable.

I think probably yes but only if Disney takes public active steps to disavow some high profile mistakes and out their money where their future mouth is (eg a simple way would be bringing back splash mountain).

Yet, we always have the very same passionate circlejerk defending these movies on every fandom on social media.

Are we 100% sure this circlejerk isn’t astroturfed? Disney and Amazon definitely have the budget for that, and astroturfed social media campaigns aren’t exactly unknown.

It's not necissarily funded by Disney, these days you can have grassroots astroturfing. There are people who comport their entire lives ideologically and will go to bat for anything they think has progressive values in it, and an overlapping group of people who will go to bat for anything they think toxic incel cis white male haters will hate. Tranny Jannies do it for free, and so do these people.

Tone down the seething resentment. We get that you are seething and resentful. You still have to express something more worthwhile to read than raw seething.

grassroots astroturfing

those are diametrically opposed, just look at the words. being super for a corporation, no matter how pathetic, isn't astroturfing if it's grassroots.

these days you can have grassroots astroturfing.

How do you figure? "astroturfing" refers to something that looks like a grassroots phenomenon but is actually a manufactured product. If the grass is real and organic it is by definition not astroturf

That'sthejoke.jpg

Some people are so ideologically motivated that they'll shill for free/for goodboy points.

Judging by your derisive tone, I must assume you get paid to post, then? How much?

I post pro-bono on behalf of my own seething resentment over being told what opinions I should have. I care about storytelling and creativity as a craft, not as a political tool.

That's right kids, Seething Resentment TM. You're soaking in it! When life gives you lemons, don't get mad, get very quiet and tense, so tense pooping gives you a hernia, and only express it online or in massive silent explosions at various slow or indifferent drivers in traffic on your daily commute. Seething Resentment TM. Da na na na nah, I'm lovin' it!

My posts on the other hand are sponsored by - like all great internet endeavours - Stamps.com. Stamps.com - remember stamps?

I think the Indiana Jones thing is part of the wider problem Disney is having right now (after all, they dumped Chapek and brought Iger back to fix things). And as you say, any quoting other people about the problems was dismissed with "this guy has no idea what he's talking about; this guy has been saying it'll flop for years and it never has; ignore them they don't know anything".

But I think even the mainstream critics accepted that the movie did poorly at Cannes, so all the rumours that leaked out about multiple versions because test audiences hated it seem to be correct. And that, in conjunction with things like the Star Wars hotel failing completely after only a year, does make me inclined to think the rumours are nearer the truth, even if not the whole truth.

Will Kathleen Kennedy get pushed out? Before it seemed likely, now it's looking like she's canny enough and an old enough Hollywood hand to be able to fight and throw the responsibiilty back on Iger (who is having his own troubles with the shareholders).

So yeah - for now, I'm sticking with the "ignore that crowd, they have an agenda" gossip-mongers because the way things are going, looks like they are more close to what is going on than the "beautiful DEI casting will always win the day, the Little Mermaid remake was a triumph! (if you ignore everything but the domestic market)" set.

EDIT: I haven't watched an Indiana Jones movie since the first sequel, but I do think there was a good way of having Indy hang up his hat and hand over to his god-daughter, but the makers or producers or writers or whoever was pulling the strings didn't do it that way. Nobody wants to see a beloved hero reduced to irrelevance in his old age, even if that is a more 'realistic' view of life (and for pete's sake, they started off with the Ark of the Covenant, we are not talking about realism in these movies). Snarky quips about capitalism, Indy needing to be rescued, having his family broken up - that's not how to do a swansong. Let him go out with a bang on one last adventure and then retire to happy, honoured life and transfer the running around adventuring to the next generation who respect him, not shove him out of the way as a dusty old relic who's long past his sell-by date.

I will say, though, that the CGI used to de-age Ford for the scenes set in his past were (on the few clips I saw) remarkably good, and maybe the actors as well as the screenwriters should now be worried about AI coming for their jobs. Why pay out millions to Harry-Bruce Affleck-Cruise for the next movie in the series when you can just have the AI act the part? For decades, if need be?

Yeah. Part of it would be Indy not being able to do things he used to (ie trying and failing) while his protégée can while at the same time the protégée failing at tasks that Indy learned from and can pass it along.

Also, heroism was never solely about ability but desire. Indy could also show that.

IMO Top Gun: Maverick did a good job of scriptwriting without throwing its title character under the bus. But that may be the only modern sequel/remake I can think of that does a passable job. Disney (really, Lucasfilm in particular) seems to like bringing up old characters and showing that despite when we last saw them victorious at the end of the movie, they've gotten old and have their lives falling apart.

On the other hand, Maverick is probably the only good example I've seen in the last few years. I've long wondered why filmmakers can't spend, I don't know, twice as much on hiring a good writer up front and making a good story, presumably saving tons of money in re-shoots and major CGI edits-on-edits. At least from the outside, it seems obvious that many of these movies are going to be trainwrecks long before release.

I've long wondered why filmmakers can't spend, I don't know, twice as much on hiring a good writer up front and making a good story, presumably saving tons of money in re-shoots and major CGI edits-on-edits.

The people making these popular films have ideological blinders that prevent them from actually making quality work. They aren't even trying to make good stories, because they assume that people will come see them anyway due to the prestige attached to those big names - they are trying to create good culture war material, not compelling art. I could have written a better sequel trilogy than Disney's highly paid team in a day if we're being generous. Not because I'm an especially talented writer - but because I wouldn't be forced to tell the story that Disney management wanted told.

There's actually an example of a Harrison Ford character getting handled well in a sequel!

Blade Runner 2049 let him reprise his role as an old, embittered version of Deckard who manages one last ride and then fades with his dignity intact.

They still screwed up that movie, because they had to go with the nihilistic message of "You, the main character, are nobody. The only one who is somebody is badly broken and probably shouldn't have been. Everything is lost like tears in the rain, only without the quotable line and anyway that's how it should be". Similar to SW8 in that respect.

I'd say you and I took subtly different messages from the ending of that film, and that's okay.

Deckard at least didn't pass his mantle on to some hot new female Blade Runner!

Maverick wasn’t all that good to me simply because they seemed to spend too much time going beat for beat on Rooster being Goose’s kid. It ended up being almost a remake of the original movie pretending that it’s a sequel and as a result, Rooster and most of the younger cast existed more as callbacks to the original cast than as characters in their own right. It just seemed like nothing original happened beyond the opening test pilot scenes, it was mostly like they had the original script in front of them and were trying to hit the same marks almost in a checklist fashion. Rooster sings karaoke, check. Sand sports on the beach, check. Hotshot pilot smirking and making wisecracks, check.

Not having seen the original Top Gun I can't comment on the accuracy of your comparison. But many of the sequels widely believed to have broken the "sequels always suck" rule were functionally remakes. From what I'm told, Terminator 2 hits all the same narrative beats as The Terminator, just with a massively expanded budget.

There's been something weird about writing in media (and gaming) for a while now, and i wonder how much of it has to do with graphics and effects. As they become more and more of a budget, and the writer therefore becomes a smaller percentage, people start thinking that the writing doesn't matter (rather than seeing it as a high return place to spend your money, since doubling the salary and getting a better writer would be a small percentage of the overall cost).

At least part of it has to be that the average audience doesn't care too much about writing as long as there are other factors to dazzle them in the production.

Hence why Reality TV remains popular.

Is reality tv popular or just profitable? If I can make TV show X for 1m and it generates 1.2m or Show Y for 0.5m and make 0.8m Y is the right choice even if X is more popular. Hell it is the right choice even if it makes 0.6m provided I could invest 0.7m somewhere else and make at least 0.1m

Shows like The Bachelor and The Masked Singer get millions of viewers.

I think the appeal is that you can afford to produce many of such shows at once and it only takes one of them getting popular to pay off handsomely.

I'm not an Indiana Jones fan, but I have a fair bit of nostalgia for the original trilogy, particularly Temple of Doom (I think because I thought the aesthetic was super cool when I was a kid). Having heard nothing much about it other than a couple people in my Twitter feed saying that DoD was going to be terrible, I decided to go to DoD at the suggestion of some friends that I was visiting over the weekend. We had a good time! I don't know if I just had my expectations super low, had the experience enhanced by a bit of a buzz (apparently some theaters bring you a beer in your seat, which is pretty nice), or just wanted to watch a corny movie with some friends, but I enjoyed it decently well.

For the people that hate it, what's the perspective? I'm not trying to be sardonic, I genuinely don't know what pissed them off about it so much. I thought watching octogenarian Indy might suck, but I thought they handled that reasonably well. The whole thing seemed pretty fun to me.

I think for casual viewers it'll be a "yeah, that was okay" experience, but I don't think they'll go out of their way to go see it rather than another movie. And for the fans, there's been enough talk already that they probably have their minds made up about it.

I tried to dissuade my mom from watching it because she's a Ford fangirl, and I heard the movie primarily dunked on him.

Imagine my surprise when she said she liked it, but she has exceedingly poor taste in movie, liking most Marvel slop well past when it was at least a fresh kind of slop.

I heard the movie primarily dunked on him.

If I believe the rumour sites, there was a lot of re-writing and re-shooting because the dunking on Indy played so badly with preview audiences, so they toned it down a heap for the theatrical release version. Critical reviews seem to say there's a lot of action scenes, with opinion divided so far as I can tell between "new director handles these well" and "new director doesn't get the hang of it".

I'm open to watching it now, tickets are cheap enough, and my girlfriend wants to do something other than lie in bed (but I'm perfectly happy doing so!).

Begs the question about astroturfing/bots. In this case Disney would have a very strong incentive to have positive “conversation” happening about the movie and has the means available. I have no evidence this is happening but to me it would make total sense as apart of the massive marketing spend.

How do you get handed the keys to the most beloved IP's there are, with passionate fandoms falling over themselves to rain cash on you for merch, something that's effectively been a cultural icon for decades, and turn it into a hot pile of steaming crap that no one wants to get 10 yards within?

People don't love the old IPs because of the bits that are IPable. Indy's whip is cool and distinctive, but people don't love every character that uses a whip like Indy as much as Indy, because the movies are a whole bunch of skillful performances crafted by a distinct vision, and that's what people loved; the whip and hat were just immediately-identifyable bits of that. And when a licensed IP holder puts out less effort than a blatant-ripoff hopefully-confuse-someone-on-the-Netflix-screen schlockfest as their production strategy, why would anyone want to see a movie by the IP holder?

If a pie brand that people love adds a blueberry pie to their apple and pear pie lineup, then people will probably buy the blueberry pie. But if the pie company changes and slowly begins shrinking portions and adulterating their most expensive ingredients, then the goodwill of the brand will fade. And if the company just starts selling you kale salads with the pie logo on, then not only will people who like pie and got invested with the company because they made good pie not buy them (or at least, not buy them twice), then the pie brand will quickly become worthless, as people who like pie recognize the brand as the opposite of a symbol of quality.

It just used to be the case that we could assume that most piemakers at least had on their priority list of making good pies as part of their business. We can't any more.

Every time we pointed out the warning signals, the /r/IndianaJones circlejerk simply kept dismissing us as bigots still continue to defend it like it's some misunderstood masterpiece and the only ones who hate it are incels that can't handle strong women. It's the same theme every single time.

So how do we know that these are actual fans? I.e. How do we know that these people aren't online activists just claiming to be fans? Dare I say that there might be people making money of the fact that shilling the movie to actual fans, that Disney have their own 50 Cent army sitting in /r/IndianaJones?

I remember back in the day that there was this whole thing about how "fans gatekeeping fandoms is a bad thing!" as a part of the culture war. But gatekeeping served a purpose in my view and it is shame that good fans bought into the reasoning of not gatekeeping anymore do their own detriment.

Certainly we've seen Amazon shutting down reviews for Rings of Power with the excuse that "bad people are reviewbombing the show because they're racist and sexist and homophobic", and they own iMDB so they were able to put their thumb on the scale there. Rotten Tomatoes did a different rating based on if you clicked on the "verified audience/critics" versus "all audience/critics" for The Little Mermaid, where one was favourable and the other was unfavourable.

So if the big corporations have shown that they are both willing and able to filter reviews, and commercial outlets go along with them (because if your film critic gives them a negative review they'll pull advertising, so you better give a good review), I suppose there isn't any reason to think they wouldn't set up astroturf sites.

Absolutly and also if you look at the positive review texts they are sometimes just copy paste with "bot like" username. Sometimes even getting simple things wrong about the movie. But the thing about reddit is that you can look at the users history and see that they are behaving suspiciosly either being straight up activists and not actually discussing having good faith discussion or defend the billion dollar companies go from little mermaid to strange worlds to elements defeding the trash and never showing up in activist circles. Back in the day a powermod punished me with a short term ban because I called out an obvious paid shill on a subreddit, like that was going to convince me that it wasn't astroturf.

Yeah I do have suspicions many of these spaces are being astroturfed, the fanbase for these IPs are big and passionate enough to usually allow a bad entry to succeed, only slightly less. As for gatekeeping, we've long since accepted that it needs to return. We threw open the gates for those who wish to subvert the IP and mold it into what they like it to be because they never liked what it is about it that made the whole thing popular in the first place. Then they kicked us out and now gatekeep us. "Make your own Star Wars" "Cishet white male tears are so sweet"... you know how it goes. I think this also applies to the recent Assassin's Creed games, that have just divided the fanbase altogether. In trying to chase the ghost of Witcher 3 and Geralt of Rivia, they've chucked out what made AC Brotherhood and Ezio Auditore so beloved to the brand and I daresay even gaming in general.

Well yeah gaming has had its kerfuffles ever since back in 2014 when Gamegate happened. But somehow the air over culture war battlefields are different now, I can't really put my finger on what has changed. The Hogwarts Legacy boycott was DOA and majority of the regular people just ignored bought and played the game. Something has changed, and I don't know what.

I mean, has there ever been a gaming boycott that has worked? I'm not even sure the limited "no pre-orders" campaigns have ever worked.

It is not the boycott in itself that is the difference in outcome, But no big fights online of people defending the game and the defenders called everything bad under the sun. It was limited fights online but nothing high profile. Like we got more than a week over the removed CoD skins.

I suspect it's because most of the calls for boycott had very little to do with the writing, technical and mechanical aspects of the game but JKR. Nevertheless, I'd still remind folks that the game was lowkey woke. Congratulations! You too can be a Black transgender pure blood wizard Nazi!

Well the thing for me which I'm open about it that there is that it feels different. Almost like the dominios started to fall after Elon bought Twitter and the latest domino to fall is all the DEI directors booted from the media companies. I remember at the beginning of the Bud Light boycott that the likes of Tim Pool thought at it was going to go over, but it is still going. But on the woke side of the things fizzle out really fast it seems. Like where they able to disrupt boycotts on the non-woke side earlier? It looks like something has changed.

It’s the Matrix 3 effect, in my opinion. Matrix 1 was a modernist film about postmodernism, which is why it won big. Matrix 2 was a deconstruction of Matrix 1, and upped the ante on ideas, spectacle, and CGI, but focused on deglamorizing the lives of revolutionaries. Matrix 3 went full postmodern, with a “who do we root for?” ending which was barely explained despite its double big sacrifice.

Matrix 1 and Last Crusade are both practically perfect movies, Matrix 2 and Crystal Skull are both CG heavy cash-ins, and I believe I’ll feel the same way after watching Dial of Destiny the way I felt after Matrix 3.

Matrix also did a really good job with AI threat. Better than other films in that genre in my opinion. They showed what I believe to be is the most likely path of AI kills everyone. A rogue program gains an ability to desire self replication and begins overproducing and eventually trying to take over all machines. The survival of the fittest gene that exists in biology happening in machines. And it only needs to happen once. They even showed weaker AI’s that didn’t want to die but didn’t develop the desire to self replicate to survive.

...I don't think we were watching the same media franchise. The Second Reneissance is a far more traditional depiction of humans being dicks until the AIs had enough and stopped playing nice.

I think they’re talking about Agent Smith trying to destroy it all in Reloaded and Revolutions.

But you make an important point. Second Renaissance is a history inside the Zion archives, which by the end of Reloaded we discover is actually part of the algorithm of control: a controlled opposition in the form of an utterly predictable opposition. The history they’ve scrounged has been planted for them to find.

It turns out this is the sixth Matrix, more stable and cruel than any previous iteration. The future world is farther into the future than any in Zion can suspect, to the point that corpses can be revived. (Matrix: Resurrections)

Here’s an alternate origin:

When humans scorched the skies to end climate change, they went too far and blotted out the sun, mostly killing the biosphere. In despair, they turned to AI for a solution. The Oracle, The Architect, and The Merovingian planned a utopian Matrix, a game world within which humanity could survive while waiting for the world to be restored by AI. It was like Ready, Player One, a massively multiplayer VR RPG, with the people in survival pods instead of trailer parks.

But the first Matrix virtual reality collapsed within a generation because humans without real conflict seek control and tear down great things, or turn existential and kill themselves. “Whole crops were lost.” So a new scheme was devised, a simulation of the height of pre-AI human civilization, within which poverty and conflict flourished.

The first One was an accident, an eventuality of free will, who escaped The Matrix, scrounged some equipment, and formed a resistance in an underground site by hacking other pods and freeing other people. But it was a real resistance doing real damage to the Machines’ architecture and The Matrix program, and it endangered the future of humanity and Machines alike, so the resistance was crushed and The Matrix reset.

The Architect crunched the data and figured out a resistance was what was needed to stabilize The Matrix, so the third iteration was built to corral the particularly strong-willed secret-seekers into a simulacrum of the original resistance. And it worked symbiotically with the reemergence of The One, whose free will potentiality was reinserted into the Matrix cyclicly. So the war raged for generations, a system of control for managing the most reactionary and free-willed humans.

But the continual reemergence of The One caused an unexpected anomaly. Tasked with keeping the cleverest reality-hacking humans oppressed but destined to fail with the emergence of The One, Agent Smith was infected with individuality when Neo blew him to bits. This individuality combined with his hatred of humans, and he became The Zero, a being who could multiply his own nihilism. He proved exactly that AI threat the humans wrote about pre-Singularity: a paperclip maximizer who broke free of alignment and fulfilled his purpose to the maximum of his abilities.

...none of that was in The Second Reneissance, and the Zion Archives thing was just a framing device. I think you're putting more thought into this than the writers did.

Also, The Matrix's version of AIs doesn't have anything to do with the current paperclip-maximizing ML GPTX doomer anxieties, which is just Performative Climate Alarmism for techspergs. Matrix AIs are conscious entities who were denied personhood and thus have that resentful tinman love/hate attitude towards humans.

I watched The Matrix Reloaded last year, having not seen it probably since the year of its release. Hot take but I actually think it's massively underrated. Sure, a lot of the CG hasn't aged too well, some of the Zion scenes are a bit silly, and it doesn't have as clean and straightforward a narrative structure as the original, but I still came away from it thinking I'd gotten everything I wanted. The ending's reputation as a mind-screwy impenetrable Metal Gear Solid 2-style headfuck is well-earned, but - well, I love Metal Gear Solid 2, so I don't see that as a demerit at all. What, you wanted your sci-fi franchise which delves into Gnosticism and Baudrillard to be easy to grasp? What's next, hardcore porn without any fucking in it?

Whatever else you want to say about it, it never felt like fanservice, or an insult to the audience's intelligence, or a nakedly commercial endeavour. Haven't gotten around to rewatching Revolutions yet, curious to see how it holds up.

I agree, Reloaded (and even Revolutions) are excellent. I think the sequels in The Matrix suffer because the first one is a PERFECT hero’s journey with the perfect theme’s for its time and place in history. That cannot be topped. But all of the movies are quite good, and add meaningfully to the The Matrix universe, and present ideas that are challenging and interesting. Also, the first benefits from the egregious cribbing from The Invisibles.

My beef with revolutions in particular is that the war stuff is fucking BORING. The mechs the humans use are stupid designs with exposed cockpits, and there's only the one mech unit, and the machine forces consist of squids and a giant drill.

My take will always be that the Watchiwski's ideas were smarter than they themselves were. the Matrix 1 was riding on a lot of heady concepts and stylistic anime stuff (cinematically it owes a lot to Ghost in the Shell), that they couldn't actually execute any further because it was beyond them intellectually.

My guess is the exposed cockpits is basically the same thing as the Mandalorian/HALO Master Chief/Avengers always taking their helmets off. It's a way to let people act.

I guess the other way to do it would be the 'Tony Stark inside the Iron Man suit' method which would have made more sense.

Yeah, my take on it is that they threw everything including the kitchen sink into the first one as a mix of "what if we use this cool SF concept?" and that the huge success meant that people were trying to read deeper meanings into it than were there, so they had to pile on the bullshit about the next instalments (because it did so well of course the studio wanted sequels) having all this deep Gnostic whatever meaning, but it didn't.

It was just about "wouldn't it be cool if we did kung-fu with guns? in slo-mo?"

Another post-post-modern(?) reading I've seen that is popular with the trans lot is that the movies are about being trans (see the Wachowski Brothers becoming Sisters) but I dunno about that, either.

I don't think there's any deep inference going on to see the parallels between The Matrix and gnosticism. That's not even subtext, that's pretty much straight text.

For what it's worth the Wachowskis said they originally intended to make the trans analogy more explicit by having Switch be male in the real world and female in the Matrix (or vice versa) but changed their minds because they thought it would be too confusing for the audience. In any case you don't have to read between the lines too much to see how they intended a trans analogy (you're born into a body that's not your own which is a prison, you can set yourself free by taking a red pill [i.e. HRT], once you're free you can choose your own name and your body will look like you want it to look). One of the Wachowskis was so distraught by her gender dysphoria that she nearly threw herself in front of a moving train, lending a deeper resonance to the scene in which Smith holds Neo down on the subway tracks.

once you're free you can choose your own name and your body will look like you want it to look

That's inside the matrix when they acquire elevated privileges and start adding arbitrary code. Outside the prison they look worse and have an artificial port in their body.

I know, I said "once you're free" i.e. after you've been redpilled.

I think anyone who feels alienated from the modern world will read their own personal struggle into The Matrix. https://youtube.com/watch?v=N2LkM-tBT4o

The Wachowski Sisters actually outright claimed that. The Wachowski Brothers, on the other hand, seem to have just wanted Rule Of Cool.

I've said it elsewhere here, but the 'trans allegory' of The Matrix is a blatant retcon. The first film openly postulates that it is sometimes necessary to kill innocent civilians that are too brainwashed to be saved, and then executes on that idea with the lobby shootout in which multiple hapless security guards (plugged-in humans) are gunned down in slow-mo. There's a good deal of revolutionary themes on display in that film; although the horror of that one in particular took a bit to really register with me on a subsequent viewing.

...Unless the Wachowskis really were saying "kill all TERFs", in which case they should really own it while I take the appropriate precautions.

My beef with revolutions in particular is that the war stuff is fucking BORING. The mechs the humans use are stupid designs with exposed cockpits, and there's only the one mech unit, and the machine forces consist of squids and a giant drill.

Yes, I remember thinking "They replaced special effects martial arts with this?"

And it turns out true zero-G fights look a lot more CG than wire-work.

It's a bit funny that an industry so dedicated to pumping franchises for money insisting on deconstructing their properties for no apparent reason at all, especially when the deconstructions aren't even good or creative.

Why not just give the audience what it wants? Ie. Another adventure man, rom com, war hero, horror, whatever.

I'm not saying that deconstruction can't be a good idea but why does every franchise have to be deconstructed? Why does almost every movie have to be about deconstruction of narrative tropes or the movie making process?

It's a bit funny that an industry so dedicated to pumping franchises for money insisting on deconstructing their properties for no apparent reason at all, especially when the deconstructions aren't even good or creative.

Always chasing the upcoming generation of new consumers who haven't been locked in yet. See Bud Light. They take the existing market share for granted (you're always going to go see the next Star Jones Drink Beer movie, you're always going to drink their brand of soapy water because it's what you started drinking when you were eighteen) but they need to keep drawing in new audiences and new customers, and if in their view Gen Z or whatever we're up to now want DEI and black Elves and trans beer, that's what they'll give them.

Then they piss off the existing customers and don't get the new kids who are never going to be satisfied ("that trans queer furry non-binary character was not played by a trans queer furry non-binary actor, this is appropriation and we're gonna boycott the studio!") , so they end up with the worst of both worlds.

That's the excuse, but peel that back and you find they -- as in those making the decisions, not those holding the stock -- don't want to cater to the existing audience because they're gross.

And in addition to that deconstruction is so common that the target audience often isn't even familiar with the trope that's being deconstructed any more. Every movie with a princess is careful to subvert the expectation that she'll be a damsel in distress who needs rescuing. All of the princesses are sassy feminists who know karate or have super powers and are conspicuously more competent than the male lead. But when was the last time a major animated feature film did the damsel in distress thing? Looking on Wikipedia I think it was Sleeping Beauty in 1959. So a kid watching Disney today is watching a deconstruction of a trope that hasn't really existed since their great grandparents were going to the movies.

Hercules is a fairly straightforward coming-of-age story where the hero rescues a damsel in distress, but Meg is a little sassy and more of a femme fatale than a damsel. The Swan Princess is more of a pure damsel in distress movie, and bombed in 1994, which might explain why people shied away from this genre.

Earlier than that, The Princess Bride (1987) is notable for having a dumb, beautiful protagonist who is clearly a damsel n distress, though it is not animated. Star Wars in 1977 felt the need to make Leia a strong independent woman who did not need to be rescued, so The Princess Bride was quite brave. Whoopi Goldberg was considered for the role of Buttercup, which would have been different.

My son's favorite character was Gaston, and he believes the movie is a tragedy and should end with Gaston falling from the roof. From his point of view, Gaston did nothing wrong. His crush was captured and imprisoned by a beast, so he roused the village to rescue her. Stockholm syndrome is to be expected, so we can't take Belle's word for things, as "No denying she's a funny girl that Belle."

My son's favorite character was Gaston, and he believes the movie is a tragedy and should end with Gaston falling from the roof. From his point of view, Gaston did nothing wrong. His crush was captured and imprisoned by a beast, so he roused the village to rescue her. Stockholm syndrome is to be expected, so we can't take Belle's word for things, as "No denying she's a funny girl that Belle."

Based son, he already understands the concept of war brides and Stockholm syndrome being a female-coded phenomenon. We'll watch his career with great interest.

Your son's hardly alone. Gaston and his dark triad personality has many teenage and adult women swooning, hence fanart such as this.

Didn’t Leia need to be rescued? She was set to be executed. Yes, she wasn’t helpless and was competent. But it is clear throughout the movies that Leia was the moral center but not the physical one.

Gaston is by any measure the hero of the movie. He's a paragon, the absolute image, of his people, and they adore him. He is the bringer of benefit, the one who is capable of moving them to action as a body.

Gaston’s problem in the end was that he wasn’t masculine enough for Belle.

To channel my inner Sloot, I thought it was that his house wasn't big enough.

I think this is a great point.

Edit: though, upon reflection, Tangled played this pretty straight.

But when was the last time a major animated feature film did the damsel in distress thing?

One Piece: Film Red, 2022

Of course, since that isn't American, it just proves your point.

Also, Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel III.

I suspect it's a skills mismatch. Years ago I watched a video essay in which the author outlined the concept of "chaos cinema". It's that style of action cinema you're all familiar with because it was all the rage in the 2000s and 2010s (maybe even today, I don't think I've seen any action films which came out in the last five years): omnipresent shaky handheld camera, cuts every half a second, lens flares up the wazoo, post-production blurring, dirt on the lens. It's a style of action cinema more prone to inspire disorientation than excitement, nausea than an adrenaline rush. Think Paul Greengrass (Bourne, Captain Phillips), Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace, World War Z), just about every Christopher Nolan action film, Hunger Games.

A later article (which I can't find now) noted that this trend coincided with a spike in Hollywood hiring directors who didn't cut their teeth making action films to direct action films, in hopes of lending them a little cachet and respectability. Before he was tapped for Batman, Christopher Nolan made understated psychological thrillers; before Bond, Marc Forster made intimate dramas and quirky comedy-dramas. The skilful directing of an action film, contrary to what Hollywood producers might believe, is not an easy thing to do, and one shouldn't assume that the ability to direct an intimate character drama necessarily translates to the ability to direct an action film which is exciting and engaging. So these directors, with colossal budgets at their disposal but essentially no experience in how to stage and shoot an action sequence effectively, took the easy way out. Let's just get fucktons of coverage from every angle and shake our cameras like we're having an epileptic fit, we'll figure it out in post.

Note that this approach can technically "work" in producing an action film which is true to the franchise in question, provided the director (and, more importantly, the screenwriter(s)) actually have some respect for it and understand why it appeals to people. The Dark Knight is widely considered a faithful adaptation of the Batman comics despite containing some of the most incoherent action sequences ever put to film, and the received wisdom was that the Nolan brothers and David S. Goyer had really done their homework in understanding the comics.

I think there's something similar going on here. We're making a new Indy movie, yay! Who's going to write it? We could hire a screenwriter who has an established track record in writing screenplays in the action-adventure genre, but that's not enough - we don't just want our Indy movie to make bank, we want it to have prestige. Everyone who's anyone is talking about that Fleabag girl, who's got her phone number?

The trouble is that, while Phoebe Waller-Bridge may be a talented playwright and screenwriter in her comfort zone (my girlfriend made me watch the first episode of Killing Eve the other day and I barely laughed, but everyone who's seen it tells me Fleabag lives up to the hype), she may not really understand what makes Indiana Jones appeal to people. She may, in fact, have nothing but contempt for the people who enjoy Indiana Jones. So when a Hollywood producer gives her a fat paycheque and tells her to "put her own spin" on the franchise - well, she's going to deconstruct the shit out of it, isn't she? It's not bloody Shakespeare.

We could hire a screenwriter who has an established track record in writing screenplays in the action-adventure genre

That genre has been dead for 20+ years. There aren't any ...

Tom Cruise disagrees.

Tom Cruise Mummy was utter shit.

Yeah but that was development by committee to the extreme, Universal pictures were desperate to create a narrative universe they could use to remake all the classic monster movies in their vault. The Mission Impossible movies are all produced by Cruise, who I suspect is responsible for maintaining the formula and quality of them (which isn't the best of the best, but is consistently better than average.)

I think Tom Cruise Mummy was the moment when Hollywood started its true decline.

People genuinely have liked Christopher Nolan films, generally, not just The Dark Knight. People raved about Inception when it came out.

Then he made TENET, though.

I will always admire Tenet for what it is - millions of dollars spent bringing to life the scattered thoughts of a guy who has smoked way too much weed. I don't have any proof Nolan is a stoner aside from Tenet, but Tenet is pretty solid proof on its own.

I'm generally not a fan of Nolan (I've seen several of his films and still think he's yet to top Memento) so I wasn't really that pushed about seeing Tenet. But I read a review somewhere in which the critic said it was the most impenetrable film they'd seen since Primer, which did pique my curiosity a bit. I love Primer, but it was made by one guy in his garage for two months' salary. The idea of someone expending a nine-figure budget to create something comparably bizarre and incomprehensible is intriguing, if nothing else.

Still haven't gotten around to watching it but my girlfriend wants us to watch it soon.

My god was Tenet bad, it's Christopher Nolan huffing his own farts, the movie.

And I say this as someone who likes his movies, I loved Interstellar and Inception.

Am I the only one that thought the male lead was really bad? I thought the praise for him was so bizarre, he doesn't have half the charisma of his father.

Is he good in something else?

Whatever it was, I think the main problem was that he made the life of an international superspy pulling off insane heists (three in one film!) seem like it was boring? Like he (the character, not the actor) just didn't want to be there?

Compare/contrast to James Bond who generally seems to enjoy killing baddies, infiltrating bases, and seducing women. For the protagonist it just seemed rote.

No possible way to forgive the audio mixing though.

I first watched Tenet during COVID with a now-ex-friend who had gone full progressive pod person; this fucking guy pretended to be "queer" because he just had to complete the trifecta of being a gay black communist (to be maximally appealing to college-educated white women).

He claimed to love TENET because (direct quote) "It had a black protagonist and internationalism themes." He will forever be my model organism of empty-inside clout-chasing scum.

internationalism themes

What the fuck does that even mean?

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Put him at the head of the queue when you live up to your username.

You're welcome to use my skull too if you'd like, I feel like it's a lot emptier after watching Tenet, and hasn't fleshed out all the way since.

I know, despite his obvious deficiencies in directing action sequences he has directed one critical and commercial smash after another.

Because artists want to do what is cool among their peers.

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