site banner
PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   2757 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I just finished watching Dune 2 and took some notes while doing so. Notes, not an essay, so what you get is a jumble of thoughts.

  • The Director turned a fanciful book that made little sense into a visually impressive film that makes even less. All visual spectacle.
  • Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.
  • Soundtrack with people suddenly screaming in fantasy-arabic, ouch, my ears.
  • Emperor: A fucking joke.
  • Chani, if it weren't rude I'd say she's an ugly bitch.
  • Irulan - the acting suited the character, the speech did not, the looks did not at all.
  • Margot Fenring, Lady Jessica, Alia, pretty actresses, decent acting.
  • Fight scenes: Absolute trash. Ridiculous acrobatics VS completely passive victim-badguys. Harkonnens, Sardaukar, no matter, they just stand around dumbfounded and do some slow-motion waving once per scene, while the Fremen breakdance all over the place. And of course the Fremen have regular guns and use them...from off-screen at impossible angles, but not when it would actually make sense. None of the fighting makes sense!
  • Lasers and metal-storm like helicopter door guns looked nice though.
  • Sardaukar standing around in the desert sun in triumph-of-the-will formation.
  • Worst of all: The boots. Floppily open-topped boots in a sandy desert. Ouch. Luckily it wasn't all of the characters who wore them, but I still pitied the ones who did.
  • The Fremen hideouts are...giant highly visible architecture. How stupid exactly were the Harkonnens? Do the people of the future just not believe in reconnaissance? Same for the Fremen having a massive but completely unnoticed troop buildup just around the corner from the Emperor's army. Everything is so damn visible! But then the Fedaykin just dig themselves out of the sand at the feet of the army, so I guess nothing needs to make sense anyways.
  • Javier Bardem, I don't know if he's a good actor at all. I don't know. Feels like he's phoning it in, or was never much good to begin with and I overrated him so far because I'm a Cormac McCarthy fanboy. Or maybe he is good, but the movie is such overrated tripe that he falls flat.
  • The final duel between Paul and Feyd-Rautha is...meh. Not as bad as the one-sided fights preceding it, but it looks like stage fighting 101, with nothing but flashy, highly-visible moves meant to be easy to counter. Makes sense for a movie, of course, but still looks something in between silly and boring.
  • Now, to be fair, Dune is difficult material to work with, because it made little sense even as a book. But this is just...all shape, no substance.

A thousand apologies for a worthless post, worthlessly posted, but I needed to put it somewhere.

Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.

Every major character apart from Chani was white (as in, portrayed by a white actor), though.

Yes, but you can clearly see a gradient of morality that's pretty much the gradient of skin darkness. From the very dark Liet-Kynes, practically a saint, to the darkish Chani, morally flawless except for her doing violence, to the lighter Stilgar, a fanatic blinded by propaganda, but at least on the right side, to the much lighter Atreides, greedy egoistical colonialists who exploit the natives for their political games and are nominal heroes only because they fight even worse people, to the almost-albino cartoon villain Harkonnens.

This frankly seems like a bit of an overthink. The Fremen (canonically originating from Egypt or the general Nilotic area) are black or brown. The Great Houses, again canonically distantly from Greece and Russia (though it would be amiss from me to not to mention that the surname Harkonnen originates from Finnish), are white. Most of the nonwhite characters died in the previous film.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats