Entertainment Forum General Chat Thread • Page 572

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The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes, October 15,2021) • forum.chorus.fm

 

Just got out of No Time to Die. Still gathering my thoughts, will post them in the movie's main thread

 

I can picture him saying this haha

 

I mean, like, hell yeah, dude. Fuck that creep.

 

Just got out of the Chicago International Film Festival screening of Memoria and it felt infinitely bigger than me in a way I don't think I can even describe

 

This sounds like a really great idea in big cities, not so much when the local multiplex is just showing the biggest blockbuster every 30 minutes.

 

Any time you say something negative about those movies you know there is going to be some bizarre sort of response, often personal and ugly. I don't understand why it isn't enough for them to have won the cultural conversation; their movies make billions of dollars consistently and the stigma of adults watching superhero movies is largely gone. Why do they need the remaining holdouts to fall in line too?

 

There's a futility in holding entertainment up to the standards of art. In a sense these films are more akin to watching sports, not in a demeaning way just the mindset people have in viewing them.

I imagine fans of Captain America have a similar feeling to me watching Robert Whitaker.

 

That is what makes this era so odd. A lot of it is the rise of social media, but you didn't really see fans of Saw IV or Transformers 2 getting mad when some critic dared to criticize the films. Football doesn't care about the handful of people who would rather see a Broadway play.

 

Its football fans fighting after the game. Fandom impels these reactions; social media has given them an outlet.

 

It's a bit more like football fans going to a museum and asking why the museum isn't showing their football games, insisting their football games have as much merit as anything in the museum and deserve the same attention and gravity, and then when they're given that, getting mad that people at the museum don't get much out of it

 

Y’all are hilarious lol

 

I'm for treating any movie as "cinema", or "art", whatever you want to call it. If it's written and directed and performed and exhibited and put out for consumption, yeah I'll watch with my critical lens and some superhero stuff holds up to my standards pretty well and a lot doesn't. Whatever genre, whatever the source material, it all has the potential to be as good as any other cinema. But the place we’re at in the MCU/superhero/poptimism cycle reminds me of when the same thing happened with video games. Ardent video game fans demanded that the medium they loved be held up with other forms of art and culture that were viewed with more esteem, and then melted down when people pointed out the many flaws in the semiotics and mechanics of the medium and how we’re supposed to interpret video games as serious art. And in this case, Disney has also successfully forged a hyper loyalty to their brands and is currently in the process of trying to become the dominant producer of the medium as a whole. Their successful co-opting of liberal/progressive narratives is also frustrating, coming from a company that, after ignoring race, gender, and sexuality for 14 years, now pays lip service to those ideas and has legions of fans on the internet insisting that if you don’t like the Eternals, you’re racist and sexist. The MCU is a lucratively successful Disney marketing strategy with a couple solid movies in their vast and forgettable oeuvre and even if I like Eternals or Black Panther 2, I think it’s important to be aware of Disney’s goals and the distinction between their product and “cinema” is a real one. Which is not to say they never produce “cinema”, just that they’re actively shaping the medium into something duller.

 

This was basically The Dark Knight in 2008. Coincidentally, the Marvel movies were just getting started with Iron Man but there was much less cultural discourse around it because it wasn't being called one of the greatest films ever made.

 

Lol

 

They are all mad because some character was revealed in a post-credits scene. What is the difference if you read that on the Internet or sit in the theater as an underpaid employee waits to sweep while you desperately sit there in extreme bladder discomfort?

 

Great post!

I find I have a very different critical lens for genres as they are usually trying to do fundamentally different things and I take that into account. That said In the yearly ranking threads although I very much enjoy comedy and horror, I dont end up ranking them as high as "serious" or arthouse films

 

I've said it before but I find "spoiler" culture so fucking ridiculous. Of course I understand the concept that if you intentionally spoil something for somebody who didn't want to know the information then you're an asshole, but the fact that actors/etc. face serious financial threat if they say something happens in their movie is really dumb

I also have noticed that most people who talk about spoilers are literally spoiling themselves on the internet on purpose. Does the general audience really care that much about going into movies completely blind?

 

Sometimes even movie trailers contain spoilers

 

I'll always remember people being mad at the trailer for Before Midnight because it showed that they stayed together and had children. It is just the premise of the movie.

If spoilers are that scary, just check out of those kinds of websites and tweets and everything else. I have no idea what happened in Venom because I never looked for it, even though it has been out for a while.

 

Venom is his dad

 

I generally try to avoid spoilers for most things because I enjoy going letting the film, show, book, etc take me for an unexpected ride. Take Titane for example. It's a good movie regardless, but going into that one blind made for a wild viewing experience. That being said, knowing a plot point or character action before hand might dampen that first viewing, but it isn't going to ruin a movie.

Sometimes, if it's a movie I had no real desire to see, I'll read the spoilers and if it makes the movie sound interesting enough I might just give it a chance.

 

It depends on what constitutes spoilers , spoiling a twist or big reveal is lame but if a character name or costume is a spoiler that doesn't make sense to me