FisterRoboto

WHAT THE FUCK?!

I messed up my ankle last year in a bike accident, and when I went to the urgent care clinic, they took my vitals, and the nurse was like, "Your BP is a pretty high. Have you heard that before?" I said that I hadn't been to the doctor in years, and they asked a few other questions. One was how much caffeine I drank. At the time, I was drinking 2 16-oz cups of coffee every morning and a SF Red Bull every afternoon. They were like, "Yeah...so that's not good."

I think it was less of an insult and more just plain patronizing. Yes, you're such a pretty boy.....

I was curious just from this picture that made the rounds a month or two ago:

One thing to keep in mind is that those are usually only production budgets and don't include any of the marketing costs. Mid-size films can easily run up to $40 these days, and blockbusters run north of $100M all the time (and that's just for domestic; international marketing can double that cost easily). Those costs have definitely ballooned over the last 15+ years. For example, in the 1980s, it cost on average about $4M to market a movie. But if we look at, say, Green Lantern, it looks like that movie made almost $20M, but it cost just under $100M to market, so we're actually looking at roughly an $80M loss.

Notice that the most recent of those films will be 20 years old this May. I think his best days are far, far behind him.

Oh, I definitely agree with that. I think everyone had Gosling as the assumed "I don't feel okay voting for Affleck" pick. But I'm totally happy to see it move in the direction of Washington.

Well, Denzel got the SAG Award last night, so that moves him a lot closer in the running. As much as I like La La Land and Gosling, I'd love to see DW get his 3rd Oscar.

I know it seems silly to complain about someone mispronouncing names on this podcast, but the director of the first two Highlander movies is named Russell Mulcahy, not Malachi.

But a bookshop whose owner just fucking lends books to people. Which is basically a goddamn library! Or does she pay a monthly/annual borrowing fee?

And that chest is incredibly hairy.

You're just made of salt, aren't you?

Or Being Julia. Or The Kids Are All Right. I really love her, and it's a shame she seems to be largely underappreciated by the Academy.

So, I ended up buying this because a streaming copy was $15 for the theatrical version + special features, and I know I'll rewatch it plenty now that I own it. So, first off, my copy didn't have the new song in it, and if someone (maybe tomspanks?) hadn't mentioned it on Letterboxd, I would have had no idea that was a thing. I looked it up on YouTube, and it's kind of heartbreaking because I had watched all the special features already. They talk A LOT about Howard Ashman in those (especially during the featurette about Paige O'Hara) and how he was sick during the production and died before the movie. Ashman and Menken basically took this dead-end script, turned it into a musical, and transformed it into the movie we know today. Anyway, this whole song is about what the servants will do once they are "human again," and they're all really simple pleasures. And viewed through the lens of someone who was wasting away from AIDS, it's just really, really sad. ON A HAPPIER NOTE, if you have the special features, watch the shit out of them! There's a great one featuring Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez (the duo that wrote Frozen), Lin-Manuel Miranda, and some other dude I can't remember right now basically sitting around Alan Menken at the piano totally nerding out over the songwriting in the movie. It's totally delightful.

Disagree about La La Land, but then again, I'm completely enamored with it and have been listening to the soundtrack off and on since its opening weekend. But I definitely agree about Streep. She pretty much just has to show up anymore to get a nomination, and that's really unfortunate because I think her slot should have either gone to Amy Adams for Arrival or Annette Bening for 20th Century Women. I haven't seen the latter yet (I'm going to try to see it this weekend), but I've heard nothing but unanimous praise for her performance.

DEFINITELY agree. I don't even care if I particularly like the movie, but if one of them really enjoys the movie, that's a lot of fun. And if all of them are on board, it's even better. That's why Fast 5-6 and Furious 7 are probably my three favorite episodes. I love that the gang and Adam are just like, "Yes, let's fucking do this!" (but it also helps that I legit love those movies, too)

One of the brags in the song "Gaston" is how no one "goes stomping around wearing boots like Gaston. I know the song is almost over by that point and you've probably used up all the good boasts by then, but is that REALLY the best one you dildoes could come up with?

Reminds me of PFT's comment in the Deep Blue Sea ep where he says something like, "So what's the count on good shark movies? Still just the one?"

Ohhhhhhh that's tomspanks. I've been trying to figure out who that shark-obsessed rando is.

In case he's caught by Death Eaters and needs help.

Yeah, if there's any VO work in a movie or cartoon, Welker was probably involved. He does basically everything.

I will fucking fight anyone that says this is a bad movie. The beat poetry scenes are my second favorite part (behind the scenes Myers as the dad). But I think they're also part of why the movie wasn't a big financial success. Those scenes are a bit too meta for 1993, when meta-jokes weren't quite as big of a thing as they are now (unless they were in over-the-top slapstick spoofs), so I think people didn't really know how to take this movie. Also, the Alcatraz scene with Phil Hartman is one of my favorite things of all time.

But, like, the dishes and shit have to eat, right? The story is that they are all people that were turned into sentient dinnerware, so they would require some sort of sustenance, one would suppose. I find it very concerning that they don't have faces. Like, Lumiere and fucking Cogsworth get to have faces and shit, but with the plates, they're just like, "Nope. You're just a fuckin' plate." What was the hierarchy in deciding who got turned into what?

My biggest problem is that many studios have started doing limited LA releases at the end of the year just to be eligible for a nomination. Then it's often nearly a month (or more) before they will get a wide release. That's been my story with Toni Erdmann, which is up for Best Foreign Language Film this year. Everyone I know that's seen it has said they loved it, but it's not showing in Austin until about a week before the Oscars. Now, I'm planning to see it the first night it's available, but it's really a bummer that if it's that solid a film, it's coming down to the wire for release. Most of the big movies, though, will have been out for a month or two by the time the Oscars happen, so I feel like if you want to see them, you've had a chance. If you wait for movies to come out on home video, you're always going to be behind the curve, so I don't really find the Oscars to be all that different in that regard.

Okay y'all. I didn't finish my rewatch the other night, but I saw this movie in the theater with my mom and my sister when I was 10. We immediately bought it on VHS when it came out, and I'm really surprised my sister and I didn't wear out the tape because we both loved it. I played trombone in band in middle school, and I remember buying the music book so I could play the songs from it (I also had the one for Aladdin, which I loved almost as much). I hadn't seen this movie in at least 10 years and still remembered all the words to the songs. This movie is just completely magical for me. A large part of that is what Quasar Sniffer talked about in his post in the other thread. It's such a beautiful blend of traditional and CG animation. The hand-painted backgrounds for Belle's village are still beautiful, and I love that animation from 25 years ago holds up so well today (see also: Miyazaki). All of that said, there is an elephant in the room, which I think we should acknowledge and then move past. The Beast is kind of horrible, and the idea that he imprisons a woman using her father as emotional leverage and that he is rewarded for this with her love is problematic. BUT, those are things that are by and large inherited from the fairy tale. Working within that construct, this version of the story largely subverts many of the even more problematic areas of the original French story (I highly recommend reading that synopsis if you aren't familiar with the original story; this movie comes out looking like a feminist dream compared to the shit in that). In that version, her defining characteristics are her beauty and her kindness. But while the film maintains these aspects, it gives her two more characteristics that stand out even more. She's smart, and she's bold. And that's what I really like about Belle. The first time we see her really interact with Beast is when he rescues her from the pack of wolves (yes, yes, damsel in distress...blergh), but later, when she's cleaning his wounds, she's basically like, "Quit being a little bitch" to him. And it's the fact that she challenges him in a way that no one else has that creates the first crack in the beast's cold persona. So it's not just that he needs to make her fall in love with him. He has to genuinely fall in love with her as well. It's not a given that he's into her because she's beautiful. He has to love her as a person the same way that she has to love him as one (in the original story, he starts asking her to marry him at dinner every night from the moment she comes to the castle). Also, the introduction of Gaston is a brilliant move. He almost feels like a deconstruction of the normal Disney prince. If you look at, say, Cinderella, Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty, the prince is pretty much characterized by just being handsome and heroic. He rescues the princess, so she immediately falls in love with him. We know absolutely nothing of his personality. Maybe he is a fucking monster of a human being, but at least he's good-looking! So when we're introduced to Gaston, the first thing we see is what a piece of shit he is. We know he's not going to be the heroic prince early on (obviously, since the real prince's name is in the title), but he's built on the usual prince archetype. Then he also serves as a foil to the Beast. Obviously, he's beautiful outside and hideous inside, and the beast is hideous outside and beautiful within. But Beast starts out being a shitheel to Belle, and again, it's only once he starts to care for her that we start to see his personality transform. As I mentioned before, he has to learn to love Belle, but he also has to become someone worthy of love. I could go on and on about this movie, but this post is already long enough, and I'm sure I'll have plenty more to say once I finish my rewatch.