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grudlian.

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Posts posted by grudlian.

  1. Posted

    55 minutes ago, Quasar Sniffer said:

    Yeah, I feel like this should have been with central thematic base for the whole film, but it's hardly ever brought up, if at all. This damn thing was over two hours long, but something that could have provided some actual emotional resonance was totally excised, or never even addressed.

    And the whole monologue that Cuba give about malt liquor in the board meeting has been a criticism of that industry for decades, and is a valid one, but seems really out of place in the middle of this one. This should have been its own the movie, not shoe-horned into a musical about small town church choirs.

    This movie felt like a first draft. They had all the right ideas for a generic saved by the church movie but they just ran with their placeholder ideas.

    His big idea was try to market malt liquor to a new clientele? Wow. What a novel idea. I get that creating a fictional business plan is difficult to sound feasible in a movie but jeez this is low level.

    • Like 3

  4. Posted

    48 minutes ago, Cam Bert said:

    Maybe I missed this but does Cuba not realize that Beyonce and her son are in the exact same position that he and his mom were? I was expecting him to finally open up to Beyonce and explain this or for that to come back in some big way but from what I recall he never mentions it. In fact he's such a liar I'm not even sure if his mom is really dead or not.

    Yeah. Were we supposed to find Cuba likeable? At first, I thought he was supposed to be a savvy businessman who just needed the right opportunity but he is kind of dumb and a jerk.

    Also, are Beyonce and Cuba supposed to be the same age? Because lol definitely not. 

    • Like 3

  6. Posted

    41 minutes ago, gigi-tastic said:

    I take umbrage to the idea we were fighting on the message boards. As far as I could see it was business as usual. There was a lot of discussion about baseball that I didn't understand but I don't think that got particularly heated? Am I missing something?

    I think Paul was just making a joke. Since he was recording this early and doing canned responses, he was making a funny excuse to not have forum answers.

    • Like 2

  7. Posted

    26 minutes ago, sycasey 2.0 said:

    Right, if it's just that you personally don't feel good seeing this person on screen or paying money to see them or whatever, then that's fine. I don't share that feeling, but I understand.

    I bristle when the argument becomes: "I'm not supporting this person, AND YOU SHOULDN'T EITHER because you are enabling them!" I just don't find that very convincing when you're talking about a $4 rental of an old movie.

    I think the argument of "how dare you support ____________!" kind of went out the window a few years ago. When people naively thought it was just Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, it was a lot easier to feign moral superiority for abstaining from a movie. Now that we're aware that abuse and molestation are rampant, you'd need to skip virtually every movie. Anyone who tries to guilt me over a movie needs to provide me with a list of their last 10 watches because I'll find someone guilty of something awful.

    We all have different lines of acceptability. I have the celebrities I won't support anymore. You have the celebrities you won't support. I won't shame you for watching a celebrity I don't support if you won't shame me.

    • Like 1

  8. Posted

    Syncasey, did you call in on the minisode about neon clothing? Because the call was your post verbatim.

    If not, then we can now confirm people are stealing our posts for calls.

    EDIT: It just occurred to me that it could be an earwolf employee reading the post. So, idk.

    • Like 2

  11. Posted

    3 hours ago, EvRobert said:

    in last week's mini ep, when Paul said Sean Penn and Madonna, I somehow heard Sean YOUNG and Madonna  and watched this thinking it was going to be some sort of Some Like It Hot/Road To with Madonna and Sean Young that just fell to the wayside because it's a WTF movie. Imagine my disappointment in expecting a beautiful 1986 Sean Young and getting Sean Penn...

    During the minisode, Paul said the was a Shanghai Surprise in the movie but not to look it up if you didn't know what that means. I did anyway and apparently it currently means when a man pretends to be a woman during sex. So, I spent the whole movie wondering if China Doll was going to reveal herself to be a man because I assumed Madonna wasn't going to play a trans character.

    • Like 3

  14. Posted

    33 minutes ago, Cameron H. said:

    There’s also a line where Clarice is told that Bill was rejected for sexual reassignment based on his psychological tests. I think this is one of those lines that one reviewer was criticizing, but it did go a long way to alleviate some of my concerns. Essentially, the movie wasn’t saying, “He’s crazy because he wants to be transitioned,” but rather “He wasn’t  transitioned because he was so crazy.” It might seem like a bit of semantics, but I think there’s a world of difference between saying “here’s a psychotic, trans person” and “here’s a psychotic person - who happens to be trans.”

    Granted, I am totally speaking from a place of cisgendered, male privilege and this doesn’t really get into the issue of representation at all. It definitely matters if the only time trans people even show up in a movie is to play either a psychopath or a punchline. I think this has (maybe?) gotten a little better, but excluding maybe The World According to Garp, I think this was especially true of the time.

    I don't necessarily think of Buffalo Bill as being trans anymore than I think of Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon as a (dragon) furry. On the surface, yes, their mental illness looks like a trans person or a furry but I don't think that's what they are.

    I get why a trans person or even a trans ally would have a problem with Buffalo Bill. The complaints are absolutely fair and valid.

    I'm not a psychologist and not even an armchair expert on any of this stuff. So, I can't make any kind of diagnosis or explain the difference on a psychiatric level. But I guess I'd say it's similar to saying Ocean's 11 is about a kleptomaniac or Norman Bates has an Oedipus complex.

    • Like 1

  15. Posted

    On 5/5/2019 at 10:37 AM, RyanSz said:

     Since time travel is fake though you can make up the rules as you see them or break them as you see them, which is what they were doing by calling BTF untrue, but then following the rules of it when they went back in time (not running into past selves, making huge changes), so it was weird that after all that Steve goes fuck it and just rearranges 70 years of history. I have seen some theories that it's not Peggy he's married to but that he managed to bring back Black Widow from the time stream and that's who he was with, also leading to why Banner couldn't bring her back to the present because she had already been brought back to the past. I am now a bit more interested in the Black Widow movie, which I believe is supposed to be out as the last MCU movie for 2020 or the first for 2021, while The Eternals is starting filming in three months so that should be coming out next year, while Black Panther 2 is looking to come out 2021 along with Doctor Strange 2 being another likely film for that year, Guardians 3 in 2022 at the earliest,  then Shang Chi has no timeline yet as they are still finding a cast and crew for it. Seeing as though that's only half of the movies that could be in this Phase given the recent release record of Marvel, I expect there to be a Captain Marvel 2, and possibly a Captain America/Winter Soldier film, along with the recent properties Disney got, which does include Fantastic Four.

    With Tony grabbing the stones, if I recall, he uses both hands to grab Thano's gauntlet and it's his right hand that ends up with the stones. After the years of seeing the various ways Tony has created suits that form around his body, I wouldn't be surprised if he had a pickpocket mode built into one for this such occasion, akin to Spider-Man's suit that has 1,000 different modes that he can use at any moment. I was irked by Nebula killing her past self because that just creates the offshoot reality that the Ancient One was warning against, and even having past Gamora running around in the present is more of those same issues. I have heard rumors that Marvel might be setting up The Maestro as a big bad, given that there is smart Hulk now, which could be interesting given that they really haven't given Hulk a standalone film since Phase 1.

    I also wondered about all of the people who came back, like how do you go about normal life after being gone for five years and you know why you were gone? They apparently haven't aged so Hawkeye is now five years older than when they last saw him, and then you have the people who come back but find out that their loved ones either died over the course of the five year gap, or via survivor's guilt killed themselves. As far as the rat goes, that I liked because of the randomness of the universe, it would most likely be an animal or something falling on the machine to reactivate it. My one big question was regarding when the people came back, what is there reaction to seeing how everyone that lived just said screw it and apparently didn't pick up a single piece of trash in the ensuing five years.

    The Back To The Future stuff felt really weird to me because it felt like it would make more sense to just have Bruce say "We don't know how it works or what the effects would be". It seems a lot easier than actively having a guy tell you it's bullshit after he says it's not his expertise then violating what he says anyway. It's funnier to have the BTTF scenes but it didn't make much sense (which is a common complaint I have with the MCU).

    Tony getting the stones really annoyed me. I excuse most the other illogical scenes for emotional weight or their comedy offsetting it but this felt like lazy writing or just lying to the audience. I can come up with a theory on Tony Stark made the new gauntlet but he developed a back door on the gauntlet that would allow him to... it just feels like after 11 years, I want more than "Tony's a genius so he definitely invented some deus ex machina"

    But other than that, I don't have major beef with the movie. It was emotional. It was funny. It was way better than I expected it to be. 

  16. Posted

    I want to defend Scott Glenn not wanting to return.

    1. Hannibal is a terrible sequel

    2. He also listened to audio tapes from the Toolbox Killers to get into the mind of an FBI agent. If you've heard anything about them, got to be awful to have heard that and get into that again. 

  18. Posted

    1 hour ago, Cameron H. said:

    Just to kick things off here, I thought Cold War  was absolutely beautiful. Visually, it was a stunner. Unfortunately, I couldn't really connect with the characters. I didn't really care if they ended up together or not. Neither Wiktor nor Zula made much of an impression on me one way or the other. 

    Still, it was absolutely gorgeous to look at.

    I had a similar feeling. I didn't particularly care if they got together. I liked the female character but remember not caring much for the guy (I haven't seen this since theatres so my thoughts are pretty weak).

    • Like 1

  23. Posted

    I saw this movie once and I was really surprised at its reputation. Maybe it was from having seen too many notable clips before saying it proper but I'm pretty sure I didn't laugh once when I saw it.

    It's kind of technically fine with good performances and maybe it felt really fresh in 1982. I can maybe appreciate it on that level but, as everyone here has said, there are a bunch of better movies that are similar to this. So, even if you need an 80s comedy, or a Bill Murray movie, or a Geena Davis movie, or a Dustin Hoffman movie, or a Sydney Pollack movie, or kind of any movie with any ties to Tootsie, there is a better example somewhere. I wouldn't say I hated this but I definitely don't need/want it on the list.

  25. Posted

    15 minutes ago, AlmostAGhost said:

    He stole that lyric from an Elvis song, but yea if I'm not being hypocrite here, maybe my test needs some reworking. Don't want to defend Lennon, he's not my favorite at all.

    But it does lead to a wider question though - do artists get to create characters? Is everything they write supposed to be heard or seen as autobiography? What if like George Harrison wrote a "Run For Your Life"? Can someone write a song about angry jealousy, or is it just verboten?

    Yeah, it's one line from another song but Lennon expanded on it to make an entire song about abuse.

    Artists can absolutely create characters. I would never argue otherwise. Lennon, in this instance, wasn't creating a character. He was abusive. He has admitted it and I believe later said the song was about his wife. 

    2 minutes ago, Cameron H. said:

    I think personal accountability and how the behavior is brought to light counts for a lot as well. For instance, take John Lennon. People like to bring up the quote, “I was a hitter” when they talk about his abuse, but the full quote and its context means a lot. The full quote is:  

    “It is a diary form of writing. All that “I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved” was me. I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically — any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn’t express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace...I am not a violent man, who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster.”

    That interview, one of his last, was him and the interviewer going through every song The Beatles wrote and what they “mean.” What’s important to me is that he wasn’t exposed, he revealed. The reviewer wasn’t bringing it up because he was confronting Lennon with some dark rumor, Lennon volunteered the information. There’s a good chance, had he not said anything, the public would never have known anything about it. This is very unlike most of these stories where you have accusers and some level of cover up. In effect, Lennon was his own accuser, which for me, makes his contrition feel more sincere.

    No, it doesn’t excuse things he did when he was younger, but it does show some self-awareness and personal growth. He even acknowledges that people will hate him when they learn the truth, and he’s honest enough to admit, “I’m scared about that.” That feels more human to me. Much more than, say, The Rolling Stones that “pretend” raped a woman as a “joke” for a documentary to be “edgy” and then sued the filmmaker to prevent its release.

    There's a reason I didn't reference Getting Better as a song about abuse. That always felt like Lennon recognizing his violent past.

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