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Wien

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Posts posted by Wien

  2. Posted

    I'm just going to leave this right here.

     

    http://io9.com/star-trek-into-darkness-the-spoiler-faq-508927844

     

    Massive spoiler alert for people who have not seen this yet. And it doesn't even begin to touch the litany of issues I had with the plot.

     

    I actually thought that, if you ignore the plot entirely, the movie was kind of enjoyable. Its like watching Bad Boys 2 in space. The integrity of its sci fi was about at Bad Boys 2 level, too. All I gotta say is, when an old sarcastic Futurama gag takes your sci fi to school for a lesson, you know you went wrong somewhere.

     

  3. Posted

    When I first saw the preview for this movie, I thought it looked like hot garbage. Then I noticed it has a 76% on RT, and I was very curious about it. I never explored that further though.... Maybe its like a Crank 2 type of thing.

  5. Posted

    snapback.pngthestray, on 11 May 2013 - 11:29 AM, said:

     

    Dude, seriously, I think you're missing the point entirely.

     

     

    It's not about whether or not individual movies are historically accurate or realistic. Nobody's refuting that white people also played a part in the civil rights movement, and nobody wants to exclude them from stories. The point is that the majority of films about fighting racism are told from a white perspective. Have you not noticed that? White people helped, SURE, TRUE, but why are THEY always the focus of OUR struggle? That doesn't bother you in the slightest? You don't think there's a problem with these movies habitually representing black folk as too timid to do anything for themselves, until a white person comes along to advocate/inspire/educate them? You don't think the constant narrative of a white person's virtue in the face of anti-black racism is a problem, when there are scores of untold stories about black men and women who didn't wait for or need a white person to fight for them? Those black people don't get movies about them (not for lack of people trying to tell their stories either). Those black people are largely omitted from history books. Hollywood has a well-documented aversion to casting non-white leads. And you're sitting here talking about "It has a good rating on Rotten Tomatoes"? Who cares?

     

    I would not have a problem with movies like The Help if they were an anomaly. If the white savior was the exception, not the rule. I would not mind seeing a white person stand with black people if they weren't always the central focus or the agents of change. Like Shariq put it, all these movies do is enforce the myth of white superiority, because any time we see a movie about racism it's 9 times out of 10 centered around a virtuous white person, and makes it look like black people were just doing what they were told until the pure noble white person came around and changed things. That's just not how that shit went down, and if you don't know that you have a lot of reading to do.

     

    Here's the thing about historical accuracy. You can be historically accurate and still only tell the side of the story you want shown. That's called whitewashing. You can tell a true accurate story and still leave out all the important and meaningful details. It then becomes a lie of omission. We see movie after movie of the altruistic white man saving people of color, but what's being omitted are all the people of color who fought for themselves. And constantly depicting people of color as passive in their own struggles is a really problematic dangerous thing to put out there into a culture that already thinks racism is just a thing of the past, minorities are whiny, and white people are the true victims in today's world. Yeah, some black people back then were too afraid to fight and thought it better to keep their nose down, but is THAT what we need to see over and over again? A movie about black maids in the 1960's just would not get made if there wasn't an Emma Stone character in there to placate white Hollywood studio execs. It just wouldn't. That's not a coincidence, and it's not because of "historical accuracy", it's because it's the way people who decide what movies get made want it.

     

    It matters. The narratives we perpetuate matter. Movies perpetuate the narrative that white people are always the heroes, even when the fight is not their own. White people, and Will Smith.

     

    1. "The point is that the majority of films about fighting racism are told from a white perspective. Have you not noticed that? White people helped, SURE, TRUE, but why are THEY always the focus of OUR struggle?"

     

    If I wanted to be a jackass about this, I could copy/paste a cornucopia of literary and theatrical examples of where white people aren't the saviors. I'll just trust you know what these examples are already and chock this up to extended, erratic hyperbole.

     

    2. Again, when talking in specific terms about this movie, I only can speak to the contents of the film. Its intent in its message can only be as malicious as it is perceived. Its funny, because I was raised for a large portion of my life in Japan, so when The Last Samurai came out, I laughed at the notion of Tom Cruise in a savior role. It didn't stop me from enjoying the film. Hell I found it rather enjoyable, all the way through that ridiculous ending where the white guy was the only one impervious to a howitzer. It never diminished my experience with the rest of the film, I simply took it in as a movie to entertain, not a teaching tool of the end of the Meiji era. If I examined the world of entertainment in THOSE terms, I would be satisfied by nothing. There is nothing stopping you, or anyone else, from reading/making/watching films or books on lesser told tales. It makes no sense to use a movie like The Help to get on some epic soap box to condemn people not having ever heard about the Springfield Lynchings or whatever other litany of examples may exist. The central point of contention seems, to me, to be "Why are white people the focus of black struggle, it diminishes the role of blacks and is not historically accurate!". To which my counter point was only to say "It IS historically accurate, depending on what example of history you wish to pluck from". The inherit problem with this misplaced rage is that you are focusing it on an intensely minuscule, random, isolated, oh and by the way largely fictional abstraction. What about movies that ARE historically accurate and based on non-fiction? What weight do those pieces have against something like The Help? I submit; NOTHING, and vice versa is the same as well.

     

    As an aside; we're talking about a film that is only being discussed because it was put up on a site that prominently displays its Rotten Tomatoes score (to serve as some barometer to a movie's potential worth to THIS COMEDY PODCAST, READ: NOT "REAL TALK WITH TAVIS SMILEY") as well as its own Trash Can and Hash Tag metrics for measuring the films worth to the show. You want to know why I mention RT? Well... <-----

     

    3. Your definition of whitewash is a bit off, so let me help you out a bit;

    Quote

     

    anything,asdeceptivewordsoractions, used tocoveruporglossoverfaults,errors,or wrongdoings,orabsolveawrongdoerfromblame.

     

     

    Whitewashing is different from what you claim that revisionist history does. Omitting information is not inherently deceptive; for starters, you'd have to identify intent. Sometimes information is omitted simply because the author just flat out doesn't know about it. Whitewashing is an active feat of deception typically to achieve some ends. If what you are saying is that there are movies that are actively attempting to undermine and rewrite American history with an intent on diminishing black roles and expanding white roles... well, you won't get an argument from me on that. The point of my argument has always been limited to this movie, and in THESE SPECIFIC TERMS:

     

    1. In regards to its application for use in a comedy podcast based on Bad Movies, I don't think The Help reaches the criteria that we typically see on this show. The film, for all intents and purposes, and perhaps in spite of some people's cultural objections to it, is widely regarded as a good movie.

     

    2. The tag "#racistrubbish" being applied flippantly to the film could mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Knowing what we know about the bad movies they do on this, again, COMEDY PODCAST, accusations of racism usually comes from more evident and extreme displays of buffoonery, ham-fistedness, or just flat out supremacistic. Whatever the perceived racism of The Help, I could not fit into those categories myself. More to the point...

     

    3. The reaction of my concerns on the response to this film seems to deal way more with what people perceive to be the message of the movie rather than the actual content or execution of the film. I reference the RT scores again because we are using this as a basis to choose a film for this NOT-CORNEL-WEST-HOSTED COMEDY PODCAST. Arguing about the message of "white savior" as an appropriate entryway into this film seemed flimsy at best to me. This isn't even a very strong example of white saviorism (Dangerous Minds anyone? Sunset Park??).

     

    And you know what? You're probably right. A movie about black maids likely wouldn't have been made if Emma Stone wasn't in it. To the author's credit, it likely wouldn't have happened also if the book hadn't been a New York Times best seller. If you want to talk about differences between the book and the film, in order to get the film greenlit and made, be my guest. Like I said, I never read it so I don't know. Sometimes I think that people look at the wrong things when trying to find a target for their rage. I mean seriously, a property's propensity to sell is what drives how things are made more than some perceived nefarious plot to "get the black man!" I mean shit, Precious got made, right? A movie about a fat black girl, I mean who cares right?? The Jackie Robinson biopic got made, right? I'm not even sure if people these days even remember who he is! But they get made, and if your gripe is that there aren't enough, or they aren't being made respectfully enough, then perhaps you should be directing your ire towards the studios funding Transformers (and CC Oprah on that, too) rather than a Bad Movie Comedy Podcast directed towards a generally good movie because you don't like how the white lady was portrayed.

     

    And if all you're watching are movies where white people are always the heroes, then perhaps you need to broaden your Netflix queue (or stop watching whats on Netflix altogether). Those movies do exist too, beyond Will Smith.

     

    I've gone on too long, my food has gotten cold, and my Star Trek Next Generation marathon was put on pause for far more than my liking. This is the last I'll speak on this topic, for sho'.

  6. Posted

     

    Nobody's saying white people weren't involved. What we're saying is that the way the movies portray it, black people had almost nothing to do with their battles for civil rights. Like it or not, movies are heavily trusted as a kind of history book; playing it like this is like erasing Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. in favor of the white guys in the marches.

     

    If you're trusting movies as a history book, that's your problem. Not the movie's. I guess Abraham Lincoln really did have a time about him with those vampires, too.

     

    More to the point, and again I must say I haven't read the book, is the nature of the story being told in conjunction with the book. Believe it or not, not every black person was as "militant" as Malcolm X or as openly defiant as MLK. There were plenty who thought it prudent to keep their noses down, their jobs secure, their friends and families safe, and let others do the marching for them. Perhaps this isn't the most heroic portrayal of the struggle (though it would still be in keeping with realism), but I would wonder if it is keeping with the tone and tenor of the book. At its worst, its a shoddy adaptation of an otherwise good book, not a gross misrepresentation and distortion of revisionist history.

  7. Posted

     

    I don't think you would say anything was racist -- whether the racism be subtle, overt, or inadvertent.

     

     

     

    I would argue all of those movies are adding to the propagation of the myth of white superiority. If black people can't be the heroes in the biggest, most important movement in their own population's history -- the Civil Rights Movement -- then what does that say about black people. Just like what thestray said earlier -- it would be like making movie after movie about feminism but having the main hero be a male. I don't care if one of these shitty as movies had better sound editing than the next, or a better plot than the other. They main premise is the same for all of them, and that's why they are shit.

     

    You DO realize that, historically speaking, white people HAVE been a part of civil rights protests and actions, right? You DO realize that everything that black people (and other minorities) fought wasn't fought in a raceless vacuum, right? It would be like saying that its absurd to think that a straight person would stand up for gay rights, or have any involvement with the LGBT equality movement, because their involvement somehow deludes the message or makes it irrelevant.

     

    This is almost like some form of Super White Guilt, where relevant contributions can't even be hinted at without the idea that its the White Devilâ„¢ trying to take all the credit and belittle the minorities struggle.

  8. Posted

    Even if you want to talk about it in terms of "white savior" films, The Help is a (highly lauded at 76/90% RT) lame-at-best entry in a psuedo-genre that has given us a WEALTH of delightful gems. I've never read the book, maybe I'll ask my mom about it. She loved the book. But even if the "white savior" aspect was shoehorned in, historically speaking, I am not going to be personally quick to shout it down as being overtly racist. There were plenty of white people in the civil rights movement who did speak out and stand up for equality for blacks, and were murdered for it. The 50s and 60s may not have been that long ago, but it was worlds apart from the situation we live in now. It may seem like a no brainer now to be a part of the civil rights movement, but back then, especially if you were white defending blacks in the deep south, it was serious shit. Sometimes in films like this, the white character is used as a sort of AVATAR (another lame ass white savior movie) for people who ask themselves "if I lived back during the civil rights era, would I stick up for my black friends knowing it could ruin my life if not kill me?"

     

    Besides, if we REALLY want to talk about lame ass white savior movies (and I do think that needs to become a tag on FYI if its not already), then how do we escape from The Air Up There?

     

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyNbGkNQO70

    • Like 1

  16. Posted

    Where do you crazy people find the time or energy to watch 13 episodes of garbage? I could understand if the show was good; but I watched the first three minutes of this crap, and could tell that it was fucked and turned it off. If you're watching it to review for work, I get it, and I'm sorry you have to sit through like 13 hours of bleh. However, if its not for a job, why watch something that's not even good-bad?

     

    Watching terrible shit has been a curse of mine long before HDTGM was ever a thing. Hell I watched all of Paul Reiser's last sitcom. It used to be an easy thing with TV shows, they'd get canceled after 3 episodes and I'd be done. But on Netflix, its 13 episodes.... its all there. And on a night when I have nothing better to do....

    tumblr_lyu5doXGW31r9zg20o1_500.jpg

  17. Posted

    I watched all 13 episodes of this, guys. Let me just say...

     

    Episodes 1-10 are complete garbage, awful shit.

     

    Episode 11 and 12 are kind of neat, things finally pick up, the story finally starts to move (still makes no sense, but at this point you won't care about that) and it actually becomes, dare I say, fun.

     

    Episode 13 is completely fucking nuts. The show's most fatal flaw is exposed in the season finale; it has absolutely NO pacing. 10 episodes of nothing happening, and suddenly in episode 13, EVERYTHING IN THE GALAXY HAPPENS. Its like some producer got railed on coke, got super frustrated with the slow pace, and then wrote episode 13 himself to wrap it all up in a hurry. There is SO much that happens in 13, so many crazy ass revelations and characters dying left and right, resolutions to shit that happened 8 or 9 episodes ago, things being set up for the future... it doesn't even feel like an episode of TV. It feels like a season synopsis montage, like you'd see before the season premier of Game of Thrones or something to remind you of everything that happened last season.

     

    Brian McGreevy shouldn't even be allowed to write his own Facebook updates.

  18. Posted

    Sure it will have hammy lines, but that's expected of a Del Toro film. I think Pacific Rim or Elysium will be the dark horse surprise for the summer.

     

    The entire ordeal looks totes ridic... which is sad because I like Charlie Day. But giant robots boxing low-grade Godzillas in the middle of a crowded city, using what appears to be a 1900s steam powered ocean liner as a baseball bat.. sounds great for an anime, less so for a live action Michael Bay-esque affair.

  22. Posted

    Eli Roth seems like a smart dude, and he’s got a great sense of humor. I assume he knows they weren’t trying to make a ‘Sopranos’, or even ‘House of Cards’, and one of the best ways for his show to develop a following is to not just admit what it is, but revel in it.

     

     

    Yeah, I don't think these guys had ANY intention of creating a campy soap. Not even in the slightest, according to this panel. Just a full blown fail.

    • Like 1

  23. Posted

     

    The AV Club review I linked to basically turned the line "That woman is what she says she is like a Mexican hates fireworks" into a minor meme in the comments. Lines like that are astonishing usually because somebody wrote them, then someone else said them, and then someone else edited them in without anybody asking what the hell it meant. But, according to the comments, that line is verbatim from the book this show is based on. So somebody wrote it, several other people copy-edited it, someone else wrote it into a script, someone else said it and someone else edited it in without anybody saying, "Wait, what now?"

     

    So when the mother says to her son "I hope those balls know what they're doing", was that also written in this book? If so, we found someone worse than Stephanie Meyer.

  25. Posted

     

    Somebody really should have said something to her about that accent. I'd imagine it would be pretty difficult to tell whether or not a foreign accent sounds good or not, and if nobody says anything to you about it there'd be no reason to worry about it. But with how bad the writing/directing was I guess it's no surprise they allowed a very capable actress to look/sound as though she belonged on a soap opera.

     

    Her accent is the WORST. Keanu Reeves does a more convincing southern accent in Devil's Advocate than she does an English one here. Its embarrassing. Whats worse, is all the dialog and narration in this is written to sound like that early 1900s HP Lovecraft effect. Kind of like this:

     

     

    Only Garrick Hagon is awesome, HP Lovecraft is amazing, and everyone involved with Hemlock Grove deserves to be beaten with a cane by an angry Singaporean dungeon master. Maybe they should have set this in the UK and hired an all English cast.

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