Half of the population is below average, so it’s hardly surprising that there’s a market for fart jokes/racism/misogyny from a reliable delivery agent like Adam Sandler. Kevin Lincoln, at NYMag, explains why the outsized success of Netflix’s least loveable product shouldn’t be a shock, either:
[Wednesday] Netflix announced that The Ridiculous 6, Adam Sandler’s abysmal Western movie-thing, has been watched more in its first 30 days on the service than any other film during its 30 days. The. Ridiculous. Six.
Now, the instinct here—and it’s an understandable one, because, again, The. Ridiculous. Six.—is to say that Netflix is lying, or, more specifically, putting dizzying spin on their data. “Of course they’re saying it’s their most-watched movie,” you think. “Netflix made it! It’s a Netflix original! They’ve got a stake in this!” You’d be making a legitimate point. We have no glimpse into the metrics behind this claim; for all we know, Netflix has been auto-playing the movie on your Apple TV while you sleep. For all we know, nobody has watched The Ridiculous 6. Have you?
But far more likely is that they’re telling the truth. The most important thing is to consider what Netflix is. Then, once we come to terms with that, we have to consider what this means. Because it means something significant, both about filmmaking in general and what Netflix is as a company in particular.
Since Netflix started streaming movies and not just sending them by mail, it’s had an eclectic selection. Netflix licenses movies to stream; they don’t own any of this content. At any given time, a movie can disappear or appear on the service based on the unforeseen jockeying of its distributor and Netflix…
..[One] case in particular stands out. Back in 2012, the Duplass brothers executive-produced a movie called Safety Not Guaranteed. They made it for just $750,000, and Mark acted in it, along with Aubrey Plaza and Jake Johnson. It was directed by a first-timer named Colin Trevorrow. During a limited theatrical run that never reached 200 theaters, it made $4 million — good money for such a cheap film, but nothing that’ll buy anyone an estate in Malibu.
Safety Not Guaranteed then landed on Netflix some time in early 2013, where it stayed until August 2014. I’ve spoken with multiple filmmakers who stressed that the exposure Safety Not Guaranteed obtained on Netflix transformed their ideas about distribution. For whatever reason — likely a mix of positive response from audiences and its surprisingly wide-ranging appeal — Safety Not Guaranteed seemed to basically live on the Netflix front-page the entire time it was on the service, showing up as a recommendation and in the various category scrolls. Now its director, who had never overseen a movie that cost more than a million dollars prior to 2015, directed Jurassic World, which was briefly the highest-grossing opener of all time. Next up, he will direct a Star Wars movie…
Pecunia non olet: Money has no stink.
Speaking of crappy movies, what overrated / underrated films have you perused with discernment recently?
Hillary Rettig
The Big Short – a fantastically fun movie about a depressing topic – how the housing market / global economic meltdown happened. Highly recommended!
Caroln
I saw Safety Not Guaranteed several years ago on dvd and it was a sweet movie. I watched Samsara the other night on Netflix and can’t get it out of my head.
maya
Makes sense. The Bundy Boyz must be watching something while cleaning their pieces. Over and over again.
Rashi
MItt Romney couldn’t have said it better.
Shell
@maya: Relatedly…never could understand the appeal of the original ‘Red Dawn’ (despite the poignantly young Patrick Swayze).
“Hey kids, lets put on a war!”
geg6
I try not to watch films that are liable to suck (IMHO). Which is why I’ve never seen an Adam Sandler movie or a Marvel-based film. My tastes are not very blockbuster, with the exception of Hunger Games, Harry Potter and Star Wars. For instance, my favorite film of fairly recent vintage is The Descendants. I really am not much of a movie person; I tend to prefer tv. In fact, if you are ‘t watching it or quit watching last season, the new season of American Crime on ABC is looking good after the first episode, which was simply riveting despite the fact that it’s all pure setup and has little “action.”
Amir Khalid
Any moment now, mclaren will come along and pour scorn on everyone’s favourite movies.
Big Ol Hound
I think most movies these days are aimed at 14 year olds so this one has lowered the bar to about age 10. If I go to a theater to see a flick, junior high seems to be the age group.
Robert Sneddon
I’m currently re-watching the various Monogatari anime episodes and trying to get my mind around its very odd story structure before the next set of prequel movies (Kizumonogatari) hit the theatres.
Steeplejack (phone)
My computer has embarked on what appears to be—based on the glacially slow progress bar—a gigantic Win10 update/upgrade. Fingers crossed.
M. Bouffant
I doubt The Ridiculous 6 would have been nearly as successful in theaters. People will stream crap they wouldn’t bother to drive to a theater to see.
Gravenstone
@Shell: A reflection of where large swathes of the American people were emotionally at the time it came out. America uber alles, and all that. Or perhaps you missed how that jingoism carried the day for at least the next decade (see Gulf War I).
CaseyL
Safety Not Guaranteed is darling: I saw it at SIFF a few years ago (in fact I think it debuted there). I’m glad to see it’s found a good home on Netflix, and recommend it without reservation.
About the Adam Sandlers I can’t say much, since I don’t watch those. I remember reading an article about his lousy work, and how he makes great googobs of money doing lousy work, because a certain demographic is a reliable audience for them. Hey, if it works for him and them, who cares?
Netflix is now making original series and movies, and I bet a big part of their financial planning has to do with Adam Sandler movies. It’s very much like the old studio system, where mediocre crowd-pleasing movies made enough money to finance more serious ones. Some terrific classic films came out of that system, so if Netflix wants to follow that model, more power to them!
ThresherK (GPad)
At what point, since the sinking of Blockbuster, does Netflix or one of these services get crowned The New King of Direct-to-Video?
Hear me out: Can we admit demise of the DVD as the sweet spot of the market? (I ask because we do not Netflix or stream anything in our home.) Someone’s gotta admit that not everything on Netflix, or the like, is an artsy niche success d’estime for the curious and open-minded, or for those of use who dissolve into paroxyms of laughter at the idea of Ben & Jerry’s making “I Blue Myself” Ice cream with a pic of Tobias Funke on it.
One of these enterprises will wear the mantle of the new Republic studio. Or the even lower-budget Monogram. Perhaps this is just one side of Netflix we’re gonna have to expect will survive until Adam Sandler become the full Ed Wood without the ambition or belief in his skills.
Today my wife picks up the Game of Thrones season 4 DVD at the library.
trollhattan
Sandler has a career because Jim Carrey got old.
trollhattan
@Amir Khalid:
The internets ran out of letters last night and supply is still tight, so perhaps not.
MomSense
@Robert Sneddon:
I haven’t seen that one. I’m currently enjoying Mushi Shi.
ThresherK (GPad)
BTW if you want something animated, musical, and heartwrenching, and experimental, I recommend ‘Sita Sings the Blues”. Heard about it when looking up a jazz singer, Annette Hanshaw, from the 1920s. A hoot and a half, and an incredibly intimate labor of love.
cmorenc
@Hillary Rettig:
I concur – the film brilliantly makes the arcane financial details behind the housing bubble crash not only concretely understandable, but entertainingly enjoyable to follow as dark comedy.
The one downside was that I arrived early enough to be subjected to the previews for the unbearably stupid Ben Stiller purported comedy – Zoolander 2. This potential audience for this film is definitely not the upper 50% of the intelligence curve, to judge from this preview.
Germy
Django sings
I really liked the Triplets of Belleville.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@Hillary Rettig: I second that with great enthusiasm.
Wasn’t nuts about Star Wars. It was better than the prequels, but that’s a pretty low bar. Most of the really powerful parts of the story happened before the movie started, and I felt like the movie was telling me, “Trust me, you care about this.”
Amir Khalid
@cmorenc:
We never saw the first Zoolander movie in Malaysia. Apparently, our PM was sore about being depicted as a Chinese guy.
Mnemosyne
@ThresherK (GPad):
It’s more what CaseyL is saying — Netflix is making both “The Ridiculous 6” and the highly-acclaimed “Beasts of No Nation.” It’s the old studio model where the popular crap finances the better films.
I know two people who watched it — one said the fart jokes were funny, and the other one says he keeps falling asleep after the first half hour.
Germy
@ThresherK (GPad): What a coincidence. I’ve been listening to a lot of Annette Hanshaw on archive.org. Also Lee Morse. I haven’t seen the film, never heard of it…
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@cmorenc: You think the Zoolander 2 trailers are bad? I’ve sat through trailers for the Michael Bay Benghazi movie since Spectre came out.
BGinCHI
Inherent Vice is really great.
It films a Thomas Pynchon novel, so of course it’s weird, but it’s amazing it got made at all.
I think Paul Thomas Anderson is a very underrated film maker. And Joaquin Phoenix should have been nominated for his performance.
Mnemosyne
@M. Bouffant:
Plus even the most liberal movie theaters won’t let you smoke pot during the movie.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Germy: Look up Roger Ebert’s review from 2009 or 2010. Because of Music Clearance Hell, the best way to get it is to download from its own website, and donate or buy some merch.
Annette Hanshaw is due for rediscovery. Recordings speak to a naturalness that’s really difficult to find from that era.
I will try Lee Morse.
orogeny
In the category of underrated/unnoticed…Frank, an indie movie out of Ireland. An eclectic cast, a plot that defies description, but really compelling. It’s Maggie Gyllenhaal’s best work.
Germy
@ThresherK (GPad): I like Annette’s little exclamations at the end of the records. “That’s all!”
I recommend Lee Morse.
Renie
I can’t stand Adam Sandler but I’m in the small majority who thought The Water Boy was just stupid.
I’ve been watching a lot on Netflix. Right now I’m watching Making of a Murderer about Steve Avery and find it very hard to stop. Have just 3 episodes left.
Robert
There’s a really simple reason for that statistical analysis. Netflix spent the first three weeks of Ridiculous 6’s release forcing it as an advertisement on everyone’s Netflix account. It doesn’t matter that I watch documentaries, indie horror, and foreign language films; I had to stare at that god awful banner every time I turned on Netflix for most of December. It also popped up on popular, trending, comedy, and totally irrational “because you watched X” lists.
So, yes, Netflix tricked enough people into watching it with omnipresent ads to make that claim. It’s the same thing they do with all their original programming. Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and The Unbeatable Kimmy Schmidt all touted similar results with the same advertising method.
Germy
@ThresherK (GPad): It’s sad to read stuff like this:
Because there are so many people who are… less than talented (Sandler) and yet fully confident in their talents.
Gravie
I just took a Netflix flyer on a film called “Lucky Them,” starring Toni Collette, and liked it quite a lot. The premise is a music journalist (Collette) who is assigned a story on a long-vanished rocker who also happened to be her boyfriend. Oliver Platt is also in it. I like the ability to try out movies on Netflix since you can abandon them early if they stink.
delk
Just watched The Assets on Netflix. A miniseries about the Aldrich Ames case. I enjoyed it and couldn’t wait to see him get caught.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Mnemosyne: Not that I miss how the studios treated lots of their workers, eve ones who were Names (directors,actors,writers–who never had control over what the studio would do with a script), but wouldn’t the studio system have figured out how to minimise the crapitude, or at least B-movie the hell out of it?
Adam Sandler is becoming a B-movie star (sic) who hasn’t got a clue. Compare to Bruce Campbell, who–even though horror movies are sooo over for me–is taking care of his bidness.
The Onion had this nailed in the 90s .
debbie
@Germy:
I saw his other film you had mentioned and liked it very much.
Brendan in Charlotte
@Shell: jingoism, a Rambo starring the “Brat Pack” (I think they were called that) – Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen…and Jennifer Grey. Love to watch it just to ridicule it. I just wish they’d Rifftraxx it…
Germy
@debbie: I love the lush, colorful backgrounds and the fluidity of the animation.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Germy: Makes me glad she stopped with her health. I knew that she retired young but wasn’t aware why.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
I don’t have a Netflix account because I have an Amazon Prime membership and having both seems a little redundant. One thing I’ve noticed about free streaming Prime content though is that the top shelf comedies are almost never available for free streaming. You have to pay to rent those. If Netflix is the same way the success of the latest Adam Sandler movie may be a result of a derth of comedy content available on their streaming service.
A Humble Lurker
@Robert Sneddon: I watched that once…that was enough for me. I liked the general surreality of it, but there was so much in there that I just…no. The animation could be pretty damn awesome, though.
Gex
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Netflix doesn’t work like that. Amazon works like that because they are both a content streamer, like Netflix, and a content seller, what Amazon originally was. Everything on Netflix is available for someone with an account to view without additional charges.
Felonius Monk
@trollhattan:
And Sandler can’t age fast enough.
Ripley
Sicario is my 2015 best film pick, an intentional update of Traffic, a genuine tragedy, and just a great movie. Loathed The Hateful Eight – Tarantino makes movies for film critics, not audiences.
Robert Sneddon
@A Humble Lurker: Kizumonogatari, the prequel (how Araragi-senpai became a vampire during Spring Break and then got better) is being released to theatres unlike the other story cycles (Nekomonogatari Kuro/Shiro, Nisemonogatari and Bakemonogatari) which were done as TV animes. The plan is for three 1-hour cinema releases but it’s still going to be Shaft and Shinbo doing the work (tilts head quizzically).
Iowa Old Lady
@Hillary Rettig: I loved the way they broke the fourth wall and had celebrities explain the complex financial instruments. Nothing like having Selena Gomez talk about collateralized debt obligations.
smintheus
I’ve seen a few Netflix films recently that were surprisingly good: Mystery Road, Uncle John, Rob the Mob, and Despues de Lucia. The last is a really hard watch though.
grrljock
Sisters–funnier than I had hoped. Granted it stars Tina and Amy (by now first names should suffice, no?), but it still could’ve been just meh. The rest of the cast was really strong, too. I howled at the lesbian jokes (I’m a sucker for good jokes that make fun of my “tribe”).
SiubhanDuinne
@Renie:
As one who vividly remembers the Atlanta Braves of the early 1990s, I do a horrible double-take every time I see or hear this reference.
smintheus
@Ripley: Has there ever been a credible character in any Tarantino film?
Tommy
@Gex: Yes. I cut the cable line and have Netflix and Hulu. I had Amazon but found it was like iTunes years ago. That charge of 99 cents here or there starts to add up. Amazon charges for most shows. This has not changed in the last year has it.
BGinCHI
@orogeny: I really liked that film.
Great performances.
BGinCHI
@smintheus: Mystery Road was terrific.
Highly recommended.
Gin & Tonic
Easy to make fun of Netflix crap, but as CaseyL said above, maybe it helps finance the good stuff. I’ve previously recommended their Winter on Fire about the 2013-2014 “Maidan” movement in Ukraine, a subject about which I know a fair amount. Harrowing to watch, but very well made. If it takes a load of Adam Sandler fart jokes to get something like that made, I say fart on.
Mike J
@Ripley:
And Adam Sandler makes movies for audiences, not critics.
I’ll sit with the critics, thank you.
patrick II
My two favorite movies of the last year were “Ex Machina” and “Mr. Holmes”. “Ex Machina” used an AI encased in a beautiful, but not entirely human, android to explore what it means to be human. Alicia Vikander was brilliant in the role.
Mr. Holmes starred Ian McKlellen as an aging Holmes struggling with his own decrepitude and his decisions about rationality vs. humanity that have brought him to possibly a very lonely end to his life.
Two movies with much talking and not much action, but damn they were good.
Amir Khalid
@Mike J:
I am ambivalent on this point. Critics make an art out of movies, but audiences’ money is what pays for them to be made.
mclaren
Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This stinker was so bad is even had a trench. A trench! A trench the X-wing good guys fly through at the end of the movie to blow up the evil giant weapon!
That’s so pathetic, words don’t exist to describe how sad it is. J. J. and his pals at Disney basically sat around a great big table at Disneyland and said to each other, “How can we rip off the original 1977 Star Wars?”
And J. J., that schmuck, probably said, “I know! A trench! We’ll have them fly through a trench at the end, just like the first movie!”
And the crappy special effects visuals when that planet blew up? Just pathetic. Starkiller Base looked like a macaroon full of peanut butter that somebody stepped. They should’ve gone back to the CGI vfx guys and told ’em, “Dammit, we want our money back!”
The whole shitty film was bits and pieces of other Star Wars films crammed and jammed together. There’s the planet Hoth — except now it’s called “Starkiller base.” And there’s the planet Tatooine — except now it’s called “Jakku.” And there’s another Yoda — except now Yoda is called “Maz Kanata.” And another Darth Vader — except now he’s called “Kylo Ren.”
Supreme Leader Schnook was particularly hilarious. Anyone who doesn’t realize that the Schnook is just Larry the Cable Guy talking through a giant hologram is dumber than a box of rocks.
For sheer crappiness, The Force Awakens definitely pegged my puke-meter in the red. The needle was stuck over at the far right, where the red zone reads DANGER: EXTREME FILMMAKING SHITTINESS. We’re talking Ishtar territory here, folks. We’re talking The Magic Christian or Uwe Boll productions.
In fact, I betcha Uwe Boll is gonna be the director of the next Star Wars after the upcoming one — Star Wars: Return of the Payout.
“I sense a great disturbance in the box office — as though millions of voices with taste and common sense cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced by fanbois.”
Gussie
‘River’ on Netflix is stunning good. If you haven’t seen it, you will thank me.
trollhattan
@mclaren:
Okay Amir, your prescience remains top-shelf.
bago
@mclaren: Aaaand scene.
dmsilev
@Amir Khalid:
Didn’t we discuss being a bit more careful with those summoning spells?
mclaren
The Big Short was really good. Revenant was spectacular. The Hateful Eight was too violent for my taste, but a really good closet drama — could’ve been put on as a play and still would’ve worked. Suffragette was tough to watch, but worthwhile. The Good Dinosaur struck me as really dumb and so ahistorical it broke my suspension of disbelief. Humans? With dinosaurs? Someone doesn’t know their paleontology, we’re talking about a gap of 76 million years here. Usually I’ll go with Pixar’s wackiness, but this time the credibility gap was just too big to bridge.
Mad Max: Fury Road had some of the most amazing filmmaking ever put on screen, but the weakness of the plot undercut the mindboggling stunts and visuals. Basically the whole film boiled down to an outback hunk chasing some supermodels in funnycars. Citizen Kane, this ain’t. Bridge of Spies was great — written by the Coen Brothers. Spielberg tried to ham it up and turn it into a manipulative feel-good tearjerker, but even a director as bad as Spielberg couldn’t wreck a script that good.
The best movies of the year were undoubtedly Inside Out and Dil Dadakne Do. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was a movie I expected to hate, but it was actually good — and the music was dynamite. Mission Impossible 5: Rogue nation also represented a return to form for that franchise. Well done and quite in line with the original TV series.
Sicario was corrosively cynical but excellent. Overall the best video stuff this year, though, came from two TV series — Jessica Jones and The Man In the High Castle. The latter departed significantly from Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel, but in ways that improved Dick’s original material. Philip K. Dick was not a very good writer, and his characters all tend toward cardboard.
raven
“Revenant was spectacular.” The photography and scenery were, the story and acting were just ok. Nowhere near the heart of Jeremiah.
mclaren
@raven:
Yeah, that’s fair. Except for the willingness of the lead actors in Revenant to subject themselves to those filmmaking conditions. Bear in mind that Leonardo diCaprio actually plunged into subfreezing water in below-zero conditions two hours from the nearest civilization. That takes guts.
A Humble Lurker
@mclaren:
I’m confused. Are you bothered by the fact that humans and dinosaurs coexist in this movie or are you bothered by the fact that the dinosaurs didn’t evolve in those intervening 76 million years since they weren’t wiped out by a space rock in the movie’s universe?
mclaren
@A Humble Lurker:
I’m just bothered by the fact that The Good Dinosaur tried to have it both ways. As a rule of thumb, if you want to do fantasy, you do fantasy and explicitly leave the real world behind. So (for example) in the Harry Potter universe, magic is real. That’s not a problem. Let’s go with that. Then the consequences of magic being real get worked out in detail. Fine, that’s great. That works.
Or you can be strictly realistic. A movie like Ex Machina pretty much stuck to reality, with a very minor instance of hand-waving (exactly how you get true AI by eavesdropping on all the world’s phone conversations isn’t obvious, but let’s go with it). Given that one slightly ludicrous plot point, everything else follows. Ex machina stakes out a realistic scenario and sticks with it. That’s great too. That also works. (For example, the gynoid played by Alicia Vikander doesn’t suddenly shoot death lightning out of her hands to kill her creator, and she doesn’t so something silly like “I hacked the operating system of this house because I’m a superintelligent machine and I understand machines so there, you stupid human!” Crap like that would’ve ruined the film.)
You get a problem when you try to blend realism (dinosaurs actually existed, they did hatch from eggs) with fantasy (humans are alive at the same time! And they can commnicate with dinosaurs! Because dinosaurs don’t have brains the size of peas, they’re actually as smart and as socially adapted to humans as dogs!). That doesn’t work.
If you want an example of a blend of realism and fantasy that does work, take a look at the Raquel Welch 1966 version of One Million Years B.C..
That film had lots of wildly unrealistic stuff. Basically Raquel and her chums were scampering around on the slopes of Vesuvius — great stark-looking brutal landscape, but early hominids actually evolved in Afrrica, a very lush and fertile region. Dinosaurs romped around and a pterodactyl even grabbed poor Raquel. Plus, she had a fur bikini, which was too chich even for one million years B.C.
But the movie chucked realism and went with the flow, and, hey! It worked. Same deal with the original Star Wars. Star drives + some mysterious goofy magic power called “the Force.” Peole use blasters but also anachronistic silly weapons called light sabers. Hey! It worked. They just ignored the entire need for realism and just brazened it out. So it was effective. The most absurd example in the original Star Wars film was the blaster battles. Within 10 seconds of any of those battles, everyone should’ve been dead. I mean, c’mon! You just wave your blaster around and you can kill everything in front of you. It was patently ridiculous. But, okay, you go with it, because this is a fantasy, and you don’t expect realistic situations in a fantasy.
One source of bad filmmaking comes about when the screenwriters/director get stuck halfway in between two premises and can’t decide which they’re going to go with. Is the film realistic? Is it a fantasy? What are the rules of this imaginary universe? Are they consistent? You can make almost anything work if you decide on a premise and stick with it, and follow the internal rules of the screenplay consistently. The problem comes when you say something like “The villain can’t deal with the color green!” and the somehow the hero uses the color green and it doesn’t work against the villain. Then the whole film falls apart.
ThresherK (GPad)
@mclaren: Lillian Fish and Richard Barthelmess was showing these kids a thing or two about location shooting way back in 1920, in service of D W Griffith.
“Revenant” wasn’t on my radar, but now it is.
WaterGirl
@efgoldman: You forgot to say please! :-)
gf120581
Speaking of “Safety Not Guaranteed,” it’s funny how Colin Trevorrow went from directing a tiny indie like that to doing “Jurassic World” and now slated to direct “Stsr Wars Episode XI.”
GregB
@raven:
Sounds like you have a soft spot for Hatchet Jack.
gf120581
@mclaren: So you think “Force Awakens” is awful (ridiculous), but are praising “One Million B.C.?”
Are you feeling okay?
A Humble Lurker
@mclaren:
I’m confused. Are you bothered by the fact that humans and dinosaurs coexist in this movie or are you bothered by the fact that the dinosaurs didn’t evolve in those intervening 76 million years since they weren’t wiped out by a space rock in the movie’s universe?
NotMax
Recently watched?
Enjoyed White on Rice very, very much.
trailer
Total pass the time on a rainy day, mindless popcorn movie, but James Caan in the The Throwaways made it bearable.
trailer
Goofy, but works – Kidnapping Granny K. Even without subtitles, was able to suss out what was likely being said more than well enough. Clever heist scene which redeems some of the lesser elements previously, too.
trailer
@Gussie (#61)
Yes. Almost worth growing another arm to give River three thumbs up. Slow-burning intensity, but worth the trip.
First half (or so) of the second season of the Australian series Rake was close to riveting. Once the major dramatic hook of those episodes concludes, less so.
gene108
I was going to ignore “Ridiculous 6” as I have found most of Sandler’s work over the last fifteen years to be pretty bad. He had a good run with the likes of “Billy Madison”, “The Waterboy”, and “Big Daddy” but after that nothing looks remotely watchable, but now I might check “Ridiculous 6” out.
Also if anyone wants to see over-the-top insane cliche-makes barely any damn sense-but entertaining, check out the short film “Kung Fury” on Netflix.
NotMax
Adam Sandler is to entertainment as Twinkies are to food.
mclaren
@gf120581:
No funnier than the way the bozo who directed Fast and Furious 6 went on to direct the latest Star Trek film. I guess Uwe Boll wasn’t available. It really gives you an idea of the total contempt the Hollywood studios have for their audiences, doesn’t it?
mclaren
@NotMax:
I was going to say Adam Sandler is to comedy as botulinus is to food, but…whatever. Hey! Maybe Sandler is Supreme Leader Schnook in the next Star Wars films!
schrodinger's cat
I did not see too many movies last year. I liked Interstellar in the theater but the more I thought about it the sillier it seemed. As for TV shows, I discovered The Americans, I am totally hooked, love, love, love Matthew Rhys.
I also rediscovered the movie scene in India (both regional and Hindi), while I was not paying any attention, it seems to have undergone a major renaissance. Yes there is still a lot of trash being made, but great stories with wonderful music are also being told.
I have to yet see Bajirao Mastani but whatever videos and promos I have seen, make me want to applaud the director and his team. Ranveer Singh who plays the 18th century warrior has embodied that role and managed to look goddamned sexy in the Brahminical shendi and ghera, a severe and not a flattering hairstyle by any means and the Pooneri pagadis (the traditional headgear from Pune that he wears). Never have traditional clothes from Maharashtra looked so gorgeous on the big screen.
MomSense
@raven:
I can’t even talk about Jeremiah. I was a basket case at the end. Best movie I will never watch again.
mclaren
@gf120581:
Mere ridiculousness isn’t enough to qualify a film as bad. Ridiculousness can work if you brazen it out.
The problem with the latest Star Wars film wasn’t that it was ridiculous. The problem was that it was derivative, shallow, callow, crude, manipulative, trivial, featured low-rent crappy CGI and yet such cardboard characters that the only thing to distract you was the CGI, a lack of any kind of memorable character other than Kylo Ren and Maz Kanata, who each only had about 3 minutes of screen time total, plus such gobs ‘o political correctness that you kept waiting for a gay droid to make sure all the diversity check-boxes were ticked off.
The set designer did a shit job, the CGI crew phoned it in, the screenplay was a warmed over pastiche, the direction had no flair or panache or sense of wonder, and BB8 came off as far more engaging than either of the two new lead actors. That’s bad.
WaterGirl
@efgoldman: Must have been quite the scare!
mclaren
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yes! I forgot about The Americans. Best show on TV. Highly recommended.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Robert: Daredevil and Jessica Jones are actually good, though.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
Twinkies are better than that.
And that’s taking into account the ingredients of twinkies.
WaterGirl
I just went to Netflix to try to add River to my list. It kept saying “ERROR”. Any idea what the problem might be?
Central Planning
Which half is not surprised by the market for fart jokes?
JPL
@WaterGirl: I was just able to add River. Maybe try again.
Central Planning
And speaking of Netflix movies, I see there’s a movie on Netflix called Rubber:
I’m not sure it can be good, but I think I might like watching a homicidal car tire, at least for a few minutes.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@schrodinger’s cat: May I suggest Syfy’s new show The Expanse? Hard SF fans have been geeking out over the books for some time, and the show is following that aspect of the books quite well.
schrodinger's cat
Guardian’s regular movie reviewer gave Bajirao Mastani four stars but the historian Alex Von Tunzelmann gave it a bad grade. It is funny how British historians even in the 21 century continue to shit on the Marathas and Sikhs who actually gave the Brits a good fight and exalt the Mughals who were a spent force by the time the British became a major force in Indian politics (2nd half of the 18th century).
In the British telling they rescued India from thugs who at the same time very child like and evil and who unleashed forces of chaos and India needed their “rescuing”) It took the British about 100 years from 1757 to 1857 to gain control over all of India.
mclaren
@Central Planning:
Reportedly President Eisenhower was deeply disturbed when he found from demographers that half the U.S. population was below average. He wanted to know if there was anything we could do to correct it. :-)
raven
@mclaren: I agree, it was incredible in that sense. My deafness probably didn’t help since I really had trouble with Lenny and Tom’s dialogue. I the dream sequences were really interesting but oh for a Bear Claw or Del Gue!
mclaren
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
Absolutely! The Expanse is awesome! Best science fiction show in many, many years.
NotMax
@mclaren
That’s mean.
/lame math humor
raven
@JPL: I liked it but I thought they overdid how many dead people he communicated with. Nicola Walker is really good, I like her in Last Tango as well.
schrodinger's cat
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: I don’t get cable, does Syfy stream it?
PurpleGirl
@schrodinger’s cat: Don’t feel bad about not seeing Bajirao Mastani yet. I have access to a theater much easier to get to than you and I haven’t gotten there either. I still plan to. Just have had problems sleeping and staying awake during the day. Haven’t gotten to The Force Awakens either.
raven
@MomSense: “And some folks say he’s up there still. ” I watch it yearly and I was telling Ozark about the voice over with Pollack, Redford and Milieus. It’s fascinating to hear all the details about the film. Milieus did “Big Wednesday ” soon after and they filmed the scene with Jan Michael Vincent and Gary Busey in the LA Vets cemetery at Jeremiah’s grave. Not long after they dug him up and reburied him in Cody, Wyoming. There was a big gathering of mountain men and the picture is of Redford with them carrying the casket.
gf120581
@mclaren: You clearly didn’t see “Force Awakens” then, because it was nothing like the movie you’re describing.
You sound like a whiny fanboy determined to hate it no matter what. That’s a shame.
Ruckus
@schrodinger’s cat:
In the British telling they rescued India from thugs who at the same time very child like and evil and who unleashed forces of chaos and India needed their “rescuing”
This sounds strangely familiar. A figure who is pure distilled evil mastermind who gets everything he wants and at the same time grossly incompetent boob who isn’t smart enough to be able to make toast. Wonder who that could be?
Larime
@mclaren: Really getting sick of hearing that having a woman and person of color as the leads is just PC run amok. For once SW actually looked like what I see every day – a diverse population.
The fact that a supposed liberal is so butthurt over a diverse SW movie is even more sad.
raven
@NotMax: I love Jimmy in Cinderella Liberty.
mclaren
@Central Planning:
Rubber is a French film, and it’s actually pretty good. At any rate it’s goofy and offbeat enough to stay diverting. At least you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in every scene, unlike so many crappy by-the-numbers American films. “Oh yeah, here comes the scene where the villain puts a knife to the girl’s throat.” “Oh yeah, here comes that scene where the planet’s gonna blow up.” “Oh, right, here’s the scene where the hero argues with his boss and gets suspended without pay for a week.”
schrodinger's cat
@Ruckus: Indeed, our GOP evangelicals sound not that different from Victorian evangelicals from the 19th century.
They have the same belief in their own moral superiority and moral rectitude.
A Humble Lurker
Star Wars TFA’s ‘PCness’ (read: casting anyone other than a white dude in a lead role) was easily one of my favorite parts of the movie.
mclaren
@Larime:
Okay, here’s why the casting in The Force Awakens was so bad — with just a few added lines, they could’ve made Finn and Rey much more poignant characters. They could have taken advantage of their ethnicity and gender.
Example: Add a line where Finn gets treated like dirt because of his color. “You’re on the front lines, trooper, killing kids, because nobody wants you back at headquarters throwing the lever to blow up a planet. And that’s just the way it is, so suck it up, boy!” Wouldn’t that have added a lot of intensity to Finn’s character? More importantly, wouldn’t that have helped explain why Finn said “fuck this!” and blew off his stormtrooper duties and joined the Resistance?
Or suppose they’d had that alien guy who treats Rey like dirt and keeps saying “this is worth half a portion” say “This is worth half a portion — because you’re female.” That would’ve explained why Rey is so down and out. That would’ve given her some real motivation to overcome her circumstances.
But no, J.J. Abrams and his chums just cast a woman and a black guy to tick off some boxes. There is absolutely nothing about the woman Rey that identifies her in her attitude or her dialogue or her actions as a woman. She could’ve been played by a guy just as easily. And there’s nothing in Finn’s attitude or dialogue that identifies him as black. He could’ve been played by an Asian, or a Native American Indian, or a Latino.
I think it’s great that they’ve got a woman and a black guy in the lead roles. But c’mon, let’s do something with their gender and their ethnicity that actually has an impact on the characters and the plot. Don’t just stick it on some generic white-guy dialogue like putting a T-shirt on a mannequin!
WaterGirl
@JPL: Thank you! I just tried again and it worked. I did close the original Netflix window and opened Netflix again just in case.
Germy
I guess the original Star Trek was pretty “PC” because there was a black woman on the bridge, as well as a Japanese guy, a Russian… and this was 1967!
AliceBlue
Saw Spotlight a few nights ago. I don’t think it’s a bad movie, but for some reason I couldn’t stay awake–I think I dozed through almost half of it.
I’m not an Adam Sandler fan, but I thought The Wedding Singer was very sweet.
Ruckus
@schrodinger’s cat:
And they were just as pigheaded and wrong.
Not to be disrespectful to pigs.
And of course they’d like to take us back to that time in history, to prove something.
Germy
They’re talking about football in the upstairs thread. I have nothing to say about football.
schrodinger's cat
@Ruckus: BTW I am not arguing that 18th century India had reached perfection, Indian society had problems like any other society. All I am saying is that the colonial experience did more harm than good and the British rule was far more tyrannical than that of any Indian despot, especially the whole scale looting. When Tory academics like Niall Ferguson want to claim 21st century India as a success story of the British imperial project. I want to punch his smug face. Whatever India has achieved is despite its bruising experience as a British subject state not because of it.
Our GOPers also like debtors prisons and they would like to treat the rest of us like serfs.
patrick II
@Germy:
Don’t forget the Vulcan.
Big Picture Pathologist
@mclaren:
In the context of all the weird alien races in the SW universe, seems to me that most aliens would look at — and treat accordingly — women and people of color the way we do for different breeds of cat (i.e., not much difference save for the occasional superstitious lunatic who has it out for black cats).
IOW, there are no ‘minorities’ in SW.
Germy
@patrick II: I remember reading that in Gene’s original script, the gender for Spock and Bones wasn’t specified. He was thinking of possibly casting females in one or both roles at first.
Larime
@mclaren: …Did you just argue it would have been better if they called Finn boy?
Are you…
No. Nevermind.
Germy
@schrodinger’s cat: Have you seen these? 1911 British royal family visits India to do some hunting (shooting from on top of elephants)
Larime
@Big Picture Pathologist: Right? And the idea that you need to call a black guy ‘boy’, or say ‘because you are female’ to make it important to the audience — he’s mean to her ‘cuz she’s a girl! He even said so! — is just… Wow.
mclaren
@Larime:
Yeah, because racism is not a real thing, not where black people are involved. We certainly don’t want to actually show the effects of racism in the movies. No, that would be wrong.
You people are seriously kooky. Portraying the negative effects of racism is somehow bad, because…ooohh! Ooohh! It’s non-PC.
That’s just wacky. Racism and sexism are real issues and if you want to grab an audience and make the characters seem real, you need to grapple with those issues.
I’m guessing chuckleheads like you strongly objected to the characters who used the word “nigger” in Tarentino’s Django Unchained, right?
Larime
@mclaren: No. It would be wrong because in a galaxy with Wookies, no one would CARE that he’s black or she’s a woman. Yes, they’re real issues, and yes we can and should deal with them, but you don’t have to have a giant neon fucking sign to point them out. It has nothing to do with being PC. Jesus fucking fuck.
And no, I had no issue with it in Django because it had FUCKING CONTEXT you mouth breather.
I’m SO glad you don’t write movies. Wow.
Ruckus
Just tried to call Netflix about a problem and all I get is some sales bullshit that I have to take a survey to get to someone that probably won’t be able to help. So I’ve now only got one thing to say about Netflix.
FUCK NETFLIX. Useless fuckers, there help line has been dramatically less than helpful about 90% of the time over the last 6 + yrs I’ve been a customer but it’s your only choice when something goes wrong. Now I have to pay a phone bill to listen to their bullshit and keep getting sent to another sales pitch whenever you press any key. And I thought needless reminders that you were still on hold were bad. Fucking cocksuckers.
mclaren
@Larime:
Let’s get clear here: the First Order people are villains. What’s a great way of making clear that these people are villains? Have ’em act like racists and sexists. Bonus points when they get blown away by Finn and Rey.
What is it about this that you don’t grasp? Hell, the storm troopers — storm troopers! — give a straight-up Hitler salute near the end of the film when that general gives that crazed speech about how they’re gonna blow up the Resistance planets and conquer the galaxy. Do you not think that a crew of fanatics who spontaneously give a Hitler salute to a maniacal leader would call somebody like Finn “boy”?
This is another perfect example of bad screenwriting. If you create characters, they should act in a consistent way. Evil characters who give a Hitler salute are very likely to behave badly toward black people. That’s just the logic of the character. And showing that helps go a long way toward explaining why Finn is so revolted by the First Order.
gene108
@mclaren:
You assume the Star Wars universe suffers from the same problems of racism and sexism that daunts us today.
The Rebellion was founded and led by a woman.
The Resistance is founded and led by a woman.
There have been a total of two black people given screen time in the Star Wars universe.
Lando owned a city / mining operation and became a general in the Rebellion. His race did not seem to keep him down.
FN 2187 (aka Finn) was an orphan raised to be a Stormtrooper, who rebelled against his training.
If Star Wars was supposed to reflect modern human population, about 1/6 of the humans would be South Asian, 1/6 Chinese, the other 1/3 African and other Asian and the remaining 1/3 European and Latino. As the Star Wars universe does not reflect this population mix, they clearly are not trying to model the Galaxy on modern day Earth.
Ruckus
You guys.
How nice trying to educate or understand mclaren
Neither of these will come to pass by the way. It is an absolute lost cause to try.
gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
What never gets mentioned is the British take credit for such institutions as the Indian Civil Service, which was nothing more than changing the name of the administrative service the Mughals already had in place.
The roles are essentially the same and there are no corresponding equivalents in Britain.
The Brits just made it so to be part of the ICS, you had to write an exam in England, which effectively froze Indians from running their country for several decades.
mclaren
@Larime:
So explain to me how you make the characters in Star Wars real and deal with those issues of racism and sexism without alluding to them.
See, this is the basic tension at the heart of the Star Wars movies that explains why all the movies after the first two were bound to turn to shit. You had a fairytale in outer space… “a long time ago in a galaxy far far away…” Okay, it’s a fairytale. But then you have planets getting blown up and an evil father cutting off his son’s hand.
You can have one or the other, but you can’t maintain both. If you introduce genocide and storm troopers giving Hitler salutes and a black guy and a girl who’s scraping by in total poverty, current audiences are not gonna buy this crap of “it’s the far future, so racism and sexism are a thing of the past!” unless you work really really hard (the way Star Trek) did to lay out a background where war is a thing of the past and poverty is gone and people no longer have to work for a living and there are transporters so we’re in a post-scarcity society. The universe of Star Wars is very very clearly not a post-scarcity society, and war and poverty in the universe of Star Wars are absolutely not things of the past.
You can have a fairytale. You can have plucky minorities and women triumphing over all the odds. But what you cannot have is a fairytale where you just drop in plucky minorities and women and totally ignore the context of that with some handwaving bullshit “oh, it’s future, there’s no racism or sexism anymore!”
If you do that, other people can just as easily run the same scam on you and claim “Oh, LEAVE IT TO BEAVER is a perfectly acceptable picture of everyday life in America even though it has not minorities or oppressed women, because that TV show depicts a parallel universe where racism and sexism don’t exist!”
Horseshit. You’re just trying to blow smoke up our asses.
Larime
@gene108: Exactly! CONTEXT. How hard is that?
Larime
@Ruckus: Clearly. He doesn’t even understand simple concepts like context and parable. I’m arguing with a tree. Point taken.
A Humble Lurker
What’s great about nobody mentioning Rey’s sex or Finn’s race in movie is it promotes the idea that neither matters. While there’s something to be said for addressing sexism and racism in movies, there’s also something to be said for bucking the common wisdom by treating a female or black lead as nothing special because if our world wasn’t so fucked up, it wouldn’t be.
Mr Stagger Lee
I loved Netflix when they had the Australian TV series Underbelly and the French series Spiral, but they went away, I liked House of Cards and Narcos, won’t watch the Sandler series. I will say this though, I liked their foreign films I am a big South Korean film fan, Northern Limit Line is a great thriller, so is El Nino from Spain. The TV show Pablo Escobar Patron Del Mal was a great ride and watching El Senor Del Los Cielos a cool Mexican telenova
chopper
@mclaren:
Django was set on earth, dumbass. maybe, just maybe, in the ‘galaxy far far away’ star wars is set in, full of shit-tons of alien races and shit, nobody gives a fuck anymore about human beings’ skin color.
mclaren
@Ruckus:
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight. I need to be “educated.” Because I recognize that genocide cannot cohabit comfortably with the world of “Snow White.” I need to be ‘educated’ because I realize that the Holocaust does not fit into the world of “Sleeping Beauty.”
Star Wars ran out of gas because by the second film it reached the limits out of its fairytale universe. In a fairytale, the most you can do is get some generational conflict. You cannot have a Nuremberg Trial in a fairytale, that just breaks the universe you’re in.
So now I suppose the rest of you nit-brains will start trying to argue that Visions of Things To Come from 1936 was a fabulous movie even though there were no minorities and women had no power, because “it’s the future and racism and sexism don’t exist!” That kind of dishonest bogus argument can be used to cover up an infinitude of bad lazy writing and whitebread middle-class complacency.
Meanwhile, out here in the real world, we recognize that if Darth Vader really did exist, He’d wind up in an orange jumpsuit shuffling around in leg chains in front of a far future Nuremberg court. Serious issues like that are just not compatible with the fun but unrealistic fairytale world of Star Wars.
We see the same problem, incidentally, with TV shows and movies that try to treat superheroes realistically. The upcoming batman vs. superman film apparently deals realistically with the fact that Superman is a vigilante. His battle with Zod blew up New York. We never see that in comic books. We never deal with that. The closest anyone came, I believe, was when Warren Ellis had a superhero grease the president of the United States for starting an illegal war of aggression (much like the 2003 Iraq War). That kind of stuff breaks comics. It blows apart the fantasy universe of fairytales like Superman and Star Wars.
That’s why Star Wars ran out of gas after 2 films. You had to either introduce reality, which would break the whole universe, or you had to rehash the same old crap with new fairytale villains and new fairytale good guys, but since nothing is real, neither Darth Vader nor Kylo Ren will ever get hauled in front of a future Nuremberg tribunal, Han Solo and Leia Organa and Luke Skywalker never got hospitalized for PTSD and chronic brain trauma the way vets are today, and being black or female in this fairytale future universe has all the advantages of today’s political correctness but none of the disadvantages of reality because [insert handwaving bullshit here about a fantasy future].
You know, there are some really good science fiction properties out there. Instead of more fucking crappy Star Wars movies, why not make a movie out of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed or some of Octavia Butler’s novels?
You people are cowering under your bed like 3-year-old from the real issues that are actually being dealt with today in contemporary science fiction by writers who are women and minorities and who are turning out books that blow Star Wars right out of the water.
chopper
this reminds me of dumbass right wingers getting pissed off about the lack of Christianity in star trek.
mclaren
@Larime:
So if context is so all-important in movies, why doesn’t the context of the audience’s experience matter? You’re trying to have it both ways — no, being black or a woman has no significance in the future universe…yes, being black and a woman has tremendous context for the audience because out here in the real world, we recognize that issues like the Bechdel Test reveal a lot of odious sexism in contemporary movies made by whitebread males in Hollywood for mostly whitebread male audiences.
Either the context matters, or it doesn’t. If it does, then it matters for the audience. And you can’t just ignore the context in which audience members will view women and minorities by doing a bunch of bullshit handwaving about “the far future.”
And speaking of aliens — none of you seem to recall that George Lucas originally did deal with racism in the original Star Wars movie! Remember when C3PO tries to walk into the cantina in Mose Eisley and the bartender says, “Hey, we don’t want your kind in here!”?
Nooooooooo, very clearly the future universe of Star Wars is not free from prejudice against minorities. So let’s cut out this happy horseshit about how the future will be a perfect world and prejudice will have magically disappeared from human nature.
chopper
@mclaren:
so not letting a robot into your bar is racism. interesting take.
mclaren
@chopper:
Here is a brutal blunt example of why current audiences can’t ignore Finn’s skin color or Rey’s gender:
“Rapper Handcuffed in Atlanta Parking Lot”
This kind of racist horseshit just keeps on happening and keeps on happening and keeps on happening in America in 2015. We keep getting told “this is a post-racial society,” and it’s a load of crap. Everyone in the audience understands that America in 2015 is a massively racist society, so everyone cheers when a black guy gets cast in the lead of the Star Wars film. And that’s great. But then we’re supposed to just ignore this whole context in which the audience marinates in a massive atmosphere of institutionalized racism?
Not buying it.
J. J. Abrams and his chums at Disney want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have a black character as a lead without having to confront the reality of his blackness. It’s reminiscent of that Disney film The Princess and the Frog that cast a black woman as a lead in an animated film, but then totally ignored and sidetracked the logical consequences of that decision and never dealt with her blackness in 1910s New Oreleans, never dealt with the reality of prejudice in America in the early 20th century, never did anything but go off on a jag about some ferkakta magic frog.
That’s as bizarre and as cowardly and as dishonest as teaching the history of the Civil War by saying, “And then black people in America in 1865 kissed a magic frog, and they were freed from slavery and everyone lived happily ever after.”
NotMax
@Ruckus
Netflix toll-free number: 1 800 841 6436
Although some have previously mentioned that going to help on their site is more efficacious.
A Humble Lurker
@mclaren:
Is there even racism and/or sexism established in the Star Wars universe?
I for one like the idea of a black lead and a female lead not being treated as the other in at least one movie.
Well one of the versions of the story of the corpse bride had Jewish brides being murdered so they wouldn’t have children and propagate their race. There’s also, in various other fairy tales, pedophilia, parental incest, murder, cannibalism, torture, mutilation and rape. So you could write a fairy tale with a Nuremberg Trial, easy.
chopper
@mclaren:
Princess and the Frog was set on earth.
Matt McIrvin
@chopper:
Actually, in the Star Wars context, it kind of is. There’s nothing they could actually serve the droids in there, but they don’t even let them come inside with other patrons and stand in the corner–and this is a place where clearly they tolerate all manner of wild-looking creatures, even if they go around picking fights and bragging that they’ve got the death sentence on twelve systems, as long as they’re biological.
I always read that line as a depiction of fantastic racism, myself. Clearly racism is a little different in this universe.
The treatment of droids is generally horrible–they’re clearly sentient beings of something like human intelligence, and everyone seems to know this, and the closest they get to dealing with the fact that even the goodest Good Guys are enslaving these beings and treating them like shit is a bit of nervous joking now and then. I actually think it’s a clever bit of just-barely-subtextual satire.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
@Germy:
In the original Star Trek pilot, the Executive Officer was played by Majel Barrett. She was the strictly rational character that Roddenberry liked to play against the others. When the network rejected the pilot they told him he could have either Spock or Barrett’s character but not both. Roddenberry claimed he resolved that by hiring Nimoy and marrying Majel.
Matt McIrvin
…That said: I don’t buy that a Star Wars movie has to replicate the experience of contemporary American anti-black racism in its fictional universe that has no direct historical connection to contemporary America.
I’ve heard women talking about fantasy literature set in vaguely pseudo-medieval universes and complaining that, while these stories aren’t historical fiction, their societies more often than not replicate the horrible treatment of women in real-world old-timey times, and the authors defend this as realism (while keeping the magic and dragons). And wouldn’t it be nice to every so often have a fantasy world that’s not like that, in which there is no sexism and women can just play the hero roles without anyone finding this peculiar? Since these are fantasy worlds.
The Princess and the Frog papering it over is somewhat more open to criticism, since, while this is a version of reality with magical spells and transformations in it, it’s also clearly supposed to be New Orleans sometime around the 1920s, and there’s no way this is not a major aspect of life there. (I seem to recall there was one line alluding to the existence of racism, when Tiana is talking to the scummy white brokers.)
chopper
@Matt McIrvin:
that’s often a trope in sci if, using some other form of prejudice as a stand in for racism. don’t think that anti-robot sentiment meets the definition of racism tho.
chopper
@Matt McIrvin:
exactly. demanding that people of color, in an alternate universe setting that shares no history whatsoever with earth, be defined first and foremost by racism shows a pretty shallow and one-dimensional view of them.
The Other Chuck
@Central Planning: You are not complete until you have seen Rubber. Preferably while high.
catclub
@gene108: I would compare Adam Sandler movies to Jerry Lewis.
I wonder what the French think of Adam Sandler?
J R in WV
We saw Suffragette not too long ago, it WAS hard two watch, but worth it.
How the British ownership class treated all the women who dared to claim to be human beings was a revelation. They were truly despicable. Beatings, forced feeding in prison, children sold into adoption when their mother was in prison.
Worth watching if you see it come to town.
Matt McIrvin
@chopper: Now if there’s a pattern that in media in general, people only ever deal with real-world bigotry through fantastical analogues, or sanitized versions in which everything gets easily fixed, rather than ever meeting it head-on, that is a problem, or at least a symptom of a problem. And you could well argue that American movies still have a problem with this when it comes to racism.
However, the most obvious place to deal with it is in movies actually set in America, which are hardly in short supply.
I always kind of wanted Nick Fury to come back at Captain America with this whenever he bellyaches about the innocence the US has lost since his day.
The Other Chuck
@jake the antisoshul soshulist: After beaming down, first thing Spock does in the pilot is flash a big cheerful grin. The whole Vulcans-as-purely-logical thing was apparently not written yet. I think the studio execs just didn’t like the way Barrett’s character took charge.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
Where did you get that number?
It’s different than the three numbers that I’ve been given on the help screen and those and yours are different that other sites give. It also looks like the one I used to call.
ETA All the numbers that I’ve called I’ve gotten off the help screen. And I logged out/in then looked again.
Larime
@mclaren: As someone who has made a comic book series that passes the Bechdel with flying colors and features characters of color in lead roles, I don’t need a lecture from you about the state of things in popular genre fiction.
If you can’t separate story context from real-life context and insist that they must match at all times in all universes, there’s nothing left to discuss. There’s no point. The skies in our worlds are vastly different colors.
Ruckus
@Larime:
@Larime:
And yet……..
The old saying was “There’s a sucker born every minute,” is this the free version, arguing with mclaren?
Larime
@Ruckus: Yeah, I know. :p
Ruckus
@Larime:
LOL
Couldn’t help myself.
Matt McIrvin
The huge success of The Ridiculous Six on Netflix doesn’t really surprise me: this is a medium by which 13-year-old boys can watch movies that nobody else will drive them to see.
schrodinger's cat
@gene108: You could take the entrance exam for ICS in India too by the 1920s. At the time of independence more than a third of ICS officers were of Indian origin (total number was around 1200 or so). India’s first finance minister, C. D. Deshmukh was an ICS officer.
There was an administrative continuity between the Mughals, Marathas and the British, which come to think of it is not that surprising, no one wants to reinvent the wheel.
Peter
@mclaren:
You really can’t see any difference between making a period piece (even, yes, one with magic thrown in) and making a movie set in a galaxy far far away?
You have serious issues, mclaren. Go take your mess and sit down before you hurt yourself.
JBL72
@trollhattan:
Adam Sandler is 49. Jim Carrey is 53. Both of them saw the peak of their success in the late 1990s.
Not seeing the rationale behind the claim, “Sandler has a career because Jim Carrey got old.”
VFX Lurker
Oh, thank heavens. The pie filter at the bottom of this page works, and I don’t have to look at mclaren’s spew anymore.
Kudos to the admin who made this possible!
ThresherK (GPad)
@Matt McIrvin: I will subscribe to this theory.
jparente
@CaseyL: I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised by the Netflix animated series “Bojack Horseman” Over the top and very well done!
Central Planning
So I watched Rubber without any mind altering substances. I could see why it would be better while high.
My kids have some friends over. They all seemed to be aware of the movie… “It sucked!”
Anne Laurie
@Germy:
The way Roddenberry told the story, back in the early 1970s, was that the network suits told him he could have a female second-in-command (Majel Barret, if you remember the Menagerie episode, which was the original pilot quilted into a Kirk-centric narrative) or he could have an alien in the main cast (Leonard Nimoy) — but not both.
“So I married the woman and kept Mr. Spock, because in California [at the time] it’s illegal to do it the other way round!”
(He did fight hard to keep Nichelle Nichols on the bridge, and yes it was important to viewers at the time. Whoopi Goldberg has talked about screaming joyously to her mother, “There’s a black lady on the bridge and she ain’t no maid!”)
Chris
@chopper:
This.
The Star Wars universe is lousy with prejudice. (Mostly but not entirely backgrounded in the movies, and gone into in much more depth in the novelverse – the X-wing series went pretty far with this, it ended up being a pretty significant part of the world-building). It just doesn’t line up with our prejudice, as you’d expect in a universe that’s entirely separate from ours and where the lines of identity are, to put it mildly, different.
Leland
As for recently watched, grossly overrated movies: Jurassic World and Gravity. I’ll get around to watching JJ Abrams’ latest lukewarm shit when it hits streaming.
BrianM
Everyone is defending Star Wars against Mclaren and no single voice is raised for The Magic Christian (re: this). And you call yourself liberals!
artkqtarks
I highly recommend a German movie called Phoenix, which is available on Netflix. The premise of the movie is implausible and you may need to suspend disbelief, but for me it is one of the best movies I have watched in recent years.
A crucial scene from Phoenix was included in a video count down of the 25 best movies of 2015 by a film critic and the scene can also be found on youtube. DON’T WATCH THE SCENE BEFORE WATCHING THE MOVIE! Even though the scene doesn’t really reveal any information that you don’t already know, it shows a critical performance by the main actor. Watch Phoenix first, and if you like, go on to watch the video count down. You may not agree with the selection of the 25 best movies, but editing of scenes from the movies is wonderful.