Brave ruled go see it I might write a proper thing about it when I'm not on my phone

here's a quick thing i wrote up for another board i'll just paste it here

WE DON'T HAVE SPOILER TAGS ANYMORE SO EVERYTHING UNDER HERE IS SPOILERS OK
first of all i like that merida doesn't seem to be portrayed as MALE HERO IN FEMALE BODY like she's never really portrayed as unfeminine or w/e she's just Not Into Being A Typical Princess. she's strong but her strength is never really in the context of "i am strong because i am like a boy and that is what everyone should strive for", the only time she really seems compared to boys is during the suitor contest when she outdoes them all. but it doesn't feel like she's going "i have to prove myself against these boys", it's purely "i am going to win my freedom". idk i just never felt that sort of constant attempt to be like a boy (because success means being Like A Boy) it was instead doing everything on her own terms for her own reasons.

i also really liked that the main conflict was between her and her mother, because disney has always had a Thing about dads and dads were always the focus of a lot of disney movies/disney conflicts and it was really cool to see the interactions between mother and daughter instead

the only thing that i really DIDN'T like were the little brothers. maybe they were for the younger kids idk but to me it felt like they were there to entertain little boys in the audience and i felt like that was totally unnecessary since there was plenty of other shit going on. i might be off base in that analysis but it just really seemed like they were there because "it's not like little boys are gonna be able to identify at all with this heroine, better throw in some little boys". they didn't feel like they had to be in the movie at all. well okay i guess there was one other minor thing that i didn't like and it was the whole thing with the house maid hiding the key in her tits and the li'l boy diving into them to get it ugh that was just gross but I REALLY LIKED THE REST OF THE MOVIE and it didn't disappoint me re: gender like i expected it to

ya you always have to expect the worst w/ disney, like this could have easily been another MULAN spit/queasy/diarrhea but good that it's not

MiB III. I heard this movie got relatively bad reviews, but idk I don't know what attracts ppl anymore. here's my rankings of action movies I've seen in theaters

transformers 1 < avatar & indiana jones 4 (tied) < MiB 3

so do we all hate it in movies and tv shows when they use handheld cameras and do those short and fast zoom-ins on every shot at seemingly random times or is that just me


edit: not sure why I posted in this topic because this post was inspired by the 30 seconds I watched of that new aaron sorkin show but welp movies do it too so whatever

i saw brave, i really liked it, but the huge expectation of it being a pixar hit sort of diminished the quality of the film, since it felt so unusual from what makes pixar films special. it was by no means a bad film, i just felt like they could have made a few of the story points stronger. visually, and from an animation standpoint, it was absolutely stellar. the rigs must've taken months to do. there is some incredibly sophisticated technology going on in the film, and i love how it all came together. the acting was also superb.

personally i'm a little more excited for wreck-it ralph, mostly since one of my personal friends is actually animating on that film, and also because it's being directed by rich moore (who directed some of the best futurama/simpsons episodes)

watched zizek's the pervert's guide to cinema

kinda thought i'd find the ideas in it pretty preposterous, but ended up finding it more an earnestly interesting perspective of the themes and imagery we see littered throughout film. i don't think it's possible for a sane person to agree with absolutely every odd intuition-based thought that zizek spews out, but that's not exactly the point. independent of any particular bit of insight anybody could glean from the movie, what i think this film does pretty well is provide something of a general primer for perceiving films differently, kinda pushing people out of the sedated comfort zone they probably fall into when they watch something. even if you aren't really too eager to accept his potentially unhealthy amount of freudian parallels, i think it's kinda neat to have what amounts to a pretty engaging film lecture presented in a visually entertaining way.

also, i should mention that the production of this was pretty clever. they went to locations of pertinent scenes of various films, and recreated various sets, generally structuring the shots to make zizek appear like he's literally standing on the set. i couldn't help but laugh when they cut from frank booth screaming BABY WANTS TO FUCK to zizek sitting in a similar-enough room, staring blankly-off screen, apparently watching the scene unfold right before him. i don't think this necessarily added anything to the film on some deeper thematic level, but it was superficially fun in the same way something like dead men don't wear plaid was fun.

i'm watching it kind of in bits. some of it is pretty interesting and i can definitely see where he's coming from.

Watched A Face in the Crowd again after hearing that Andy Griffith died.

It's one of those really incredible black and white movies that is probably too slow for young people, but it's worth watching if you like Andy Griffith and were like me and more or less just watched his television work and thought that his performance was near the ceiling of his acting capabilities. It's not. It's almost frustrating to think back on how he slipped into his sedentary acting career, because this guy had an unique energy and range that he just didn't display often enough. Seeing this makes me think he could have literally done whatever he wanted as an actor, which isn't something I can really earnestly say about a lot of people. I don't really think I could name five performances in film that were more effective than this. Scares the fuck out of me.

Basically watch this movie if you want to see Andy Griffith as the Terminator, and only Patricia Neal and Walter Matthau in prop glasses can save us.

Watched A Scanner Darkly very nice animation really. The drama was so so but the concept was solid, mainly because it's based on a book. I'm pretty sure the book contains much more dialogue and maybe narration and explanation.

yo sorry but I did not think Brave was that good.  super pretty and definitely way better than prometheus but not particularly engaging or anything.  also I think you could have shoehorned the plot into a wide variety of settings and very little would have to be changed.  and they build up the fact that she's really good at archery but there's no payoff to that at all.  maybe one super brief moment that could have been handled a million different ways anyway (and was handled differently almost immediately afterwards WHAT IS HE EVEN TALKING ABOUT this is super vague).  I don't know.  It was aight.

Watched A Face in the Crowd again after hearing that Andy Griffith died.

It's one of those really incredible black and white movies that is probably too slow for young people, but it's worth watching if you like Andy Griffith and were like me and more or less just watched his television work and thought that his performance was near the ceiling of his acting capabilities. It's not. It's almost frustrating to think back on how he slipped into his sedentary acting career, because this guy had an unique energy and range that he just didn't display often enough. Seeing this makes me think he could have literally done whatever he wanted as an actor, which isn't something I can really earnestly say about a lot of people. I don't really think I could name five performances in film that were more effective than this. Scares the fuck out of me.

Basically watch this movie if you want to see Andy Griffith as the Terminator, and only Patricia Neal and Walter Matthau in prop glasses can save us.

my dad tells me my grandparents were extras in this movie and that it was mostly filmed in his hometown. i watched the trailer for it after he told me and at the very least it made me want to see more and not less (which trailers aren't very good at nowadays). so i should probably see it!

stalker, videodrome, and the pervert's guide to cinema were good

pervert's guide is fun to watch, if not always enlightening. his description of Vertigo was a lot more interesting than watching the movie, and I liked his articulation of Lost Highway. it's too bad this was made before the release of Lynch's Inland Empire, because I'd really like to hear what zizek has to say about that mess. he already made a comment about Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway fundamentally being the same film, and Inland Empire is both the third iteration of those films and sort of a summary/capstone of Lynch's film work as a whole

stalker was great. the final scene is a problem, but the film as a whole is excellent, beyond ability to intelligently describe. someone I remember made a post about videodrome being all about this place, this forum, but I'd argue Stalker is equally so. excluding the obvious connection to my one topic

videodrome was pretty neat, but I'm not sure I got out of it what you wanted me to. I looked up some film criticism to see if I was missing anything and it was all either unintelligible babbling about cronenberg's film repertoire or fairly apparent stuff. I wasn't particularly entertained by the man-media hybrid concept since I think ragnar has expressed this idea a little better, but I thought it was a cool sci-fi movie that managed to talk about some interesting subjects without being dumb about it

by the way I know I said earlier that I did not particularly like Brave, but I forgot to mention that I at least appreciated the atypical approach to a female protagonist, especially for a disney princess character.  In terms of storytelling, it doesn't really transcend being a children's movie in the way that I think most Pixar movies do (although tbh I've only seen a few Pixar movies and other than Toy Story my memories of them are pretty hazy but I think people will generally agree that Pixar can tell stories that are a little more sophisticated than the average children's movie), but Merida at least transcends typical gender roles WITHOUT being defined by the men around her (that is to say, as Velfarre mentioned, she doesn't break out of female gender roles by being ONE OF THE BOYS), and there is a lot of value in that, particularly for a disney movie, so I don't mean to write off the movie completely.  It's just a shame that, beyond that, it was just kind of meh.

the bears were cute

I caught Species on tv last night. I had such low expectations for it that I really thought it was alright. I think the first 2 acts were really pretty good in a sort of poor man's James Cameron kind of way with softcore porn thrown in for good measure. The characters really were nothing special and the clairvoyant Forrest Whitaker character seemed kind of out of place and more like he was just there so they would know what to do next. The third act was... eh... not as good. It started with any intelligence Alfred Molina had was magically wiped away for plot convenience and then it's like 20 minutes of clashing special effects. The 1995 CGI and puppetry mesh together so poorly but it switches between the two every couple of shots. After the big alien fight, I was not convinced that the one-liner by Michael Madsen wasn't purposefully said as dull and lifeless as possible to point out how bad of a one liner it was. Finally, the way they had a sequel pull at the end was so forced considering that they told you information at the beginning of the movie that could have lead to a sequel anyway.

But really, it was kind of an enjoyable popcorn movie. It gets like a C in my gradebook.