You and your hatred of what youths like is the fuel that feeds my fuel addiction.
If someone wants to do a movie about a group of teenagers from a bayside California highschool, it would be great! Full of optimism and fun! Even have them work at a beach club in the summer or go to Hawaii!
I've actually looked through my list of films I've watched this year and last just to see if I've liked any teen movies, and the only ones coming to mind are Freaks of Nature and Deathgasm.
TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
Yeah, even found my review from an older thread, and while I didn't care for it, I didn't mind watching it. It's like Paper Towns in that it wasn't for me and cribbed a little too much from its predecessors but to eyes who never saw past stuff it would be more appealing.
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
Hah.
Jackie Earl Haley is a perfect prick in that movie. I mean, he's no Clarence Boddicker, but he's a decent substitute that wasn't trying to be an equivalent
Oh brilliant
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I've definitely never seen anything because Michael Cera was in it.
He was good in Zombieland, but a little over his head in B Vs S.
Never gets old.
Cafe Society is eh
Fencingsax on
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Okay, back to the Blazing Saddles thing: I don't like to hear it said that "Blazing Saddles couldn't be made today!" For one, I've been hearing that since the first time I saw Blazing Saddles, which at this point is almost as far in the past as the actual release of the film was to my first showing. I don't get what it means, exactly, that I Can't Be Made Today. Why not? What is so intrinsic about that film that bars it from escaping the bounds of its era? Did satire suddenly die in 1974? Did we solve racism? Did good comedy fall out of fashion?
Fuck no. All of that stuff still exists, for good and ill. And as others here have pointed out, some artists are successfully employing the same kind of humor in their work today.
So what do I hear when I hear, "You can't make Blazing Saddles today?" Not to offend anyone specifically, but I hear, "You can't make fun of people's ethnicity anymore." Which, yeah, maybe. But Blazing Saddles didn't do that, and if you thought the jokes were all the racist shit the white characters said and did to the black characters, then Jesus Frickin Christ you missed the whole point of it, and missed it wide. Like, Blair Walsh wide. The joke, in the most literal sense, is on you.
And you know what, there's a few parts of the film that you probably wouldn't remake today, like (hopefully) the pointless T&A at the governor's mansion and the ending that is one long gay-panic riff. And I'm okay with that. It means we've grown.
There's a lot of stuff from our earlier days that "can't be made today," and that's fucking fantastic, because maybe this shithole planet is actually getting better after all.
Sometimes it seems like people in casting think that (some, high-dollar) men have no discernable age, or at least that they age in lengthy, imperceptible, demographic-like blocks (something like "kid" -> 16-35 -> 36-69 -> "elderly").
Thus we get the silliness not only of men old enough to have high-school age children portraying high school/college students, but also guys in their late middle age being cast as 40ish dads with precocious grade-school tykes, despite looking more like the grandfather of a kid that age. Add in a lesser-known 30ish actress as the wife/mother for additional absurdity.
I know there's (somewhat) understandable reasons why they do this, but you think they would at least try to write around it more often than they end up doing. Nothing brings me out of being engrossed in something than hearing a character say something like, "You're twenty years old, you have your whole life ahead of you" to an actor that very obviously is/does not.
Of course, a similar thing happens with women, where it breaks down along the typical ingenue/mother/crone lines.
EDIT: Aaaargh. I just looked up this "James Franco frat dude" movie. Wanna know one of my pet peeves? Bullshit like this.
Congratulations, poster designers, you obviously weren't in any fraternities yourselves! A Φ is not an O, or anything remotely resembling an O (or even a vowel). The title of this movie, according to this poster, is actually "GPHAT". Go off into the doghouse with all the other people who think they're being clever when they write things like GRΣΣCΣ.
Sometimes it seems like people in casting think that (some, high-dollar) men have no discernable age, or at least that they age in lengthy, imperceptible, demographic-like blocks (something like "kid" -> 16-35 -> 36-69 -> "elderly").
Thus we get the silliness not only of men old enough to have high-school age children portraying high school/college students, but also guys in their late middle age being cast as 40ish dads with precocious grade-school tykes, despite looking more like the grandfather of a kid that age. Add in a lesser-known 30ish actress as the wife/mother for additional absurdity.
I know there's (somewhat) understandable reasons why they do this, but you think they would at least try to write around it more often than they end up doing. Nothing brings me out of being engrossed in something than hearing a character say something like, "You're twenty years old, you have your whole life ahead of you" to an actor that very obviously is/does not.
Of course, a similar thing happens with women, where it breaks down among the typical ingenue/mother/crone lines.
There's really no excuse for it.
It's understandable why they cast young 20-somethings to play older teens in television shows, because work restrictions on child actors make television show shooting schedules nightmarish so you really need to reduce the number of child actors as much as possible.
Beyond that there's really no good excuse, and there is certainly no excuse for casting near-40 year old actors to play teens or early 20's characters. That's just absurd.
If we're talking about an actor with a legitimately elfin appearance like Elijah Wood did for most of his career then fine. But that's not usually the case.
I tend to agree, though maybe it's worth noting that theatre tends to go even further with mismatched casting. In a play it wouldn't be surprising to see a boy played by an adult woman, or a younger version of a character played by a white actor and an older version played by a black actor. Things you'll never see in a movie ...unless perhaps, the movie's directed by Todd Solondz.
Animated Blazing Saddles "reimagination". Lead actor: Michael Cera. Poster is a close-up of a morbidly obese cartoon cat's ass, clad in a sumo loincloth. Tagline: "Prepare to Crack Up".
Holy Christ I thought you were making shit up until I looked at the poster.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I tend to agree, though maybe it's worth noting that theatre tends to go even further with mismatched casting. In a play it wouldn't be surprising to see a boy played by an adult woman, or a younger version of a character played by a white actor and an older version played by a black actor. Things you'll never see in a movie ...unless perhaps, the movie's directed by Todd Solondz.
The take-away from the Casablanca script hoax isn't really "Oh they don't know a good script when they see it" (which is true enough) but more importantly that they simply aren't looking for new stuff from unknown writers. It's a reputation and word of mouth business, which is why Hollywood is so incestuous, creatively speaking.
My takeaway is "movies today (or in the 80s) ate not like movies in the 40s". Which is less an indictment than a statement that things change.
There have been several shifts in film making, especially in dialogue, which has trended towards increasingly naturalistic for decades. Casablanca doesn't look or sound like the movies made today. Is that because every movie made in the past 20 years is inferior to movies made in the 40s? Of course not.
What would actually be a much more interesting experiment would be if we could release Casablanca today, for the first time, and see how popular and acclaimed it is. Would it be universally loved? Would it sweep the Oscars? Yeah, probably not. You can take that to mean we all suck nowadays and can't appreciate timeless films. Or you can take it to mean that "timeless films" maybe are, you know, not so much.
(What I would really like to do, actually, is see if audiences can, when introduced to it for the first time, fully appreciate Vampire Dog.)
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
The take-away from the Casablanca script hoax isn't really "Oh they don't know a good script when they see it" (which is true enough) but more importantly that they simply aren't looking for new stuff from unknown writers. It's a reputation and word of mouth business, which is why Hollywood is so incestuous, creatively speaking.
My takeaway is "movies today (or in the 80s) ate not like movies in the 40s". Which is less an indictment than a statement that things change.
There have been several shifts in film making, especially in dialogue, which has trended towards increasingly naturalistic for decades. Casablanca doesn't look or sound like the movies made today. Is that because every movie made in the past 20 years is inferior to movies made in the 40s? Of course not.
What would actually be a much more interesting experiment would be if we could release Casablanca today, for the first time, and see how popular and acclaimed it is. Would it be universally loved? Would it sweep the Oscars? Yeah, probably not. You can take that to mean we all suck nowadays and can't appreciate timeless films. Or you can take it to mean that "timeless films" maybe are, you know, not so much.
(What I would really like to do, actually, is see if audiences can, when introduced to it for the first time, fully appreciate Vampire Dog.)
Well yes, film buffs tend to be up their own butts about the classics in precisely the same way literature snobs are.
It's great that films are evolving, if they were not it would be a dead art form. But the fact that the business can be impenetrable to new talent while constantly recycling and retreading old shit is absolutely a symptom of stagnation.
And that's not even getting into stuff like the popularity of Michael Bay films and the like, which have all the artistic depth of a Kinkade "painting".
-edit-
I should point out though that stagnation in art isn't a "problem" that needs to be addressed particularly. Historically art forms move through periods of stagnation that work themselves out when the next exciting movement comes along and demolishes the status quo. The only danger is boring art in the meantime.
Okay, back to the Blazing Saddles thing: I don't like to hear it said that "Blazing Saddles couldn't be made today!" For one, I've been hearing that since the first time I saw Blazing Saddles, which at this point is almost as far in the past as the actual release of the film was to my first showing. I don't get what it means, exactly, that I Can't Be Made Today. Why not? What is so intrinsic about that film that bars it from escaping the bounds of its era? Did satire suddenly die in 1974? Did we solve racism? Did good comedy fall out of fashion?
Fuck no. All of that stuff still exists, for good and ill. And as others here have pointed out, some artists are successfully employing the same kind of humor in their work today.
So what do I hear when I hear, "You can't make Blazing Saddles today?" Not to offend anyone specifically, but I hear, "You can't make fun of people's ethnicity anymore." Which, yeah, maybe. But Blazing Saddles didn't do that, and if you thought the jokes were all the racist shit the white characters said and did to the black characters, then Jesus Frickin Christ you missed the whole point of it, and missed it wide. Like, Blair Walsh wide. The joke, in the most literal sense, is on you.
And you know what, there's a few parts of the film that you probably wouldn't remake today, like (hopefully) the pointless T&A at the governor's mansion and the ending that is one long gay-panic riff. And I'm okay with that. It means we've grown.
There's a lot of stuff from our earlier days that "can't be made today," and that's fucking fantastic, because maybe this shithole planet is actually getting better after all.
While I happen to think that it could be remade as well, the idea is that outrage driven media won't bother with trying to understand it. They won't get the satire because it's at a level deeper than they'll be interacting with the film. It's far easier to demonize something you haven't seen to drive clicks than to actually engage with ideas.
+5
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ElJeffeRoaming the streets, waving his mod gun around.Moderator, ClubPAMod Emeritus
Did the media get and appreciate Blazing Saddles the first time around, though?
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
Perhaps I'm naive or selectively blind, but I have to say that I very rarely see "outrage driven media". There probably are media that thrive on outrage, but outrage driven media? What I see way more often is media that criticises (sometimes with more justification, sometimes with less), which is decidedly not the same as outrage, but some then twist this criticism into "OMG you can't say anything without overly sensitive people starting to shriek in outrage!" (Take something like Tropes vs Women in Video Games; if that is considered outrage, then people are using a very different dictionary from me.)
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Perhaps I'm naive or selectively blind, but I have to say that I very rarely see "outrage driven media". There probably are media that thrive on outrage, but outrage driven media? What I see way more often is media that criticises (sometimes with more justification, sometimes with less), which is decidedly not the same as outrage, but some then twist this criticism into "OMG you can't say anything without overly sensitive people starting to shriek in outrage!" (Take something like Tropes vs Women in Video Games; if that is considered outrage, then people are using a very different dictionary from me.)
The series wasn't made in outrage but it wound up being outrage driven because the initial backlash sparked a huge shitstorm of outrage driven kickstarter donations.
No backlash to begin with would have meant the whole thing would have passed very quietly along the internet and then been forgotten, but instead it is a sort of misbegotten touchstone for internet feminism and MRAs alike.
-edit-
Sarkeesian didn't do any of that intentionally though, it was just a thing that happened.
Ghostbusters absolutely did intentionally court the outrage that they knew would spring up when they hyped the backlash though. But we're not discussing that film in this thread. But it is an example of intentional use of outrage to drive sales, whereas Tropes vs. Women is an example of unintentional benefiting from the same.
ElJeffeRoaming the streets, waving his mod gun around.Moderator, ClubPAMod Emeritus
I am just preemptively mentioning that if people start talking about Anita Sarkeesian in here I will shiv a motherfucker.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
Perhaps a less problematic example would be Dogma. It definitely benefited from the minor media attention it received due to pissed off Catholics boycotting it. Kevin Smith even showed up to a protest and gave an interview as if he were there to protest the film.
(Although that was undoubtedly just something he did for fun rather than an attempt to stir up more controversy)
Did the media get and appreciate Blazing Saddles the first time around, though?
Google tells me Blazing Saddles was very well received at the time, even if people didn't know what to make of it.
History of the World was not. Ebert said it was unfunny in bad taste, and he didn't like the ethnic stereotypes. NY Times wrote:
A musical number about the Spanish Inquisition, with Mr. Brooks playing a torturer who merrily abuses Jews, is about as crashingly unfunny as a musical number can be.
ZampanovYou May Not Go HomeUntil Tonight Has Been MagicalRegistered Userregular
just got done with interstellar
this is definitely the film of his most in line with @Atomika 's opinion of him
I do wish I'd seen it on the big screen
some parts that I really liked and some parts that I really didn't, all in all the degree to which it's uneven for me might put it at the bottom of my list of his films
I thought the movie trailer was going to go somewhere dark with the rather obvious age difference LaBoeuf has with the girl (she's 20 irl), so I too am amazed that LaBoeuf is included as being one of the gang of teenagers.
PSN Fleety2009
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
It was quite the experience on a big screen
But I've never been able to make it all the way through again in one shot
Just bits and pieces here and there
I feel like that's a theme with Nolan films
Once you know how it all fits together the magic is gone
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
this is definitely the film of his most in line with @Atomika 's opinion of him
I do wish I'd seen it on the big screen
some parts that I really liked and some parts that I really didn't, all in all the degree to which it's uneven for me might put it at the bottom of my list of his films
I'm not mad I saw it
I saw the movie in the theater. It was very impressive, but I had OPINIONS.
I watched it again recently and was much happier with it. Not his best movie, but it got me in the feels a lot and didn't feel cheap.
I wonder if some of that is because I had just finished True Detective.
Posts
Have that on DVD somewhere. It's really a deep dive on the subject.
pleasepaypreacher.net
If someone wants to do a movie about a group of teenagers from a bayside California highschool, it would be great! Full of optimism and fun! Even have them work at a beach club in the summer or go to Hawaii!
I've actually looked through my list of films I've watched this year and last just to see if I've liked any teen movies, and the only ones coming to mind are Freaks of Nature and Deathgasm.
silly me, I thought typing that into bing would be enough to pull up the quote or youtube clip from N&N, but nope.
Not. At. All.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
He was good in Zombieland, but a little over his head in B Vs S.
Never gets old.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Inquisitor77: Rius, you are Sisyphus and melee Wizard is your boulder
Tube: This must be what it felt like to be an Iraqi when Saddam was killed
Bookish Stickers - Mrs. Rius' Etsy shop with bumper stickers and vinyl decals.
Jackie Earl Haley is a perfect prick in that movie. I mean, he's no Clarence Boddicker, but he's a decent substitute that wasn't trying to be an equivalent
Cafe Society is eh
Fuck no. All of that stuff still exists, for good and ill. And as others here have pointed out, some artists are successfully employing the same kind of humor in their work today.
So what do I hear when I hear, "You can't make Blazing Saddles today?" Not to offend anyone specifically, but I hear, "You can't make fun of people's ethnicity anymore." Which, yeah, maybe. But Blazing Saddles didn't do that, and if you thought the jokes were all the racist shit the white characters said and did to the black characters, then Jesus Frickin Christ you missed the whole point of it, and missed it wide. Like, Blair Walsh wide. The joke, in the most literal sense, is on you.
And you know what, there's a few parts of the film that you probably wouldn't remake today, like (hopefully) the pointless T&A at the governor's mansion and the ending that is one long gay-panic riff. And I'm okay with that. It means we've grown.
There's a lot of stuff from our earlier days that "can't be made today," and that's fucking fantastic, because maybe this shithole planet is actually getting better after all.
Maybe the future isn't so scary after all.
one is played by Shia LeBoeuf
teenagers
Shia LeBoeuf
teen
aged
what
That's even worse than the frat hazing film that has James Franco as a fratboy.
Thus we get the silliness not only of men old enough to have high-school age children portraying high school/college students, but also guys in their late middle age being cast as 40ish dads with precocious grade-school tykes, despite looking more like the grandfather of a kid that age. Add in a lesser-known 30ish actress as the wife/mother for additional absurdity.
I know there's (somewhat) understandable reasons why they do this, but you think they would at least try to write around it more often than they end up doing. Nothing brings me out of being engrossed in something than hearing a character say something like, "You're twenty years old, you have your whole life ahead of you" to an actor that very obviously is/does not.
Of course, a similar thing happens with women, where it breaks down along the typical ingenue/mother/crone lines.
EDIT: Aaaargh. I just looked up this "James Franco frat dude" movie. Wanna know one of my pet peeves? Bullshit like this.
Congratulations, poster designers, you obviously weren't in any fraternities yourselves! A Φ is not an O, or anything remotely resembling an O (or even a vowel). The title of this movie, according to this poster, is actually "GPHAT". Go off into the doghouse with all the other people who think they're being clever when they write things like GRΣΣCΣ.
There's really no excuse for it.
It's understandable why they cast young 20-somethings to play older teens in television shows, because work restrictions on child actors make television show shooting schedules nightmarish so you really need to reduce the number of child actors as much as possible.
Beyond that there's really no good excuse, and there is certainly no excuse for casting near-40 year old actors to play teens or early 20's characters. That's just absurd.
If we're talking about an actor with a legitimately elfin appearance like Elijah Wood did for most of his career then fine. But that's not usually the case.
Holy Christ I thought you were making shit up until I looked at the poster.
Well, yes but it's theater. It's different.
My takeaway is "movies today (or in the 80s) ate not like movies in the 40s". Which is less an indictment than a statement that things change.
There have been several shifts in film making, especially in dialogue, which has trended towards increasingly naturalistic for decades. Casablanca doesn't look or sound like the movies made today. Is that because every movie made in the past 20 years is inferior to movies made in the 40s? Of course not.
What would actually be a much more interesting experiment would be if we could release Casablanca today, for the first time, and see how popular and acclaimed it is. Would it be universally loved? Would it sweep the Oscars? Yeah, probably not. You can take that to mean we all suck nowadays and can't appreciate timeless films. Or you can take it to mean that "timeless films" maybe are, you know, not so much.
(What I would really like to do, actually, is see if audiences can, when introduced to it for the first time, fully appreciate Vampire Dog.)
Well yes, film buffs tend to be up their own butts about the classics in precisely the same way literature snobs are.
It's great that films are evolving, if they were not it would be a dead art form. But the fact that the business can be impenetrable to new talent while constantly recycling and retreading old shit is absolutely a symptom of stagnation.
And that's not even getting into stuff like the popularity of Michael Bay films and the like, which have all the artistic depth of a Kinkade "painting".
-edit-
I should point out though that stagnation in art isn't a "problem" that needs to be addressed particularly. Historically art forms move through periods of stagnation that work themselves out when the next exciting movement comes along and demolishes the status quo. The only danger is boring art in the meantime.
While I happen to think that it could be remade as well, the idea is that outrage driven media won't bother with trying to understand it. They won't get the satire because it's at a level deeper than they'll be interacting with the film. It's far easier to demonize something you haven't seen to drive clicks than to actually engage with ideas.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
The series wasn't made in outrage but it wound up being outrage driven because the initial backlash sparked a huge shitstorm of outrage driven kickstarter donations.
No backlash to begin with would have meant the whole thing would have passed very quietly along the internet and then been forgotten, but instead it is a sort of misbegotten touchstone for internet feminism and MRAs alike.
-edit-
Sarkeesian didn't do any of that intentionally though, it was just a thing that happened.
Ghostbusters absolutely did intentionally court the outrage that they knew would spring up when they hyped the backlash though. But we're not discussing that film in this thread. But it is an example of intentional use of outrage to drive sales, whereas Tropes vs. Women is an example of unintentional benefiting from the same.
(Although that was undoubtedly just something he did for fun rather than an attempt to stir up more controversy)
Google tells me Blazing Saddles was very well received at the time, even if people didn't know what to make of it.
History of the World was not. Ebert said it was unfunny in bad taste, and he didn't like the ethnic stereotypes. NY Times wrote:
I disagree with both of them.
Part 1 or Part 2?
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
When I was a kid I was totally fooled by that, I always wondered when the sequel would come on television so I could finally see it.
Alas.
this is definitely the film of his most in line with @Atomika 's opinion of him
I do wish I'd seen it on the big screen
some parts that I really liked and some parts that I really didn't, all in all the degree to which it's uneven for me might put it at the bottom of my list of his films
I'm not mad I saw it
PSN/XBL: Zampanov -- Steam: Zampanov
I thought the movie trailer was going to go somewhere dark with the rather obvious age difference LaBoeuf has with the girl (she's 20 irl), so I too am amazed that LaBoeuf is included as being one of the gang of teenagers.
But I've never been able to make it all the way through again in one shot
Just bits and pieces here and there
I feel like that's a theme with Nolan films
Once you know how it all fits together the magic is gone
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
HITLER ON ICE
JEWS IN SPACE
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
this is the only one of his that might be that way for me
I've rewatched pretty much all of them fairly regularly, like maybe once a year at least
PSN/XBL: Zampanov -- Steam: Zampanov
I saw the movie in the theater. It was very impressive, but I had OPINIONS.
I watched it again recently and was much happier with it. Not his best movie, but it got me in the feels a lot and didn't feel cheap.
I wonder if some of that is because I had just finished True Detective.