DuVernay experimentally found the answer to the question “Could a celebrated black female director make a big budget film in 2018 that is super into diversity and inclusive messaging, but is of such execrable cinematic quality that it still manages to get a negative score on Rotten Tomatoes?” I honestly would have thought the answer was “no”, but but she managed to pull it off! (And I don’t feel sorry for her, after the way she slandered LBJ.)
Relatedly: OMG, funny because true:
But yeah: this movie was truly awful. Cloyingly sentimental glurge. Believe in yourself, face your fears, love will conquer all, yadda yadda. WE GET IT. I was bored and annoyed throughout.
It’s also in one of my least favorite categories of movies, those that claim to be about physics but the “physics” onscreen is in fact ludicrous.
Inclusivity is awesome, but let’s still insist on cinematic quality. The gulf in quality between this film and, say, “Moonlight”, is as vast as it gets. (“Black Panther” is a bit overrated, certainly not in the league of “Moonlight”, but it’s still FAR better than this steaming pile of shite.)
One more thing, which is technically a spoiler—so if you haven’t seen the movie and actually plan to, you are hereby warned.
It’s hardly unique to this movie, but I hate the cliché that it is always the wrong choice to save the majority of the group at the expense of leaving one behind. Chris Pine’s character had every reason to believe that if they stayed, they would all be doomed. So to leave and save the other three was the brave and correct choice. Unless he had some indication that if Meg just told her brother she loved him a bunch of times, they would win. But I didn’t see any hint of a reason to expect that.
Perhaps this will serve to remind people that there is nothing special about being black or white or male or female or straight or gay or young or old or… What matters is the end result.
Why can’t it just be a crappy film? Why does (zOMG!) Inclusivity! have to play a contributing factor in its failure? Would the film be better with a less diverse cast?
Moonlight = good!
Wrinkle in Time = (ostensibly) bad!
Why not leave it at that?
I can think of any number of films that failed miserably which would in no way be improved by more/less diversity.
Finally, why does virtually every single post OP makes have this faint but ever present stench of bigotry about it?
So you think I love “Moonlight” but hate this movie because of its diversity? How would that make any sense? I did find that link funny, but it’s from the ONION, not Breitbart.
The diversity was the ONLY thing good about WiT. But that’s not enough to save it when it is so bad otherwise, and it’s an insult to truly great filmmakers like Spike Lee and Barry Jenkins to reflexively rally around a piece of garbage like this, or even to temper one’s criticism. This is as bad as a Transformers movie, just with diversity and some well meaning, earnest, and incredibly simpleminded treacle stirred in.
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Because (1) I really HATE this movie like few others; and (2) I thought the Onion piece (and the truth it contains) was awesome—and I’m not sure if it would go over in CS. (Would it?)
I did first look in CS for a thread, though, and all I found was one about the previews. I posted there first and asked about a thread for the movie: check my post history.
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You hate the type of movie it is, you hate the cliche that is part of the movie’s climax, and you hate the message it sends about love conquering all and believing in yourself- which, incidentally, is the exact message of the source material, so it’s not like the director pulled it out of her ass.
Why, exactly, did you go see the movie in the first place? And do you have this level of rage-boner for the other versions of WiT, which were even MORE awful?
The part in bold says more about your stupidity and prejudice than anything else. Look at you, advertising the fact that her race and gender influence your judgements about her work. But what takes the cake is the pretense that you assumed her race and gender would make her film good, not bad. Riiiight.
Your post is the embodies the bias that non-white, non-male directors have to overcome. Instead of just saying “eh, the movie sucked to me” you have to politicize your critique by bring diversity and inclusion.
I’m trying to figure out what does Moonlight and Black Panther have to do with this movie? They seem to have as much to do with each as Interstellar and Gone Girl do. Which is to say, nothing whatsoever.
This is a decent self-pitting, in that it reveals once again the OP’s weird (and usually counterfactual, like that she “slandered LBJ”) ethnic obsessions. If black directors and filmmakers had it easy there’d be tons of them, and tons of them winning awards. Luckily, every time any of them make even the slightest error, or make the type of creative choices about historical events that most historical movies make, the OP is there to shit on them and proclaim that only PC-ness (or something) allows these directors to be praised, rather than just the possiblility that his tastes are different from other critics.
Lord help me I thought the “slandered LBJ” part was true enough… didn’t Selma have LBJ doing a lot of things anti-MLK that were counter to the tenor of the things he did IRL? I haven’t seen it but that seemed to be the general assessment at the time…
It portrayed LBJ as having serious political concerns, as well as having a manipulative and somewhat malevolent FBI head, but ultimately did the right thing anyway. I think both of those things are entirely reasonable and probably true, even if not every single conversation in reality happened exactly as it did in the movie.
This was discussed extensively in a CS thread about the movie.
I went to see it, despite the bad Rotten Tomatoes score, because:
(1) I have a MoviePass card, so there is zero marginal cost to see movies, and everything else that’s out is either stuff I’ve already seen or movies I have zero interest in (like “Tomb Raider”).
(2) A feminist movie podcast I like called The Contenders did their latest episode on the movie;
(3) An NPR writer I like named Linda Holmes LOVED the movie. So I was curious to see for myself.
I have not seen any other versions of WiT, and I gave up on the book as a kid after a chapter or two. But as I said in CS a few minutes ago, the things that turned me off about the book were (at least in that early portion I read) nothing like the lameness of this movie. It was more that it was kind of dark and weird/offbeat in a way I didn’t like (sort of like how I felt about the movie “Harold and Maude” when I saw it as a teenager). I never would have expected that book I abandoned to become a movie that’s like a big budget version of something intellectually akin to Dora the Explorer.
Taking those questions in order:
(1) No. In fact, this is as I said pretty much its only positive quality.
(2) YES! I do hate that. That is exactly what bugs the shit out of me.
Ehhh…wot? I think you must have misread something, because I never said any such thing.
My kids weren’t super impressed by it. They didn’t call it “the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” which is how my daughter described “Sherlock Gnomes,” but they didn’t seem thrilled. They enjoyed “Black Panther” a lot more.
All the story problems the shithead of an OP has with this movie are basically there already in the glurgy source material, so I have no idea why the fuckstick is blaming DuVernay when L’Engle should get the lion’s share of that blame…idiot.