But I posted the exact same thing about Casablanca above. And yet, Casablanca is an iconic movie that is still excellent.
“Of all the tree houses in all the Springfields in all the world, she has to walk into mine.”
I’m picturing Lisa as Ilsa and Nelson as Victor, Bart as Louis, Homer as Ferrari, Skinner as Strasser.
And Thelma and Louise is stupid! “Female empowerment”, Bah! Empowered to make stupid decisions, and commit suicide rather than actually solve the problem, all the while thinking they were the heroes of the film. That they did the right thing.
It’s starting to become considered a Christmas staple by many and, at the very least, had a bunch of iconic scenes (the cue card scene has been parodied by everyone it seems).
Similar to The Exorcist, I think The Blair Witch Project is only effective if you believe in the supernatural (and don’t know that the actors didn’t actually die).
A very religious colleague who found TBWP really scary came in to work crestfallen the day after he saw the female co-star on a talk show alive and well.
Don’t get me wrong – most individual classic rock songs are fantastic. (And iconic.) But I hate the genre. For one thing, it’s boring to hear the same few hundred songs day-in, day-out, and for another, classic rock has helped destroy the market for new rock that might otherwise catch on with a wider audience.
Contemporary Americans are willing to look the other way when fruit companies fund Colombian death squads. If we’re willing to let corporations massacre other humans in pursuit of a cheaper banana, I don’t see future humans getting too upset if we wipe out a bunch of not-humans on an entirely different planet, especially when what’s at stake is the survival of human civilization as we know it.
Except that’s not actually the argument against Avatar. You’re conflating two criticisms. The first is that the big fight at the end was dumb, because the corporation controlled orbital space. They didn’t need to send in a marine in chain saw power armor to destroy the tree, they could just drop a medium sized rock on it and there’d be absolutely nothing the natives could do about it. That’s not “nuke the planet,” or even “wide scale genocide” - that’s causing just as much destruction and dead natives as the plan they actually went with. The other criticism is the idea that, now that the natives have killed a dozen or so marines and taken over one of their space ships, that they have any sort of realistic chance of holding on once the rest of human society realizes their unobtanium supply has been cut off, and their entire civilization is now teetering on collapse until they get it back.
I don’t believe in the supernatural, nor do I believe in FTL travel, but I am able to enjoy The Exorcist and Star Trek, because I’m willing to accept the story as it is.
TBWP still sucked, EVEN with willing suspension of disbelief, because it was just stupid.
The movie was marketed as real footage of actual missing campers. A fair number of people got fooled, especially during the viral campaign leading up to the film’s release. Arguably, that’s what led to the film’s surprising success. Once it was #1 in the box office, and started getting attention from major media outlets, the gimmick fell apart pretty quickly.
Yes. Recall that the producers created a pioneering internet-based campaign which fooled a lot of gullible people here in Baltimore. They got Stan Stovall, a prominent local newscaster, to take part, reading an account straight-faced.
I’m sure he wasn’t glad. But he seemed to sincerely believe that the film was the truth, proving that you don’t mess around with God. And he seemed crestfallen that he’d been taken in by a hoax. Maybe ‘bewildered’ is a better word. FWIW he was in his early 20s, and from the Deep South.
I’ve seen plenty of criticism of Avatar from people who said that we’d just casually wipe life off the whole planet and that the movie portrayed anything else is dumb and implausible and is therefore a plot hole. Your version is more reasonable, but that is not the critique I’m generally responding to.
I think it’s plausible that the movie version makes sense - dropping a rock from orbit to hit an exact target is probably tricky business due to the variability of how the rock will react to atmospheric burn, and I don’t think we’re shown that the humans of Avatar have magic space tech that basically gives them unlimited thrust. Getting into the right orbit with a big enough payload to drop a rock on that exact spot in a reasonble time frame may have been outside of the capabilities of the shuttles they were dealing with.
Just dropping some improvised mining explosive from the air seemed like it was going to work, and did work well enough. And their attack plan was plausible - they had good enough equipment to handle anything they’d dealt with on the planet before, and it was only the surprise that the planet essentially had a coordinated defense system that made them lose the battle. A lot of accusations of plot holes aren’t plot holes at all, but just people saying “they acted plausibly but imperfectly given the information at the time and the constraints they had to work with, plot hole!”
Does the movie imply this? I haven’t seen it in 10 years, but I don’t remember anything like this. They won the battle, but there might be a next move from Earth on the next trip back. That’s probably what the sequels are about. If no one in the movie says “yay, we won, now Earth cannot possibly hurt us”, then this isn’t a plot hole at all, it’s just something that would come after the movie ended. It’s entirely plausible that Avatar 2 will be about exactly that thing. The story, as told, was plausible from the limitations and expectations of the characters.
I agree about much of the discussion on Avatar going on here. Kind of fun to watch in the theater, but I’ve never bothered to revisit it.
Anyway, if the company dropped rocks from orbit, couldn’t the Navi float them back up? I don’t remember how their magic worked. I hope that isn’t a spoiler for the sequel.
Once Upon a Time In Hollywood is not up to the job. The concept alone, the idea for it are great. Just not well done. Lame dialogue, corny jokes, randomness without resonance. Is this really QT?
I saw Citizen Kane when I was roughly 17-19. I would probably do well to watch it again. I wouldn’t say it’s “bad” by any standard, but I feel it’s somewhat overrated. I certainly can’t agree with anyone who would claim that it’s the best movie ever made. Compared to “Schindler’s List” or “Seven Samurai”, it’s a joke. That said, “staid” would be a good way to describe it. The acting style makes sense in a 1940s context, but today comes across as too theatrical. Moreover, I recall that most of the characters (other than the reporter who’s so doggedly interested in finding out the meaning of “Rosebud”) were mildly to strongly negative. Apart from his shitty childhood, I had little sympathy for the title character, plus I find Orson Welles to be mildy repulsive. So it was a combination of personal taste and the acting being too staid (on the other hand “Gone With The Wind”, which is a little older, is my favorite film ever, partly because the actors are more passionate and the characters IMHO more relatable). That said, I don’t wish to disparage it, as long as you don’t claim it’s anything like the best movie ever made.
… of Doctor Zhivago. Good lord, if I heard “Lara’s Theme” one more time I was going to track down Maurice Jarre’s descendants and feed their dogs kung pao chicken.
