Sure, but my point is, we should evaluate the dialog/scene in the movie based on its own strength. Bringing in how the audience would or would not react to hypothetical changes adds absolutely nothing to the debate, particularly as it can be used as a response to literally any suggestion about anything in pop culture.
“Phantom Menace would have been better without Jar Jar?” “Eh, everyone would find something else to complain about”
“Final season of Game of Thrones sucked?” “Eh, everyone would be bitching this much no matter what”
There’s a huge difference between:
(1) Things currently suck
(2) We should try this idealized plan
(3) But if we tried that idealized plan, it would go from being a purely idealized plan to something that had to be implemented in practice, and thus its flaws would start to manifest themselves, thus it’s not as good an idea as you think
vs
(1) Things currently suck
(2) We should try this idealized plan
(3) But if we tried that idealized plan, it would go from being a purely idealized plan to something that had to be implemented in practice, and thus people would complain about it, and thus it’s not as good an idea as you think
Those are not the same same thing at all. Almost nothing that ever happens in the real world doesn’t have people complaining about it. That doesn’t mean that all policies/actions are equal, nor does it mean we should never do anything for fear of someone somewhere complaining about it.
But… this conversational thread has gotten weirdly divorced from the original topic.
I remember that criticism when The Matrix was released and I think it’s fair one. But I like to look at it on the bright side and think of how many people were introduced to Plato’s allegory of The Cave without even knowing it.
That was a criticism I had with Shrek at the time. I really enjoyed it, but argued the pop culture references were going to date it rather quickly in a way other animated movies like The Little Mermaid or The Lion King aren’t.
I’ve recently been watching reruns of Frasier, which I am old enough to remember first time around. I thought most of the humour had held up well, especially Frasier’s pomposity and the way Daphne would pin-prick it. And his spats with his father and Niles are still great.
What stuck out a mile this time round though was the total absence of any non white characters. Did we just not notice back then??
What I would like to see is an undiscovered episode where Frasier has a black girlfriend, but he’s scared to bring her home because of how he thinks Martin will react. Martin would probably be fine with it, but Frasier’s jitters would be funny to see.
Actually, fairly late in the show’s run, Broadway great Brian Stokes Mitchell appeared for a few episodes as Fraser’s neighbor Cam Winston, who Frasier hated. He was, perhaps, the only man in the world more pompous than Frasier. Martin did date Cam’s mother briefly, to the chagrin of both of them.
Although the British TV series The Avengers broadcast in 1961, it was only in the UK. They didn’t start broadcasting in the US until 1965, when the brought in Diana Rigg. The US comic was over two years old by then. There was no reason for the US comic to avoid the name when it was not being shown in the US.
James Burke’s limited series still hold up. I’ve gotten DVDs of the first I ever saw, Connections from back in the 1970s from a local library, and it definitely still works. So does The Day the Universe Changed (which I received as a gift). My recollections of the Connections2 and Connections3 were that they were in the same vein. I haven’t seen the recent streaming series of Connections that he did.
It seems to me a lot of these un-funny movies were trying to be. In that they were like toddlers trying to tell jokes. They sounded like jokes, but they weren’t funny. They knew the words, but not the music. And the movie posters usually featured some dweeb with a popped collar, peering saucily over the rims of his kool sunglasses.
I liked the scene where Michael ad libs the reveal of his being a man on live TV. How it just went on and on (“Here come the demands!”). There were some other scenes I thought were funny.
However, I never thought Tootsie was supposed to be gut bustingly funny, I thought it was more wry, more meta-funny. And, :it tried too hard", and I hated Jessica Lange’s character. Michael should have ended up with Teri Garr.
But when it comes to soap opera hijinx movies, I prefer Soap Dish.
It wasn’t even that. After hearing everyone gush about how funny “Tootsie” was, my wife and I went to see it on a Saturday night in a full theater. It got one solid laugh. When Sydney Pollack tells the camera operator to pull much further back to get a better shot of ‘Tootsie,’ and the camera operator says something like “How about Cleveland?” At that line, the audience laughed. After that, a few polite chuckles but that was it. We left shaking our heads. We just didn’t get it. And I think “Some Like It Hot” is a riot, so it’s not like guys in drag can’t be funny. I think you’re right. It “tried too hard.” And Dustin Hoffman simply is not a funny guy.
A lot of us didn’t notice or perhaps didn’t care. Ellen Cleghorn criticized Friends for it’s lack of black characters on Saturday Night Live in a Weekend Update segment. “We all know how hard it is to find a black person in Manhattan.” Cleghorn left SNL in 1995 and Friends started in 1994, so I’m guessing this was likely from a 1995 episode. But I do remember people talking about a lack of diversity on American television noting a lack of African American leads and Latinos and Asians in general.
A while back I watched the first four hours of MTV’s broadcast on YouTube. One of the things I made note of was the lack of black artists. There were videos featuring black musicians in bands, but no solo artists or majority black bands and it was a little jarring.
And to keep up with the spirit of the thread, as much as I enjoyed watching the first four hours of MTV, it doesn’t hold up. While a channel devoted to music videos was novel in 1981, it is a format that simply could not exist today. Had MTV executives insisted on sticking to their original format they would have gone bankrupt.
Yeah! Hoffman is like a minor-league version of Buster Keaton, desperately trying to keep a straight face while something absolutely absurd happens around him.
