#clips from the original trilogy only sorry. I got lazy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lumikinetic · 5 years

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*flops down on sofa*

*exhales*

Tumblr gives me a lot of wild shit every now and again. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's hilarious, sometimes it's disheartening. And then yesterday came along and gave me the one-two punch of:

Captain Marvel being dolled up by the Russos instead of a jacket, S.H.I.E.L.D baseball cap and a Nine Inch Nails shirt, which is how she should be (not gonna talk about this, just want it out there that I'm pissed about it)

One Day At A Time being cancelled

ODAAT I'm gonna kind of touch on because it's not really what I want to talk about, but it did help me finalize the words for what I do, and that's capitalism in entertainment.

The most annoying goddamn trend in filmmaking (and of course in TV and Netflix/Prime originals) is companies caring more about their bottom line and less about making good content, and yeah I know this dead horse isn't just beaten, it's thrown into an active supervolcano but it really pisses me off and it's why I hate the new Star Wars stuff (well OK hate is a bit strong but they're uh Not Good) but I'll get to that. What corpos can't seem to get into their bloated skulls is that one cannot exist without the other. You need to put out good, quality content with value so that fans like it so they give you money so they increase your profits so you can make more content and so on. But somewhere down the line some fuckhead went "what if we just pushed out what we have?" and just kinda expected us to not take notice.

Now before the comments section gets all hot and bothered because I know some people on this site don't have the gift of reading comprehension, I know profits are important, I'm saying when companies shun good filmmaking for more money, they get lazy and all they can think about is profit and not how they make that profit, they don't care at all about using that money to make more good, valuable content.

One Day At A Time

I've never watched One Day At A Time but the fact Netflix just outright cancelled it knowing damn well what it meant to the people the characters are representing is just disgusting. And they have the fucking audacity to blame it on the viewership? I've seen hundreds of artworks, gifs and a video clip here and there of this show. I've seen precisely one (1) meme of 13 Reasons Why and that is literally it. I'm not following the tags for either. Plus, #saveODAAT has, last I checked, 350k tweets on trending or thereabouts?

So obviously the viewership isn't the problem, it's the racism and homophobia of cancelling a Spanish (? - again, never seen it), LGBT+ focused show that a lot of people quite happily and positively connect with when a crap show about suicide and Friends gets to stay on. It's just ugh. Cancelling a show like this then paying something like $100mil to keep Friends. I was going to expand on the shitty capitalism here but tbh that's it, Netflix are making bad decisions and like I say, I'm only going to touch on it because it's not the main part.

Star Wars

Go watch the original trilogy and it's clear George Lucas was trying to create and do. He was trying to make art. The key difference between that and modern SW to me is BB8. Look at C3PO and R2D2 and already you can see they belong. C3PO is a translator droid and I'm not sure what exactly R2's job description is but it's obvious he does some kind of pilot assistance for X-Wing fighters. I never understood people who said R2 never did anything, because they obviously haven't seen Star Wars. You get that this is an R2 unit, right? Like, there's more than one out there and they have a job they were specifically built to do, it's just this one particular R2 unit who had to carry the message? Anyway, I'm derailing. R2 and C3PO have functions and they're clearly not new, they've been used for a long time. Then you look at BB8 and instantly it's like "this is a toy. This so called character was designed to sell toys". And then he was. He's a toy, he's on bags, notebooks, pens, clothes, everywhere. Disney is less concerned about making a Star Wars movie and more about making money off of the Star Wars name.

Into The Spider-Verse VS YA Movies

YA movies tend to suck because they were adapted from books and we all know how that pans out but the reason I'm using YA books specifically is because my mind jumped to The Hunger Games. I couldn't tell you a single fucking thing that happens in those movies. They're so dull and dead and forgettable and the characters are borderline unlikeable but you know which one I do like? Catching Fire, for one reason and one reason only: Jena Malone as Joanna Mason. Save for Haymitch, she's the only character I liked because those two are the only characters with any kind of charisma or life to them. They made an at most halfway decent attempt overall at recreating some otherwise really great books and they made a big show out of it, hiring some pretty well known names. And I'm not disparaging their performances, it was just what I call, ever since Suicide Squad came out, the Harley Quinn effect, in which good actors get given a good character and perform them really well and, through no fault of their own, fuck it up because the character was written poorly and no matter how well they act, if the script doesn't change, the performance will always be shit. The same for Divergent. And Percy Jackson. And Fault In Our Stars.

Then outside all of that you have Perks Of Being A Wallflower which is just a great, heartwarming movie because the characters feel like people and the brightness isn't turned way the fuck down in post and you actually want to be invested, and they're not afraid to have a colour palette beyond a splash of pink here and blue there and red there. Plus, Ant-Man as an English teacher. THEN you go watch Spider-Verse and oh hey. I can actually see the movie now. And I mean see it. They do not slack off when it comes to visuals. Even by animation's standards, everyone is so expressive and alive and... animated. Sorry, I couldn't get a better word but they are! When you look at Miles in comparison to Katniss in terms of writing and performance, the difference is just startling. The only times I can think of where Katniss shows any kind of emotion in the first movie is when she slams the knife in the table and Rue's funeral and I had to think about that. Without thinking for Miles, already I've got "who's Morales?", the scene where Uncle Aaron teaches him the shoulder touch, the scene where Miles spray paints in the subway, that scene in the alley, the moment in Olivia's office when he just freezes after she says she can't wait to watch Peter in immense pain Like That and made all the wlws melt in their seats. You get the idea. So what's the point for this section? Well, as simply as I can put it, Hunger Games was made with money, for money. Spiderverse was made with love, for love. Spiderverse cared about people who read comic books and paid more than enough tribute to the art forms people think of as lesser for no goddamn reason other than elitism and proved for the thousandth time that it is something that can be used in filmmaking. They were trying to make art. Hunger Games and most other YA novel movie adaptations saw a preestablished fan base they could exploit for money. They were trying to make money.

Rambo

This was a weird one, yeah. Don't worry I was confused too when it popped into my head. I saw the original Rambo a while back and what I liked about it (and Apocalypse Now) is it wasn't a war film where the USA charge in and hooray everything's all right, this movie grabs your shirt and says "hey. Vietnam did something to these guys and they're not OK. Probably they'll never be OK". Then I watched the Rambo reboot that came out in like 2011 or something and I remember thinking "OK so now he's just this dude? Who lives in Thailand... And what, that's it?" There was no scene to show his psychological state today. Nothing to acknowledge his PTSD. They just thought "hey! Let's make Rambo but this time, just give him guns and and yelling and spray some blood!" The reason I kind of ended this train of thought quickly is because I realised that, let's be real, the main body of Rambo's audience just want to see Sly Stallone kill some fools. But yeah, the fact that they just ignored John's mental state in place of mega violence is such a glaringly obvious move to just appeal to violent teenage boys.

The Auteur

My favourite director is Wes Anderson and my favourite movie is The Grand Budapest Hotel (though Panos Cosmatos seems to be eyeing these titles with Beyond The Black Rainbow and Mandy, I haven't watched them yet). Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Wes Anderson, auteurs always stand out even though their movies are all the same, and I think the reason they're so successful is because that specific style is so much better than most other mainstream cinema. I'm not saying that those other movies are bad, I love them and will watch them again and again but I'm saying Wes Anderson could make a short movie and it would be better than most Marvel movies put together (don't talk to me about Captain Marvel, I haven't seen it yet. Gonna see it this Sunday). No matter what you think of these directors, you can instantly tell the difference between these movies that they care about and the passion and hard work they put in and Disney pumping out their 400th reboot.

It Keeps Working

You guys wanna know the thought that keeps me up at night? Someday they're going to make a Fortnite movie. You guys wanna know why it keeps me up at night? Because it's going to be popular. Yeah, obviously not at the box office, because it'll be a videogame movie and those are worse than book movies, but it will be popular for no apparent reason. And what pisses me off is that Fortnite's popularity is only because of the battle royale mode, which has now essentially become synonymous with dying franchises and it just adds another layer to the lack of creative effort and the movie will just be Hunger Games with guns. Exactly the same as what I said at the start of this rant, there's a really noticeable shift from making content to jumping on whatever bandwagon is passing by because you know it'll make you money. Yeah, you have to spend money to make money but that doesn't mean you get complacent in what you spend your money on or if you spend money at all because when you cut corners, consumers can see that shit.

Anyway I'm done complaining thanks for having the willpower to pay attention to my dumb opinions.

#discourse #odaat #one day at a time #capitalism #star wars #into the spiderverse #rambo #long post #hunger games #hunger games: catching fire #ya fiction #young adult fiction #netflix #eat the rich #corpo #captain marvel #marvel #disney

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