Which movie did you watch today and how would you rate it?

[Underseer]

If you just don't like superhero movies, then I apologize. You don't need good reasons for why you don't like Wonder Woman because general preferences like "I don't like superhero films" does not need to be justified in the first place.

Objection 1 is ludicrous (as previously mentioned). I only skimmed number 2 but it sounds like a quibble over geographical distances and not the kind of reason one usually decides a movie is a "dumpster fire." Number 3 ignores the fact that the clay story was a lie that was told to her.

4: the thematic staple of Wonder Woman is to sell little girls on the idea that they can wield power and don't have to sit around and wait for men to wield power on their behalf. The only reason Amazon island is separate from the rest of the world is so that little girls reading the comic book can imagine a place where women are in all the positions of power and do all the doing. It's not there to make Wonder Woman into an immigrant metaphor like Superman is. It's just there to get girls used to the idea of women having power, which was an incredibly radical idea when Wonder Woman was first published.

5: Her motivation for caring about humanity is pretty obvious because that's the purpose for which the Amazonians were established in the first place (at least in the movies, in the comic books the reason seems to change with every reboot). It would have been ingrained in her from the culture of the Amazons.


If you just don't like superhero movies, then I take everything back. Just say so, and you don't need justification for not liking something. Those kinds of preferences usually aren't rational and they don't need to be.

But if you like superhero movies and still insist that Wonder Woman is a "dumpster fire," and give those reasons for why you don't like it, then I have to assume that you're not being honest about why you don't like it because the reasons you gave sound pretty flimsy to me. It remains to be seen if you're not being honest with me or not being honest with yourself.

If you are a rabid Marvel fan and just hate everything DC does, then you also don't have to justify hating Wonder Woman, but then I have to wonder why you gave such a tepid response to Black Panther given that most Marvel fans seem to think it's at least in the top 3 of all Marvel films.

 

[ZiprHead]

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

I don't even know how to describe how funny this movie is, but this song might help.

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wCH4dSD7RQ[/YOUTUBE]

I love that movie. It's hilarious and under-appreciated by the public. I think many just didn't get the rock history/culture references.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Show

1. the characterization of her personality makes absolutely no sense - the lore says she was created by zeus in the olden gods times, which means she's at least 3-6 thousand years old.
so, either amazons are like highlanders who age to a certain point and then just stop, or else they have an elongated development cycle, in either case the implication is she's just chilling out vaguely training to be a warrior for like... let's say 4000 years, which seems a little excessive.
she's stupidly naive for someone that has been around for that long, even giving her the benefit of the doubt that it's an isolated island and she's never left it, in the movie they say the amazons occasionally go out and get some dick to replenish their numbers, so there's SOME interaction with the outside world and the island... you'd think just gossip from the warriors during that 4000 years she spent training, she's simply either a complete fucking idiot (to the point where she wouldn't be able to suddenly be a cognitively normal person functioning in modern society once she leaves the island) or her "teehee i don't things about the world" routine is a plot device used to make her 'cute' and is just terrible writing.

2. steve flies away from a german military camp in a fighter plane, is chased by planes and boats, and pops into the island - which means the island has to be somewhere vaguely near axis powers territory.
then, they sail away from the island and in the middle of the night come across a tug boat that tows them into london within, to be generous, a span of 10 hours.
that is literally geographically impossible... not to mention how stupid is the idea that an island just off the coast of *anywhere* that is covered in a shroud of perpetual storm hasn't been discovered by anyone prior to this.
this is a plot hole that the writers created, that didn't have to be there, by establishing shitty rules for how the island's cloaking mechanism works instead of it being something like "the island moves around by magic, it's not in physically the same place all the time"

3. as a humanoid created out of clay by a god to be a weapon against another god, raised for thousands of years by warriors who go out of their way to deny her exposure to anything non-amazon, how am i supposed to believe or buy into her as a character with anything resembling relatable motivations or emotions? the movie goes "okay so she's a clay golem that's 4,000 years old.... but now because we want this to be a standard movie plot she's a totally normal 20-something human" and it's bullshit.

4. one of the thematic staples of wonder woman (and superman for that matter) has always been that they are not one of us, but they aspire to be because of the good they have seen in the world. this movie assumes this thematic element without ever actually establishing it within the narrative (man of steel has the same problem) because nothing in the script ever justifies or even shows an abbreviated example of her confronting the duality of man and deciding to embrace the good aspects of humanity and fight for them.

5. coming back to the issue of her not being human or even biological: what is her motivation in this movie? what's the emotional through-line that informs her behavior? why is she a people-loving hippie and not one of the hardasses who don't give a shit about the world?
we the audience know the answer because we know wonder woman, but the movie again just assumes this information instead of ever giving it within the narrative - which would have been fine with me if the movie had just skipped any kind of origin story entirely and gone with "fuck it, you all know who wonder woman is, here's a story about her in the DCEU" but it's all fucked up and muddled trying to give an origin without any actual origin.
this movie, and man of steel, are both narrative structures that say "that happened" and never "this is why that happened" or "this is how that happened", which robs any emotional resonance within the narrative of the film, leaving the audience to have to extrapolate from external sources.
(contrast this to the two most obvious marvel parallels and think about how well established steve rogers is as a character in his own right and as the persona of captain america within the first movie, or how thor's odd behavior is explained as being a combination of cultural differences to an alien race and his blithe ignorance and indifference to anything that isn't related to asgard)

i wouldn't consider that a script problem, that's really more of an issue endemic to superhero genre blockbuster movies, almost none of them know how to do a proper follow-through for the third act... that's not even on my list of gripes.

Oh. I get it. Wonder Woman and Black Panther don't have white male protagonists and are therefore inferior. Got it.
I'm sorry you got triggered. Do you need a safe space?

i've already tolerated you copy/pasting this spam bullshit you like to throw in people's faces around here a few weeks ago when we were discussing altered carbon, and i gave you a pass on it because i don't expect you to memorize the posting habits of every person here.... but seriously man, do you just have that crap on a macro and you use it any time you think a thing you like isn't liked by someone else?

get the actual fuck over yourself, and like i told you weeks ago: have some shred of an idea who you're talking to or the context of the discussion before pulling out your hobby horse, you're starting to moore/coulter up in this bitch by just being a quivering liberal vagina version of derec.

If you dislike superhero movies in general, then fine, but both Wonder Woman and Black Panther are among the best superhero movies made.

Wonder Woman? I wasn't impressed. The action sequences felt and looked more like anime than I would have liked. A good deal looked very CGI'd.

I think maybe I just didn't like the juxtaposition of WWI in the film and that carried a heavier weight on my viewing. WWI really sucks, with people getting cut down by machine guns and dying from chemical weapons. The ultimate outcome of the armistice, of which they are trying to save, would pave the way for both Germany and Japan to bring upon WWII, so umm... not exactly great. The concentration is on the evil scientist, when in reality, that is just one cog in what was terribly wrong with WWI. So while the movie obviously needs to stay within certain bounds thanks to our grim history in the first half of the 20th century, it is an extremely unsatisfying conclusion when held inside a larger context.

Also, the war plot seemed quite a copy of Captain America.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Also, the war plot seemed quite a copy of Captain America.

Look, just because they were both about a super powered person with a shield leading a group of misfits against the German army and stopping an evil scientist from deploying a superweapon which will win the war, culminating with an American soldier sacrificing himself on a plane in order to destroy said weapon doesn't mean that it was a copy. There are some mild similarities, to be sure, but don't forget that Wonder Woman had a magic lasso and that makes it completely different.

 

[prideandfall]

If you just don't like superhero movies, then I apologize. You don't need good reasons for why you don't like Wonder Woman because general preferences like "I don't like superhero films" does not need to be justified in the first place.

so anyone who doesn't fawn over a movie you've decided that you like is a racist, sexist, clinically insane person who is lying to both themselves and to you for purposes of pure spite and you feel compelled to attack them online for having opinions different than your own... and the problem is that *other people* are overly sensitive narcissists. got it.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

If you just don't like superhero movies, then I apologize. You don't need good reasons for why you don't like Wonder Woman because general preferences like "I don't like superhero films" does not need to be justified in the first place.

so anyone who doesn't fawn over a movie you've decided that you like is a racist, sexist, clinically insane person who is lying to both themselves and to you for purposes of pure spite and you feel compelled to attack them online for having opinions different than your own... and the problem is that *other people* are overly sensitive narcissists. got it.

We have a consensus. File it!

 

[Underseer]

If you dislike superhero movies in general, then fine, but both Wonder Woman and Black Panther are among the best superhero movies made.

Wonder Woman? I wasn't impressed. The action sequences felt and looked more like anime than I would have liked. A good deal looked very CGI'd.

I think maybe I just didn't like the juxtaposition of WWI in the film and that carried a heavier weight on my viewing. WWI really sucks, with people getting cut down by machine guns and dying from chemical weapons. The ultimate outcome of the armistice, of which they are trying to save, would pave the way for both Germany and Japan to bring upon WWII, so umm... not exactly great. The concentration is on the evil scientist, when in reality, that is just one cog in what was terribly wrong with WWI. So while the movie obviously needs to stay within certain bounds thanks to our grim history in the first half of the 20th century, it is an extremely unsatisfying conclusion when held inside a larger context.

Also, the war plot seemed quite a copy of Captain America.

Actually, it was a copy of the 1977 Superman much more than it was a copy of Captain America: First Avenger, and that was intentional. Patty Jenkins is a huge fan of that Superman movie and she straight up admits in interviews that that's what she was going for. The alley scene in WW is even an homage to the alley scene in Superman.

I understand that some people didn't like the change to WW1, but personally I liked it.

WW1 is a more appropriate setting for a story with Ares as the villain. The lead-up to WW1 involved a series of horrifying errors that could have prevented the war but didn't. It is not hard at all to imagine Ares engineering things behind the scenes to make sure the war happened despite the best efforts of European diplomats. Further, Ares got not one but two world wars out of the deal, which also feels like something Ares would do. Even though Ares was killed by WW, he ultimately got what he wanted, which will probably make for a rousing sequel.

And lastly, changing it to WW1 helped distinguish the movie from the inevitable comparisons that would be made to Captain America. If they left it in WW2, it would have felt even more like Captain America.

- - - Updated - - -

If you just don't like superhero movies, then I apologize. You don't need good reasons for why you don't like Wonder Woman because general preferences like "I don't like superhero films" does not need to be justified in the first place.

so anyone who doesn't fawn over a movie you've decided that you like is a racist, sexist, clinically insane person who is lying to both themselves and to you for purposes of pure spite and you feel compelled to attack them online for having opinions different than your own... and the problem is that *other people* are overly sensitive narcissists. got it.

Not at all.

I already gave all my caveats.

There are all kinds of personal preferences* that could cause you to not like a movie.

However, if those other preferences don't apply and if the reasons you give for hating (not disliking, hating) the WW movie sound like bad or flimsy reasons, then it sounds like you are not being honest about why you didn't like the movie.

* One of my African-American friends went to see it because all the other African-Americans were excited about it despite the fact that she hates comic book movies. She still hated comic book movies after watching it.

 

[Underseer]

Somewhat related is the recent Ghostbusters movie.

Personally, I don't like SNL-based movies. I find most of them tedious and not all that funny. It's just a preference thing.

But I kind of liked the original despite the pseudoscience premise that would ordinarily turn me off, and all the alt right nuts where whining at the tops of their lungs about it, so I went to see it anyway.

I found it above average for an SNL film. I genuinely laughed, especially at the performances by McKinnon and Hemsworth. Just about everything they did was funny. The other actors were hit or miss humor-wise, which is more than I usually get out of a SNL movie. Some of the action scenes were kind of OK.

But I just didn't see how it deserved the kind of insane vitriol we saw swirling around it. Yes, I grant that it is possible that some legitimately hated it out of personal preference, but it seemed obvious that quite a bit of the vitriol was just whiny MRA man-children getting their panties in a wad because one movie starred women instead of men.

Can I say that all of the negative responses were MRA man-babies getting triggered? No. But I'm pretty sure most of the cacophonous caterwauling was just triggered man-baby bullshit. I could easily understand someone saying it was below average, but most of the complaints seemed to indicate that it was such a steaming pile of shit that an entire festival of Uwe Boll movies would have been preferable. That just doesn't remotely jive with what I saw. The reasons people gave for absolutely hating it were flimsy at best, insane at worst.

 

[Goodchild]

A Bad Mom's Christmas

Really enjoyed this more than I expected to. Female-centric comedy films can be hit or miss for me as the humor isn't necessarily directed towards male tastes as much but this one was IMO enjoyable by anyone who doesn't have a stick up their ass about women. I really enjoyed seeing Kristen Bell in a character so vastly different from Eleanor Shellstrop on The Good Place, it gave me a great appreciation for her abilities. I'd actually never seen Kathryn Hahn before but she stole the show in so many scenes.

 

[spikepipsqueak]

Finding Your Feet 7/10

I didn't hate it but it was aiming to be one of those warm human stories that the Poms do so well - and missed by a fraction.

I don't know if I just know the formula too well, or if the makers forgot that a large part of the successful formula is to deviate from it occasionally.

Pissed off that 3 Billboards and The BBQ were in adjacent cinemas and I flipped my coin the wrong way.

 

[ruby sparks]

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

I don't even know how to describe how funny this movie is, but this song might help.

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wCH4dSD7RQ[/YOUTUBE]

I love that movie. It's hilarious and under-appreciated by the public. I think many just didn't get the rock history/culture references.

It's going on my list to see.

 

[Toni]

A Bad Mom's Christmas

Really enjoyed this more than I expected to. Female-centric comedy films can be hit or miss for me as the humor isn't necessarily directed towards male tastes as much but this one was IMO enjoyable by anyone who doesn't have a stick up their ass about women. I really enjoyed seeing Kristen Bell in a character so vastly different from Eleanor Shellstrop on The Good Place, it gave me a great appreciation for her abilities. I'd actually never seen Kathryn Hahn before but she stole the show in so many scenes.

Saw this because I really loved Bad Moms. Bad Mom's Christmas did not live up to the first in the franchise, imo. The cast is really good, though.

 

[KeepTalking]

It should be obvious what should have been left out. How about no gorilla tribe? Would the plot collapse without that part? What about robbing (drugs) from your own people? Selling guns? How about naming the first black superhero something other than the title of a violent revolutionary group that everyone hates? SO much disgusting stuff but the biggie, the thing you should be most upset about... the gangsta rap. Look up the lyrical content of the score's tracklist. Not good, Underseer.

There is no gorilla tribe. They changed it to the mountain tribe precisely because of the negative implications.

There was no drug deals. I don't even know where you're getting that from.

As for the guns, this was not what you make it out to be. They were talking about getting technically superior weapons into the hands of the oppressed to end oppression, and it was the villain trying to do that.

I think you just automatically associate gorillas and drugs and gun dealers with people of African descent. What movie did you even watch?

Psssst, he didn't watch the movie. He watched faux news, and someone posted some of the lyrics to songs that were played in the movie with no context, then combined that with the hero of the movie having been the name "Black Panther", so he got triggered. He can't even be bothered to look up the history of the name, and the fact that Marvel used it before the Black Panther Party existed, as that might poke holes in his alt-right alt-history paradigm.

 

[Toni]

Somewhat related is the recent Ghostbusters movie.

Personally, I don't like SNL-based movies. I find most of them tedious and not all that funny. It's just a preference thing.

But I kind of liked the original despite the pseudoscience premise that would ordinarily turn me off, and all the alt right nuts where whining at the tops of their lungs about it, so I went to see it anyway.

I found it above average for an SNL film. I genuinely laughed, especially at the performances by McKinnon and Hemsworth. Just about everything they did was funny. The other actors were hit or miss humor-wise, which is more than I usually get out of a SNL movie. Some of the action scenes were kind of OK.

But I just didn't see how it deserved the kind of insane vitriol we saw swirling around it. Yes, I grant that it is possible that some legitimately hated it out of personal preference, but it seemed obvious that quite a bit of the vitriol was just whiny MRA man-children getting their panties in a wad because one movie starred women instead of men.

Can I say that all of the negative responses were MRA man-babies getting triggered? No. But I'm pretty sure most of the cacophonous caterwauling was just triggered man-baby bullshit. I could easily understand someone saying it was below average, but most of the complaints seemed to indicate that it was such a steaming pile of shit that an entire festival of Uwe Boll movies would have been preferable. That just doesn't remotely jive with what I saw. The reasons people gave for absolutely hating it were flimsy at best, insane at worst.

What I thought the original Ghostbusters got right that the remake did not is part of the premise. Bill Murray's character is clearly a fraud who accidentally, through his association with his non-fraudster friends, stumbles upon actual ghosts. That cynicism that Murray does so well elevated the comedy of the movie, which is a funny thing to write given how broad the comedy was. It was another layer.

On the other hand, Melissa McCarthy's character was far too earnest and invested in ghosts. It removed that extra layer of comedy that was so much fun: cynical fraud gets sucked in by weird reality that turns out to be real.
Hemsworth and McKinnon were delightful, something I did not expect from Hemsworth. I also loved Leslie Jones. Kristen Wiig needs antidepressants or something.

I loved how the original cast was honored throughout the film via cameos. I hated the final parade of ghosts--not fun and seemed like a low grade knock off of the original.

The original Ghostbusters made me want to see the sequel.

The remake makes me want to see more McKinnon and Jones

 

[ZiprHead]

A Bad Mom's Christmas

Really enjoyed this more than I expected to. Female-centric comedy films can be hit or miss for me as the humor isn't necessarily directed towards male tastes as much but this one was IMO enjoyable by anyone who doesn't have a stick up their ass about women. I really enjoyed seeing Kristen Bell in a character so vastly different from Eleanor Shellstrop on The Good Place, it gave me a great appreciation for her abilities. I'd actually never seen Kathryn Hahn before but she stole the show in so many scenes.

I enjoyed the first one. I think Kathryn Hahn stole that one too. Far from a great movie but I just love Kristen Bell.

[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/ZoBXTcatYhM[/YOUTUBE]

BTW, welcome to the board.

 

[ZiprHead]

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

I don't even know how to describe how funny this movie is, but this song might help.

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wCH4dSD7RQ[/YOUTUBE]

I love that movie. It's hilarious and under-appreciated by the public. I think many just didn't get the rock history/culture references.

It's going on my list to see.

Meeting the Beatles at the ashram was brilliant. I won't post the scene to spoil it for you.

"Oh, no! The Temptations!"

Also, the songs themselves are quite good. From the wiki: Singer-songwriters Dan Bern and Mike Viola (of the Candy Butchers) wrote most of the film's songs, including "There's a Change a Happenin'", "Mulatto", "A Life Without You (Is No Life at All)", "Beautiful Ride" and "Hole in My Pants". Charlie Wadhams wrote the song "Let's Duet". Marshall Crenshaw wrote the title song, and Van Dyke Parks penned the Brian Wilson-esque 1960s-styled psychedelic jam "Black Sheep" (the recording session seems to be a specific parody of Wilson's Smile album sessions, on which Van Dyke Parks worked).[3] Antonio Ortiz wrote "Take My Hand". A number of critics noted the unusually high quality of many of the individual songs on the soundtrack, how well they reflected the styles and times they were attempting to parody, and how well they stood on their own as quality compositions. The soundtrack was nominated for both a Grammy and Golden Globe Award and was nominated and won the Sierra Award for Best Song in a Motion Picture from the Las Vegas Film Critics Society. John C. Reilly sang on all the tracks and played guitar on most of them.

 

[Underseer]

It should be obvious what should have been left out. How about no gorilla tribe? Would the plot collapse without that part? What about robbing (drugs) from your own people? Selling guns? How about naming the first black superhero something other than the title of a violent revolutionary group that everyone hates? SO much disgusting stuff but the biggie, the thing you should be most upset about... the gangsta rap. Look up the lyrical content of the score's tracklist. Not good, Underseer.

There is no gorilla tribe. They changed it to the mountain tribe precisely because of the negative implications.

There was no drug deals. I don't even know where you're getting that from.

As for the guns, this was not what you make it out to be. They were talking about getting technically superior weapons into the hands of the oppressed to end oppression, and it was the villain trying to do that.

I think you just automatically associate gorillas and drugs and gun dealers with people of African descent. What movie did you even watch?

Psssst, he didn't watch the movie. He watched faux news, and someone posted some of the lyrics to songs that were played in the movie with no context, then combined that with the hero of the movie having been the name "Black Panther", so he got triggered. He can't even be bothered to look up the history of the name, and the fact that Marvel used it before the Black Panther Party existed, as that might poke holes in his alt-right alt-history paradigm.

Thank you for clearing that up.

I thought it was something like this.

Isn't it amazing how conservatives can "see" things that aren't there? And what they choose to see reveals much about them.

 

[Goodchild]

A Bad Mom's Christmas

Really enjoyed this more than I expected to. Female-centric comedy films can be hit or miss for me as the humor isn't necessarily directed towards male tastes as much but this one was IMO enjoyable by anyone who doesn't have a stick up their ass about women. I really enjoyed seeing Kristen Bell in a character so vastly different from Eleanor Shellstrop on The Good Place, it gave me a great appreciation for her abilities. I'd actually never seen Kathryn Hahn before but she stole the show in so many scenes.

I enjoyed the first one. I think Kathryn Hahn stole that one too. Far from a great movie but I just love Kristen Bell.

[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/ZoBXTcatYhM[/YOUTUBE]

BTW, welcome to the board.

I haven't seen the first one yet, actually. My wife and I were going to watch it at some point before seeing the new one but she ended up watching it without me I'll have to catch it at some point when I get the chance.

And thanks for the welcome! Trying to get back into forums after a long absence from them.

 

[Opoponax]

When people give you reasons for why they hate something and the reasons don't make sense, it usually means they're not being honest about why they hate it.

And it's amusing that you are so offended by my use of "triggered" comments, given that the whole reason I do that is to show how shitty those "triggered" comments are. Bigots are the ones who normally use that term, and they're usually the biggest snowflakes.

No. I was going to suggest you see a proctologist in order get whatever it is removed from your ass too. I've ignored your unwarranted comments regarding exactly this stuff, but I'm glad someone else said something.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Black Panther - Well golly, I can see why some people hated this film. Not only were there are lot of blacks in the film, there were also a lot of smart women (black women) too. To make matters even worse, for the most part, the resolution to the plot also involved just black people. This film was a trigger fest!

The film itself? Well yeah, sure it was good. The one big issue I had with it was I was spending a lot of time wondering where in the heck I had seen the main "bad guy" (The Wire). Didn't realize it until I got home. That was bothering me. The other issue I had was that the bad guy wasn't as developed as a great character as I was led to believe by other people. He has a history, a life, yes. But then his attempt to takeover and his ultimate plan is just over the top, with no thought behind it.

Otherwise, this film was really good. The big missing element was the humor, but as I have been told, that is something to be expected with the Black Panther. He isn't Tony Stark.

A very strong offering to the massive Marvel tapestry. I wouldn't say the strongest, I reserve that for Avengers and Ragnorak, but this is definitely a great film.

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