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Darren (1186)
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Not as good as the original, but I enjoyed it
The Obsolete Man
I always found it funny that David's parents didn't come to London.
Has anybody here read a real book about vampires...
Post-apocalypse people shouldn't have needed dogs to spot terminators
So how did St. Olaf massacre the trolls?
Possibly the most definitively American movie ever made
What is your favorite episode?
An interesting omission from the movie
Steve's '80s fashion scenes.
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Oh I don't much care about Disney. I cancelled my Disney+ subscription when they fired Gina Carano for wrongthink. I won't give my money to organizations that demand ideological conformity and punish dissenters. I consider Disney Star Wars to be pastiche, not canon. I haven't seen more of The Acolyte than what I've caught on YouTube clips, but that little bit looks awful, and more importantly, awful because it's so overtly political, and written by hacks who want to push an agenda, not tell a good story.
Disney ruined Star Wars, so I tuned out a while back. I'd like to believe the franchise could be rescued someday, but I won't hold my breath.
13% now. The rate of descent has slowed, but it's <i>still</i> sinking.
There's a key difference between infusing your <i>entertainment</i> with a moral, ideological, or political message, and making the entertainment come in a very, very distant second to pushing the message. As I've said elsewhere, woke messaging is not the only kind that's guilty of this: explicitly Christian movies have the exact same problem, just a different message.
When you are message-driven, instead of prioritizing plot, character development, and all the other things that go to make good storytelling, you skew the whole thing, and usually end up making the same kinds of mistakes. Rather than letting the message definitely, but unobtrusively play out through the story, never overwhelming the entertainment, the writers become preachy and very in-your-face. The plot suffers because the writers aren't nearly as concerned with it as they are with pushing the message. The heroes suffer because, as characters who have to represent the "correct" worldview, the writers are afraid to give them human flaws, and redemptive story arcs, and all too often make them unrelatable Mary Sues, not to mention blatant author self-inserts. The villains, as representatives of wrongthink, often go way over the top and become laughably cartoonish caricatures.
And of course, the biggest difference, when you bottom line it, <i>good</i> entertainment that promotes a message is thought provoking, makes you question your assumptions, and consider different ideas and points of views you may not have before. The bad sort -- which The Acolyte most definitely is -- tries to tell you what the correct opinions and beliefs are.
Star Wars took off because Luke Skywalker was a classic mythological hero, and it resonated on a deep, subconscious level. He was modeled on Hercules, Perseus, Cú Chulainn, Beowulf, Sigurd, and many more. Luke Skywalker reached back to something we feel in our bones, and which is represented again and again and again in the heroic tales of all the world’s mythological traditions.
Woke SJW’s can’t do this. The can’t come up with anything that resonates like the original Star Wars did, because they aren’t even trying to tap into the bone-deep cultural influences Lucas did. They <i>reject</i> the past, and think they have the map to a utopian future. But their shallow and nouveau ideas simply don’t resonate. People don’t buy into it, the way they feel a great truth about Luke Skywalker’s hero’s journey.
So they <i>can’t </i> create new ideas – not ones that will work, at any rate. What new things they try fall flat. So the best they can do is try to hijack classic heroes and stories, and turn them into vehicles for their nihilistic, woke ideology.
(This site restricts post size, so I have to break this replay in two)
Simple. They're not talented or creative enough. Whatever talent they might have is warped by their ideology. When your job is to create entertainment, but you're <i>driven</i> by an ideology, it will stifle you creatively. The Message becomes the priority. The protagonist of your story is almost certain to be an ideological self-insert into the story, and because he has to be a hero for The Cause, you'll likely not allow him or her to have significant flaws -- the character will all too likely be a Mary Sue. The plot, the story, the characters, they will all come in second to The Message.
Back when George Lucas created Star Wars, he wasn't pushing an agenda, he just wanted to tell the kind of stories that he had loved as a kid watching movies and movie serials. He tried to buy the rights to Flash Gordon, but he couldn't get them, so he and Gary Kurtz (with whom he'd worked on American Graffiti), decided to make something in the sci fi genre that was all their own. They bounced ideas off each other, and came up with a broad outline for an epic saga, and decided to film what became Star Wars/episode IV "A New Hope" because that was a part of the whole thing that could work as a standalone story -- in case it flopped and they never got the chance to finish telling the rest.
But Star Wars not only didn't flop, it didn't even just become a hit, it became a <i>phenomenon</i> like nothing anyone had ever seen. There had been blockbusters before, but this was next level.
And it all worked because George Lucas just wanted to tell a great story. He deliberately mined classic mythological tropes that date back to antiquity. Jos. Campbell, who wrote "Hero with a Thousand Faces," cataloguing these ancient myths, called Lucas the best student he ever had.
Because the universities these clowns went to indoctrinated them. Now they really believe they are on "the right side of history," and they're saving the world.
You have to understand, they are basically religious zealots.
I lived through the 80s. The girls then were no different than girls of any other decade; and Flashdance is just a chick flick, no worse than any other.
But the girls of the 80s had one advantage of those of today: they weren't covered in tacky-looking tattoos.
The teenage girls who made it a big hit when it came out, and all started dressing like Jennifer Beals' character once they saw it. That's who it was made for.
15% now. I wonder if audience scores can get into negative numbers.
Another series falls to the god of "representation."
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