Talk About Movies: Part 4

👍

Disney's The Acolyte Budget is $180 Million... For A Disney Plus Show?

Mutha effing LULZ.

Megalopolis budget was $120 million.

Watching the house of mouse burned to the ground makes me very sad... but f*ckem.

When your key demographic audience is white males and you make a show for $180m featuring zero white males.

Most people don't confine themselves to shows featuring only their own race and gender.

Most people, that is.

Hollywood “accounting” is at an all time high.

I just walked out of a 10:40am showing of Furiousa. I guess the walking out fact contains its own review. Funny thing, right when a character says to a child "Don't look away," I had just looked away. I thought "I really don't want to look back at it now," so I left.

For every 'go woke, go broke' example you could present, it would be easy to give a counter example. And even if there weren't, that phrase would be a superficial explanation that has a lot of holes.

Sure, if you're only capable of thinking in binary terms (woke/non-woke; success/failure) then you can likely find counter-examples.

However, I'm talking about the predictive value of casting choices. For example, audiences checked out of female-led (aka girl-boss) action movies a long time ago, which is a shame for a movie like Furiosa, which appears on course to be a huge box office bomb despite the positive reception it has generally received here and elsewhere.

This guy bringing his toxic brand of prejudiced posting into the film thread is not a welcome development imo.

lol.

Why do you think audiences have checked out these movies?

Ultimately because they are not very good movies. Proximally because the people they employ to make these movies are hired more on the basis of their ideology rather than their talent.

Righto

.

I guess he’s saying Furiosa IS a good movie, but because the demo (women?) have checked out of girl-boss movies then it will bomb. Therefore the demo of Star Wars (white men?) will bail on Acolyte for being woke or something.

That’s the most sense I could make of it. Either way, he sucks at articulating his opinion.

The target demographic for action movies is men. In other words, if men don't show up for an action movie, it will bomb. Same rule for women and romcoms.

I don't have a problem with women in action movies. Alien and Aliens are two of my favourite movies ever. However, the reason Ripley works as a character is she is a woman behaving like a woman. This is more true of Aliens (the role of mother) than Alien (she is effectively representing how the audience would likely behave). And it is believable as she has all the strengths and limitations of a woman.

The issue with modern Hollywood action movies is women are frequently omnipotent. Whether it's a 50kg woman beating half a dozen goons up, or a teenager inventing an ironman suit or a quantum device in her bedroom, it's unrealistic, and most importantly from a storytelling POV, unearned.

Furthermore, when we have the most egregious examples of woke casting, you can likely guess whether someone is bad (Halbrand in Rings of Power) or good (Riva in Kenobi) purely from the sex and/or ethnicity of the actor.

And this is one reason why men are checking out out of these kinds of movies and TV shows.

Your arguments are so muddled, it's hard to know where to begin. You say it's binary to use box office success/failure as a yardstick, then proceed to do just that to explain why woke casting is a bad idea.

You then say women action heroes are unrealistically powerful while referencing superpowered people. Exactly what is so egregious about Reva being a poweful black woman?. It's like you're saying it's realistic for men to have superpowers, but not women. Or is that there were no black women in the original films, so there shouldn't be any prominent ones in any Star Wars media?

And none of what you're saying can explain the poor box office performance of Fall Guy. The cinema industry is facing all kinds of challenges that are impacting box office. Blaming failure on woke is just lazy thinking.

I still want to know why it's Furiosa not Furiousa.

Challengers: 8.5/10

It could’ve easily been a 6 or 7 if I’d posted right after I watched it, but after thinking about it a bit, it went up. I saw a post about this film before that mentioned all of the tricks and **** that was used at the end. I agree that they’re annoying, but the last 15 seconds kind of made up for it. Then after thinking about it, it was kinda great! While it’s certainly not Whiplash level, it is cathartic in a similar way.

Gotta say, I've been in a super weird place with the whole wokeness in movies thing. Because while I think diversity and inclusion is generally good for entertainment in general (and long overdue), there are also cases where some parties are badly overcompensating and/or doing it strictly for demographics reasons.

The last time we had one of those Star Wars chats in my living room there was a lot of talk about the focus on women and someone pointed out that Disney made this a selling point to a toymaker (Hasbro?), who later complained about the resulting sales, and my wife actually summed it up saying, "little girls still aren't going to have Star Wars **** on their Christmas list."

And I agree also that a lot of movie studios struggle with women's roles by equating strong with masculine, pretty often pairing her with an oafish male character for comparison. Not the only example of reductive but a common one.

I think I and most people can generally sense when roles are created and cast based purely on fit and talent, and those done trying to force things like say tossing in a Chinese guy to appeal to a Chinese market. Sometimes it's subtle but most of the time it's not.

The problem in casting and films in general is that they were so exclusive for so long that even well-intentioned studios are still figuring out what organic inclusivity actually is. Because in real life, it's still not terribly uncommon to walk into a campus cafeteria and see a little bit of self-segregation at the tables for example. And Jesus if you're doing a period piece set in a specific part of the world long ago, or even a fictional one, it can be a little jarring when you have a group of people that look like you could have selected them at random off of a Manhattan bus stop.

Having said that it's always worth noting that most movies aren't good, and wouldn't be good with a more or less diverse cast, and yet diversity is blamed for it by default too often.

I also have been mindful of who I have this discussion with in real life. Don't care whether they disagree, but if it's one of those folks who think a black dude in a stormtrooper suit is an offense to society they can eat half a bag of slightly microwaved dicks. Or like the people who cried that the little girl who died in Hunger Games wasn't white like in the book.

I'll believe they are trying for diversity when stunt performers and Tom Cruise get their Oscars.

I absolutely HATED this movie and honestly cannot understand why it's getting such rave reviews. Normally I can at least understand why a movie is critically acclaimed even if it's not my cup of tea, but this one just baffles me. It will almost certainly be the worst movie I watch this year.

There's been some bad movies which included extremely diverse casts and women in the role of leading characters who are poorly developed throughout the movie to instead on highlighting the main character kicking ass over character development. I think Red Letter Media was the one who said that the Star Wars sequels were "a hero journey without the journey". The problem here is the bad writing, not the casting (also being called "wokeness" or "diversity").

Here's your challenge: without changing anything about the script, who do you cast in the role of Rey (man or woman) to save the Star Wars sequels?