I love Lindsay Ellis, watched her video on [b][url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Radg-Kn0jLs]Stranger Things, IT, and the Upside Down of Nostalgia[/url][/b] earlier today, so I just blindly clicked the video and started watching.
It wasn't until she said "I can't stop thinking about Bright, so we're gonna make a thing out of it" that I looked at the runtime.
Holy fucking 44 minutes. It's already past midnight for me. I think I'm gonna have to finish this later.
That being said, I'm confident that Lindsay brings up lots of good points and makes good arguments. She's pretty consistent on that front, in my experience.
I don't love or hate Bright but I do hate Twilight and it's pretentious unending sparkly mopiestness and brooding abs, so I'm not sure what that's even supposed to mean as a deconstruction of me as a viewer.
Also comparing a 90 million 5 month movie versus the five years+ a godzillion dollars for LOTR is straight bullshit. Sure, Bright's world building is bad and crap as hell but reaching LOTR in five months was and is never going to happen.
Yes, by all means, they should have gone with the original draft that had no racism-per-second counter and that draft was then polished by a writing team, but LOTR played directly on Tolkien's pretty hyper-defined nordic-mythic tropes to create initial tension that the Hobbits are almost overwhelmed by in the first third of the first movie.
Yes, the climax is dumb.
Also last entire half of the video lambasting dumb coding when she just had what three videos where Disney's absurdist stereotyping is PRETTY GREAT YAY DISNEY IT'S OKAY TO BE SIMPLE AND BASIC CAUSE YAY FORCED POSITIVITY AND FAKE CHEERFULNESS AS LONG AS IT'S MY NOSTALGIC CHILDHOOD SO REVISIONISM IS TOTALLY ENTERTAINING AND OK.
No, no it's not.
If it's not ok in Bright it's not ok in a story about Mary Poppins via Disney and P.L. Travers not really get along or Song of the South, and there's no contextual difference in "I love Disney theme parks so much gais omg" and "I hate Bright cause it causes serious shade on both Disney and race and stuff".
This video could have been five minutes of why world building is critical to good fantasy and David Ayers wrote a bad rewrite, holy shit.
And I thought I was overly verbose.
I liked Lindsay back in the day, and I'll respect her knowledge of cinema... but I just can't watch her newest stuff ever since I heard about how she's started drinking the SJW koolaid. I can be nothing less than intensely wary of someone who's taken a photo of herself with Anita Sarkeesian of all people, not to mention all the other stuff she's gotten up to in recent years.
I'll watch her old TGWTG stuff all day long. She was one of my favorite contributors... but she's clearly a different, worse person now. It's very sad... I thought she was smarter than that.
[QUOTE=Vigilante2470;53102735]I liked Lindsay back in the day, and I'll respect her knowledge of cinema... but I just can't watch her newest stuff ever since I heard about how she's started drinking the SJW kool-aid. I can be nothing less than intensely wary of someone who's taken a photo of herself with Anita Sarkeesian of all people, not to mention all the other stuff she's gotten up to in recent years.
I'll watch her old TGWTG stuff all day long. She was one of my favorite contributors... but she's clearly a different, worse person now. It's very sad... I thought she was smarter than that.[/QUOTE]
Not every feminist is a bad person. Lindsay, whenever she brings up her politics side has been pretty cool about it and far from extremist. She's the furthest thing from the "SJWs" you can get. She tackles issues like Disney's Pocahontas with a deal of understanding and respect, to the degree that even if you don't agree with her you can see her viewpoint and understand where she's coming from.
Also who cares if she took a pic with Anita? When you come across people in real life they can be pretty friendly. People often say Antia can be pretty nice when you aren't talking about social issues. I wouldn't give a shit if a youtuber took a pic with Sargon, someone I completely despise but I bet he too can be friendly in person when he wants to be. Just because you take a selfie with someone doesn't mean you agree to their tactics.
Lindsay is the perfect example of a feminist who's actually cool. She doesn't see the world in black and white.
[QUOTE=Vigilante2470;53102735]I liked Lindsay back in the day, and I'll respect her knowledge of cinema... but I just can't watch her newest stuff ever since I heard about how she's started drinking the SJW koolaid. I can be nothing less than intensely wary of someone who's taken a photo of herself with Anita Sarkeesian of all people, not to mention all the other stuff she's gotten up to in recent years.
I'll watch her old TGWTG stuff all day long. She was one of my favorite contributors... but she's clearly a different, worse person now. It's very sad... I thought she was smarter than that.[/QUOTE]
I've never watched this person's videos before, so I can't speak for those.
But I watched this one.
I'm not sure if you didn't watch the video, or if your hate-boner popped up very shortly in to it, thereby blinding you to the screen and drawing too much blood from your brain to properly process what was going on until you'd jerked this post out.
If you watched the video, she makes a lot of poignant, well-nuanced points about how a story could and should handle racism.
A lot of it is done through other movies that handled it badly (Crash) and handled it surprisingly well (District 9, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.)
If you watched the videos, you would have heard a lot of points that I certainly wouldn't imagine "an SJW" (which I take to be someone who cares quite a lot about those types of topics, so much that they can't spare time thinking before they engage in slacktivism and nagging, or... say, [I]making an uninformed, angry post on the internet[/I]) saying.
For instance, she points out how, even though J.R.R. Tolkien detested allegory and explicitly said he never employed it in his works, there are things in The Lord Of The Rings that expose his world views. That is, just what Tolkien thought was [I]good,[/I] or [B]beautiful.[/B] For instance, if you took a written description of an Orc from LOTR and drew it, well. It might look very nearly like [URL="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d8/41/61/d841617ca27f80b2f40d5b0eb74bccc8.jpg"]this.[/URL]
She even says there are [I]pretty good[/I] reasons for things like that happening. Tolkien came from the [B]Greatest Empire Ever[/B] and reflected the values and beliefs of his time and place. She explicitly says, "people can have good reasons for being racist, like [white people's reactions to] black men embracing black stereotypes." She adds near there, "racism isn't logical, it's illogical. You can't logic someone out of something they didn't logic themselves in to." Those are points that are pretty strongly contrary to a supposed "SJW" viewset. They actually sounds pretty understanding.
Because the point is that [B]Bright[/B] ultimately isn't a movie about race and racism. It's a movie about a caricature of race and racism that tries to pretend people aren't racist because of say, complex things in the world outside of their control. The movie says, people are racist because they are assholes so don't be an asshole. Which is, frankly, way too simple and childish to be taken seriously.
There are also really major points in the essay that have [I]nothing[/I] to do with race, like the tissue-paper world building, or the terrible plot structure.
So yeah, I think you may have missed your mark.
I didn't care that the exposition was lazy. I liked it.
edit: wait, she has a problem with the name 'Elftown'? Has she never heard of Chinatown? Greektown? Koreatown? Similar simple named ones like Little Italy? Sure, Elftown was misused but there isn't anything wrong with the name. Is it even established that Elftown is an official name? Maybe it's just what the police refer to that part of town as.
edit: bitching about the fairy killing is also bullshit, she makes a big point about how the worldbuilding is so clumsy and then talks all this shit about a GOOD worldbuilding scene where a guy who is portrayed as a nice family man goes and kills an animal with a broom. It's a demonstration that fairies aren't seen as simply animals but as pests that need to be killed (which is how a lot of people view real life pests, the girl probably just doesn't have the stomach for it)
Everyone was bashing critics like those on Rotten Tomatoes for the low score, but then you look at the user score and it's higher than even Blade Runner 2049. At that point you know something's not right.
Netflix made sure to hit all the check marks for their young casual base, fantasy cop movie with the well liked Will Smith, so it's not surprising to me that a lot of people enjoyed it. The user backlash became a circle-jerk of critic hate and paranoia though.
To be honest, most of the critics are right. The movie is pretty bad, for a lot of the points pointed out in the video.
"Fairies lives don't matter today" was such an awful line, like if the fairy's are pests why do their lives not matter just today, or any day.
[QUOTE=shadow_oap;53104021] At that point you know something's not right.
.[/QUOTE]
Barely anyone has sat through the original Blade Runner. There's nothing fishy about people not coming to praise 2049. They simply haven't seen it. It's a wonder a sequel to Blade Runner was ever greenlit.
[QUOTE=Dirty_Ape;53103791]I didn't care that the exposition was lazy. I liked it.
edit: wait, she has a problem with the name 'Elftown'? Has she never heard of Chinatown? [B][I]Greektown[/I][/B]? Koreatown? Similar simple named ones like Little Italy? Sure, Elftown was misused but there isn't anything wrong with the name. Is it even established that Elftown is an official name? Maybe it's just what the police refer to that part of town as.
[/QUOTE]
Hold the phone. There's a "Greektown?"
[QUOTE=maddogsamurai;53104060]Hold the phone. There's a "Greektown?"[/QUOTE]
Isn't there? I was just trying to think of examples and it sounded right in my head.
[QUOTE=Dirty_Ape;53103791]
edit: bitching about the fairy killing is also bullshit, she makes a big point about how the worldbuilding is so clumsy and then talks all this shit about a GOOD worldbuilding scene where a guy who is portrayed as a nice family man goes and kills an animal with a broom. It's a demonstration that fairies aren't seen as simply animals but as pests that need to be killed (which is how a lot of people view real life pests, the girl probably just doesn't have the stomach for it)[/QUOTE]
She understood why the fairy was killed, she understands that they're nothing but pests in that world, that's not what she was complaining about. What you leave in a film means something, and focusing so much time on the killing of such a large creature will send a message about the character.
Imagine that Will Smith's character in Independence Day started off the movie being asked to kill a raccoon with a broom or even something like a pigeon, something that's the equivalent in our universe. If he killed that animal in the same manner and with the same amount of blood you'd be painting him in a completely different light. It doesn't matter if they're pests, they're still animals, living creatures. mean, I'd feel bad if I stepped on a lizard, let alone something as big as a pigeon. Seeing him quip about killing a dumb animal would make him seem like a heartless asshole, or worse, someone who takes joy in doing it. Likewise The scenes where he kills the aliens and eventually punches it in the face might be painted differently as something he enjoys doing.
And yet, this is only one aspect of what's wrong with that scene. It also goes against the previous scene where he's a happy family man, a bit of a jarring shift.
Additionally what does it add to the story? So what if fairies are pests? Why is that important? As far as I can remember it scarcely comes up again in the movie, if at all.
Then there's the whole "Fairly Lives Don't Matter Today" thing. It's either an in universe reference to Black Lives matter, which implies that black people (or some equivalent in the fantasy races) has gone through similar struggles to the black people in our world as well as had a similar movement, or it's a tasteless meta breaking line left in that mocks an issue a lot of black people feel very strong about. Possibly both.
It's a bad scene.
[QUOTE=27X;53102101]I don't love or hate Bright but I do hate Twilight and it's pretentious unending sparkly mopiestness and brooding abs, so I'm not sure what that's even supposed to mean as a deconstruction of me as a viewer.
Also comparing a 90 million 5 month movie versus the five years+ a godzillion dollars for LOTR is straight bullshit. Sure, Bright's world building is bad and crap as hell but reaching LOTR in five months was and is never going to happen.
Yes, by all means, they should have gone with the original draft that had no racism-per-second counter and that draft was then polished by a writing team, but LOTR played directly on Tolkien's pretty hyper-defined nordic-mythic tropes to create initial tension that the Hobbits are almost overwhelmed by in the first third of the first movie.
Yes, the climax is dumb.
Also last entire half of the video lambasting dumb coding when she just had what three videos where Disney's absurdist stereotyping is PRETTY GREAT YAY DISNEY IT'S OKAY TO BE SIMPLE AND BASIC CAUSE YAY FORCED POSITIVITY AND FAKE CHEERFULNESS AS LONG AS IT'S MY NOSTALGIC CHILDHOOD SO REVISIONISM IS TOTALLY ENTERTAINING AND OK.
No, no it's not.
If it's not ok in Bright it's not ok in a story about Mary Poppins via Disney and P.L. Travers not really get along or Song of the South, and there's no contextual difference in "I love Disney theme parks so much gais omg" and "I hate Bright cause it causes serious shade on both Disney and race and stuff".
This video could have been five minutes of why world building is critical to good fantasy and David Ayers wrote a bad rewrite, holy shit.
And I thought I was overly verbose.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Vigilante2470;53102735]I liked Lindsay back in the day, and I'll respect her knowledge of cinema... but I just can't watch her newest stuff ever since I heard about how she's started drinking the SJW koolaid. I can be nothing less than intensely wary of someone who's taken a photo of herself with Anita Sarkeesian of all people, not to mention all the other stuff she's gotten up to in recent years.
I'll watch her old TGWTG stuff all day long. She was one of my favorite contributors... but she's clearly a different, worse person now. It's very sad... I thought she was smarter than that.[/QUOTE]
these posts are insane. what are you even talking about?
her video is well thought out, her arguments make a lot of sense. these are just some gibberish anti-sjw tirades (as they usually are) for literally no reason
What is it about brights setting that triggers the fuck out of people? I'll never understand why people get so upset over this movie.
[QUOTE=DinoJesus;53104269]What is it about brights setting that triggers the fuck out of people? I'll never understand why people get so upset over this movie.[/QUOTE]
you could watch the video in the op for starters? it's pretty clear
[QUOTE=DinoJesus;53104269]What is it about brights setting that triggers the fuck out of people? I'll never understand why people get so upset over this movie.[/QUOTE]
Maybe watch the video and find out
[QUOTE=Rusty100;53104230]these posts are insane. what are you even talking about?
her video is well thought out, her arguments make a lot of sense. these are just some gibberish anti-sjw tirades (as they usually are) for literally no reason[/QUOTE]
I didn't mention politics anywhere, so for someone complaining about missing context and agency, that person is yet again, you.
I mentioned bad worldbuilding in my initial foray about the movie in the review thread, and mentioned it twice here again itself, so for you to say the focus of my complaint is "anti sjw rhetoric" simply highlights how continually subpar you are at reading without jumping to an opinionated conclusion before you even get to the end of the post, conclusion that is plainly wrong without even having to go a look at the source.
Her "review" is her [I]repeating herself[/I] ad nauseum for [B]twenty five minutes[/B] after even basically recapping the movie, which doesn't even provide a cogent platform for her complaints, seeing as she already made all the salient ones in the first ten minutes of her endless maudlin diatribe.
Her subpoint is revisionism of established coding is bad and she even does the ol "revisionism is never justified" tact, yet her stance on Mary Poppins is the exact opposite, so she needs to actually pick a stance that isn't an absolute when it suits her argument and then backtrack when it doesn't.
Also of point is this is about a low hanging a fruit as you can pick, and to pick it and then pad your video with literal repetition I guess for the sweet youtube dollars is pretty sad when your point could be made in about five minutes, with a further aside on why David Ayer's rewrite is also demonstrably bad for a couple more minutes.
That you even have to go for a political angle shows how worthless your point of criticism is.
Alright, now I can't stop thinking about that Alamo line. Like. What the fuck is the history of this world? What?
[QUOTE=Zeos;53105066]Alright, now I can't stop thinking about that Alamo line. Like. What the fuck is the history of this world? What?[/QUOTE]
That's what baffled me most about Bright's worldbuilding. With the exception of the war with the Dark Lord, their world history seems to run parallel with ours, right down to pop culture and even Shrek apparently existing in this universe. It feels lazy and a missed opportunity.
I haven't seen the video yet but if that isn't brought up in some capacity, I'll be very surprised.
[QUOTE=27X;53102101]I don't love or hate Bright but I do hate Twilight and it's pretentious unending sparkly mopiestness and brooding abs, so I'm not sure what that's even supposed to mean as a deconstruction of me as a viewer.
Also comparing a 90 million 5 month movie versus the five years+ a godzillion dollars for LOTR is straight bullshit. Sure, Bright's world building is bad and crap as hell but reaching LOTR in five months was and is never going to happen.
Yes, by all means, they should have gone with the original draft that had no racism-per-second counter and that draft was then polished by a writing team, but LOTR played directly on Tolkien's pretty hyper-defined nordic-mythic tropes to create initial tension that the Hobbits are almost overwhelmed by in the first third of the first movie.[/QUOTE]
Just wanted to point out the LOTR trilogy cost about $280 million to make and filming took place over 15 months for all 3 movies, so that really comes out to about $90 million and 5 months per movie. In contrast Bright was also about $90 million and 4 months of filming.
This isn't really a statement that Bright is bad. More wanted to highlight an interesting way that the LOTR trilogy was a fucking marvel of filmmaking.
[QUOTE=Sir Whoopsalot;53105129]That's what baffled me most about Bright's worldbuilding. With the exception of the war with the Dark Lord, their world history seems to run parallel with ours, right down to pop culture and even Shrek apparently existing in this universe. It feels lazy and a missed opportunity.
I haven't seen the video yet but if that isn't brought up in some capacity, I'll be very surprised.[/QUOTE]
So did Shrek get made and like no one complained about how racist it was to Orcs???
[QUOTE=Zeos;53105136]So did Shrek get made and like no one complained about how racist it was to Orcs???[/QUOTE]
Apparently?
Also, a thought: if the more extreme subgenres of metal really are mellow music for orcs, does this mean mosh pits don't exist in Bright's universe? Because that is terrifying.
[QUOTE=Zeos;53105136]So did Shrek get made and like no one complained about how racist it was to Orcs???[/QUOTE]
Shrek's an ogre silly billy. Though the fact it's a pastiche on fairytales, which gets brought up in the video, does raise questions the script is not interested in answering.
27x, what are you even talking about?
[editline]3rd February 2018[/editline]
I challenge you to reduce the video to "five minutes" like you said it could be.
Keep in mind that the summary of the movie, which is [I]necessary to understand the video[/I] without watching the entire movie, is already five minutes long.
I'm sure you can do it!
[QUOTE=Zeos;53105136]So did Shrek get made and like no one complained about how racist it was to Orcs???[/QUOTE]
I just figured upon its release, ogres went on strike for its offensive portrayal of ogre culture and something like Lord of the Rings is closer to a historical film in Bright's world.
[QUOTE=dillspears;53104052]Barely anyone has sat through the original Blade Runner. There's nothing fishy about people not coming to praise 2049. They simply haven't seen it. It's a wonder a sequel to Blade Runner was ever greenlit.[/QUOTE]
Audience Score on Rotton Tomatoes:
Bright:
86% Liked
Average Rating: 4.2/5
User Ratings: 17,353
Blade Runner 2049:
81% Liked
Average Rating: 4.1/5
User Ratings: 55,349
1. Blade Runner had more ratings, so your point is moot.
2. My point is that it's hilarious the amount of rage Bright fanboys had at critics for not liking their Will Smith fantasy cop movie that Bright is beating out some of the best movies of 2017 on RT. Yes it's just one site, I'm not claiming it's proof of anything, it's just entertaining.
[QUOTE=doomkiwi;53104128]She understood why the fairy was killed, she understands that they're nothing but pests in that world, that's not what she was complaining about. What you leave in a film means something, and focusing so much time on the killing of such a large creature will send a message about the character.
Imagine that Will Smith's character in Independence Day started off the movie being asked to kill a raccoon with a broom or even something like a pigeon, something that's the equivalent in our universe. If he killed that animal in the same manner and with the same amount of blood you'd be painting him in a completely different light. It doesn't matter if they're pests, they're still animals, living creatures. mean, I'd feel bad if I stepped on a lizard, let alone something as big as a pigeon. Seeing him quip about killing a dumb animal would make him seem like a heartless asshole, or worse, someone who takes joy in doing it. Likewise The scenes where he kills the aliens and eventually punches it in the face might be painted differently as something he enjoys doing.
And yet, this is only one aspect of what's wrong with that scene. It also goes against the previous scene where he's a happy family man, a bit of a jarring shift.
Additionally what does it add to the story? So what if fairies are pests? Why is that important? As far as I can remember it scarcely comes up again in the movie, if at all.
Then there's the whole "Fairly Lives Don't Matter Today" thing. It's either an in universe reference to Black Lives matter, which implies that black people (or some equivalent in the fantasy races) has gone through similar struggles to the black people in our world as well as had a similar movement, or it's a tasteless meta breaking line left in that mocks an issue a lot of black people feel very strong about. Possibly both.
It's a bad scene.[/QUOTE]
I totally disagree. This is one of the first scenes we get setting up this universe and it shows us that although "magical" creatures exist, they aren't seen as anything special. They're basically just animals like any other, thus treating it like a pest. On top of that, it shows that Smith's character has the stomach for violence. It doesn't add anything to the plot of the film itself and it doesn't have to. And besides that, the fact that it is a fictional creature means you can watch it's demise guilt free. If it was a raccoon or something like that, it would be horribly gruesome but since it's not, it's kinda funny. Kinda like how zombie killing can be funny. Fun little scene.
[QUOTE=JXZ;53105189]27x, what are you even talking about?
[editline]3rd February 2018[/editline]
I challenge you to reduce the video to "five minutes" like you said it could be.
Keep in mind that the summary of the movie, which is [I]necessary to understand the video[/I] without watching the entire movie, is already five minutes long.
I'm sure you can do it![/QUOTE]
i'd just ignore his posts. they're bombastic walls of nonsense about things he's already decided to hate
agree, disagree, that's fine, i don't really care what opinion anyone has. but 27x yours are so poorly presented and borderline incomprehensible as well as unnecessarily volatile
[QUOTE=Rusty100;53111640]i'd just ignore his posts. they're bombastic walls of nonsense about things he's already decided to hate
agree, disagree, that's fine, i don't really care what opinion anyone has. but 27x yours are so poorly presented and borderline incomprehensible as well as [/QUOTE]
Except you feel the need to grade them quite often, so once again, what you post as demarcation of 'fact' and your behavior have rather disparate points, particularly in regard to disagree and agree, because if you just agreed or disagreed you wouldn't be attempting to draw this conversation out for painfully obvious reasons.
As for compressing the video down, I already hit the points in text form in far less time in the actual movie thread, and I didn't have to drive down revisionist memory lane with Tolkien to do it and make a gas face about while repeating a clip from the movie in 90s-O-vision fifteen times.
In fact the entire point of the original Landis script was three people having a very bad weekend in LA that happened to have purple skin and pointy ears and neither of those things respectively, and had jack shit to do with paralleling filmicly exaggerated racial tensions, which was one of the clever and subversive things about it.
And calling out David Ayer for inserting all of that neither requires a thesis nor exegesis, but rather two sentences consisting of
[quote]
David Ayer's ad hoc is terrible. Hamfistedly conflating racial tensions with fantasy proxies like a junior high composition test is both lazy and cowardly and also terrible. [/quote]
[quote] unnecessary volatile [/quote]
The level of hypocrisy is so palpable it can be smelled over the internet.
it seems weird to ping a film analysis video for being a) longer than two sentences and b) adding some comedy. you could have just said you disagree with her instead of going on a weird rant about her perfectly normal video and analysis format.
the critisism of her repeating herself doesn't make sense to me. some things are repeated for effect, sure, just like all videos and analysis', but the analysis is split up into different categories that cover different ground and have different things to say. do you also hate plinkett reviews? i just don't get why you're going off at such a reasonable video.
also are you calling me or her a hypocrite? you're still being super volatile dude. like damn, chill out. it feels like you watched 5 minutes of the video, swallowed a thesaurus, and went ham.
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