afterbite

I don't really see that, or see it as a valid comparison (despite what Rian says). I didn't get the impression that Rey thought she was somebody big or somebody special in the 'saves the galaxy' sense. I got the sense she was waiting, and that whoever she was waiting for was important to her on a personal level. Probably she'd built up some romantic notion about her parents, but finding out that you're not cosmically special (which I don't think she believes in the first place) doesn't at all seem to be on the level of finding out that your father is a mass murderer/your nemesis/tortured your friends, etc.

And Zachary Quinto in the Trek movies, though he was the secondary lead. And Michael Vartan in Colombiana, though I'd argue that he was the white male love interest to her lead in that one. Rosario Dawson is also currently the love interest of Petra, a white secondary character in Jane the Virgin atm.

There must be a very different theater experience where I live than for those of you discussing the reserved/not reserved seating issue above. I'm having to wait in line again now that I have Movie Pass because there isn't a lot of ability to pre-select a seat like there is when purchasing movie tickets online, but the work around is to not see a really popular movie at a reserved seating venue on opening weekend. My longest wait in line so far has been maybe 10 minutes. If I'm dying to see a movie when it's released and I know it's going to be sold out, I can pony up for the ticket price and purchase online, where I'll make my reserved seating selection. Since I generally only do this for Star Wars, I'm making my seat selection 6 weeks or so in advance because that's when I'm buying my tickets. If I couldn't make my seating selection in advance, I wouldn't buy advanced tickets. I wouldn't stand in line to get a good seat; I'm constitutionally not interested in doing that. I'd go later in the week when the crowd was thinner because I'm not paying movie ticket prices for a crappy seat. I'm also not going to arrive more than an hour early in a non-reserved seating situation, and usually the only reason I'd be that early for a show is because the timing of whatever other activities I have that day makes it more feasible to go to the theater instead of going home for 20 minutes only to then go to the theater. I waited in line for an hour and a half or so for Atomic Blonde because I had a free ticket to an advance screening. I went with friends, and it was fun to hang out with them, but what's even more fun? Hanging out with them in a place that isn't standing in line for a movie. I guess I'm pretty lucky because there are 5 movie theaters that are extremely convenient for me. I can choose between going to one that does reserved seating or one that doesn't. I've never had problems with reserved seating for smaller movies because they're generally never sold out. I can get a good seat even if I walk up 15 minutes before showtime, which is what I do now that I have Movie Pass, and so don't buy my ticket (and pick my seat) before I even leave for the theater. It's been my experience that most people that go to smaller films do this. The time lag between them picking out their seat on a screen and reaching that seat is a few minutes, so it's essentially changed nothing. I have also lived in places where the nearest theater was at least 30-40 minutes away, and usually more. Reserved seating is excellent for those situations because I know before I leave the house that I have a ticket and won't arrive to find out its sold out. I also don't have to turn movie watching into a half-day affair, allotting additional hours to the process that those living closer don't have to. tl;dr: Unless you're talking about the big movies (e.g., Star Wars, the MCU hits) that are going to sell out theaters, my experience is that there's very little difference between movie-going at theaters with advanced seat selection versus those without. Even without buying tickets online and selecting seats ahead of time, I get good seats and generally have a wait time of 10 minutes (and usually much less) in line when buying tickets at the theater upon arrival. My pre-movie arrival time is generally 15-20 minutes before the posted start time.

I can't find the clip on youtube for some reason, but when Sara, Ray, and Gary find the lab, isn't there some sort of metal skeleton in the fancy future tech sphere over which they essentially 3D print a new Ava? If that's the case, if she's a clone, she's not grown from infancy so much as she's produced as an adult. If that's the case, how has show Ava developed her personality? Was she just told she's a no-nonsense Time Bureau agent but everything after that unfolded organically? (Also, I love Gary and I hope they keep him. And Ava.)

In re: the hot girl who pops up long enough to be hot and then, later, to remind us that she's hot - I hope there was some sort of story arc for her that got lost in editing. If what we saw was the sum total of what was written for her, I feel the need to smack some folks. She was given the traditional movie cues of 'this is an important character' and then... existed almost solely to be hot? And maybe, like you said, remind viewers that the two male leads were 100% straight dudes even while also writing them with a healthy dose of hoyay? (I quoted the last line of your post simply because it's an excellent summation.) On a random note, I was really disappointed that Jake's name was Jake. His dad's name was Stacker Pentacost. That's a badass name right there. Jake Pentacost? Not so much.

I thought that was its previous position on the list? 1st, 2nd, 3rd highest grossing of the week, etc?

Boyega saved what little of this movie he could, but otherwise it was just not very good. There was no heart to it. No emotion. People died and I just didn't care, because they were pretty much interchangeable shells. (Not Mako - the new ones.) The girl who built the jaeger - how? Her parents were killed when she was in the 2nd grade, maybe. Explain to me how she moved from that to such a gifted engineer that she could build a huge fighting robot. Explain to me how she assembled it all by herself. Or don't explain it to me and don't give her a ridiculous backstory and razor thin connection to the main character (Boyega) and actually build on the characters I actually have an emotional connection to already (Mako) or shave down on the Space Camp* cadets so I can actually spend enough time with any of them to be able to tell them apart, much less care if they're in danger. Also, science doesn't work that way. You can't have an idea you've never tried in practice and a) produce it and b) have it work perfectly with a couple of hours of turn-around. This is a story-telling fail. They start out with the nerd with the bad haircut saying that he thinks propulsion might work but that he needs help with it to having the nerd with the bad haircut somehow manage to construct the mechanism and have it perform as anticipated over what seems to be a timespan of a couple of hours. You can make that less patently ridiculous by having him have constructed prototypes or having him have already developed it and have it be ready to be fitted to jaegers just as jaegers are becoming obsolete. FFS, a few small lines changed in the script and it goes from laughable to maybe plausible. The fighting was fun, but they spent way too much time not having monsters and robots fighting and the movie just wasn't very interesting during the non-fighting bits. Without Boyega to make it palatable, this movie would have been painful to watch for at least half of its runtime (and pretty much all of its non-fighting runtime). *By that, I mean that just like in the movie Space Camp, it was clear that the kids were going to be thrust into the heart of the action and have to (try to) save the day.

Verily.

It's been so long since this movie came out that there's really no one around to talk about it with, so let me share this with you, long dead forum: I hated this movie. My hatred grew as the runtime dragged on until I was doggedly hatewatching it to the end. I despise pretty much everything about it (except Mark Strong, because I could never). It was a nonsensical, try-hard mess that pretty much ruins any and all excitement I might have had for a 3rd movie. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

I dropped Once Upon a Time a long time ago, but I did enjoy Regina. Even minus the evil, though, in real life I would have gotten tired of her superciliousness with a quickness. Jayne from Firefly. Loved the character, but in real life, I'd constantly be worried about when/how he would sell me out. Sterling Archer and Mallory Archer from Archer. I feel like no further explanation is needed.

Oh but she has! My first exposure to Adams was in Cruel Intentions 2, where she played Kathryn Merteuil. She was sexy, devious, and morally questionable.

I don't know what the studio wanted for the end of the movie, but I kind of wished something had been changed. I loved 85% of this movie and then we got to the part where it looked like Portman's character crawled into an anus, slid down a rectum, and encountered CGI gone wrong vomiting light everywhere. Said CGI then turned into an early Windows screensaver, and a woman in an iridescent foam suit danced around mirroring Portman. I did not care for the aesthetic at all, in case that didn't come through. The shimmer world was beautiful and then, inexplicably, we found ourselves in the middle of something that could have been in The Abyss back in 1989. If they'd toned it down and stuck with the creepiness of the film up until then, I think it would have been much better. (They could have lost Isaac's weird Southern accent, too. I don't know part of the region he was going for, but it wasn't good.) Other than that, I was riveted. It's one of the creepiest films I've seen in a while. The scene with the mutant bear calling out 'Help me' had me frozen. In a way, it reminds me of Danny Boyle's Sunshine. Gorgeous to look at. Hauntingly creepy. Went off the rails in the final act. I wonder, too, about the symbolism of the HeLa cell line. Portman's character was seen reading "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." She worked for Hopkins, where Lacks' cells were taken without her consent to create the cell line still used today (she had cervical cancer). Portman's intro lecture with the students was about cervical cancer cells. Lacks' cells created the first immortalized cell line - one that will reproduce continuously in the right conditions. Was the Shimmer no different than a continuously producing cell line? Wanting nothing, thinking nothing, just reproducing?

I would think it could serve multiple purposes. For one, he ensures that 1) no one else really has the power to challenge him without some kind of military coup. He and he alone has the power of Black Panther. 2) He and he alone has the power of Black Panther, which makes him a revered part of their tradition with no way to replace the kingdom's traditional protector if he's unseated. 3) He dealt a blow to the heart of the structure upon which Wakanda was built. He destroyed something sacred and interwoven with Wakanda's sense of itself. I would think that's pretty destabilizing. I don't think it would destroy the monarchy in and of itself because a monarch could still be wise and rule, etc., but it's taking out a pillar of the foundation upon which the monarchy exudes power, divine right, and status of protector of the realm. In that way it's a huge blow, true, but Killmonger strikes me more as an eliminate all competition and destabilize to create uncertainty/panic so that he can seize opportunities than someone specifically invested in ending the monarchy. He wanted the be the monarchy, but more dictator as monarch, I think.

I think this is probably well trodden territory, but Finn never should have been a comic relief character in the first place. Boyega is an incredibly charming and affable guy but he can also play more of a hard case. Finn is a child soldier who was taken so early that he doesn't even remember his own name. He is unwilling to kill villagers and plots an escape with someone from the other side in what is very much so an 'odds are quite clearly against us' moment. He's terrified of the FO. His should be the story of the involuntarily indoctrinated who is struggling to overcome the things done to him and the mindset that's been drilled into him since birth, essentially. I've read a few accounts of child soldiers and they're not comic figures. The movie wanted the coolness of having a stormtrooper taking off his helmet and (eventually, kind of) joining the other side without having to put in the work that would make it realistic. And his hero's moment of defeating Phasma? She wasn't some terrifying villain. She was visually imposing, sure, but TFA completely undermined any sort of menace she might have. Instead of fighting the two (three?) rebels who surprise her, she gives them the keys to the castle and then, presumably, gets dumped down a trash chute. Thus, in what should be a triumphant moment of Finn standing up to and conquering an oppressive (but important) cog in the system that had stolen his life from him in TLJ, it comes across more as managing to humiliate that irritating middle manager who was always more bark than bite anyway. IMO, his real hero's moment was when he took on Kylo Ren, but it gets lost in the shuffle of Han's death. Yeah, in the day or so since she'd known this figure of myth, Rey had really taken a shine to him, but Finn was her friend. He was her very literal comrade in arms. Give Leia and Chewie their much deserved hug at the end of TFA and let Rey be hovering nervously at Finn's bedside. He's the only reason she isn't dead or in the hands of the FO. He stood up to someone more (force) powerful and better trained than himself while she was incapacitated, and was grievously wounded in the process. I've got to stop replying to this thread for a while. I end up ruminating, once again, on all of the things I perceive as weak and lazy storytelling and major missteps in these movies, which makes me grumpy.

In a world where even the most decrepit places have service droids? I'd say a hard no to that. They practically invented the concept of human janitors in star wars for a black man. Yeah, I can concede that. Then again, the latest entries into this series have often done nonsensical things just because they're copying and echoing a modern convention, like our military, often in ways that make me think that they didn't think through the implications besides 'it'll look badass' or 'for the lulz'. I don't know what the writer's room looked like, but I imagine there are definite blindspots. I don't mean to undersell just how easily this could have been corrected, probably by increasing the diversity in the room. Finn, in particular, has not been well served, I think. He went from central character in the first film to 'off on a wacky hi-jink adventure of little importance to the overall plot' in the second. No matter how people describe the implications of his journey as somehow important, he was sidelined. In terms of importance to the story, he was demoted. As much as I love SW in general, I often find myself perturbed by the fact a by-product was the repackaging and selling of space nazis so that Stormtroopers and Vader have become beloved cultural icons when really (specifically for the OT) they're SS troopers made into adorbs plushie dolls. (This seemed somehow connected in my head.)

I'll admit it's been a while since I've seen TFA, but I have the vague recollection that Finn being in sanitation was, at least in part, in service of setting up the 'throw Phasma in the trash compactor' joke. He knows where some thing-a-ma-jiggy is because he was in sanitation, which is why they come upon Phasma who they then throw in the trash compactor so that Han can make a throw-back joke to ANH. That entire plot point was essentially ridiculous, though. First, you have the extra extraneousness of Phasma. The woman has a concept car modeled after her, but aside from being shiny, the filmmakers clearly do not give a shit about her story. Then you have Finn being in sanitation as the entryway into this whole bit. Are there reasons why he could have been in sanitation? Sure. I've never been in the armed forced, but I did read a book about the French Foreign Legion once and the soldiers had to do all sorts of housekeeping tasks, including mopping and cleaning toilets, etc. Likewise, there's probably only so much military training a fascist organization can do with a child, so they likely keep them busy in other ways. I imagine there were all sorts of squads of young future Stormtroopers in sanitation squads, food prep squads, etc. Finn could have mentioned that everyone had to do upkeep tasks and so he's pretty familiar with the ins and out of the base. He could have said that the children were made to work menial tasks while they were in child soldier training. These make it either routine for everyone or yet another reason to hate the FO for their exploitation of children. What they did, instead, was to make him part of sanitation (probably also in part because Finn has a comic relief function in addition to his primary character arc) without thinking through the optics of it beyond 'isn't it funny that he's going to use the info he learned scrubbing toilets to bring this place down'. It seems like the kind of thing a writer wouldn't notice unless they were keyed in to the trope (likely because it applied to the group to which they were a member and they were sick and tired of it). They very easily could had made it so that he was in training to be a systems tech or system engineer, etc., but they just wouldn't have been able to make those "jokes" if they had done that.

I am likewise finding it difficult to get hyped about this movie. Han wasn't my favorite in the OT, but honestly, I don't think I'd be interested in seeing the pre-OT lives of any of our main characters. We already know their stories. Make a Lando movie with a young Han cameo. Make a Chewie movie. Make a Bail Organa or Mon Mothma movie, even. Maybe the movie will be amazing and I'll eat my words, but where's the suspense in a Han movie? He gets the Falcon. He meets Leia. He was a smuggler who had gotten in trouble with the Hutt cartel. He's not going to get into any trouble that we know he can't get out of, and we've already seen 3 movies worth of his personal growth.

I don't usually rewatch shows on purpose. There are definitely shows that I'll watch if I catch a rerun (e.g., Designing Women, Golden Girls), but otherwise once I've seen it, I see no need to revisit it. I've watched the totality of The Clone Wars animated series probably 8 times, though. I guess that would count for 'shows you can watch over and over again'. :)

The early ones are far too rapey for me to revisit. I didn't pick up on it as a kid watching marathons, but as an adult, I can't watch them.

I see the point but we see this all the time in movies.....Quentin Tarantino anyone? and to me it KINDA fit the story given what was going on....I think to criticize the movie just for the offensive language is unfair given how SO MANY movies have offensive language It might surprise you to learn that I don't like those movies either. I'm not sure why the fact that it exists elsewhere means I can't dislike it here (and elsewhere)? Look, when the movie kept hitting the n-word hard in its dialogue, I could see black audience members shifting uncomfortably in their seats. It was not integral to telling the story and, in fact, was occasionally played for laughs. It's a type of storytelling I find to be lazy, going for shock over substance. I'm not saying we need to bowdlerize every single piece of media, but there are other ways to convey that someone is abrasive or racist or just generally an awful person without leaning on certain pejoratives. Movies don't have to exactly mimic the awfulness of real life and real people for us as viewers to understand. If that mimicry's purpose in the narrative doesn't outweigh the unpleasantness of its viewing for people who would like to watch a movie without having to have slurs hurled about that are generally hurled at them with malevolent intent in everyday life, then exercise a wee bit of imagination and find a way to make your character abrasive or racist or whatever without making at least part of your viewing audience physically uncomfortable. But, like I said, it's my pet peeve.

I really wanted Jesse Williams for Finnick. I was also dead set on Kristin Bell for Johanna. I don't know how I arrived at these head canons, but they seemed perfect to me and seeing other actors playing them in the movie was a disappointment. Lesson learned on getting too attached to your head canon casting.

I think it's 6, actually - 3 Thor movies and 3 Captain America movies. On a different note, something I've been increasingly irritated with recently is pointless female nudity in films. I'm not talking sex scenes. Why are there so many scenes in strip clubs? There was a fight between 3 different groups in a strip club in Bright, and of course there's a naked woman staged quite obviously as our protags enter the joint. They've just said they're in a strip club (iirc). That totally naked woman isn't really necessary in any way nor was it especially necessary that all the action take place in a strip club instead of a bar. Likewise, just saw I, Tonya and there's a scene where the two lead guys were having a meeting in a strip club. It's possible it happened in real life, but it wasn't as if it was a litchpin part of the plot so they probably could have dropped the strippers and kept the bar. I cite these movies because they're fresh in my mind, having watched them recently, but there's probably enough footage of strippers dancing listlessly in the background to run 24/7 somewhere. I'm tired of movies that feel the need to decorate themselves with naked women when they don't really advance the narrative. And this is coming from someone who really likes looking at naked women...

I didn't love this movie as much as I'd wanted. It hit one of my big pet peeves, and that's the use of racist or offensive language when it doesn't necessarily seem to serve the story. I'm not quite sure what extra we gained from the repeated use of the n-word or r-word, for example. Did we need it hammered home that there was probably some racism going on in that police department? I think we could have gotten that without the use of that word, and just as well. Did we need to know that Frances' character was abrasive? I think that was pretty well established outside of the use of that language. There are plenty of ways to show that people are bad people or racist people or morally gray people without using language that makes the movie uncomfortable to watch for those viewers who have those words thrown at them as a slur. Use those ways so that your movie isn't unnecessarily painful for some of the people watching it. The other thing that bugged is that there were absolutely no consequences. Rockwell's character pistol whips and throws a guy out of the window in front of half the town, including the incoming chief, and no one arrests him or makes it seem like he will ever be arrested. Frances' character sets the police station on fire, badly injuring whats-his-face (I can't remember anyone's name in this movie except for Willoughby). It's pretty clear she did it, but no one seems to care. Wtf kind of town is this? As a smaller irritant, the fact that Cornish was a very young 21 years younger than Harrelson was just uncomfortable for me to see. She looked so, so young in comparison that, once I figured out that she wasn't his daughter, every interaction between them seemed like one where someone should be yelling 'bad touch, bad touch' in the background. I guess what all of this is saying is that these things took me out of the movie. I couldn't manage to get immersed because every few minutes there was something that made me think "did they have to make that directorial choice?", which is not what you're supposed to be thinking when watching a movie, I don't think. That said, Frances acted the hell out of it, and it was hilarious seeing Charlie's mom from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia essentially playing Charlie's mom moves to Missouri.

I thought this movie was phenomenal - excellent acting and excellent storytelling. Using the faux documentary approach was interesting, because it made it quite clear that the story was being told by unreliable narrators, all with vested interest in making themselves look better than they likely were. In a way, the movie let you pick through the stories to decide what happened. It's one of those 'truth is stranger than fiction' stories, because I literally don't think you could make this up - at least not with an ending like the one it has. Contrast it with Lucky Logan, for example. You have some of the same archetypes going on there - the poor folks who everyone looks down on and sees as dim-witted, the loony crooks, etc. But in that movie That's interesting. The movie built her up as someone who was never at fault for anything that had happened to her, always trying to put the blame elsewhere (e.g., her shoelace, the blade not being refit properly, etc), and that's what I took from that as well. She has just told us that she's doing everything she can to stay in the public eye. That's what she wants. As an accusation, it falls pretty flat imo. (That said, I also recognize that she wasn't at fault for a number of the things that happened to her, especially the abuse.)

I'm way late to the party, and a lot of my thoughts have already been said, but let me geek out for a moment. I'm all the way on board with Dr. Carr and her insistence on following a (at least somewhat) standardized format. There are various reasons for that - better quality data, you're never going to be accepted by the academic community if you don't and acceptance by the academic community leads to something being admissible in court, etc. It's sort of a wonky conflict, though, in that things that work perfectly well under controlled conditions don't always work well when put out into the real world (efficacy vs effectiveness). She's an academic researcher, and so invested in doing things the right way - they do, after all, repeatedly call this research. Ford is, at heart, a practitioner. He's all about action, action, action. They're both right, and they're both incapable of seeing how the other is right because of circumstance. I don't know that they said it explicitly, but Carr is a clinical psychologist, I would imagine. She'd need to have a detachment. If she's done a lot of this type of data collection, she's probably pretty aware that people will react to signals from an interviewer. If you encourage something - nod, smile - then you might get more of it because the interviewee sees that you feel it's interesting or important, which can skew your data collection. Maybe they go into great depth about something that isn't actually all that relevant to appease you, when they would have moved off of that topic and onto one that's more substantive had you not given those nonverbal cues. On the other hand, they're not going to tell you anything if they don't feel some level of connection, so Ford's trying to create a bond is in service of that. You can see, though, that he absolutely does not buy into Carr's questionnaire and doesn't want to use it, even if he finds her fancy and impressive and wants to be able to talk with her on her level. He reads the informed consent in the most monotone voice possible. He abandons his efforts before he's more than a few sentences in and reverts back to what he thinks is the right way to do things. On the flip side, we don't see her providing them with any training on how to be good qualitative data collectors. She's probably not allowed into the prisons to do the interviews because of who the subjects are. (I don't know if we'll see her do this, but she'd likely be very disruptive to the process just because she's a woman and these are men who like to kill women but who have largely been deprived of contact with them.) He can't see her demonstrate ways to do this better, and she can't get the practical experience to help them figure out how to do things better. And then you have all the bits and pieces about academia vs real world. Carr's girlfriend is firmly ivory tower and sees Carr's activities as beneath her and her intellect, as if she's playing around with cavemen and, as she clearly says to Carr, wasting her time. You have Tench, who sees the value in what locals have to offer even if they don't have the training and inclination/insight the BSU has. (Even if he does get frustrated with some understandably dopey locals.) You have Carr who takes a chance to step out of the ivory tower for something she believes to have real, practical value. You have Ford who is desperate to get the shine of academia on him. (You have his girlfriend who has the shine he wants but, bless her, hardly gets to get a word in edgewise around all of his self-congratulation, especially there at the end.) Like, I don't think I've described it well, but I find it an interesting continuum, where there's value on both ends but they're often so far apart that the value they have to offer one another isn't appreciated or nurtured or capitalized upon. They need each other, but at this point in time, are about as compatible as Ford and Debbie.