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Watched, Watch, Watching : Save the Wiseguys fundraiser


TheLastWolf

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On 8/9/2022 at 10:06 AM, Heartofice said:

There is an episode where they meet fans of the podcast, who are these fawning sycophants who believe everyone on the podcast is amazing and they are so lucky to even be able to be in the same room as them. At times it felt like the writers of the show felt that was how viewers of the show should be.. a bunch of fawning sycophants who will love whatever they are served.

There's like 4 or 5 of them though. I saw that as some kind of joke.

4 hours ago, Heartofice said:

I guess it depends on your expectations. This show was talked about quite highly, but for me it's a pretty average, not especially inspired show that I guess is harmless. It's not top quality tv, and I think for me that is a bit of an issue because I don't have time in my life to watch middling harmless average tv, not in a world of a million streaming shows some of which are absolutely golden. 

My issue with OMITB isn't that its harmless fun, it's that it seemed to promise to be something a bit better, but very quickly stopped doing all the interesting things and fell back on some pretty standard caper comedy that wasn't pushing any envelopes. Thats probably fine for some people, it's not for me.

A bit harsh. To be fair, the show is rather average all in all, with a few golden moments.
I'm not sure there's that many shows that are much better though. And unlike many average shows, it doesn't take itself -too- seriously, which is a huge plus in my eyes.

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From what I’ve heard, I’ve not seen it all yet, the protagonist tends to make mistakes and isn’t flawless, not everyone likes her, so I don’t think she qualifies.. though my opinion might change when I actually get to watch it:

Anyway, the term is Mary Sioux

Thank you.

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43 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Also, Predator 2 is a bad movie, though one that's fun to enjoy. Predators was just a god awful movie. And who calls Edge of Tomorrow criminally underrated? I've literally only heard people say glowing things about it.

You spent too much time on the boards :P Outside of it, EoT is hardly known unfortunately. Bad marketing from the beginning leading to people sleeping on how good it was.

Also no qualms about calling Predator 2 a bad movie. Note that I said Predator 2 is better than Prey in my book, but I never said it's a masterpiece. It's a movie with flaws, but it is indeed a lot of fun to enjoy. It's a classic guilty pleasure from the eighties (although I believe it's actually a film from the 1990s).

You are wrong about Predators though. As @Heartofice already indicated, perhaps you are mistaken it with The Predator? (which I hear is terrible, but I skipped that one). Predators takes itself too seriously and it introduces questions about the Predator universe that are dumb even by the standards of creature features, but it has a rather good central idea to start from and it has an excellent cast just hamming it up all the way through. Miles better than Prey in my book, even though it isn't a master piece either.

22 minutes ago, mormont said:

If you watched Prey  and thought to yourself 'this lead character is such a Mary Stu!' you need to

a. Remind yourself that it's Mary Sue. Gary Stu is the masculinised version of Mary Sue which is the term that came first because omnicompetent men are unremarkable, indeed a staple, in modern Western fiction.

b. Remind yourself that the term isn't applicable to any female lead character who shows any degree of competence at all. In Prey, Naru eventually defeats the Predator - but only after encountering severe difficulties and failings, and relying on the help of other characters to even get as far as the climactic confrontation. The story doesn't view her as flawless or perfect at all. She is significantly less competent, really, than other protagonists in the series, who all happen to be male but weirdly don't get derided for being too competent.

Ah, I feared that this was going to lead me into a world of controversy. To address your points, let me just make the following retorts:

a. Point taken on the terminology, I should have used the exact term (although do we know that she identifies as a woman? Perhaps she's non-binary and the mixture is adequate. Seems like this is an argument that can go on for a while, but I shall in good faith accept that I made the error here).

That being said, I resent the overall implication you seem to be making in your argument. I wouldn't be cheering on this character if she had been (or identified as) a man. This trope is terrible in all its gender incarnations and should be avoided like the plague by any serious creative endeavor.

Let me say that I don't think it is very gracious to immediately go for an ad-hominem (not to mention the "two wrongs make a right" fallacy in point a.) in the same argument just because I do not happen to like a movie you do. We are/can be better than this.

b. Note that I spoke of "Mary Stueish tendencies" in the post, which together with the lazy writing in most other aspects of this film created the mess it ended up being

Spoiler

These were for me the most clearly expressed in two areas:

1. The initial motivation for her character's actions which were ill-defined and hinged on the fact that she was told "she couldn't do something." That's lazy, but par for the course I suppose, this movie was very weird when it came to setting emotional and philosophical stakes. 

2. Her explicitly idiotic plan for taking down the Predator. There is a reason why I made the comparison to Home Alone in my initial post. There were just too many coincidences for the plan to work and there wasn't enough razzle-dazzling for me to buy into it. Perhaps different people have different standards of that, but for me the film crossed the line into implausibility before that and thus lost me.

Add to that that she was a brilliant tracker, good warrior and a medicine woman who discovered a magical flower that could confound the Predator's senses and I feel like "Mary Stueish tendencies" is an apt description. 

 

 

 

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56 minutes ago, Veltigar said:

You spent too much time on the boards :P Outside of it, EoT is hardly known unfortunately. Bad marketing from the beginning leading to people sleeping on how good it was.

Nope. Anytime I hear people mention it it's almost always in a positive way. Just wish they had kept the original working title of the film.

Quote

Also no qualms about calling Predator 2 a bad movie. Note that I said Predator 2 is better than Prey in my book, but I never said it's a masterpiece. It's a movie with flaws, but it is indeed a lot of fun to enjoy. It's a classic guilty pleasure from the eighties (although I believe it's actually a film from the 1990s).

Prey is a good movie unlike Predator 2. :tantrum:

Quote

You are wrong about Predators though. As @Heartofice already indicated, perhaps you are mistaken it with The Predator? (which I hear is terrible, but I skipped that one). Predators takes itself too seriously and it introduces questions about the Predator universe that are dumb even by the standards of creature features, but it has a rather good central idea to start from and it has an excellent cast just hamming it up all the way through. Miles better than Prey in my book, even though it isn't a master piece either.

No, I own the film and am not mixing it up. All I need to say about it is Topher Grace's performance in it makes his performance in Spiderman 3 appear Oscar worthy. That's how bad it is.

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30 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Nope. Anytime I hear people mention it it's almost always in a positive way. Just wish they had kept the original working title of the film.

Ah yes, that is that film's particular tragedy. It is great and everyone who sees it, loves it but due to the horrendous marketing almost no one saw it. That's why it is so underrated even though it was the best thing Tom Cruise did between 2010-2020.

25 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

No, I own the film and am not mixing it up. All I need to say about it is Topher Grace's performance in it makes his performance in Spiderman 3 appear Oscar worthy. That's how bad it is.

Poppycock! Topher Grace is not performing in that film at all, the crew just didn't tell him there were camera's present.  

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1 hour ago, Veltigar said:

Ah, I feared that this was going to lead me into a world of controversy. To address your points, let me just make the following retorts:

a. Point taken on the terminology, I should have used the exact term (although do we know that she identifies as a woman? Perhaps she's non-binary and the mixture is adequate. Seems like this is an argument that can go on for a while, but I shall in good faith accept that I made the error here).

That being said, I resent the overall implication you seem to be making in your argument. I wouldn't be cheering on this character if she had been (or identified as) a man. This trope is terrible in all its gender incarnations and should be avoided like the plague by any serious creative endeavor.

Let me say that I don't think it is very gracious to immediately go for an ad-hominem (not to mention the "two wrongs make a right" fallacy in point a.) in the same argument just because I do not happen to like a movie you do. We are/can be better than this.

I'd counter that the tendency to take any attempt to point out bias (conscious or unconscious) as an ad hominem attack is much more damaging to sensible civil discussion than the highlighting of such bias could ever be.

As to whether you'd have cheered on this character if she had been a man: did you like the first Predator movie?

Unless you can persuade me that Naru is presented as significantly more competent and without flaws than Dutch, I think we have to accept that the term cannot be applied to her and not him (though it could be applied to him and not her).

Motivations don't enter into the Mary Sue issue, really, for me: and while Naru is competent, she's actually not really more competent than her brother Taabe. She's a little smarter, maybe, but without him she'd have died. Twice. That's not Mary Sue territory, to me.

(ps: she doesn't discover the plant, it's known to the tribe.)

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I think Prey is the better movie than Predator.  The two leads in Prey were fully realized characters.  It's been a long time since I saw Predator but I don't remember anything character-developing about it.  Which would I rather rewatch, easily Prey.

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6 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

I think Prey is the better movie than Predator.  The two leads in Prey were fully realized characters.  It's been a long time since I saw Predator but I don't remember anything character-developing about it.  Which would I rather rewatch, easily Prey.

Yeah, but it shamelessly stole lines from Predator. "If it bleeds, we can kill it." :D

@Veltigar I agree about the orange flower thing. But I don't think the character is a Mary Sue. Hell, in the beginning she is an awful hunter by Comanche standards. She gets made fun off for putting her hatchet on a string. The French fur trappers were there for the buffalo originally, and if the main character can realize there's a new creature in the forest, why can't they?

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35 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

@Veltigar I agree about the orange flower thing. But I don't think the character is a Mary Sue. Hell, in the beginning she is an awful hunter by Comanche standards. She gets made fun off for putting her hatchet on a string. The French fur trappers were there for the buffalo originally, and if the main character can realize there's a new creature in the forest, why can't they?

The orange flower appears to be real, or based on a real flower:  https://screenrant.com/prey-movie-orange-flower-real/

 

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1 hour ago, SpaceChampion said:

I think Prey is the better movie than Predator.  The two leads in Prey were fully realized characters.  It's been a long time since I saw Predator but I don't remember anything character-developing about it.  Which would I rather rewatch, easily Prey.

If you think Predator is movie about character development then you just don’t get it

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26 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Cos it doesn’t need it

And yet every movie that does have it is way better.  Action movies like Prey and Max Max: Fury Road.

The real objection to Marvel movies 3rd act CGI-fests is about the lack of emotionally significant action.  (I'd disagree ones like Shang Chi lack that however).   When the action reflects the theme and character development it is clearly better than action just mechanically advancing the plot.

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17 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

And yet every movie that does have it is way better.  Action movies like Prey and Max Max: Fury Road.

The real objection to Marvel movies 3rd act CGI-fests is about the lack of emotionally significant action.  (I'd disagree ones like Shang Chi lack that however).   When the action reflects the theme and character development it is clearly better than action just mechanically advancing the plot.

Gotta say I disagree. A good action movie just has to serve up.. action. Predator does that, almost perfectly. The stakes in the movie are perfectly explained and you understand who everyone is at a glance, there is literally no need for anything else. 
 

Saying Predator needs more character developments is one of the more bizarre comments I’ve ever seen on this board.

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19 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Saying Predator needs more character developments is one of the more bizarre comments I’ve ever seen on this board.

Irrelevant because I didn't say that.  I said it's not the better story.  Stories with thematic and character resonance are clearly better stories.  That pretty basic to storytelling.

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4 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

Irrelevant because I didn't say that.  I said it's not the better story.  Stories with thematic and character resonance are clearly better stories.  That pretty basic to storytelling.

A story can work to serve up suspense and tell a narrative without spending time on character development. Predator is an excellent example of a movie that is about as tight as humanly possible with its storytelling. I know everything I need to know about every character, anything added would have made the movie worse

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7 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

Irrelevant because I didn't say that.  I said it's not the better story. 

 

You said it's not the better movie. I haven't seen Prey so I can't say on this specific example but even without being a big Predator it's better than a lot of action movies that have more character development and all that stuff than it. 

Shang-Chi is not a better movie than Ong-Bak even though by any reasonable measure Shang-Chi does more of all the development and themes and all that stuff. 

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12 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

Irrelevant because I didn't say that.  I said it's not the better story.  Stories with thematic and character resonance are clearly better stories.  That pretty basic to storytelling.

That's the issue, not character development. You need to care about the characters and only Predator and Prey have characters that you're invested in. The middle three films collectively only have one character that matters and if he died and the end of the film, oh well.

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