Films where I don’t recognize a single actor among the whole crew are almost always better than ones where I’ve seen such and such actor in other movies. Just more immersive. And even if they’re not the best actors I’d much prefer that over whatever the hell Chris Prat or Tom Cruise or Leo D are up to.
It's part of the blockbuster model, which does everything it can to reduce risk. Before the 70s, studios would go bust when an expensive movie flopped. Studios became very risk averse, especially for the expensive stuff. So they make a sequel to a movie that's done well, or a plot similar to that of a movie that's previously done well, based on an intellectual property that sold well in another medium(comic, book, tv-show, ...), in a genre that's previously done well with audiences, starring actors people previously liked, preferably very attractive actors so that audiences like looking at them, pushed by a saturation marketing campaign that gets as many people to watch it on the opening weekend as possible, so that if it sucks they can't tell their friends not to go and see it. It's like McDonalds. It's not the best meal you'll ever eat, but you know what you're getting, so you won't have wasted two hours or your life, or shit yourself after eating it.
Also, video killed the radio star. It's rare to be incredibly beautiful. It's rare to be incredibly talented. It's incredibly rare to be both. If you have to pick one, pick the incredibly beautiful actor, who looks good on posters and in promotional material. Acting isn't that hard. Even a pretty moron can be a passable actor.
This is basically what I told people when I started to watch some of the most amazing international and documentary cinema in the early 00s. Ciudade de Deus, La Cité d’enfants Perdus, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain, La Vita è Bella, Der Untergang, Lola Rennt, 올드 보이, Mononoke Hime, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Whale Rider. Documentaries by Adam Curtis or Errol Morris. So many people just don’t know.
True to an extent, there are a few famous actors out there who are genuinely good at taking on different roles and immersing you in the character. A great example is Jim Carrey. Obviously I know Ace Ventura and Truman Burbanks are the same person, but it doesn’t feel like that when you’re watching them. They might share similar qualities, but they’re clearly different characters.
I knew being faceblind must have some benefit. I often only realise I know an actor when I see their name in the credits. Then again it can take me half a movie to realise there are two men with dark hair, a beard and glasses, so I wouldn’t entirety recommend it.
My experience watching The Departed while almost entirely sober felt like a face blindness simulator. I was baffled when one of the characters that had been killed came back and none of the other characters acknowledged it. Cool movie but so confusing.
I'm somewhat faceblind but great at voices. There's no escape. It also totally ruins a lot of animated shows and movies because a very small number of voice actors get a majority of the work.
en again it can take me half a movie to realise there are two men with dark hair, a beard and glasses
I’m not face blind, but this is the reason I never watched another Mission Impossible movie after the first one: Every single male in that movie looked identical to me, and I couldn’t follow any of the plot line(s?), as I never knew who was doing what to whom. I can only imagine how annoying it must be when that’s the norm.
Regardless how you feel about “woke Hollywood injecting forced diversity into films,” it’s really helped the issue of telling all the good-looking white people apart.
Especially when there are a few examples of amazing actors that you can know and still sometimes struggle to recognize them in their characters. Like Gary Oldman, and … uh… OK well I’m not in a movie headspace, but he’s not the only one!
Tons of lesser names that play great side/background characters and it’s hard to tell, too, so I totally agree others need chances at lead characters.
Those are the actors I’m never tired of because their characters are almost always unique characters.
Where I wrote of MCU was Wonder Woman. I liked the movie and acting, but the story was so dumb. I called out the antagonist from the first time I saw him. The story was the same as all the MCU movies, I realized, after it:
Here’s this unstoppable bad guy, here’s the main characters getting their ass beat by the bad guy, here’s defeatist attitudes that they can never beat the bad guy, main protagonist suddenly “believes” they can beat the bad guy, beats bad guy, and roll credits. Splash of some sort of callback end-credits gush scene, and end.
Ahh yes. The one where the villain weaponized a glaring plot-hole and everyone was doomed until they figured out that they’d already covered this in a previous movie.
At least the first two Tobey McSpiderman movies were legitimately good, the problem was some studio exec went “LET’S MAKE NOTHING BUT SUPERHERO MOVIES FOR THE NEXT TWENTY-FIVE YEARS!” Sometime after the second one, I lost track of how many The Incredible Hulk movies they made, and then stopped paying attention. A very few have risen to the top since, including The Dark Knight and Deadpool, both legitimately good movies.
The last movie I saw at the theatre was Inglourious Basterds. Over the years, I’ve looked at what’s playing with dates and such, and…there’s nothing I want to see.
Cillian Murphy was good, the historical figures were well represented if you know a bit about the history of quantum mechanics, and the overall movie was a disappointment compared to the hype at the time, but it will be forgotten. That doesn’t mean it SUCKED though.
Sucking is subjective. The same film can not suck for you and suck for BoastfulDaedra. That’s what an unpopular opinion is about - if you disagree with them, you should upvote them!
That “The Man from Earth (2007)” is the best movies there is. I recommend it to people all the time but no one seems to realise how profoundly interesting it is. And it doesn’t need any scenery or special effects. It’s literally just conversation and dramatic music, tuned to perfectly tell a story that touches on many philosophical questions. I just love that film.
A lot of commenters agreeing and recommending this, so I’ll probably look it up. That said, a movie where it’s just talking with music, seems pretty obvious why most people avoid it.
Way too many good movies to have a single best, but that one is one of my favorites certainly. If I recommend it to someone I avoid any spoiling of the twist because it was so great when it happened. It might be obvious before that point for some, it came from left field for me.
And while I heard the sequel wasn't all that great, I felt that even if a sequel could be good it was totally unneeded. It'd be like trying to make a second Highlander movie, if one could even imagine that.
I agree, and i think everyone i know that has seen it does so too. You should check out the one where they hop into a tent to travel through time(primer 2004) , it has a similar ‘production value’ vs ‘delivering plot’ ratio!
Primer and The Man from Earth are two of my all time favorite films. Production value is nice and all, but an interesting idea explored well wins every time for me.
I’ve seen this movie many times and introduced many to it. It’s one of those movies that sticks with you. I think about it a lot, I find, drawing parallels to it all the time.
I’ve watched the film and it’s nothing more than okay. It’s reduced to the point of being bland. The good script can’t carry everything else that is mediocre at best.
Jokes aside, I used to pay for Netflix and Amazon prime. I quit Netflix ~2 years ago when they raised prices outrageously. I’m still on Amazon prime, though, and I would have quit if it wasn’t for my brother who is still using it as a linked account. Especially after I’ve seen the Oobah Butler video (not like I didn’t hear/read about them before, but all those in one video were just enough).
Yeah attracting (active) users is the real challenge…
I created !vans and hoped that I could cultivate some active posters before I ran out of my years worth of content from r/vans on reddit, but that didn’t happen…
I haven’t given up on it (definitely took a hiatus tho…) and need to post some new material, but it’s not easy to cultivate active communities. Especially when all of life’s bullshit gets in the way.
But I remember early communities on reddit where I was one of like 5 active posters for a long time, then users would eventually overwhelm the community. r/MisleadingThumbnails is an example.
I think the way to go right now is to create or post in broader, more top-level kind of communities. Lemmy doesn’t really have a lot of traffic, and what would probably be a small or medium community over on Reddit is a niche community over here.
To avoid that, find or make something like /c/shoes then post your Vans content there. You may find a larger audience more quickly, and can break out in to smaller subcommunities when there’s enough content submitters to justify it
“Pay yourself first”. My bank has a feature that allows me to setup automated money transfers to and from different accounts based on rules I setup. The most important one is when any deposit is received from my employer, 20% of the amount is automatically transferred from my chequing account to my retirement account. My paycheque is deposited overnight and the money is already “gone” by the time I wake up in the morning. Treat it like another tax on your income that you have no way to avoid paying. Then live off what’s left.
I have accounts for travel, house expenses, utility bills, groceries, car expenses, and fun money. Each of them gets part of my paycheck. Every couple of months I take a look to see if things are getting out of whack.
The best part is that I can be an idiot and overspend with the fun money account. If I spend it all, there’s absolutely no repercussions, since everything important is already safely in different accounts.
Also, when car expenses (or vacations) roll around, I already have money put aside for it.
Terminator is better than Terminator 2, and as cool as it is Terminator 2 should never have been made (or should have a different script).
I know the mob is raising the pitchfork, but hear me out, there are two main ways time travel can solve the grandparent paradox, these are Singular Timeline (i.e. something will prevent you from killing your grandfather) or Multiple Timeline (you kill him but in doing so you created an alternate timeline). Terminator 2 is clearly a MT model, because they delay the rise of Skynet, but Terminator is a ST movie. The way you can understand it’s an ST is because the cause-consequences form a perfect cycle (which couldn’t happen on an MT story), i.e. Reese goes back to save Sarah -> Reese impregnates Sarah and teaches her how to defend herself from Terminators and avoid Skynet -> Sarah gives birth to and teaches John -> John uses the knowledge to start a resistance -> The resistance is so strong that Skynet sends a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah -> Reese goes back to save Sarah…
The awesome thing about Terminator is how you only realise this at the end of the Movie, that nothing they did mattered, because that’s what happened before, the timeline is fixed, humanity will suffer but they’ll win eventually.
If Terminator was a MT then the cycle breaks, i.e. there needs to be a beginning, a first time around when the original timeline didn’t had any time travelers. How did that timeline looked like? John couldn’t exist, which means that sending a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah was not possible, Reese couldn’t have gone back without the Terminator technology, which they wouldn’t have unless the resistance was winning, and if they are winning without John, the Terminator must have gone back to kill someone else and when Reese went back he accidentally found Sarah, impregnated her and coincidentally made a better commander for the resistance which accidentally and created a perfect loop so that next time he would be sent back and meet Sarah because she was the target (what are the odds of that). Then why is the movie not about this? Why is the movie about the Nth loop after the timeline was changed? The reason is that Terminator was thought as a ST movie, but when they wanted to write a sequel they for some reason decided to allow changes in the timeline which broke the first movie.
Not to mention that it’s fucking stupid to have all your infiltration units have the exact same face and body. The first movie even showed other terminators with different faces, so why is every T-800 Arnold?
This tries to play on the idea that skynet is terrifyingly smart in some ways, but still deficient in others.
It doesn’t really “make sense” but it’s the whole reason there’s a chance of an “ongoing” conflict between humans and skynet. If skynet was as smart as it should be, humans would be long gone.
And you know how they explained time travel not making sense in Doctor Who? They called it “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff” and hand waved all that shit away.
And that’s fine, but if one Dr. Who explained time travel in detail, showing things that would be impossible, the next doctor shouldn’t violate those rules, it’s about in-universe consistency.
You are correct, I haven’t. But if the next Doctor said Time travel was impossible and spent the entire show not time traveling (because time travel is impossible) I bet that would raise some eyebrows.
No, the problem is internal consistency, in Star Wars the force works the same way in all films. But imagine if on one movie someone was shown using the force to move objects, and on the next movie the same character was shown trying to reach for something important and failing and not using the force and when asked he replies “it’s not possible to move objects with the force”. That’s the problem here, internal consistency, on one movie it’s said it works one way, on the other it’s said it works differently. I love both movies, I just think T2 shitted on one of the main things from T1.
Ah! A fellow holder of the belief that time travel stories are better when they are internally consistent! I hate e.g. Looper for having time travel that makes no goddamn sense. It takes me out of the story when the characters are literally watching the timeline change before them as it magically radiates out from one point. And then our protagonists somehow remember the original timeline… Bah.
…So I must ask - have you seen Primer? If not, maybe you’d like it!
I really, really appreciate this unpopular opinion, it made me see things in a different light. Unfortunately, the convincing you just did pales in comparison to how good Terminator 2 was. It wasn’t just a cool flick, a sequel, a “time travel movie”, etc, it was something special and it was amazing. But I fully understand and appreciate when time travel in movies doesn’t make 100% sense, because it almost never does …
Inception is one of the worst executions of an interesting idea. My imagination can imagine anything. Hollywood’s? Well I guess you imagined too hard so now there’s people with guns. Oh and this applies to everyone.
If you haven’t give the anime Paprika a watch. I don’t think its a smarter movie necessarily but it is great and I’m pretty sure a couple scenes from inception were basically pulled directly from paprika.
In theory I agree, but in practice? The amount of people having a hard time following the timelines of inception show that you really can’t make a more complex execution, the average viewer simply won’t get it. You have to simplify it to make it more digestible.
For comparison Dark is an exceptionally well done series that doesn’t hold back with the complexity. How many people can say they “got” Dark when watching it the first time around? I’m an attentive viewer and even I had wrap my head around it to really understand what had happened. My wife, who is not an attentive viewer, pretty much gave up after S2 because she simply lost the plot. Too many bits of information was thrown in her way and she couldn’t keep track of what was happening.
Personally, I give Nolan props for even trying to execute interesting ideas because the average high profile movie is pretty barren of interesting ideas. Would I like to see more interesting ideas with complex executions? Absolutely. Do I think it can be done? Considering who the target audience is, not really.
Red Wing boots (only the classic ones). I’ve had my Iron Rangers for 6 years edit: 7 years now as my primary pair of non-athletic footwear. Occasional brush with a bit of conditioner and they look and feel amazing with no signs of slowing down. Will be replacing the sole when it eventually wears out but the original minilug is still going strong
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