Question of taste of course!
I for one immensely enjoy the slow pace and tense rhythm of it all.
The "for its time" is 100% subjective, and some young (18-20) people I know (very well I must say: children and nephews, etc) also enjoyed it very much. Asked to watch the sequel on our next "cinema night". Also all were flabbergasted at seeing an "empowered woman character" from "literally like 50 years ago". Came as a little bit of a shock for them. :o)
And ... I would kindly argue the opposite: today's productions are a blur of action, cgi vomit, sometimes almost non-sensical kaleidoscope of seemingly unrelated scenes and topics. I believe they reflect "their time": <tongueincheek>I want it all, I want it now and delivered to my door please. I will let Alexa answer the doorbell for me</tongueincheek>.
> Also all were flabbergasted at seeing an "empowered woman character" from "literally like 50 years ago". Came as a little bit of a shock for them. :o)
The interesting thing there is that the story and dialog was written for a male character and then swapped to a woman for commercial reach reasons. They'd didn't really change the dialog when they did that change though.
Had it Ripley been originally written as a woman I'm not sure her character would have been as empowered and I'm also not sure the movie would be the masterpiece that it is.
I re-watched Star Wars for the first time in a while (I watched it surely more than 100 times as a kid, but hadn't in a long time).
Leia is a straight-up badass the entire movie. She's the only competent one in the main 3 (Obi Wan's a contender if you expand it to 4, but he dies, spoiler alert). The other two are bumbling idiots until the very end, and don't go through half as rough a time as she does.
Then we open Empire and she's perfectly cool under fire while being the #1 person in charge of commanding a fighting retreat against an overwhelming, mechanized force, and has to be dragged away to finally leave her post as the structure is collapsing around her.
The whole thing is played like it's ordinary, no awkward asides to make sure we understand that this is a WOMAN being STRONG. 1977 and 1980 release dates.
> The whole thing is played like it's ordinary, no awkward asides to make sure we understand that this is a WOMAN being STRONG. 1977 and 1980 release dates.
This is a big problem I have with modern movies; they're unable or unwilling to simply show, they need to show and tell. It doesn't matter the theme, even wholly unpolitical themes are far too often explicitly laid out, multiple times, with blunt dialogue exposition to the audience who are presumed to only be half-watching the movie.
A modern movie can't just have a bank robber kill another bank robber. They need the killer to say "hehehe, this way I get a larger cut of the profit!" Does that really need to be said? Why can't a movie just show it but not have the character explain his motivations outloud to an empty room? Because modern movies are made to spoonfeed disinterested dimwits with short attention spans. Movies are catering to people who aren't even paying attention, because in test audiences there are always a few people who keep muttering questions "what's going on? what did they just say? why is this happening?" And the worst part is, these sort of people are still confused even when the movie explicitly explains everything to them.
This is a big problem I have with modern movies; they're unable or unwilling to simply show, they need to show and tell. It doesn't matter the theme, even wholly unpolitical themes are far too often explicitly laid out, multiple times, with blunt dialogue exposition to the audience who are presumed to only be half-watching the movie.
The smart writing (and smart audiences) have all moved to TV. The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, True Detective, Better Call Saul. These are the shows that respect their audience's intelligence.
The movie business has turned into Disneyland with guns.
> Movies are catering to people who aren't even paying attention, because in test audiences there are always a few people who keep muttering questions "what's going on? what did they just say? why is this happening?" And the worst part is, these sort of people are still confused even when the movie explicitly explains everything to them.
I've got a few relatives I simply can't watch movies with because it's like this the whole movie. It's like they can't remember anything that happened over 2-5 minutes ago. "Who's that character?" "Where are they?" "Now who's that?" "Is that the cousin or the uncle?" "What are they doing now?" "I don't understand." OF COURSE you don't understand! You've been on Instagram the whole movie! They come out of a standard brain-off romcom and they don't really know what it was about, except that the ending was sweet and romantic and they liked it. Put something like Inception or Tenet in front of them, and they're going to just sit there totally befuddled.
Also, often times that’s the whole point of the movie that we don’t know yet who is that character! Like, can’t you accept that as an unknown and work the story from there?!
As I heard it, they wrote the script without concern for the gender of the actors, and they picked actors for the parts based on auditions. Although commercial reach reasons would also fit.
SPOILER ALERT: At the end of the day, it still fits the meme:
"Alien is a movie where nobody listens to the smart woman, and then they all die except for the smart woman and her cat."
If her character was really empowered, maybe they'd listen to her?
well I personally don't give a flying flamingo about man/woman in the lead role of that film. It's just great.
What I found telling is the reaction of young people today after realising "waitaminute, this isn't 100% like twitter and tiktok tell us it was... Maybe I need to do a little bit of research and <del>listen to the old man<del> (nah!)"
That sounds like an awesome trick to write tough female chracters without having your tainted brain trick you into sterotypes. Just random all genders up after writing.
watched it for the 5th time a few months ago.
result guaranteed: scared the bejesus out of me :)
Great cast, great characters. And a franchise which: 1) is one of the greatest scifi franchises around (bar the couple of alien/predator anomalies) 2) is hopefully not going to be purchased and ravaged by Disney.
When did everyone suddenly start spending what seems to be a non negligible amount of time worrying if they are affected by this or that or that or this?
To be clear: I do not mean to belittle / deny the right or need of people who are genuinely affected by certain conditions.
But I do worry (as a parent of teenage children) as to whether this sudden (a few years? max a decade old) wave of "I'm pretty sure I have <INSERT_ACRONYM>" or "I'd better get tested for <INSERT_ANOTHER_CODE> before X or Y happens" is real or not. In some cases, could it be a fad?
As the insensitive bastard that I am (to almost quote my eldest the other day... :) my god I love this child), I cannot help but conflate this with how overwhelmingly present "mental health" issues have become. Twitter? Check. The BBC? Check. Instagram and YT? Check. Everywhere.
Like it or not, the "me-me-me-I'm-a-victim" also feels like a very trendy thing nowadays.
Whatever happened to toughing it out and becoming better/stronger in the process? Has such a view of things and self-betterment in adversity completely fallen out of fashion? Have we all become babies to be nannied? Is this now all viewed as "male, pale and stale"?
I cannot help but think (the "300x" is made up, but you will get the idea I hope):
. either genuine mental conditions have started to plague humanity 300x times more in the past 30 years
. or today's physicians have started to worry 300x more about it, hence diagnose it 300x more often
. or physicians from 30 years didn't give a flying flamingo about it
. or all of the above
What times we live in. We all have our small (or larger) problems -- and I do worry about the the system's influence on my children's ability to become beautiful, responsible and independent adults in the future.
> When did everyone suddenly start spending what seems to be a non negligible amount of time worrying if they are affected by this or that or that or this?
I don't spend time "worrying if I may be affected". Who does?
My reaction to reading up on the topic was "oooooh, so many things that didn't make sense about my behavior suddenly make sense now". It was a happy moment.
Reading up more, I started to find advice that actually works. Which was extremely refreshing, as most of the advice I was getting before outright failed, regardless of how hard I tried to implement it. Now I know why.
Are you sure you aren't fighting a straw man?
Mindlessly "toughing it out" is exactly how you end up with people who aren't responsible and independent and have no slightest clue on why or how to change it.
> I cannot help but conflate this with how overwhelmingly present "mental health" issues have become.
Just because they are more present doesn't mean they are being faked. I believe that mental health issues were largely ignored before.
Now people are paying attention, so more cases are caught.
> To quote: "The busy bee has no time for sorrow".
The busy bee I picture when you say this also lives with high stress, is easy to anger, and doesn't talk about their feelings in a health way or at all.
Well I'd rather go to a bar/pub anyway. Social, human beings, brawling to order a beer at the zinc, contact and all that?
Not to mention you at least get the tipsiness/(more: drunk) if/when all else fails... 8>
Same here, I can look at, meet, and chat with 5-10 girls in one evening in a bar, and get a pretty good impression of them. Takes months to do the same on a dating app, with heaps of added toxic behaviour/people that you don't get in a bar. Gave it up a long time ago..
Maybe I'm just socially inept, but I have never once managed to meet someone at a bar that wasn't already part of some bigger group that I was with.
Edit: that's actually untrue, there are exactly 2 instances where it happened in my life. They were in the kinds of bars that I would usually avoid (too many drunk people shouting over loud music), in areas far from where I lived, that had pretty strong "going out" cultures.
Edit 2: now that I think about it, I'm not exactly dashing handsome. I've historically done a lot better in "house party" type of settings, but again that's with people who are already friends of friends.
I know that works to make friends, when you drunkenly, randomly start to talk to other people, or jump into conversations.
But how does it work for meeting the opposite sex ? Being drunk for these kinds of things usually isn't good
what about trying to see such advanced fields of studies as (extremely?) long-term investments (for the species?).
I'm sure that 20,000 years ago some crazy shaman was frowned upon for trying to "melt rocks and see what happened", or "ate some weird/unknown/sacred plants" or "what if I push this seed into this little corner of land and look after it (water, sun, defend if against herbivores)"? etc, etc, etc?
May the Emperor bless their souls.