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Whiplash
Some people think it’s an inspiring story about resilience and persistence towards one’s dreams. But it’s basically a story about textbook abuse and how pandering to the abuser ends up consuming you, erase your personality and turn you into his puppet.
The solo in the end is tragic, it is not a climax. Andrew started it to stick it to Fletcher but ended up pandering to him. Fletcher won. He now was his little trophy. Andrew is now a great drummer, for Fletcher to brag about, but sacrificed everything for it and he will die young, sad and alone. All for Fletcher’s ego. And when Andrew is gone, Fletcher will find another toy to mold.
Wait, did anyone not think that’s what it was?
Most people I know that saw the movie thought that.
Pan’s Labyrynth … its not a Fairy tale.
Apparantly 1984, because we are currently implementing it.
Most people got the popular ones here, so I’ll put:
Annihilation: Folding Ideas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URo66iLNEZw)
science fiction hold up a mirror to examine the present by talking about the future. idiocracy wasn’t a warning about the future, it was a condemnation of the present.
Not a movie, but the finale of Lost. Everyone one was like “Oh my god! They’re all dead! <crying noises>”. Yeah, no shit, they’re in purgatory. If you pay attention, they didn’t all die at the same time. They’re waiting for each other before moving on. Everything dies, damn.
Princess Bride. Every single person I talk to says it’s about true love but it’s really the most important lesson is to never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
No it isn’t. Its a public health statement warning people about being “Mostly Dead”.
Truthfully it is a revenge movie … “Hello, my name is …”
Misunderstanding The Princess Bride is one of the classic blunders, right up there with getting involved in a land war in Asia
Trump has never seen this movie.
I don’t know, seems pretty inconceivable.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I’m sad he never ended up completing the sequel Buttercup’s Baby. I read the sample chapter ages ago and was very excited about it, but I’m pretty sure the author has died since.
Then again we already have The Fitz and the Fool books by Robin Hobb, which I think hit a lot of the same notes we would have gotten.
Maybe when Stephen King finally finishes his abridgement.
It’s about fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…
AND KISSING
ew
lol - I love the lack of context the inbox gives so I was thinking “…what did I say???” - makes me laugh every time something like this happens. :)
Some day you might not mind so much.
Dune 1 and 2.
Moral of story: beware blind loyalty to messianic figures
Audience reaction: Paul is so cool and admirable, I hope he wins!
the third movie will be based on Dune Messiah, which I believe is the book where Herbert finally understood that subtlety is for people who don’t really care about their message :p
It’s even more broad. The lesson is to not blindly trust charismatic leaders. The longer Dune story is about teaching humanity to think for themselves. Most people are far too easy to control.
If you continue to Dune Messiah, Paul talks some about all the destruction that he causes putting humanity on the “golden path”. This is referring to that. He needs to create so much suffering that humanity stops blindly obeying leaders. Paul actually is too good of a person to give up the last of his humanity and turn into the worm God Emperor, so his son ends up having to do this instead.
It gets worse. Even Frank Herbert started having a cult, his answer was: “did you guys not read my book??”
I think he mentions it in one of the commentaries at the end (or beginning) of Dune Messiah.
In my experience, the fans of the Dune book series are pretty much always cultish.
More than any other book series, people think they’re special if they like Dune.
Holy shit, that checks out. The two most Dune-obsessed people I know well are both born-again Christians (previously agnostic/atheist of Catholic upbringing) and both initially fell into the MAGAsphere.
I’d put Enders Game as a contender, though the demographic obsessed with that book seems to be former gifted kids who somehow missed how screwed up Ender’s life was.
I love Dune, but Herbert was all the way up his own ass by the time he got to God-Emperor. The books were still good, but his giant ego wasn’t helping. I mean, he, and a bunch of his fans, thought, or still think in the case of the fandom, that Star Wars ripped off Dune when they only have some surface similarities at best. It’s like claiming that Sonic the Hedgehog ripped off Mega Man on the basis that they’re both sidescrollers that feature a blue protagonist. But he was really fucking adamant about it, so people still keep repeating it.
I agree to an extent. However, on the Star Wars thing, I’m pretty sure we have it on record that Lucas wanted to make a Dune adaptation first, but couldn’t get the rights. This led to Star Wars.
It’s not an exact copy, but it does share a lot of similarities. It also copies plenty of other sci-fi (and a lot from other storytelling, like it’s an almost exact copy of the hero’s journey) too though. Lucas was (maybe still is) a great artist, and, as the saying goes, great artists steal from other works.It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that there is Dune DNA in Star Wars. It isn’t a rip off, but it is taken to be used.
He wanted to make a Flash Gordon adaptation, not Dune. It shows, too, with Star Wars’ aesthetic being heavily inspired by both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.
Narratively, the original trilogy is heavily influenced by pulpy sword-and-sorcery books and comics and Kurosawa’s films, but with the twist that it’s in space.
Dune, meanwhile, is Hamlet crossed with Lawrence of Arabia in space.
Spice appears in both, except what spice actually does in Star Wars wasn’t explored in anything Lucas made and Frank Herbert died before any of the expanded universe existed. There are only three mentions of spice in the entire original trilogy, all in ANH, and those are a bit about Luke believing his father was a navigator on a spice freighter, 3PO mentioning the spice mines of Kessel, and Han having to dump a load of smuggled spice. It’s clearly just a shout-out; the spice is just a background reference and doesn’t feature in the story. You could replace spice with beanie babies and nothing would change.
What parts of Star Wars do you feel originate from Dune? I’ve never actually gotten a straight answer and I’m genuinely curious.
It doesn’t have the story of Dune, but it has elements inspired by it. As you mention, Spice. It’s just an homage, but that’s obvious.
It also has Luke starting on a desert planet, with an emphasis on gathering water. His family is killed, leading to the start of his journey (though this is common in storytelling in general, so it could be from a million other places).
The force has some similarities to the pseudo-magical aspects of Dune, with a heavy focus on meditation and understanding your body and the universe. (Both the Bene Gesserit and Mentats have forms of This. BG are more internal-focused and Mentats external.)
Im sure there’s a lot more that could be pointed out. That’s just a small list off the top of my head.
Any of it could be argued as coming from any number of sources. After all, Frank Herbert was inspired by other sources to create his world too. The desert planet was inspired by his experience with dunes. The religion and cultural stuff are all inspired by real life religions and cultures. None of it is from nothing.
No one has ever had an original idea. It all comes from other aspects that we absorb in our life. Lucas didn’t “rip off” Dune. He certainly borrowed pieces from it though, along with a lot of other media, sci-fi and otherwise.
Ok, sure, uh… This sounds the equivalent of MAGA cope, to be honest.
Not to say that I disagree with the cultish behavior of the Dune Fandom in the general sense.
But your tirade is basically at the same level. So, like… Chill out?
Ah yes, the original Imperial Truth -> Imperial Creed pipeline.
This is the correct take of the message. It also, given the universe the story is set in, is the only way towards success. Within the big picture, I have empathy for Paul, as he is put in a situation he cannot win and has to follow for the better outcome (for himself, family, humanity).
Wishing for omniscience is like wishing for immortality. Be careful, you might get it. I love the scene after the awakening. Seeing all paths, knowing the only one that will work, and seeing its horror.
One thing to note that I think we’re supposed to question is that we mostly only have Paul’s (and later Lato II’s) perspective. In the version we hear, what they’re doing seems evil but is the only path to a good outcome, where humans have free will. However, I think we’re supposed to question if they’re actually fully omniscient. I think we’re supposed to consider that there’s other ways to achieve the same goal. This is just the only path Paul and his descendants can see.
The books do a far better job portraying this. The characters tell the reader. The trilogy spends more time giving Momoa extra scenes than it does following the story. (Yeah, it could be worse, but they miss a lot of critical events).
As long as Denis doesn’t wuss out and gives me at least some on screen God-worm, all is not lost.
Also - the allegory for oil dependency and the Middle East?? Went right past so many people I talked to
well Paul does have powers that no one else has …
No one else has -yet.
Starship Troopers I think, though that’s a bit of a weird one since I remember that the movie is a lot more antifascist than the book it’s based on.
The book is fine. The opening pages tell us clearly that we are nuking bugs on planets with intelligent beings, using all the ammo (because it’s too expensive to return with nukes) and leaving for another planet with bugs.
After that we jump to our protagonist, who is being brainwashed in high school.
Finally, Heinlein was writing his father’s worldview and wanted to take it to its logical end.
I love that book and movie.
So how do you rate it as an adaptation?
Good but not great. They dump the battlesuits entirely. For budget reasons this makes sense at the time but that investment in equipment (and to a lesser extent the soldiers within) shows the cost of space travel and how we are spending insane amounts to kill space bugs that are on most worlds.
But they, in turn, use the infantry rush of unarmored soliders pretty well to show the cost of war.
The use of propaganda in the media mirrors the indoctrination well enough. It keeps the audience from completely getting on board with the propaganda since it’s so on the nose. (Some will still swallow it, the same way some people saw The Boondock Saints as an awesome hero flick rather than an over-the-top action comedy.)
Shooting the cat and it exploding into the wall should have been a clue for most people.
In a lot of ways the movie is a spoof of the book. Verhoeven famously hated the book and it’s depiction of military fascism.
The book doesn’t so much promote fascism as explore it. It’s more obvious when you read his other works that that’s just what he does, explore premises.
Stranger in a Strange Land came out less than 2 years later and depicts the creation of a free-love hippie space religion.
its seems loosely based on nazi too, even down to the uniforms.
The obvious one for me would be Wolf of Wall Street. Clearly tried to exaggerate excess and hedonism, but people praised the lifestyle and tried to think “that is what I want to be one day”
I truly do not understand what makes people think that way.
Same with the movie Wall Street: it was meant as a cautionary tale about greed and callousness in modern society, but Reagan era yuppies ended up identifying with the villain.
Several decades later, they made the atrociously titled sequel “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” which had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow to the genitals and Trump cult members STILL managed to consider the obvious villain admirable.
It’s got to be The Matrix.
These red pill people view “liberals” as the Matrix they’re escaping…when the film explicitly says the opposite.
Do red people know that both of the writers are trans…?
They spell it out in plain words in the 4th movie too lol
To be fair, everything past the first movie is pretty ass.
They never read the article. Ever. Doesn’t matter if it’s the bible or playing Born in the USA at a rally.
500 Days of Summer.
Everyone thinks it’s another one of those “manic pixie girl” rom com movies that were all the rage in the mid 00s but it’s not. It’s more of a story about Tom’s inability to have a healthy relationship with just about anyone. He builds this ideal girl in his head for Summer, falls for her, but she’s just not into him. For her Tom is just a fling, that’s it. People wanted the two to be together but she just never had feelings for him. And he doesn’t learn his lesson at all because at the end he does the same thing again with another woman named Autumn thus further proving it’s all going to happen again. they meet because they have a similar interest in ONE topic and she even initially declines his offer for coffee. He builds these women in his head without actually taking them for who they are. He constantly falls for the wrong women. like the changing of the seasons.
I always felt it was a little bit more open ended, possibly even hopeful at the end.
Him finally moving past the 500 days of “summer” to find autumn would imply that he’s “changed with the seasons” and has learned more about himself during his relationship with summer. There are definitely allusions to him potentially sliding back, but it’s not something the movie really commits to in its ending.
I know some people that had the sarcasm and satirical nature of Starship Troopers fly right over their heads.
Starship Troopers taught me one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned: I am not immune to propaganda
Definitely understood that it was satire, but the idea of unifying to fight against a common enemy hits me in ways that I need to understand and account for
the idea of unifying to fight against a common enemy hits me
Organized cooperation is basically one of the human superpowers though, so it’s hard to hold that against you.
Yup! It just becomes a problem when the common enemy is another group of sapient beings (even worse when they’re humans) instead of things like climate change or starvation
I watched that movie when i was way too young and it was one of my favorite movies. I had no idea that it had any message besides cool bug fights. In hindsight, it’s pretty weird that there are apparently adults who never see past that.
I think that’s Paul Verhoeven’s fault. He doesn’t understand the difference between satire and farce.
In a farce, the world the characters inhabit is entirely different to our own. In Airplane!, the characters are deadly serious, but the world and culture they inhabit is 1000% sillier than ours. You don’t watch Airplane! and come out of the theater thinking “man, air travel is the stupidest thing we could be doing, it’s time for anti-aviation social reform.” You spent your evening laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.
Compare that to Dr. Strangelove, which is also over the top ridiculous, but it has some serious and sane characters in it to help ground the satire. There’s a theme where the higher in rank a character is, the more crazy they are. The crew of the bomber, enlisted through lieutenant, are perfectly professional. Captain Mandrake is the movie’s straight man. Major Kong is a bit of a character but he takes his job seriously. Colonel Guano is checked out, General Ripper is elbow chewing insane, and The War Room is full of nutcases. The grounding in reality provided by the straight characters who respond realistically to the situation is what makes the satire effective.
Paul Verhoeven doesn’t let any normalcy into his movies. I think Showgirls is the worst for it because it doesn’t take place in a Sci-Fi future, it’s supposed to be the film’s present day…except people don’t talk like that. People don’t act like that. Sex doesn’t look like that. Vegas doesn’t work like that. So, this movie isn’t set in our reality. The closest thing the audience is familiar with to what’s actually on screen is a Skinemax flick. People don’t act like that and sex doesn’t look like that but the actress really took her clothes off, so…am I supposed to be whacking it right now? Metallica managed to get the point across more effectively in their music video for their cover of Turn The Page than Verhoeven did with a $45 million feature film.
Fight Club
There’s a theory that the main character actually is suffering from cancer and that the love interest is also a lens for him to confront who he really is.
Fascinating how that upends it all, but I am not sure I believe it.
There’s also a theory that Tyler Durden is created in response to The Narrator’s inability to form a real personal relationship with Marla.
There are a million Fight Club theories. My favourite is that the narrator is Calvin and Tyler is Hobbes.
There’s some unreliable narrator aspects to Fight Club (the narrator is mentally ill) so there’s some ambiguity with events, particularly the nature of Tyler Durden that are open to audience speculation. For example, was the soap salesman on the plane actually real, and The Narrator latched onto his image to create the Tyler Durden persona?
Better question: Who cares? Does that change the theme or message of the film overall?
steve jobs| (listed as “Steve Jobs” but stylised as the former)
A lot of people assumed it was a fluff piece about the late Apple co-founder and dismissed it. Then it came out that it wasn’t very historically accurate (the people who lived many of those moments came out and said “hey, that’s not the way that happened!” and more people looked away.
The point was how much of an asshole Steve Jobs actually was and how he basically got lucky and exploited circumstances. It was also built like a stage play, with three acts, each consisting of a series of skits where Steve interacts with various people — the same people, in each of three eras. The launch of the Macintosh, the launch of the NeXT Cube, and the launch of the iMac.
The only punch Aaron Sorkin really pulled was the Lisa stuff. According to her, he was kind of a creep. Not quite #MeToo level, but like, he’d ask her if she touched herself in bed, and she’d say “ew, no,” and that would end it for the day. One day she said yes to shut him up, and he started talking about how she was gonna be popular with the boys… or something like that. In the movie, he was only really mean to her in the first segment, and then only at first.
One thing the movie did get right is why every time they show a digital clock, it’s always 9:41. (With analogue, 10:10 or 2:50 are common because it looks like a smile.) It’s 9:41 because that is the exact moment the Mac was announced. Jobs came up with a lot of stupid reasons for why it had to be that time — the timing was planned in advance — but those numbers were cemented in his brain and his subconscious wouldn’t let his conscious mind see it. He may have been on the ASD spectrum as well. Anyway, the numbers came from a paternity test that said there was a 94.1% chance he was the father of Lisa, which he was in denial of, and famously stated that some 20,000 men could have been the father. And yet, he took that number and, no one knows what mental gymnastics he went through to get to 9:41 without making the connection, but that’s the time he announced the Mac and it’s why every Mac, iPhone or other Apple device shows 9:41.
Anyway, the whole movie is good, and watching it reminds me why I like not just movies, but the craft of acting and building scenes and stringing them together. The rocket scene was pretty solid (Jobs explaining the logistics of a NASA mission and it tying into his plans), but the best scene is Michael Fassbender (Jobs) and Jeff Daniels (former Apple and Pepsi CEO, John Sculley) hashing out their differences around the middle of the movie (“Why do people think I fired you?”). Takes place across two timelines (present and flashback) and these guys are talking about 2-3 things at once while advancing one conversation. Had I been 30 years younger, it might have made me get into filmmaking. But as it stands, it just made me appreciate the actors and the writer more.
It’s entirely possible I missed the point, because it’s not exactly a hit piece on Steve Jobs like I initially suggested. They left a lot of things on the table in that regard. It’s just not the fluff piece people make it out to be, though I can understand, there’s a lot of Apple glazing going on. Either way, it was an enjoyable film for dialogue in much the same way The Man From Earth was.
That it’s historically inaccurate makes it uninteresting to me.
And that means there’s no point in it, in my opinion.
If someone wants to write fiction, fine, but using a real figure like Jobs to ride his coattails just makes it lazy.
And since I was around for a lot of the history, the inaccuracies would be distracting. For someone who doesn’t know the history, it makes the movie revisionist history; propaganda.
there’s also quite a bit in the film that just didn’t happen. like the final confrontation between Woz and Jobs and essentially the who basis for the three confrontations. Woz himself said that never happened. Also most of the stuff with Hertzfeld didn’t happen. Like the stuff in the first act where Jobs threatened him. Andy said himself he doesn’t recall jobs being THAT much of a dick to him although jobs very much was an asshole.
