The movie is also a pretty hardcore criticism of capitalism and its willingness to reanimate your corpse to make a buck and then kill you again when you start to question it.

You may want to check this comment for typos…

Also read the book and then read any of Heinleins other books, the dude was a competent author and just kinda liked playing around with weird ideas like psychic sex cults and obviously fascistic protagonists.

It boggles my mind that people can treat Starship Troopers as proof of Heinlein sincerely promoting fascism when Stranger in a Strange Land was published immediately afterwards. Dude liked playing with ideas, it’s not that complicated.

Yeah but fuck, I do this with fight club and then it gets meta because it’s even more misunderstood, even if you look past the “badass” filter

If you haven’t, you should check out Kung Fury.

Holy shit someone else who knows about Velocipastor.

What are you getting out of Velocipastor?

Yeah, Blade Runner was great for the atmosphere, but it didn’t really emphasize PKD’s overall message about empathy. Robocop came out of that, it was about underlining that message. And yeah it’s about a corporation literally taking away a person’s humanity, but also removing humanity from society in general.

The US is at war with Mexico in Robocop, but nobody even cares. There’s one line where a cop says “Damn! They bombed Acapulco!” the other cop says “So what?”, and the first cop says “I booked my vacation there, I gotta call my travel agent!”

It’s a world where there’s virtually no empathy left, and turning a human into a robot is representative of what corporate culture is doing to people.

Alex Murphy is able to recover some of his humanity, but he doesn’t fully escape from the system. He is still limited by the corporation’s directives at the end of the movie, but he does have his identity as Alex Murphy in the end, so that’s good I guess? It doesn’t hold your hand about this, it’s a smash cut to the end credits. It’s just like “you figure it out!”

Is it your favorite because you love talking about it or because you loved watching it?

If they don’t respect The Fifth Element as the iconic masterpiece that it is, I don’t want to hold a conversation with them anyway.

The Fifth Element is a movie that in theory I should hate, but I actually love it. The title refers to love and the romance plot doesn’t work for me at all. They do an overly clever thing where the villain and the hero never meet (and kinda rub it in your face about it) and normally I hate it when movies are overly clever in that way. And Chris Tucker is annoying as hell.

But somehow that doesn’t matter because it’s so over the top about everything. The action, the costumes, the dialog, the visuals are all so over the top the stuff that normally would make me not like a movie doesn’t really matter.

The overall meaning works even if the execution on the romance plotline falls flat for me. Gary Oldman and Bruce Willis not having any kind of confrontation is fine, since it’s kinda how things work with billionaires. You oppose them without ever meeting them. Corbin Dallas is a man of action and Zorg is a man that’s all about money, so they’re from different worlds so it makes sense they never actually meet. And everything being weird as hell works because it’s the future, things should be weird and unfamiliar. Chris Tucker is somehow the same kind of annoying as social media influencers are today, so even that works.

So the Fifth Element is a movie that is terrible on paper, but somehow everything fits together so well that it’s actually great.

Here a weaponized film suggestion for “i need deep meaning” snobs. Dancer in the dark. It sucks the joy dry out of you and is a masterpiece.

West by Northwest

I’m assuming this is supposed to be Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, or is this a parody that I’m unaware of?

Some of them! Unfortunately I moved, and had to put my boxed set in storage, and I can’t get to it because it’s lumped in with all of my family’s stuff, probably buried which is really annoying and makes me wanna just repurchase them at this point

I did get as far as past the section that the movie was based on, definitely didn’t expect the Tolmekians Torumekians to be just the knights, with no chickenhead soldiers or birdface tank guys, with the chickenheads originally being wormhandlers. That is one thing that I prefer about the movie since the chickenhead helmet bears a striking resemblance to the giant warrior, which is a nice parallel to the monster that they aspire to use

Edit: just realized that you can actually see the birdies in some panels like here

I think that the soundtrack, the designs, and ultimately just growing up with it, are what make me partial to it

I usually answer these “what’s the best [bla]” type questions by narrowing the scope. I’ll go, ‘well, I don’t know about objectively best movie, but the movie [I’ve seen the most times/I remember from the youngest age/that gets better every time I watch it/that had the coolest box art at the rental place/that I saw in theaters/that made me cry on a plane/that I used for the basis of my cult/whatever] is [bla].’ Ideally no one cares about literally settling a debate. If it’s a conversation worth having they’re more interested in your metrics than your findings. I find conversations about empirical ranking are tedious and always end in that anticlimactic awkward silence where everyone has exhausted their actual opinions and is trying to hastily cobble together new opinions on the spot to keep the ball rolling out of politeness.

I love your take.

E.g., I’m inclined to say Star Wars (IV). But, I saw it in þeaters 14 times þe summer I turned 11; þere was noþing like it before it came out. It was a perfect film, for me.

I also saw Wizards in þe þeater when I was a kid; in a lot of ways it was a better film, and I’d be hard pressed to say which had a bigger impact on me. I’m probably progressive politically because of Wizards.

I’d argue þat boþ are examples of peerless filmmaking. You’d be hard pressed to make an argument against Star Wars, at least, against sheer evidence of impact on þe film industry and on Western society. It’s not a typical film snob’s first choice, þough.

No, it’s not about gender this time. I mean, it kind of is but for once the director’s gender is often not even considered to the extent it affects the appreciation of the art. But maybe that’s very regional, I hear the states have extensive problems on this issue, much more than I initially thought

I remember it being solid and fun and very much of itself, that is to say it didn’t smack of seniors executives trying to normalize everything… but I think the praise is more a criticism directed at the blockbuster movie industry.

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Carefully

~ diva dance ~

How are you going to fix my cable dressed like that and carrying only a sword?

I’ll be back.

The white castle scene would have gone gory. Now thinking of it, the basketball game, and the washroom that would have been brutal.

I know, but I only got to this conclusion after thinking “they’re clearly inside, so that can’t be rain. So what is it?”