Films The Official bit-tech Movie Thread - What have you seen lately?

Alien Resurrection was a goddamned weird film. Not exactly terrible but just so off-tone, like it was targeted at an audience demographic that doesn't exist. It's got a great cast though, Ron Pearlman and floppyface French dude carried it. Wynona Ryder can act now but she couldn't act then in my opinion, an absolute plank of a character. Sigourney Weaver seemed to realise she was playing a dumb dead character in a dumb dead franchise instalment though, and hammed it up to 11.

The one scene with real pathos that I actually remembered and took seriously was the clone lab. She briefly snaps out of camp mode and goes "oh ****, they gave me a real Ripley moment to act properly" and smashes it, literally and figuratively. If the whole film had been as grim and disturbing as that scene it'd have been a classic.

 

Ghostbusters : Afterlife

Colour me impressed, it walked a very fine line betwixt new & nostalgia, but hit the balance bob on

 

Lightyear - Woke Nonsense/10
But with one or two funny lines thrown in. I'm not a cat fan particularly, but I did like this one (or at least, the idea of a robot one like it that doesn't know its own sarcasm).

EDIT: corrected film name, no offence intended to Lightspeed. Or Lightspeed.

 

What does that even mean? Watched it recently myself and enjoyed it.

 

Not surprised you're confused - I put the wrong film title in, which doesn't help...!

 

I'd actually read it as Lightyear without realising it! So still not sure what woke nonsense means/is referring to.

 

I feel like people who say "but what do you mean by that?" almost always know what was meant and are trying to embroil both parties in an argument.

Wokeness is one of the most ubiquitous and widely used terms on the internet, even I understand the insinuation and I'm literally not on any social media, don't watch the news and don't have a TV license.

If you think "grr it's too woke" is an invalid or tacky criticism, just say that, don't pretend the person mentioning it is speaking in Martian.

On the 0.1% chance you genuinely have no idea what woke means, the concept has been in popular usage so long it has a lengthy Wikipedia article now:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

 

So according to that they rated the film "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination nonsense"/10.
What does that even mean? Is that a high rating, a low rating? Most of the time I've heard woke be used is meant as an insult and moaning about something they read or watched not purely featuring white straight men walking about, so just wanted some clarification.

 

I mean I've never spent too much time trying to understand what 'woke' is although I get the impression alot of people use it for all sorts of reasons, usually trying to use it as an insult.

 

Yeah, well it's twice now you've reacted in the same way to someone mentioning the word. Your intentions might be innocent, so it might just be miscommunication/misunderstanding, but it reads like you want an argument.

 

I couldn't disagree more strongly. The word 'woke' has been appropriated and had its original meaning so twisted beyond recognition that it's often impossible to know what someone actually means. Like "politically correct" before it, it's become a catch-all bogeyman that can be used to mean whatever someone wants it to mean.

If people use "woke" in a perjorative or negative sense, without any further clarification, then I'm going to assume that they're objecting to basic human decency. Because as best as I can tell, all the things that people complain about as being "woke" generally fall under that category: not being a d!ck to other people.

 

Yup, pretty much how I see it and why now I no longer understand what it means. It has lost all meaning.

I generally now take it if somebody is accused of being woke then they're probably just not a tw@t.

 

When some marks something down for being 'woke', I translate it to 'overly politically correct'. And it's a valid point. Examples:

1) Retconnoning of established characters for no good reason (e.g. making Faye Valentine's character a lesbian in the failed live action Cowboy Bebop).

2) Dramatically overpowering a (typically female) character and making men (typically white) the villains, usually including incompetence or being evil just for the sake of it (e.g. Horizon Zero Dawn).

3) Disproportionate representation of the LGBTQ community that is out of place for the film/series/game (e.g. The Old Guard).

4) Making the bad guy characters make racist/homophobic comments that are just completely out of place, just so the protagonist can be completely justified in killing them (e.g. The Old Guard again).

At the end of the day, I'm actually an optimist and I assume that people just want to get on (apart from that tw@t Audi driver who cut me up yesterday). I don't like it when it's shoved in my face. The large majority of people have no problem with other people being themselves, just as long as it doesn't stop them getting on with their own life.

And the people who are racist/homophobic/otherwise hateful? You're not going to change their mind by making a 'woke' film.

 

I don't want to get into a pointy-by-point blow-by-blow thing, because ain't nobody got time for that and it rarely achieves anything anyway. But I will say that representation matters, and when you're not used to having minority groups fairly represented then it can feel out of place or jarring. Female characters or protagonists in video games who aren't just eye candy are a perfect example of that. Of course there are good and bad ways to do it, and you can debate the artistic merits until the cows come home, but ultimately whether it's "appropriate" is not something I can judge. I'm a straight cis-gendered middle-aged white dude, and there's already plenty of those to go around.

The point is that no two people will agree on what "woke" means, even if you trot out dictionary definitions, just as no two people ever agreed on what "politically correct" meant. Whatever meaning it might have once had before it was picked up by culture warriors is long since gone.

FWIW though - and I know I said I wasn't going to do this but frankly I'm still sore over this show - I didn't think they really made a big thing out of Faye Valentine being gay (or possibly bisexual) in the live action Cowboy Bebop. I do remember thinking "huh, that's an interesting take on it", but I don't think it detracted from the character they were portraying. I still thought that the character in the live action version was sh_t, but that's not because she was gay or bi: it's because I thought the entire show was sh_t!

 

Well you would you lefty woke liberal elitist

 

I don't care about your feelings

That sounds like a "you" problem.

 

Yes, you can. I don't give a sh!t what you are. You're always allowed to give your opinion on whether something's appropriate or not. Why?

• You're a human being.
• You've displayed good judgement in the past on Bit-Tech.

So, please don't EVER tell me your opinion doesn't count because XYZ .

 

The Core 5/10

It's engaging enough to keep watching till the end, but it's so utterly ridiculous that you have to treat it like unintentional comedy. And the SFX budget was obviously very low, but the production team did quite well considering.

Dead Silence 0/10

I legit fell asleep watching this. It's quite the opposite of what horror movies are supposed to do. My rule: if I don't (or can't) finish a movie, it's an automatic zero.

 

The Core is such a guilty pleasure, I love cheesy disaster films....I'm looking at you MoonFall