Category Movies

The Dumbest Thing in Recent Memory – Vin Diesel driving off a cliff in Furious 7

kennyu4 2 Comments

I know what you’re thinking, it’s pretty ridiculous to call out something for being dumb in a proudly dumb action flick like a movie from the Fast and Furious franchise, but hear me out. This scene in particular is especially dumb in the classical sense. It’s not something you have to think too hard about like a movie plot hole, and it’s not something that really takes you out of the movie in terms of how stupid it was (that ship should have sailed long ago). It isn’t “so bad it’s good” dumb, I think it’s a bit too ridiculous for that, but it is a stupid enough moment to make you stop and think about what exactly went on in the writers room.

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The Lion King 2 Was a Seriously Underrated Classic

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The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride, the 1998 sequel to Disney’s The Lion King (something you may have heard about), was received poorly from critics. It happens to be another dreaded “Direct-to-DVD sequel” to a Disney film (a distinction that comes with the assumption that the product will be terrible), which probably gave a negative impression from the start, although the plot proved to be problematic as well. If the original Lion King was supposed to be a Disney retelling of Hamlet, this film would be its retelling of Shakespeare’s other supremely famous play, Romeo and Juliet. While its predecessor brought a fresh take on a timeless tale of fratricide, The Lion King 2 suffers from being highly derivative of other romantic stories. You have the outsider infiltrating our lead’s society for nefarious purposes only to end up falling in love with the person he was supposed to hurt and being forced between choosing between love and duty. There is nothing involving the romance between Simba’s daughter Kiara (Neve Campbell) and her boyfriend Kovu (Jason Marsden) that you won’t see coming, but the movie’s true strength lies in the story that is being told around them. Above all else, The Lion King II is a story about parenthood, and as a discussion on that subject this movie is very good.

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Avengers and Why the Ultron Humour Works

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A good villain has the power to elevate any story they’re in. They drive the plot obviously, but more important is the fact that they challenge the hero. Beyond physical confrontation, their goals are in direct opposition to whatever ideal the heroes are striving for, and because of that writers are given a wonderful opportunity to say something interesting about a specific subject. For example, Syndrome from Pixar’s The Incredibles argues that only people’s perception is of value while the rest is irrelevant, but he is proven wrong by the heroes when they demonstrate that the substance and not just the appearance of being a hero matters more than anything else. Sometimes, the villain will carry the weight of the world on their shoulders and if the audience doesn’t connect with them, the story will have an enormous gap. There are many ways to connect a villain to the audience, some of which include sympathy, fear-factor, and relatability. In the case of Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, the titular Ultron is written to connect with the audience using humour.

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Guilty Pleasure Tropes

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Ever watch something that you know you should hate for various reasons (that usually include being the fact that it’s stupid as all hell), but you enjoy the hell out of it anyways? That’s what most would describe as a guilty pleasure, and just about everyone seems to have one in the form of a movie, TV Show, game, or book. Maybe it’s considered a “guilty” pleasure for you because it advocates an ideological stance you’re totally apposed to, maybe it’s something that people you just don’t like identify with, and perhaps it’s just stupid as mentioned earlier, but all of these guilty pleasures are comprised of guilty pleasure tropes. Things that many GP’s have in common, a way to immediately let the viewer know what they’re getting into. In this post, I’m going to highlight 3 of my favourite tropes and explain why they’re just as “right” as they are wrong.

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“Stealing White Heroes” – The Ridiculous Triple Standard and Why Minority Heroes Matter

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I should probably clear up the fact that, yes, the phrase “triple standards” isn’t a thing; however, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t the best way to describe the situation we find ourselves in with race and casting in Hollywood. Casting the right actors for movies (and superhero ones in particular) is arguably the most important part about making one. Who you cast seriously affects the box-office turnout, the strength of your film, and its critical reception. There is a lot that goes into picking who should star in your movie because that process alone will mean the difference between success and failure. Thanks to the potential for prestige and adoration enjoyed by many prominent actors (and perhaps a genuine passion for the craft), there is a huge number of people aspiring for roles in films; all of which coming from wildly different backgrounds, but the unfortunate reality is that while many of them would like to be movie stars, most will fail miserably. A huge factor in this is the discrepancy between race and representation in Hollywood.

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The “White Guilt Film” Complaint and Why it’s Offensive

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Twelve Years a Slave, The Butler, and even Django Unchained have been labeled with the “White Guilt Film” moniker. With Selma already receiving a great deal of positive buzz from critics, that phrase has seen a resurgence of use. And honestly? Labeling a film that covers things like slavery, discrimination, and other historical struggles for black people simply as “White Guilt Films” is an extraordinarily offensive thing to do. On top of that, it’s also incredibly arrogant and – I say this seriously – completely stupid. What’s worse is people are going further to state that these films are praised merely because critics are coerced into giving positive reviews out of some sense of guilt. Many negative criticisms on these films are often preceded by some variation of the absurd claim “Oh I’ll be called racist for not liking it”, which is a tellingly defensive thing to say and speaks volumes about the real racial issue that surrounds these movies. In this article, I’m going to unpack, analyze, and dismiss all of the “White Guilt Film” arguments, and hopefully by the end you will see how problematic they are if you don’t already.

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The Hobbit: The Battle of the 3 Unexpected Desolations of Integrity in the Journey for Cash

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Credits to Harry Partridge (a youtube animator) for this excellent portrayal of Peter Jackson

Man do I hate The Hobbit movies. Yes, obviously I can’t stand what a blatant cash grab the franchise is, but there’s also the little personal reasons I have to hate it too. When I told people I was going to make a blog, this type of post was what they had in mind. Random vitriol pointed at something that probably doesn’t deserve it with nothing new or insightful to say about it. I think this post will fall into that category. So if you’re a big fan of the series (in which case we can’t be friends), stop reading now. Here are things I hate about The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings franchise as a whole.

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The Answer is Suffering

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“You go to the movies to see people you love suffer-that’s why you go to the movies.”

This is a quote from Joss Whedon, a writer, director, composer, and the crowned “Lord of the Nerds”. He is behind some of the biggest movie and TV franchises of all time (he directed The Avengers and created Buffy the Vampire Slayer), with several of his works developing dedicated cult followings. This is a striking quote that caused a lot of fans anticipating The Avenger‘s sequel to raise an eyebrow, and anyone whose watched Buffy, Angel, or some of his other shows should already have had some inclination that this was his mindset when it comes to creating stories. He kills character we love, he builds up hope for a certain thing to happen with the sole intent of shattering it, and he does not always provide us with happy endings. The most common criticism against Whedon is that he ventures too often into dark territory. That he relishes in cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and loves to punish his audience for loving his characters. I would argue that Whedon is doing the opposite of that, and that suffering is the key element in every story. By forcing characters to go through despair, he connects us with their world. Whedon isn’t punishing us for liking his characters, he is connecting the audience to their lives by sharing the most intimate thing they have: Their pain.

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Nicolas Cage is Unquestionably Good

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Recently, the question of whether or not Nicolas Cage is a good actor has come up frequently. Is he a legitimately good actor, a good actor in the “Tommy Wiseau” sense, a bad actor, or an actor that cannot be measured by any standard of quality as Dan Harmon’s Community recently suggested? Commonly cited in Cage-Theory is that he is either a good actor who suffered a Shyamalan-esque fall in grace due to a lack of consistency in his ability, or that his fall can be attributed to the tremendously poor roles he has chosen within the last decade. I find myself in the latter camp. The Wicker Man, Ghost Rider (1 and 2), The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, all of these films are unquestionably awful pieces of cinema that Cage happens to be a part of, and those are just a few I’ve named. There are countless other terrible Cage films that have been released in the past, and it looks like countless more are on the way as well. But when you stop to think about it, is that really a bad thing?

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