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jriddle73's Replies
And in what smoke-filled back room are they meeting?
Militant antifa activists in the U.S. are largely anarchists, which is to say, anti-government, not "working together" with government, and opposed to the Democratic party. The contraction "antifa" doesn't stand for "anti-fascism"; it stands for "Anti-Fascist Action," which was an actual anti-fascist militia in the '30s they use as a symbol. I'm sure there's some tortured, Orwellian way you justify calling fighting fascism "textbook fascism," but not too sure I can to hear it.
Ebert gave NOTLD zero stars--none--in 1969. That 3.5 was retroactive (there's even a note about it on the page to which you linked).
I have a love/hate relationship with Ebert and Gene Siskel. Some of the development of my love of movies came from them but they could be insufferable at times.
Rightists misuse it far more these days, but it's been kicked around by everyone.
It's a noble profession that fell into disrepute well before the internet because it so often fell into the hands of elitists and snobs. In the internet era, everyone is a movie critic but few are very good at it. Most "reviews" are mostly plot synopses, which is neither challenging nor, to get at your initial question, relevant. It isn't, as I see it, the job of a critic to tell you the plot of the movie; that's what the movie is for. A critic should have something to say about what the movie has to say, or its place in our world or about questions it raises. Sometimes, there's something worth saying, sometimes there isn't. When Roger Ebert was trashing movies like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE because of the reactions to it by people in the audience with which he watched it, when he trashed THOR because it failed to explain things it actually had explained but he'd missed because he wasn't paying attention, he was being a very <i>bad</i> critic.
The TWD board was a lot of fun in the early seasons. The "napping zombies" controversy, that "Ed's Revenge" video someone put together, the timeline issues, parachuting zombies, etc.. I became sort of the arch-critic of the show over that time and my reviews, which, over the years, addressed it from just about every conceivable angle, would end up generating hundreds of responses. It was great fun.
I guess "HE TALKED! ABOUT! THE DEER!" will never not be funny.
Haven't seen it in a few years but I can't imagine the finale was any worse than most of what had preceded it--for most of its run, it was one of the worst, poorest-written shows on television. If, by the end, they'd stopped killing off the queer or black characters, that's a major change (the Black Guy Rule, in particular, was rigidly enforced through most of the run).
VICE is plenty dark and depressing--it's basically top-notch film noir done as a tv series--but it also has a healthy sense that these are vice-cops and a lot of the job is basically bullsh!t, so the show is often funny, even farcical.
Yes, the basic driving idea behind the 2006 movie was to take MIAMI VICE and strip away everything that made it unique, innovative and great. Godawful, pointless movie.
I've long wondered what it would be like to watch MIAMI VICE for the first time now, after decades of shows and movies ripping it off. It's just as great a show as ever but would it seem as fresh and innovative after a few decades of some of what it established has been done and done and done across media?
All of the RAIDERS sequels are very poor to straight-up godawful. Insultingly stupid cash-ins and nothing more.
No.
It was the silliness that not only undercut and rendered absurd the efforts at darker material but also killed the movie. The darkness belongs in a Batman movie. In BR, the silliness is just overwhelming and takes one out of the movie at every turn, makes one wonder why one is even bothering to watch this mess. Those complaining about the darkness just wanted some Adam West stupidity in front of which they could park the kiddies and decided--probably wrongly--it was too intense for children.
It was Adam West goofiness, filtered through Burton (stuff like the programmable batarang, the bomb, etc. was straight Adam West stuff). In real time, I missed BATMAN RETURNS, and went right into BATMAN FOREVER having not seen how the original had deteriorated in the 1st sequel. Talk about suddenly being doused in ice-water! I was flabbergasted.
The show became dumber and dumber while also devolving into a pattern of 5 minutes of plots being stretched to fill entire episodes. By the 3rd season, the writers were writing so little that production had to be repeatedly shut down. The showrunner's gofer was allowed to "write" an ep. One entire ep was 2 characters just looking at one another.
Hey, you never know...
<i>The first 3-4 seasons are generally excellent.</i>
No, they're really, <i>really</i> not. The show in that period featured some of the worst writing to be found anywhere on television, particularly in season 3.
The show would get marginally better or worse at times but all of the problems people came to hate about it (and to attribute to whatever season alienated them from it) were present from early on--many in the 1st season and all of them by the 2nd. It's just that people got tired of them at different speeds.
There's no such thing as a "centrist." Some have tried to use the word as a synonym for "pragmatist," but that's not defensible. When the corporate press uses the word (or its twin "moderate"), they're referring to the Clintonite right among the elected officials in the Democratic party or the conservative wing among elected officials of the Republican party. Most Americans aren't ideologues, and wouldn't even give the matter enough thought to decide where, overall, they could realistically be said to fall.
The shadow of Adam West Batman lingered VERY heavily, not just over any screen adaptation of the character but over any adaptation of any comic character. The whole point of this Batman project was to move away from that nonsense and make something representative of the darker, more complete character that had developed in the comics. The casting of Keaton, who was a big star at the time but whose stardom was entirely down to goofy comedy roles, suggested the production may have gone off on a very wrong track. Thankfully, this proved not to be the case, although the Adam West goofiness reappeared with a vengeance in Burton's 2nd bat-flick then totally took over with the others in that run.