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Thread: Match Cut Madness 3: Best of the 00s

  1. #601
    Producer Yxklyx's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting DFA1979 (view post)
    Oh God. That movie is beyond fucked up.
    In Audition, when she goes "kili, kili, kili" while she's doing some cutting - well in my Spanish speaking familiy, "kili, kili, kili" is what we say when we're tickling someone.

  2. #602
    The Pan megladon8's Avatar
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    I always thought she was saying "kitty kitty kitty."
    "All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"

    "Rick...it's a flamethrower."

  3. #603
    Quote Quoting Skitch (view post)
    You are the only one putting that standard on Closer.

    Rephrase: I feel like you put your experience into play sometimes, and other times ignore the possibility of others experience. Not maybe intentionally, I'm not trying to be a dick, just maybe your experience (relationship or otherwise) isn't the same as other have experienced? So maybe a movie portrayal you can't relate to does accurately portray a real life thing? Whether you buy it or not?
    With regards to believability, my personal life experiences are irrelevant. After all, there are plenty of films based on true stories that are unconvincing as fictional narratives (Spielberg's Munich, for instance). The issue isn't one of accuracy but one of artistry: a film can portray commonplace events in a manner that is unconvincing or it can depict fantastical events with great persuasiveness. It all depends on the skill of the filmmakers.
    Just because...
    The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022) mild
    Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) mild
    The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022) mild

    The last book I read was...
    The Complete Short Stories by Mark Twain


    The (New) World

  4. #604
    I'm the problem it's me DFA1979's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Yxklyx (view post)
    In Audition, when she goes "kili, kili, kili" while she's doing some cutting - well in my Spanish speaking familiy, "kili, kili, kili" is what we say when we're tickling someone.
    Heh that's funny and then I'm reminded that she does her own brand of tickling oh God.
    Blog!

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  5. #605
    Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
    With regard to The Lord of the Rings, it seems to me that the first question is: how genuinely progressive is its depiction of a world ostensibly less sexist than our own? I would argue not very, since the films' female characters gain assertiveness on the battlefield at the expense of sexual expression. In other words, the efforts of Jackson and his co-writers to imagine a non-sexist fantasy world are constrained by the sexist attitudes of the world in which the films were actually produced and consumed. It's evident that mainstream audiences in the early 2000s readily accepted the assertiveness of the films' female characters on the battlefield to the point that it aroused virtually no comment, but I doubt the same audiences would have as readily accepted them having Dionysian bisexual orgies. (Needless to say, there can be no female liberation without sexual liberation.)

    The second question is: how interesting is the film's depiction of a non-sexist fantasy world, limited though it may be in its omission of female sexuality? Again, I would argue not very since the films' unambiguously affirmative stance towards female empowerment (as distinct from emancipation or liberation) leaves nothing for the spectator to do but nod in agreement: Yes, this is how things ought be but aren't yet. The films' attitude is essentially pious and nothing is more boring in art than piety, since it doesn't allow for contradiction, messiness, tension, ambivalence, or complexity.

    This is, not incidentally, why so much liberal film criticism is not only insufferable but overly simplistic. In characterizing films in binary, either/or terms (progressive/regressive, enlightened/unenlightened, feminist/misogynist), such criticism fails to grapple with the complexity of pop culture as a site of ideological contradiction. To take the example of a classical film in which the heroine dies at the end, Josef von Sternberg's Dishonored has both progressive and conservative elements and much of the film's fascination results from the productive tension between them. Inevitably the prostitute heroine dies (by firing squad, no less), yet the film in no way endorses this, instead regarding her as a sort of martyr and contrasting her genuine (if sexually transgressive) patriotism with the hypocrisy of the male military officers. (Jonathan Rosenbaum has characterized the film as "an antiwar statement that a prostitute can do more for her countryman than a female spy.") Yet the film's attitude towards its heroine is far from straightforward, as evidenced by the famous close-up of her instinctively fixing her lipstick just before she's shot. On the one hand, the heroine/Marlene Dietrich is to be admired for her beauty, while on the other, her exaggerated, slightly campy makeup denotes the lack of an authentic essence. Basic Instinct evidences a similar split attitude towards its heroine, combining fascination and condemnation, although as I've pointed out elsewhere on this forum, she's never punished for her transgressions and the seeming phallic victory of the Michael Douglas character is highly provisional and could be reversed at any moment: if he's still alive at the end of the movie, it's only because Stone wants him alive for now. The contradictions of Sternberg and Verhoeven's films make them a lot more exciting to watch (and re-watch) than the bland liberal pieties of Portrait d'une jeune fille en feu or The Lord of the Rings, neither of which I have the slightest desire to see again.
    Trying to measure the progressiveness of the trilogy by merely zeroing in on its fantasy setting makes little sense though, because whether the films are set on Middle Earth or not, they're still created and released 100% on our Earth, by people who (male or female) are all products of a historically sexist society, so the actual relevant question is, how progressive is the trilogy's depiction of women when compared to other movies produced by the same overall culture up to that point? I would argue very, because, while "women of action" weren't unheard of in movies around the turn of the millennium, the prevailing trend of that time was still to sexually objectify them at the same time, giving off the illusion of empowering these women while still exploiting them for the viewing pleasure of the heterosexual men those movies were targeted at, having their (cheese)cake and eating it too, whether you're talking about Charlie's Angels, The Fast & The Furious, or Tomb Raider​...



    ...so LOTR's depiction of women still holds up much better, not just when compared to those examples, but also just on their own merits at the same time. Besides that, how do the women of the trilogy gain assertiveness at the expense of sexual expression? They weren't particularly sexual in the books in the first place (although this wasn't some double standard on Tolkien's part, since the male characters weren't different in that regard), nor should they have been changed to be so for the movies, and doing so would probably have been a bad idea, since it would in all likelihood have clashed with the fundamental tone of that world, like the unnecessary jump scare in Fellowship when Bilbo grabbed for the Ring off of Frodo (which was one of the few missteps Jackson made with the trilogy, IMO).
    Last edited by StuSmallz; 09-07-2021 at 07:48 AM.

  6. #606
    Voting is closed. Here are MC's results:

    Champion
    [
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    Runner-Up
    [
    ]

    Third Place
    [
    ]

    The madness is over... or is it?

  7. #607
    Quote Quoting StuSmallz (view post)
    Trying to measure the progressiveness of the trilogy by merely zeroing in on its fantasy setting makes little sense though, because whether the films are set on Middle Earth or not, they're still created and released 100% on our Earth, by people who (male or female) are all products of a historically sexist society, so the actual relevant question is, how progressive is the trilogy's depiction of women when compared to other movies produced by the same overall culture up to that point? I would argue very, because, while "women of action" weren't unheard of in movies around the turn of the millennium, the prevailing trend of that time was still to sexually objectify them at the same time, giving off the illusion of empowering these women while still exploiting them for the viewing pleasure of the heterosexual men those movies were targeted at, having their (cheese)cake and eating it too, whether you're talking about Charlie's Angels, The Fast & The Furious, or Tomb Raider​...

    ...so LOTR's depiction of women still holds up much better, not just when compared to those examples, but also just on their own merits at the same time. Besides that, how do the women of the trilogy gain assertiveness at the expense of sexual expression? They weren't particularly sexual in the books in the first place (although this wasn't some double standard on Tolkien's part, since the male characters weren't different in that regard), nor should they have been changed to be so for the movies, and doing so would probably have been a bad idea, since it would in all likelihood have clashed with the fundamental tone of that world, like the unnecessary jump scare in Fellowship when Bilbo grabbed for the Ring off of Frodo (which was one of the few missteps Jackson made with the trilogy, IMO).
    I haven't seen Charlie's Angels, The Fast and the Furious, or Tomb Raider (although I have seen 2 Fast 2 Furious, which I liked, and I played the first two Tomb Raider video games on Sony Playstation back in the day), so I can't comment on them, but claiming that The Lord of the Rings is more progressive in terms of gender politics than other Hollywood blockbusters of the same period seems to me a very weak argument--especially since, if nothing else, Angelina Jolie is still the star of Tomb Raider, and Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu are the stars of Charlie's Angels, whereas the women in The Lord of the Rings are all relegated to secondary roles. But more to the point, progressiveness is no guarantee of interestingness. One can approve of a film's politics and still find it deathly boring.

    But even if I were to concede for the sake of argument that The Lord of the Rings is relatively progressive in its treatment of women, and that Tomb Raider and the other films you mention sexually objectify their female stars (although I've seen Jolie a lot more naked than that in other films), well, so what? In what demonstrable way has The Lord of the Rings made the world a better place for women or has Tomb Raider (or Basic Instinct) made it worse? Ultimately, films aren't the weather but the thermometer: they can reveal the ideological contradictions of the societies that produce them but they don't change anything, for better or for worse. So if Jolie wants to show off some side-boob (or more), and men--and, I suspect, a good many women, straight and gay--want to see it, what's the harm? It may not be empowering but it's hardly a crime.

    As for the women of Jackson's trilogy gaining assertiveness on the battlefield at the expense of sexual expression, my point is that, insofar as the film's positive attitude toward their assertiveness represents a gain from a political standpoint, it entails a loss in other areas. To the extent that the women in The Lord of the Rings are portrayed as sexual beings, the expression of their sexuality is restricted to the confines of heterosexual monogamy (and is thus socially acceptable), whereas a femme fatale like the Sharon Stone character in Basic Instinct need not be either monogamous or strictly heterosexual. In other words, Verhoeven's film is essentially about the threat a liberated woman poses to the existing patriarchal order, while Jackson's trilogy never pushes the issue of female liberation--or any other issue--to a point of crisis. The problem with The Lord of the Rings films is that they're too respectable to be really fun.
    Just because...
    The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022) mild
    Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) mild
    The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022) mild

    The last book I read was...
    The Complete Short Stories by Mark Twain


    The (New) World

  8. #608
    collecting tapes Skitch's Avatar
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    I am very cool with the champ. I love the runner up, but I probably wouldn't have raised it that far.

  9. #609
    Quote Quoting Skitch (view post)
    I am very cool with the champ. I love the runner up, but I probably wouldn't have raised it that far.
    Ditto. I'll add, of the three, these are the madness results I like most.

    00s results > 80s results > 90s results

    [
    ]

    Every champion so far is a masterpiece. We're definitely getting that much right so far.

  10. #610
    collecting tapes Skitch's Avatar
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    I'm really proud of MC raising an animated film so high. Good job MC.

  11. #611
    I'm the problem it's me DFA1979's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Idioteque Stalker (view post)
    Ditto. I'll add, of the three, these are the madness results I like most.

    00s results > 80s results > 90s results

    [
    ]

    Every champion so far is a masterpiece. We're definitely getting that much right so far.
    Huh I've seen all of those. Guess I shouldn't be too surprised but I am. Good batch of movies for every decade.
    Blog!

    And it's happened once again
    I'll turn to a friend
    Someone that understands
    And sees through the master plan
    But everybody's gone
    And I've been here for too long
    To face this on my own
    Well, I guess this is growing up

  12. #612
    Producer Yxklyx's Avatar
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    Great work Idioteque Stalker!

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