(Thread IKs:
Nuns with Guns)
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Microcline posted:He doesn't even say that The Dark Knight Returns is a bad comic, or that we shouldn't make comics like it, but that it works because it's an elseworlds and that there's something wrong if the dominant version of this colorful children's cartoon is a gritty story about celebrating sadistic violence. I personally think TDKR is a mediocre take on the hyper-violent superhero tho, even before getting into the implications of it being the dominant form. The two ways I see of doing it are to either to depict the uncomfortable consequences of violence (e.g. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen) or to lean into the goofy, unrealistic spectacle of it (e.g. Blade) Uncomfortable depictions of violence is practically Snyders calling card, but it seems some folks didn't get the memo (See: World of spite video linked a few pages back) or think it's some sort of endorsement of randian objectivism. Turns out that when you strip away the power fantasy elements and depict the consequences of knocking a dude through a building as horrific instead of cool people lose their minds. But if you set mass murder to a jaunty tune then it's cool and awesome! These two gifs depict roughly the same thing, but one is maligned as objectivist disaster porn and the other is celebrated as a cool character beat    Hell yeah, Snyder Snype, suckas Edit: Just to clarify, I don't mean to imply one is superior to the other. To borrow an example, John Wick for instance, wouldn't be nearly as fun if it was hyperrealistic violence. The point I was trying to make (kinda badly, perhaps) is that uncomfortable depictions of violence is usually misinterpreted as endorsement or glorification of said violence. McCloud fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Nov 28, 2020 |
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Nov 28, 2020 00:41
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Terrible Opinions posted:The video being discussed isn't about kids turning out well, but about adults claiming ownership over something that is for children in a way that denies it or at least makes it less accessible to chidlren. Unless you're just talking about the MPAA in general, in which case yeah the MPAA is dumb and shouldn't exist. Some form of consistent content warning should exist, but the one we have no is awful. I was talking about the MPAA in general yeah
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Nov 28, 2020 00:52
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McCloud posted:Uncomfortable depictions of violence is practically Snyders calling card, but it seems some folks didn't get the memo (See: World of spite video linked a few pages back) or think it's some sort of endorsement of randian objectivism. Turns out that when you strip away the power fantasy elements and depict the consequences of knocking a dude through a building as horrific instead of cool people lose their minds. But if you set mass murder to a jaunty tune then it's cool and awesome! In the Timm animated one, it was Saturday so all those buildings were empty.
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Nov 28, 2020 01:09
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:In the Timm animated one, it was Saturday so all those buildings were empty. he x-rayed the building first to make sure it was empty Alternatively: He used super-math to calculate the trajectory so no civilians got hurt (lol Hulk) Alt take 2: Rubber Darkseid. Honest.
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Nov 28, 2020 01:15
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Nuns with Guns posted:I went and watched the Patrick H Willems video yesterday and I realized he kind of says a lot of the same things I mentioned in my prior post. I'm not sure I agree that, say, Batman should be solely reserved for all-ages or kid appropriate shows. I think he's right that chasing R-rated superhero films and the kind of content that's added to them is the result of myopic Hollywood assessments of what made Deadpool successful and what people expect in R-rated content. It's funny because it's the same shallow assessment of what made Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns successful in 1986 that lead to the "darker" comics of the late 80s and 90s. I feel like one of the points I agreed strongest with from the video was that the DCAU shows were probably one of the best presentations of those characters. They were far from perfect, but they occasionally dipped their toes into covering more mature subject matter and tones than people would expect from a kids cartoon about super heroes and generally treated them with the gravity and sometimes the respect they deserved and moreso they trusted that the audience watching was capable of understanding and dealing with it as well. It kind of goes back to the discussion of how people conflate blood and violence with "mature" when it's a very thirteen year old in middleschool mindset of rad cool grownup stuff to watch batman say a gently caress and punch someone's jaw off in a fountain of gore, as opposed to the storylines that deal with the fact that sometimes the villains really are just people in extremely lovely circumstances who do what they do because they fell through society's cracks and feel like they don't have any other options left and punching them doesn't solve the underlying problem; something the batman animated series dipped into more than once when it wasn't the joker's wacky crime time.
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Nov 28, 2020 01:25
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-9wma8WW-Y this video is like a week old but im just seeing it now, so you all are too!
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Nov 28, 2020 01:27
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McCloud posted:Uncomfortable depictions of violence is practically Snyders calling card, but it seems some folks didn't get the memo (See: World of spite video linked a few pages back) or think it's some sort of endorsement of randian objectivism. Turns out that when you strip away the power fantasy elements and depict the consequences of knocking a dude through a building as horrific instead of cool people lose their minds. But if you set mass murder to a jaunty tune then it's cool and awesome! It probably helps that the entire erst of those bits of surrounding those two shots. One of them has the cast of heroes and villains saving people evacuating with very little damage to the surroundings outside of that shot and like one more building where the slap fight with Bats and Darkseid happen in. The other is just one tiny portion of a fight scene that goes on entirely too long that is 50% building damage/collateral death by weight. To the point that one of the snyder movies opens with batman on the ground during one of the attacks just to emphasize the absolute death and carnage it caused, lol. As always, yeah these shots are superficially similar, but the context of the writing and the tone and the rest of the film are part of what causes people to have a negative impression of it.
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Nov 28, 2020 02:11
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McCloud posted:Uncomfortable depictions of violence is practically Snyders calling card, but it seems some folks didn't get the memo (See: World of spite video linked a few pages back) or think it's some sort of endorsement of randian objectivism. Turns out that when you strip away the power fantasy elements and depict the consequences of knocking a dude through a building as horrific instead of cool people lose their minds. But if you set mass murder to a jaunty tune then it's cool and awesome! I don't know how blind you have to be to read Watchmen and watch Snyder's movie and not see how he butchered it with slow-mo and superhero poses. The original doesn't even have "fights" (apart from one or two specific scenes) so much as singular acts of violence and Snyder saw it fit to reinterpret everything as carefully choreographed displays of hypercompetent violence. And even though I haven't seen either movie, there are clear differences between the damage depicted (fire and flying glass vs. ambiguous smoke), what the focus is (the first shot is about buildings being damaged, the second is about the clearly visible villain being punched through buildings), and the reaction of the crowds, along with the fact that one of them is a cartoon. The second is a wrestler throwing a heel through a row of props scaled up to mythic proportions, the first is "superman did 9/11". And that's before considering either shot in context.
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Nov 28, 2020 02:18
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Microcline posted:And even though I haven't seen either movie, there are clear differences between the damage depicted (fire and flying glass vs. ambiguous smoke), what the focus is (the first shot is about buildings being damaged, the second is about the clearly visible villain being punched through buildings), and the reaction of the crowds, along with the fact that one of them is a cartoon. That's exactly McCloud's point. As long as its clearly fantastic (or cartoonish) the destructiveness and violence seems nonthreatening, but once you portray those things "realistically" it suddenly becomes uncomfortable.
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Nov 28, 2020 02:28
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Karloff posted:The rating systems also focus a lot on repeatability. They don't want kids replicating actually dangerous fight moves on their siblings, which is why the most gruesome contemporary film series at the PG-13 level is Jurassic Park. You get severed arms, people being torn in half and to pieces on screen, waterfalls of blood, one poor dude getting crushed flat and getting stuck to the bottom of a Tyrannosaur's foot and getting repeatedly crushed into pulp. But no kid is gonna eat another kid* so it sneaks through. Something else to consider is that movie distributors will (depending on the film) try to edit it down from R to a PG-13, since they can potentially get more money from a younger audience, who would otherwise not be able to view a R. Antifa Turkeesian posted:In the Timm animated one, it was Saturday so all those buildings were empty. ZenMasterBullshit posted:It probably helps that the entire erst of those bits of surrounding those two shots. One of them has the cast of heroes and villains saving people evacuating with very little damage to the surroundings outside of that shot and like one more building where the slap fight with Bats and Darkseid happen in. The other is just one tiny portion of a fight scene that goes on entirely too long that is 50% building damage/collateral death by weight. To the point that one of the snyder movies opens with batman on the ground during one of the attacks just to emphasize the absolute death and carnage it caused, lol. If anything, Superman: TAS made me wonder what it must be like to live in Metropolis, because if Superman and his opponent are damaging buildings on a weekly basis, the insurance rates must be hell. This is sort of peripheral to the discussion to some degree, but I used to listen to an animation podcast, and there were a few episodes where the talked about the DCAU and the production of it. One of the things they mentioned was that Bruce Timm had to deal with the network censor in regards to what would could be shown, and one of the issues was villains/henchmen using firearms (with the censors wanting them to use lasers or something). What Timm did, though was have the villains use Tommy guns, and his argument was, "No child would be able to replicate this, since no child could possibly get access to a Tommy gun in this day and age." Surprisingly, that argument worked.
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Nov 28, 2020 02:35
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Schwarzwald posted:That's exactly McCloud's point. As long as its clearly fantastic (or cartoonish) the destructiveness and violence seems nonthreatening, but once you portray those things "realistically" it suddenly becomes uncomfortable. Yeah, that's what I find interesting about Snyder's superhero movies. Obviously it's not for everyone, but I like that his consequential violence co-exists alongside the more cartoonishly framed violence in the MCU, where the 9/11 equivalent event killed a couple hundred people. edit: This is not me wanting to start a Snyder/MCU-fight in this thread again! I just think that, since comic adaptations are so huge right now, it's good to have a range of styles and approaches. I mean, if 9 out of 10 blockbusters a year are superhero movies, I'd like at least a couple to be aimed more at adults than children. Metis of the Chat Thread fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Nov 28, 2020 |
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Nov 28, 2020 02:38
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Bingo Cop Metis posted:Yeah, that's what I find interesting about Snyder's superhero movies. Obviously it's not for everyone, but I like that his consequential violence co-exists alongside the more cartoonishly framed violence in the MCU, where the 9/11 equivalent event killed a couple hundred people. See it's what makes the whole thing feel even more juvenile than the normal super hero poo poo. Going "Wow if this was realistic itd be way more hosed up and brutal" was a line of thinking that was bled dry of interesting commentary by the time I was 14.
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Nov 28, 2020 02:54
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Schwarzwald posted:That's exactly McCloud's point. As long as its clearly fantastic (or cartoonish) the destructiveness and violence seems nonthreatening, but once you portray those things "realistically" it suddenly becomes uncomfortable. So you're saying Snyder is basically operating on the same mental level as Control Alt Delete, except with cartoons instead of video games?
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Nov 28, 2020 02:58
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:See it's what makes the whole thing feel even more juvenile than the normal super hero poo poo. Going "Wow if this was realistic itd be way more hosed up and brutal" was a line of thinking that was bled dry of interesting commentary by the time I was 14. Oh sure, and it's hardly a new phenomenon, I know superhero comics are constantly going through cycles of optimistic -> edgy -> meta -> rinse and repeat etc. But like I said, it's such a huge genre at the moment I welcome variety in tone. Going to use a Jenny Nicholson tweet as an excuse to pivot away from this topic: https://twitter.com/JennyENicholson/status/1332484720479719426 Really enjoyed this movie, it has the classic rom-com flaw of one half of the couple being awful and a side character having way more chemistry with the protagonist, but it was a lot of fun! I saw it at a drive-in and it was great having something approaching the feeling of a packed cinema with carloads of lesbians cheering at big moments. Real cinemas are open here again but obviously at very low capacity, so it was a nice experience after months of isolation.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:15
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Microcline posted:I don't know how blind you have to be to read Watchmen and watch Snyder's movie and not see how he butchered it with slow-mo and superhero poses. The original doesn't even have "fights" (apart from one or two specific scenes) so much as singular acts of violence and Snyder saw it fit to reinterpret everything as carefully choreographed displays of hypercompetent violence. You don't think perhaps there was a bit of a commentary intended with the scene where the two vigilante superheroes get sexual gratification from brutally and graphically crippling and murdering a bunch of thugs? No? Ok then. As others said, that was my point. The "realness" of the MoS scene made people uncomfortable because it wasn't abstract cartoon violence anymore, which itself was the point! "Uncomfortable depictions of violence is practically Snyders calling card". Superheroes knocking monsters through building is cool, but when you remove the cartoonish aspect it's also abjectly horrifying. It is it possible to have a mature take on the genre that uses violence and gore in service of the story (See, Watchmen) but there should be purpose to it and not just for the sake of gratification. And I love that there are movies that want to explore that aspect of the genre and do its own thing instead of just copying the MCU formula (no shade, the MCU does what it does very well) , but my original point was that this was wildly divisive, because many people refuse to see the genre as anything other than childish powerfantasies about men in spandex knocking monsters about, which is sad because there's absolutely room for both fun cartoony action where spandex-man knocks Maligno through a office building and one where there's actually consequences for doing so, especially if it drives the story.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:17
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There is a shortage of kid-friendly superhero material
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Nov 28, 2020 03:20
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:See it's what makes the whole thing feel even more juvenile than the normal super hero poo poo. Going "Wow if this was realistic itd be way more hosed up and brutal" was a line of thinking that was bled dry of interesting commentary by the time I was 14. Pointing out that violence has ugly consequences is cool and good actually, especially in an age where 99% of it is sanitized and normalized.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:22
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Every Snyder debate in this thread "I don't think Snyder movies examine idea X well" "No you see it's good because it examines idea X" "It's a bad examination of idea X" "No you see it examines idea X, that makes it unique and cool"
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Nov 28, 2020 03:26
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Terrible Opinions posted:Every Snyder debate in this thread In my experience it's usually claims of Snyder being a secret Hitler created to bring about the Trump presidency by the latest Youtube video followed by one or two people saying "Hmmm, that seems wrong" before somebody complains about how terrible Snyder fans are.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:30
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tbf McCloud is arguing that they think snyder does examine ideas well. they do actually back up their arguments and explain their thought processes so I always find their posts interesting to read, even if I don't necessarily agree. But I guess that means no one else has seen the lesbian kristen stewart christmas romcom then?
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Nov 28, 2020 03:32
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Roth posted:In my experience it's usually claims of Snyder being a secret Hitler created to bring about the Trump presidency by the latest Youtube video followed by one or two people saying "Hmmm, that seems wrong" before somebody complains about how terrible Snyder fans are.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:32
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Terrible Opinions posted:So you didn't watch the video that started this conversation at all. Sorry, I didn't realize when you said "Every Snyder debate" you meant this one in particular.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:33
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Roth posted:Sorry, I didn't realize when you said "Every Snyder debate" you meant this one in particular.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:35
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Terrible Opinions posted:Sorry you're right should have started with "posts a Dan Olson tweet that may or may not be misread" Does he still post here at all?
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Nov 28, 2020 03:36
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No but people keep posting his tweets.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:38
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Bingo Cop Metis posted:tbf McCloud is arguing that they think snyder does examine ideas well. they do actually back up their arguments and explain their thought processes so I always find their posts interesting to read, even if I don't necessarily agree. Aww, that genuinely makes it worth the effort, thank you! Terrible Opinions posted:No but people keep posting his tweets. Tbf those are some terrible tweets
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Nov 28, 2020 04:08
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McCloud posted:Pointing out that violence has ugly consequences is cool and good actually, especially in an age where 99% of it is sanitized and normalized. Nothing Snyder has done has done it as deftly or skillfully as Kamen Rider Kuuga a children's superhero show that came out in 2000. Itd be cool and good if it was done well or with anything more to it than the fairly banal take that's been done better by the genre its critiquing for at least 40 years.
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Nov 28, 2020 04:08
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Schwarzwald posted:That's exactly McCloud's point. As long as its clearly fantastic (or cartoonish) the destructiveness and violence seems nonthreatening, but once you portray those things "realistically" it suddenly becomes uncomfortable. Oh god, are we going back down the 'What if Home Alone were R-rated and serious?' well again?
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Nov 28, 2020 04:22
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RareAcumen posted:Oh god, are we going back down the 'What if Home Alone were R-rated and serious?' well again? R-rated Home Alone where all the traps are rube goldberg machines that pull the trigger on a revolver
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Nov 28, 2020 04:26
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R rated home alone that's the 2 hours of story and then the kid dies setting up one if his own traps.
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Nov 28, 2020 04:29
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R rated home alone where the framing device is the court battle where Harry and Marv’s lawyers take the McCallisters for everything they’ve got
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Nov 28, 2020 04:35
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I started typing up a reply before I realized I was arguing with someone who thinks Penny Arcade and CAD are incisive criticism of video game violence
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Nov 28, 2020 04:36
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Microcline posted:I started typing up a reply before I realized I was arguing with someone who thinks Penny Arcade and CAD are incisive criticism of video game violence Ah, but it seems you voted for Joe Biden so who really is the villain here?
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Nov 28, 2020 04:42
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what if we deconstructed the implicit violence of sonic the hedgehog by making him carry a gun and have depression
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Nov 28, 2020 04:46
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:R rated home alone where the framing device is the court battle where Harry and Marv’s lawyers take the McCallisters for everything they’ve got We Need to Talk About Kevin, Part Two
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Nov 28, 2020 04:48
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:Nothing Snyder has done has done it as deftly or skillfully as Kamen Rider Kuuga a children's superhero show that came out in 2000. So instead of a fairly banal take on violence in the genre it would have been better to make a banal take with cartoon violence? Galaxy brained take there, gotta say. Your personal opinion on the execution notwithstanding, the original point I was making is that Zacks films fit the bill of superhero films with uncomfortable depictions of violence, and that it's perfectly fine to include that in the service of story/plot/character development, but that it's unpopular because folks are too invested in these films being sanitized power fantasies (ie Timm-style violence), and that it's a shame because there's plenty of room for both to co-exist. Even if both are banal I'd much rather have some variety and ambition in the banality rather than one boring bland flavor. RareAcumen posted:Oh god, are we going back down the 'What if Home Alone were R-rated and serious?' well again? Morbid curiosity compels me to ask. What?
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Nov 28, 2020 04:49
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Farm Frenzy posted:what if we deconstructed the implicit violence of sonic the hedgehog by making him carry a gun and have depression Be a better movie
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Nov 28, 2020 04:49
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:R rated home alone that's the 2 hours of story and then the kid dies setting up one if his own traps. Sounds like a hoot, I'm in. Microcline posted:I started typing up a reply before I realized I was arguing with someone who thinks Penny Arcade and CAD are incisive criticism of video game violence Even for a strawman this is an incredibly stupid post, and you should really strive to do better.
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Nov 28, 2020 04:50
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seeing shadow firing his deagle at a group of soldiers is makign me question everything i thought i knew about sonic the hedgehog. this is not the sanitized power fantasy i grew up with. i am finally an adult
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Nov 28, 2020 04:56
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:R rated home alone that's the 2 hours of story and then the kid dies setting up one if his own traps. that would literally be one of the funniest movies made if it was just played 100% straight thriller about a kid hiding from robbers after a fight with his family and all and then the final scene is just him getting his head taken off by his own paint bucket trap.
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Nov 28, 2020 04:58
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