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[quote="JazzFlight" post="513060089"] I was a bit disappointed that the societies boiled down to set characteristics, like these people are sneaky thieves, these people are brutal warriors, etc... Con-Baby kinda fell into that stereotype, the big guy was nice but still a giant musclebound dude with an eyepatch and scars (which he must have gotten from battle unless it's a silly "workplace accident" backstory), and of course her rival from Fang was conniving and power-hungry until the very end. Would have been a little more interesting if the message was that people are kind of the same everywhere and the party members were trying to dispel the racist prejudices. I read it that those stereotypes were related to the fighting forces of each region, not all the people that inhabited them. Not that we saw a ton of regular people in general, but the folks in the market in Spine (?) seemed pretty normal and not sneaky thieves. They felt fairly anti-theft based on the scene where Sisu learns about "credit", for example.
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Mar 8, 2021 13:59
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I feel like there was a version of the plot/themes where the credit scene was integral to the plot. Where the dragon learns about giving people credit then she learns it doesn't work like that, the townspeople specifically call out they can't give her credit because they don't know her. If they knew who she was they would know if they trusted her or not to pay later. Like there was two teams of writers with one writing like the dad where you should trust everyone even if they hurt you and keep trusting them and they only hurt you because they don't trust you and the only way to fix that is to keep trusting them vs "don't trust people until they prove it".
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Mar 8, 2021 14:24
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I really hate to go on about this, but loving “dragon nerd”. Imagine if, here, people referred to their all powerful deities in that way. “I’m a big Catholicism Nerd. I really stan the Holy Trinity, I ship FatherxSon. I’m a big Muhammad fan, I’m way bigger into the Shi’a OST over the Sunni arc though.”
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Mar 8, 2021 14:54
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NieR Occomata posted:I really hate to go on about this, but loving “dragon nerd”. Imagine if, here, people referred to their all powerful deities in that way. “I’m a big Catholicism Nerd. I really stan the Holy Trinity, I ship FatherxSon. I’m a big Muhammad fan, I’m way bigger into the Shi’a OST over the Sunni arc though.” I was unclear if raya was intended to be sheltered or not. I interpreted that as I watched it as her living in the dragon temple training to be the dragon guardian and having it be her whole world, so all she would talk about is dragons and she thought she was connecting with someone on something she thinks of as her special interest but is clearly just the normal thing anyone coming to the dragon temple would care about. Reading it that way in that part of the movie made sense, she took a superficial shared interest that everyone likes and made it basis for wildly over trust but it never really felt like that was her portrayal again. Which I guess you could say she snapped out of it, but eh.
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Mar 8, 2021 15:43
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Pick posted:It's like how a robot vacuum would make a movie if it bumped into enough of them. Hahaha I won't know if I agree with your review until June when I watch this movie for free but this made me laugh. This kind of gets why I'm not terribly excited about Disney movies these days though. I enjoy seeing them more for the music than the actual narrative, since these all are written by committee. I feel like the Disney movies have more disparate creative control than the Marvel movies. I disagree with some of the messaging in Marvel movies too but somehow they feel more consistent in their vision than the Disney animated releases, who still seem to be finding their narrative feet with each film. Disney appears to have a really solid team behind their Marvel releases, but Feature Animation and Star Wars are still a mish mash of really good creatives all thrown together with hard deadlines and executive oversight that knows what they DON'T want (like a Lord and Miller Solo movie) but not exactly what they do. Sivart13 posted:I'm about halfway through Season 2 and there's a lot to like, though I do find it a little hard to root for a team who is always indiscriminately killing people in the name of low-stakes villainy. Haha yeah the over the top violence is a little much, especially since their blood splatter and explosion effects don't mesh with the rest of the animation that well. But it really sells the image of a much more messed up Gotham than ever before, and it makes sense Gordon is such a wreck in this world.
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Mar 8, 2021 15:44
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NieR Occomata posted:I really hate to go on about this, but loving “dragon nerd”. Imagine if, here, people referred to their all powerful deities in that way. “I’m a big Catholicism Nerd. I really stan the Holy Trinity, I ship FatherxSon. I’m a big Muhammad fan, I’m way bigger into the Shi’a OST over the Sunni arc though.” I'm sure there's a youth pastor somewhere in the US that's exactly like this. "This ain't your grampa's scripture" and all that.
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Mar 8, 2021 15:56
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flashy_mcflash posted:I'm sure there's a youth pastor somewhere in the US that's exactly like this. "This ain't your grampa's scripture" and all that. Sure, but that reinforces my point. The joke of “You know who had the original BTS Army? The LORD” is that it’s based off an out of touch lamer who thinks that their religious imperative is somehow more palatable with current references as opposed to making them look needlessly desperate and pathetic, and they’re definitely not supposed to be the ostensibly cool or interesting protagonist who keeps dropping “sick one-liners” when she fights or whatever the gently caress.
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Mar 8, 2021 16:42
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I feel like there was a whole subplot cut where they showed what the dragon's actual deal was. Like we are informed she is somehow a lame/bad/insecure dragon, it was unclear if her magic power was fake or not (she could swim well, but that seemed like a skill more than a power, she didn't contribute anything to the gem) and her family apparently didn't trust her? I guess if there is a sequel it'll be 'hey, what is the deal with the dragon anyway"
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Mar 8, 2021 16:49
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I feel like there was a whole subplot cut where they showed what the dragon's actual deal was. Like we are informed she is somehow a lame/bad/insecure dragon, it was unclear if her magic power was fake or not (she could swim well, but that seemed like a skill more than a power, she didn't contribute anything to the gem) and her family apparently didn't trust her? If Frozen 2 is anything to go by, her "deal" will be that she is a bunch of rock people all at the same time (earth).
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Mar 8, 2021 16:53
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But yes, you're entirely right, the movie sort of suggests part of the idea was the very predictable plot beat that--oh no!--you woke up a dragon... not very good at dragoning! And that's why you have to keep helping, because also you can't expect some magic creature to save the word for you*! * unless...
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Mar 8, 2021 16:54
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I feel like there was a whole subplot cut where they showed what the dragon's actual deal was. Like we are informed she is somehow a lame/bad/insecure dragon, it was unclear if her magic power was fake or not (she could swim well, but that seemed like a skill more than a power, she didn't contribute anything to the gem) and her family apparently didn't trust her? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. The whole "trust" thing in her story doesn't make that much sense unless she was kind of a failure, or they happened to be enemies, or anything. As it is, they just happened to do it first and give it to her cause she was the only one left. There's no higher meaning to it, as she said "it could have been any of us". Elman fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Mar 8, 2021 |
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Mar 8, 2021 16:57
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NieR Occomata posted:Sure, but that reinforces my point. The joke of “You know who had the original BTS Army? The LORD” is that it’s based off an out of touch lamer who thinks that their religious imperative is somehow more palatable with current references as opposed to making them look needlessly desperate and pathetic, and they’re definitely not supposed to be the ostensibly cool or interesting protagonist who keeps dropping “sick one-liners” when she fights or whatever the gently caress. I think it's partly a marketing tool (my daughter has been calling herself a 'dragon nerd' since Saturday) and partly because the society in this movie is a whole lot closer (5 generations) to being actually saved by these creatures who existed IRL than anyone is to Jesus or other religious figures. Like, they have evidence that the dragons were real based on them existing as stone statues and with the crystal so it would be pretty natural for kids to revere them and express that in a more 'modern' parlance imo.
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Mar 8, 2021 17:01
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I feel like there was a version of the plot/themes where the credit scene was integral to the plot. Where the dragon learns about giving people credit then she learns it doesn't work like that, the townspeople specifically call out they can't give her credit because they don't know her. If they knew who she was they would know if they trusted her or not to pay later. I can basically tell you exactly what happened. They had a script and the point of the movie was "to unify people, you have to take the first step and trust them  ". And this was probably a pretty coherent script.And then someone was like "AH, but you can't trust people ALL the time  " and they were like oh yeah, you have to make it clear that you don't 100% trust people 100% of the time! Sometimes it will go wrong!... And they forgot that you can have a film with a simple message and then just leave it to the audience to like, not apply that lesson in its most stupidly extreme form. But instead the movie tries to pinpoint the exact level of trust you should have for?? Strangers?? Or in the interests of national unity? And that's so loving far above the movie's paygrade, and even if you established the perfect level for Kumandra, it's also not earth so that exact winnowing in wouldn't make the movie much better anyway. But in the process, it helpfully made the film incoherent.
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Mar 8, 2021 17:01
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The moral of our story is: love is the answer But I just broke up with my evil ex! This movie is terrible!!
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Mar 8, 2021 17:05
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flashy_mcflash posted:I think it's partly a marketing tool (my daughter has been calling herself a 'dragon nerd' since Saturday) and partly because the society in this movie is a whole lot closer (5 generations) to being actually saved by these creatures who existed IRL than anyone is to Jesus or other religious figures. Like, they have evidence that the dragons were real based on them existing as stone statues and with the crystal so it would be pretty natural for kids to revere them and express that in a more 'modern' parlance imo. If you want "marketing tool" then fine, I'll break the ice, I'll be the one to say it: Sisu and her face are exactly My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic-shaped, with the same expressions you could probably compare shot-to-shot from that show, and the palette-swapped dragons later are an appallingly shameless attempt to cash in on that idea. e: Sisu even has the same "beat" to her walk cycle.   
Pick fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Mar 8, 2021 |
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Mar 8, 2021 17:06
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Pick posted:If you want "marketing tool" then fine, I'll break the ice, I'll be the one to say it: Haha, that's awesome and hilarious. Like we were talking about earlier, it cracked me up to see Disney (Disney!) getting all self-conscious and identity-crisisy about upstart competition in the 2000s and going hard on the explosions like Titan A.E. was the wave of the future. Now they're spooked by some Lauren Faust doodles with Margaret Keane eyes that somehow struck the landscape of expressiveness and visual appeal like a bolt from the blue Data Graham fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Mar 8, 2021 |
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Mar 8, 2021 17:10
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Also I like that the dragon was collecting metroid style powerups and in the end she just died for no reason by accident and there was never some scene where she used all she learned mixed with her own swimming skills to save the day. I don't think we even get to know what power the last orb fragment even had and the power to "glow" wasn't used even one single time.
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Mar 8, 2021 17:12
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This is just a nit-pick I wasn't going to mention, but we're all kinda piling on Raya right now, so why not: I didn't like the joke Sisu made about "you know when you do a group project in school and there's one kid who doesn't do anything" or whatever because it felt anachronistic. Are there dragon schools in their world where they have group projects?
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Mar 8, 2021 17:14
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Also I like that the dragon was collecting metroid style powerups and in the end she just died for no reason by accident and there was never some scene where she used all she learned mixed with her own swimming skills to save the day. I don't think we even get to know what power the last orb fragment even had and the power to "glow" wasn't used even one single time. Exactly! Christ. We're at that stage of a bunch of nitpicks and major, fundamental flaws all together but some of the nitpicks are really god drat annoying. Why did Sisu's siblings turn to stone? They never have a reason to step out of the water circle they're trapped in. The orb doesn't blow them back or anything. The animators/boarders/whatever have to breeze by this sequence or you can openly see it makes no sense, again also making this completely different than the later scene because there was no easy way for Raya etc to be safe and wait while Naamari fitted the orb back together.   No one in Talon breaks the stereotype at all? The POINT of having a representative character from EACH land is to CONFRONT THE STEREOTYPES SHE LISTS OFF IN THE OPENING. Also, as a point about the redemption arc aspect, I'd have had Namaari maybe have to make the choice to do something good, in a situation other than 'the light of the orb is fading anyway and my kingdom is still being actively destroyed' because it's as much a practical decision with those stakes as a moral one. I know she's in a hurry to rescue her single houseplant but it just felt limp. Pick fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Mar 8, 2021 |
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Mar 8, 2021 17:15
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I may have not been fully paying attention, but were the stone dragons in 2 different locations? The first time when Namaari and her 3 troops they were on a plain, wrapped in vines. Then later on, they were in a much more enclosed space with plants all around and walls?
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Mar 8, 2021 17:43
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The_Doctor posted:I may have not been fully paying attention, but were the stone dragons in 2 different locations? The first time when Namaari and her 3 troops they were on a plain, wrapped in vines. Then later on, they were in a much more enclosed space with plants all around and walls? Yep. We also never know why the dragons don't come back from the stone's magic the first time but they do the second time. power of heart probably.
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Mar 8, 2021 17:43
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The_Doctor posted:I may have not been fully paying attention, but were the stone dragons in 2 different locations? The first time when Namaari and her 3 troops they were on a plain, wrapped in vines. Then later on, they were in a much more enclosed space with plants all around and walls? Her family were the last dragons alive. I assume the ones in that field were just different, random dragons.
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Mar 8, 2021 17:47
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I do want to give the film what little kudos it deserves because that scene of Namaari and them all going through the stone dragons silently as she prays for them, and it expresses her feeling for and how the dragons are regarded in this universe, and it’s actually a legit and sobering moment in the movie, was genuinely really good. Also it was wordless so it wasn’t ruined by some godawful one-liner like literally every other scene in this wretched, wretched movie. It’s also one of the like, TWO slow and measured moments in the movie that doesn’t immediately cut to something else and it’s by far its most effective, and doesn’t feel like an attention deficit and unfocused mess like pretty much every other scene. It’s so frustrating. Scenes like Namaari walking through the stone dragons or Raya/Sisu looking at the Druun and talking about what they are as Boan mourns his family imply a better and more nuanced film that this movie studiously ignores in favor of being a lovely The Last Airbender knockoff with an even stupider climax and resolution for its protagonist (which I didn’t even think was possible, but here we are). The part that makes this movie so infuriatingly bad is that they keep hinting at an actually good movie underneath the surface but some terrible line of dialog or poorly thought through plot point or rushed and unfocused scene or sequence sort of destroy any possible goodwill it generates.
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Mar 8, 2021 18:07
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The_Doctor posted:The movie’s message: “Learn to trust people, maybe on the 3rd or 4th chance they’ll get it right.” Yeah, whatever the message was supposed to be, it was really muddled and poorly executed. Like, I think it might have started life as some variation on "It's bad to close yourself off and refuse to trust anyone just because one person betrayed your trust one time...", which is a reasonable enough idea, but then the main characters spend most of the movie getting screwed over and occasionally almost murdered or actually murdered because they trusted people they shouldn't have trusted, but then they trust other people (or sometimes the very same people who previously screwed them) and it all works out OK, so the message is...some people can be trusted and some are assholes who will stab you in the back and sometimes people are both, and you'll never know who is which, so good luck figuring it out? OK then... Also, the resolution ends up being "Everything will be fine as long as you totally blindly trust the one person who has screwed you over and directly or indirectly hurt or killed everyone you've ever loved on literally every single occasion that the two of you have interacted, including this one that is happening right now...", which is less of a healthy message about coping with negative feelings and more of a thing that an abuser would say to their victim to convince them to stick around. The whole parallel between Sisu's family trusting her with the orb and Raya trusting Namaari with the orb also makes zero sense in context, because there isn't really a parallel at all; Sisu's family knows her and has good reason to trust her with this task because they know that she'll do the right thing and they have faith in her, even if she is a bit of a screwup sometimes. Raya and Namaari barely know each other; they were pretend-friends for all of five minutes when they were children before Namaari's initial betrayal, and it's not clear whether they ever had any contact with each other at all after that before the scenes we see in the movie itself. Raya has absolutely no reason to trust Namaari and plenty of reasons not to trust her...but she does, and of course Namaari does the right thing eventually and everything in the world is all fixed and back to normal. So, again, the message here is evidently "You should trust people who have clearly and repeatedly demonstrated that they're unworthy of your trust, and this time things will be different and it will totally make everything all right!", which again seems more like some bullshit that abusive spouses/SOs/parents/etc. spout to their victims than a healthy message to be teaching to kids.
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Mar 8, 2021 18:43
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A lot of the reviews I've read said that they did a good job mirroring Akwafina's expressions and mannerisms and didn't reference My Little Pony at all. I can say honestly that MLP didn't enter my thoughts for even a moment during this movie but we all see what we want to see I guess.
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Mar 8, 2021 19:33
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I mean, she looks great in human form, where Awkwafina is also a human being.
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Mar 8, 2021 19:36
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To be fair the Druun are basically the Windigos from MLP, and they're even defeated in the same way (the good guys get frozen but win anyway).
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Mar 8, 2021 19:50
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Being compared to MLP is a positive in my book.
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Mar 8, 2021 19:58
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Kinda sad Tom and Jerry did better at the box office than Raya. There's like 14 minutes of animation in the whole film, it's rendered in a way that must have been super cheap (I hope, if those shaders cost computing power then that's sad) and it's apparently awful.
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Mar 8, 2021 21:28
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https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1369024368060334087?s=21
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Mar 8, 2021 21:40
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Another funny thing about Raya is that they were really aware of the lesson they had in Moana, where they made the point that she was really too young to have been tasked with something so overwhelming. So Raya is very visibly and explicitly aged up for her quest! she is then aided by a literal infant who can do kung fu
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Mar 8, 2021 22:52
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Gotta get back those Disney fans that strayed to the open arms of the Boss Baby
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Mar 8, 2021 22:57
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Hurry Disney, get in on that Secret Life of Pets mania
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Mar 8, 2021 23:02
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flashy_mcflash posted:Gotta get back those Disney fans that strayed to the open arms of the Boss Baby I would go see Kung Fu Baby
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Mar 8, 2021 23:07
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Roth posted:I would go see Kung Fu Baby I just assumed that most/all of the decisions in Raya are in service of future content for D+ so a Conbaby series is probably not out of the realm of possibility.
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Mar 8, 2021 23:14
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Ccs posted:Kinda sad Tom and Jerry did better at the box office than Raya. There's like 14 minutes of animation in the whole film, it's rendered in a way that must have been super cheap (I hope, if those shaders cost computing power then that's sad) and it's apparently awful. Are they also charging 30 bucks for Tom and Jerry over at HBO max? Because that might explain why more people are watching it. Tom and Jerry looks bad, but if I had to pick a movie I would pick the non-30 dollar one.
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Mar 8, 2021 23:33
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Wyasnt Raya's production a complete mess? That'd probably explain why the story/writing doesn't really hold up under scrutiny.
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Mar 8, 2021 23:43
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behold: the perfect object 
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Mar 9, 2021 00:10
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For all that I like to crap on what has happened to Star Wars as a property, you would've thought by now that a lot more studios would've realized the strength of a "A New Hope". Tell a story with a good guy, and a bad guy, and have a good guy succeed. And especially if your world is really complex and it takes people some effort for audience the buy in, keep the plot simple so people can enjoy the new world. If it goes over well, you can build from there in later installments.
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Mar 9, 2021 00:10
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Also maybe tease a little incest in there, as a treat.
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Mar 9, 2021 00:22
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