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fuzzy_logic posted:I had to see this and now you do too
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Jun 7, 2020 03:42
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 23:54 |
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A silver lining I hadn't thought of
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Jun 7, 2020 03:55
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As a kid during that time, and many of you were too, it's no secret that anime and video games were orders of magnitude cleaner, more dynamic, and more kinetic than anything live-action TV was putting out. Big clunky ships with expensive parts that take years to engineer and manufacture just so they can fart across a screen and fire a few guns once is only impressive when you have some idea of the labor involved, not when you're a dipshit kid on a perpetual sugar high. The fact that the anime of the time often featured more realistic clothing didn't help. Being older and having had to compromise a few too many times for my liking, having made homes with bands of other cast-offs and refugees, knowing how fragile the line between independence and irreversible poverty is, there is something about Firefly that connects beyond the troubling "Space Confederacy Freedumb" aesthetics. The characters and interplay do work and have resonance, same as they still do in Buffy/Angel. Whedon for all his garbage really is the best in the business at writing teams, Justice League not-withstanding. It's just that the universe it's in really does suck on like every level. The "I want to show my poly friend how woke I am" Companion stuff is the worst, but I also want to point out how awful the Shepherd and Christianity stuff plays. Once for shits and giggles I looked up what the Shepherd's real backstory was and goddamn it was lame. The Asian cultural appropriation is really lame. Keeping everything about the Alliance and Reavers and Independents so thinly sketched really wears thin fast. I watched through it with my girlfriend and the very first thing she asked was "So wait none of them know about hydroponics?" and I'm like "I know, I know, just... this show has a lot of crap you've got to look beyond." We did enjoy it but that should tell you the level of Capital T "Theatre Kid" crap that drags down the show overall. "Ooh but Mal's name is a pun and Zoe means 'life' and Serenity is an ironic name and the writing is so layered with symbols" yeah sure but to what actual end? The more I look back on it the more impressive it is that Whedon convinced anyone to give him a budget. Buffy/Angel have aged better because you can tell that even at their most high-minded they're still not pretending to be anything more than teenybopper shows.
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Jun 9, 2020 20:13
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That would make a painful amount of sense. Lots of poly people--specifically the kinds of poly people that tend to be a touch dramatic about their poly status-- flocked to Firefly as well because "any sex positivity is good." Being fair in 2002 that was kind-of true.
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Jun 9, 2020 23:32
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Having ingested an embarrassingly large body of Whedon's work, the only time he was ever actually good at a major arc was on Buffy, if I'm being honest. Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible, Astonishing X-Men, Runaways, even his work on the Avengers movies all kind-of falls apart on a macro level. He's really good at tight contained stories and premises and carrying character development forward-- a refreshing evolution in the 90s and early 00s when syndication was king for genre fare, but no longer the case.
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Jun 10, 2020 01:52
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It's NCIS but with more shipping and occasionally someone make a reference to a Marvel thing. I mean that both negatively and positively. I don't think Whedon is involved at all aside from collecting Exec Producer checks. It's all his brother and whatever castoffs from other shows fit in. Age of Ultron is fine by the way, it's just clear that Whedon and the overall MCU machine are at odds and it's the one time where even I felt that Whedon's "quip voice" was actively getting in the way. There's a lot of dialogue in that movie that is memorable for all the wrong reasons. In hindsight I can say that a lot of decisions were bad but it's hard to tell who is responsible for who-- if I had to guess I'd say that the MCU machine wanted the army of mooks and the stopover in Korea and Vision and all of that bloats the movie, and that Whedon wanted the thing to be small and dark which is a blisteringly stupid instinct.
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Jun 10, 2020 02:10
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Either Fisher really doesn't mind only doing regional theater work for the rest of his career or he's made some exceptionally powerful friends and is feeling cocky. Regardless-- respect. Crap like this needs to get called out more.
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Jul 3, 2020 18:47
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There's probably real truth to that. According to imdb Whedon's next project is a TV show called "The Nevers" which seems to have a large Brit cast and be about Brits (including Nick Frost and Olivia Williams):"imdb posted:An epic tale following a gang of Victorian women who find themselves with unusual abilities, relentless enemies, and a mission that might change the world. So between Whedon loving with the Disney machine, the accusations and subsequent dropping of him by his core base, Justice League underperforming, and now this. It looks from a complete outsider perspective like he's being farmed off to a deep corner of "the industry" because he's too established/connected to just drop, and see if he's "still got it" by giving him a simple project that greatly resembles his past successes. I can't say I'm looking forward to it and won't be supporting it. ----- What has me curious from a gossip angle is if Fisher has been promised some seriously juicy future stuff by HBO, the WB, and/or Zack Snyder to be talking this confidently. Other black actors like Boyega and Mackie seem to realize that after their current Disney contracts are up they're probably "done" for lead roles in A-List projects and have one foot out the door, but Fisher doesn't have their decade + of royalty checks to sit on (which probably isn't insane because it's Disney contracts, but if used wisely is also probably enough money that they'll never need to worry about a day job again). So between that and the constant rumors that Snyder apparently wanted Fisher to be the central focus on his original Justice League, and WB/HBO making a big show of how they're pumping millions of dollars into making "the Snyder Cut" a reality for neckbeards, Fisher might have been promised some lucrative focus and/or feels very confident in his relationships with these guys to keep getting work for at least a few more years.
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Jul 3, 2020 20:47
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Sanguinia posted:EDIT: Apparently he played MLK opposite Brian Cranston as LBJ in a HBO Drama about the Civil Rights Act? poo poo, I need to watch that!
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Jul 4, 2020 20:47
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Geoff Johns is such a loving wanker. Wrote 3 years worth of half-decent DC comics and got to do nearly two decades of masturbatory crap.
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Feb 22, 2021 20:05
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His Wally-era Flash, some of his JSA, and the very very beginning of his Teen Titans wasn't half-bad, and then he wasted his gifts by redrawing the sandbox to be exactly the way he wanted it... which just happened to be "too obvious" Bronze Age fellating. That wasn't healthy when it was happening and it only seems to have made him worse at every possible turn.
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Feb 23, 2021 00:00
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"It's extremely important we establish early on that she was sexually assaulted by the Joker and survived. We show the opening montage of her learning to walk again as a strong, empowered woman with lots of closeups of her crying in the shower. Later on we reveal the assault made her have a hysterectomy and Joe Sweden has to use his nebbish, doughy charm to reassure her that she's still a real woman."
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Feb 23, 2021 15:20
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Yvonmukluk posted:These posts are really starting to remind me of the Batgirl parts of the animated Killing Joke movie. We we sure Joe didn't have something to do with it? indigi posted:keep going
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Feb 24, 2021 17:44
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The important thing is Batgirl proves her strength by being the best Mommy possible.
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Feb 24, 2021 20:30
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Alternatively we all grew up sucking on his man-teat-- whose excretions soaked into nearly every corner of mainstream nerd culture over the last twenty years-- and we really really know how he likes to roll by now
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Feb 25, 2021 14:38
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My phone pinged me with some Variety expose on all the Whedon crap, saying they canvassed about 40 people who worked on the shows and basically found nothing new that was terribly juicy. Seems to be exactly what it looks like-- a case of a privileged princeling being a douche because he could, leveraging verbal abuse on employees he didn't like because he knew he could get away with it, and using his "We're the feminist show!" reputation as a shield to keep them from rocking the boat. The only thing that stood out was that they couldn't get full details on what Tracthenberg meant specifically beyond "He's not allowed in a room alone with [her] again" besides "there was an inappropriate verbal exchange" which could honestly mean a lot of things and none good. In the end I mostly skimmed it because it had all the air of a sleazy afternoon TV movie that deglamours the franchises down to all but their very brightest moments, stripping the long-dead corpses for carrion. You can practically feel the thick SoCal evening sun drenching the mood and making everything feel wet and sticky. Kind of lurid, but ultimately very pedestrian and common. A tale of sleaze and corruption older than its participants, betraying every pretension to progressivism the show ever attempted to solidify. In some ways I actually think that does a bit of harm, as when this stuff was private or conjecture the shows did do some objective good for some people, even if it was based on faulty people and typical show business lies.
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Feb 26, 2021 22:33
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Oh I stopped a watch of Angel/Buffy/Firefly I was doing with my girlfriend midway because we both agreed this news was making the shows too unpalatable. Aside from some highlight reels those shows are gonna get buried. All the same the shows did bring a lot of comfort and guidance to me during a very dark period, stupid as some will inevitably say that is, and I know they did for a lot of other people too. They're very flawed programs at the best of times, but they did have their moments of insight. I still consider Angel's finale to be a shockingly mature examination of how class politics actually works, even if it's all a thinly veiled metaphor for Whedon's impotent potshots at his bosses for canceling his show. What chafes me is that for all of Buffy's trailblazing-- and make no mistake it did in-fact blaze some trails-- the drama behind the scenes was so loving basic. Like it couldn't be something really lurid or weird, it was just another case of a privileged rear end in a top hat being a privileged rear end in a top hat because everyone lets rich douchebags do whatever the gently caress they want.
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Feb 27, 2021 01:35
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It's been said earlier in the thread but all of the "Companion" poo poo in Firefly makes a lot more sense when you realize he was cheating on his wife on the regular, most likely with actresses either afraid to say no and/or attempting to social climb. A disgusting, disgusting sense.
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Mar 1, 2021 21:02
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Well, where do you expect them to find an Asian actor in...[checks notes]...Vancouver? wdarkk posted:Outlaw Star is like 33% of the reason I have anything to do with anime (the other 67% is Dragon Ball Z and Gundam Wing). Also Firefly 200% ripped off the "girl in a box" thing from Outlaw Star and I will never hear a single word to the contrary:   Sanguinia posted:Is there even a single asian person on that show, let alone one of Chinese ethnicity?)
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Mar 2, 2021 03:58
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I'm not even mad Whedon did it but he reportedly denies it and it's like "loving why?"
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Mar 2, 2021 04:05
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Creepy big-eye anime waifus set to that lilting jpop and sci-fi sketches are one of the truest lullabies for a generation of kids around 2001-03. If you know, you know.
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Mar 2, 2021 12:19
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's been a long while since I watched Outlaw Star. I remember liking it, but I kinda like remembering it as a bizarre fever dream that barely makes any sense. The one episode I do strongly remember is the cactus episode. CainFortea posted:
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Mar 3, 2021 13:08
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Tulip posted:Westerns are weird because, outside of their golden age, it seems like it's a genre that Americans really, really want but still doesn't produce megasuccesses. I don't really have a good explanation for why it declined without ever having a big retro comeback.
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Mar 6, 2021 19:07
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I think the biggest cultural significance Firefly had was in affirming that in a post 9/11 world the "liberal" culture was feckless, inept, and more hollow than a chocolate rabbit.
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Mar 7, 2021 05:35
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twistedmentat posted:Firefly would be as forgotten as Automan or M.A.N.T.I.S. if it wasn't Whedon at a time when he was king of all nerds. No one cares that Dollhouse didn't last long because it came out after his nerd stock dropped enough that it wasn't considered a amazing classic that was canceled before its time. Plus the story of Firefly's cancelation is way more romantic. Dollhouse was always "oh poo poo an Eliza Dushku project... and it's Whedon? Ok I guess. Oh look it's already on the Friday night death slot. Lmao this concept loving sucks and every week Dushku is dressed up like a prostitute." Firefly was pushed as this "wait wtf?" thing with a huge budget in primetime slots and then shunted around the schedule in a way that made for a compelling rumor mill, even decades after the fact.
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Mar 7, 2021 06:37
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I will not stand for this Olivia Williams erasure. If only she hadn’t been cast as the head pimp in a human trafficking operation.
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Mar 7, 2021 06:46
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 23:54 |
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Yup. the art/media production pipeline is way closer to the pre-Industrial model than anyone wants to admit to and it's loving weird. You can and will see the people with the highest social/institutional status-- who come from the right families/connections and prebuilt with lots of money, to a one-- form weird social orbits around themselves where people jockey for their attention/approval to advance their careers, and the people who get to stay in said orbit are those who ignore and look the other way on whatever vile poo poo the status holders do. Not only will social climbers get cast out if they call out the nobility, but others of lesser status can and will use dissent as a means to undercut rivals and advance their own agenda. If that all sounds like dumb medieval Italian bullshit, that's because it is!
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Mar 8, 2021 15:16
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