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What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?
- Sagrilarus
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jpat wrote: A quick separate point: "The Batman" as a PG-13 film just shows how completely broken the rating system is. There's no way, in a holistic sense, that "The Batman" is anything but an R; yet the (near) absence of profanity and sex plus the antiseptic and sometimes visually obscured treatment of violence manages to result in a PG-13. Crazy.
The system is kind of odd, in that it doesn't have an official definition for each rating. There's a group of people more or less selected from the general public that view the film prior to release and come to an agreement. So as the country becomes more comfortable with violence it becomes more welcome in the less restrictive categories. As the country becomes less comfortable with sexual exploration it gets more and more restricted.
I'll be honest, it appears to me that virtually any American TV show that features law enforcement or general adventure themes leads off its pilot episode with a big dose of big gun-play to get people's attention, often the most violence displayed in a show's entire run. Cowboy Bebop is a recent example. That is the environment that movie ratings are being adjudicated in. Ratings don't mean jack on TV, which pipes into your house largely unfiltered and unrestricted. So at some point it just becomes the baseline.
My wife and I spend 90% of our viewing time watching foreign television now, most from other English-speaking countries. Often these are police procedurals about murder and other violent crime. But it is exceeding rare for a firearm to appear and even rarer for it to be fired. When we come back to American films and TV there's a reacclimation process that we need to pass through, often with the mute button on until the firing stops. Pretty remarkable how often American police mysteries are solved by someone setting off a gun.
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I have not seen it yet. The few reviews I've read cite both the unnecessarily long running time ( close to three hours, WTF ??) and what seems to be an increaingly common theme, hard to hear dialog and overly dark photography. Fuck you Hollywood, I am not paying theater prices for that shit, esp when I know I can watch it on my home theater system streaming in a few months. With subtitles if I have to, FFS.
Rant off.
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Msample wrote: THE BATMAN
I have not seen it yet. The few reviews I've read cite both the unnecessarily long running time ( close to three hours, WTF ??) and what seems to be an increaingly common theme, hard to hear dialog and overly dark photography. Fuck you Hollywood, I am not paying theater prices for that shit, esp when I know I can watch it on my home theater system streaming in a few months. With subtitles if I have to, FFS.
Rant off.
For whatever it's worth, I didn't have an issue with the dialogue audio mix in this one. The movie is almost always physically dark, but I didn't have any serious trouble following the action.
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Sagrilarus wrote:
jpat wrote: A quick separate point: "The Batman" as a PG-13 film just shows how completely broken the rating system is. There's no way, in a holistic sense, that "The Batman" is anything but an R; yet the (near) absence of profanity and sex plus the antiseptic and sometimes visually obscured treatment of violence manages to result in a PG-13. Crazy.
The system is kind of odd, in that it doesn't have an official definition for each rating. There's a group of people more or less selected from the general public that view the film prior to release and come to an agreement. So as the country becomes more comfortable with violence it becomes more welcome in the less restrictive categories. As the country becomes less comfortable with sexual exploration it gets more and more restricted.
I'll be honest, it appears to me that virtually any American TV show that features law enforcement or general adventure themes leads off its pilot episode with a big dose of big gun-play to get people's attention, often the most violence displayed in a show's entire run. Cowboy Bebop is a recent example. That is the environment that movie ratings are being adjudicated in. Ratings don't mean jack on TV, which pipes into your house largely unfiltered and unrestricted. So at some point it just becomes the baseline.
My wife and I spend 90% of our viewing time watching foreign television now, most from other English-speaking countries. Often these are police procedurals about murder and other violent crime. But it is exceeding rare for a firearm to appear and even rarer for it to be fired. When we come back to American films and TV there's a reacclimation process that we need to pass through, often with the mute button on until the firing stops. Pretty remarkable how often American police mysteries are solved by someone setting off a gun.
Ultimately, the rating system has to have a rubric that involves counting instances or minutes of x, y, and z, and that's going to mean that people and companies are going to find ways to brush up against the limits. But in terms of thematic content, tone, and implied (if not always shown) violence, the PG-13 rating is, to me, a significant misclassification of "The Batman" on a more holistic level. This sort of thing is never going to be fixed. It was already tried with the NC-17 rating, which was a complete disaster given that theater owners didn't want to show those movies, and PG-13 itself was already a response to the PG rating stretching of 1980s movies such as "Temple of Doom."
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Sagrilarus wrote: My wife and I spend 90% of our viewing time watching foreign television now, most from other English-speaking countries. Often these are police procedurals about murder and other violent crime. But it is exceeding rare for a firearm to appear and even rarer for it to be fired. When we come back to American films and TV there's a reacclimation process that we need to pass through, often with the mute button on until the firing stops. Pretty remarkable how often American police mysteries are solved by someone setting off a gun.
I would call out one American counter-example: The Wire.
If I'm not mistaken, across 60 episodes of The Wire, there are only TWO instances of a police officer firing a gun. Both happen to be Pryzbylewski. One, he accidentally fires his gun into a wall, and two he accidentally shoots an undercover officer in a dark alley. That's it.
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- Jackwraith
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Shellhead wrote: What was remarkable about The Wire was the lack of shooting by police, which is fairly realistic. Plenty of police officers have never fired a pistol at a suspect, and quite a few never even drew their weapon outside of the firing range. The violence between criminals does happen more often, especially between rival organizations grabbing turf. Much of the writing for The Wire and also Homicide: Life on the Streets was based on the writing of long-time Baltimore crime beat reporter David Simon. He also wrote an excellent book about his experience riding along with Baltimore homicide detectives for a year.
Just to clarify for those that have not watched the show, this is not to say that the police are depicted in a positive light . While the principal police characters ( other than Prez's incidents ) don't fire, they do engage in some questionable behavior including beating down some suspects, one scene where two pocket drug money, as well as the usual lazy old timer tropes ( early season 1 ) and the viewpoint that a of the policing policies are deeply flawed and often driven by political motives.
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- Jackwraith
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dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2022/03/s...-animation-2021.html
dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2022/03/s...ges-documentary.html
Just FYI: I did writeups on all the nominated shorts (the awards for which are under the pre-ceremony axe this year.) The majority of them were excellent and, AFAIK, all of them are available on places like YouTube, if you're interested.
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I can't remember all of the details now, but another aspect would be that it was open-sourced to the public instead of handed down from a select group.
Anyway, after really diving deep into this idea and trying to figure out a way to promote it and make it the new standard, I discovered some Christian website that basically did the same thing and I felt totally defeated.
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Gregarius wrote: Anyway, after really diving deep into this idea and trying to figure out a way to promote it and make it the new standard, I discovered some Christian website that basically did the same thing and I felt totally defeated.
CAPalert!
capalert.com/
Kind of famous for a while; they are pretty nutty and consider almost everything to be offensive in some way. E.g. Prince of Egypt, which you’d think is an ideal movie in that it’s faithful to the biblical narrative of the Exodus (and just a great movie generally) loses points for portraying “reckless horseplay.”
That said, points for trying to supply an objective breakdown by category. Their output seems to have dropped off recently. I think it’s just one guy, and of course there’s no way to keep up with the deluge of content without a dedicated team. I think Greg’s idea of crowdsourcing is probably more feasible these days.
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- hotseatgames
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Jackwraith wrote: I thought it was... average? It's totally predictable, as most noir films are, since you know they're just locked on a trip to a dark end. But it still felt like they were going through the motions, rather than really engaging the story. Cate Blanchett's character seemed wholly artificial; present only to drive the story forward, rather than having any actual motivation. I haven't seen the original, so maybe they were just following that, note-for-note, but it still felt like there was room to flesh out her character a bit and make her something other than the one-note femme fatale. I'm a Del Toro fan, too, and I kind of expected more from this one. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't that great, either.
I was expecting more from this movie. I didn't realize it was a remake of I may have passed on it altogether. Was the psychologist so resentful from the issue at the performance that she wanted to set him up for the fall? Was she just meant to be the personification of the tarot reading? I wanted more direct motivation for the doublecross than I got. Average movie with amazing set dressing.
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I've also read that there are guidelines that the MPAA kinda sorta follows. x number of violent deaths, no boobs, and just one non-sexual f-bomb will keep you at PG-13, stuff like that.
I think the rating system I see on TV is pretty good, where you get a list of what you can expect to see that might be problematic. "Language, sexual situations, nudity, smoking."
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