The Appearance of Heroes
If you are an avid consumer of media, you might have noticed a few things. We write a lot about common tropes and themes that you encounter so you can begin to notice more details. So let’s do a small exercise: when you picture a hero, what do you see? Strong, virtuous, noble, upstanding. Or it is a generic white guy with five o’clock shadow and a set of rocking abs.
For some reason, a lot of our heroes look remarkably similar. Handsome, male, in-good shape, well-dressed, etc. And over the years, this image has changed slightly. It’s why a Victorian era hero looks different than the massive bodybuilders that were 80’s action heroes, and the slightly older, bearded men of today. But some things have stayed the same regardless: the fact that our heroes are overwhelmingly male, white, and heterosexual.
Why Did I Watch That? - Gallowwalkers
Wesley Snipes and hair dye are two things that should probably never go together again. You see, he is some sort of undead cowboy, hunting down a group of men that he already killed once but needs to kill again. After his family was attacked, Snipes goes after the killers for revenge. Which he gets, but he dies, but then his mom brings him and everyone he killed back from the dead. So he has to re-revenge everyone that he loves.
It actually was stuck for a while in production hell, due in part to Mister Snipes’, um, “financial and legal difficulties.” It had a troubled history over the eight torturous years of production, with the main actor switching from Chow Yun-Fat (who was first announced in 2005) to Snipes, three years later. It actually was finished a full three years before the movie would ever see the light of day, and you can sense that when you watch it, a film somehow out of time, a subpar action flick that wouldn’t be out of place in 2006 feels even more shockingly bad in 2013. And four years later, it hasn’t managed to improve.
Historical Accuracy vs. Entertainment
If you’ve ever gone to YouTube after a big movie came out, you’ve no doubt seen dozens of videos picking apart why it was actually a bad movie because something was included that wasn’t invented yet or a character’s backstory is incorrect or some other minor detail is wrong.
The same can be said about games, with the inclusion of weapons, vehicles, or personnel that might not fit the setting perfectly. We like to make a big deal out of details like this, for some reason. Maybe it makes us feel smart, or maybe because we get to contradict the majority opinion about a piece of media, something that teases a deeply contrarian part of our brains, because what is mainstream and popular is almost necessarily uncool. Read More…
Anatomy of a Character - Nightcrawler
It is hard to describe what “creepiness” is, the feeling of existential dread that it fosters deep within you, an inability to look away in fear of what might happen if you do, an uncertainty of what exactly is going on. And it’s a feeling that the oddly stoic Gyllenhaal nails to a T with the character of Lou Bloom. From the moment that he is introduced until the credits roll, he demands your attention, much in the same way as a wild animal or poisonous insect, calmly watching you back, his wide eyes searching for weakness.
From the moment that he is introduced to us, we watch him try to approximate normal human behavior. Behind his smiling mask, there is an anger simmering just below the surface. But the scariest part about him is not this rage. It is that this anger might just be another mask, trying to pass for normal human emotions.
Why Did I Watch That? - Hitman: Agent 47
I watched a bad movie today. It is sort of a guilty pleasure of mine. Watching bad movies that is. I revel in the terrible plots, paper-thin characters, cheesy effects, and wooden acting. It fuels me. I love them in a way that I can’t quite describe, or feel about bad games or music. To me, bad films deserve to be recognized, talked about, and maybe occasionally ridiculed. This one is no exception.
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It always baffles me at which movies manage to get reboots made, and the absolute insistence on taking awful properties and milking them for all of their worth is more than a little ridiculous. There are a lot of great action movies, but there are also a lot of terrible action reboots. And for some reason, I just can't stop watching them (partly because of my almost obsession with bad movies, and partly because I'm a glutton for punishment).
Luckily Hitman is better than Death Race, but that is like trying to find out which of two spoons is sharper. I went into this with a vague hope that they would be able to leverage the property to make an at least passable movie, but instead of making the sneaky assassination movie that the game sets up so well, they try to turn it once again into an action packing political thriller full of super humans and gratuitous slow motion. It didn't work in 2007 and, unsurprisingly, it doesn't work here either.
"Grimdark" Storytelling
There is a widespread hate for the oft-maligned "gritty reboot" of a beloved franchise, where a director takes a well-established (and often not dark) property and propels it into a much more "realistic" world, which usually means a greyscale color palette, an actor with a five o'clock shadow, and a love of the word "fuck". Sometimes these can work out for a property, and the new direction can be a refreshing take on a familiar formula. The problem comes in with so-called "grimdark" storytelling, where the point of the story stops being the characters and becomes about how "dark" or "edgy" it can be.
Spend any significant amount of time reading fanfiction (which no one should ever do), and it is a trope that you'll become intimately familiar with> For many writers, they don't know how to make a story more mature, and as such they conflate maturity with severity, and fill their stories full of rape, torture, and gruesome murder because "it happens in the real world all the time."
Anatomy of a Film - Inglourious Basterds
Chapter One
Once upon a time…
In Nazi occupied France
Colonel Hans Landa cuts quite the figure. Decked out in the all black SS uniform, bright, white smile plastered across his face, from the very moment that he steps on screen, he makes you uncomfortable. Not only is the seemingly cheerful man a Nazi; an officer in the Schutzstaffel, but there is just something bout his mannerisms that seem off, manufactured in a German lab as a facsimile of a friend, designed to put you ill at ease in whatever situation you find him. He takes pride in his gruesome, genocidal work, treats it like his own little game, an intriguing puzzle for him to solve. As he tinkers with his victims, the only prize that awaits them is death, to be meted out at his absolute discretion.
To him, this day on the farm where the film opens is just another in a long line of brain benders, but to the family that he is interrogating, it is the worst day of their lives. Perrier La Padite is a simple, hard working man. He has a beautiful family, an idyllic dairy farm situated in the rolling hills of France. It is almost picturesque, greenery stretching through the background as the jolly Landa strolls up, a wide grin tearing across his face, with the quiet mask of Perrier across from him. We can see the joy that he takes in his work, and the horror that everyone else sees it as.
Why Did I Watch That? - Hitman (2007)
There aren’t very many good video game movies. For some reason, it would appear that in the translation from games to film, something vital is lost. Condensing down the story and characterization of an entire franchise into a sub-two hour long movie is not an easy thing to do, and capturing the feel of gameplay, the driving force behind many games, in a human actor bound by the actual laws of physics is more than a little difficult.
As a franchise, Hitman has never had the most compelling story, propped up almost entirely by the puzzle-like challenge of finding your way through each mission without breaking stealth, navigating the semi-open levels and seeing which parts interacted with each other in interesting ways.
Superhero Fatigue
With today’s release of Wonder Woman, it has been a little over nine years since the release of the first Iron Man movie, and with it, the beginning of an international love affair with these spandex-clad superhuman, ripped from the pulpy pages of so many comic books. In these nine short years, we’ve seen the release of 36 mainstream comic book superhero movies, with even more films about the superpowers surrounding them.
It is an unprecedented inundation, and it shows no sign of slowing down, with juggernauts like The Justice League, Infinity War, Black Panther, and more on the horizon. And it is becoming harder and harder to keep getting ourselves excited at this point. The good guys beat the bad guy who had some sort of device/magic/being that threatened a city/country/world with total annihilation.