[TheWastelander]

I like Fassbender as an actor and I think the British may have adopted him.

I also like Jack O'Connell and I've been wanting to see '71 quite badly but they haven't released it here in America.

[Teedub]

I used to do a bit of acting. I love it, but I find it incredibly nerve-racking. I think if I was allowed to be drunk on-set all the time, I'd be pretty good!

[DickDastardly]

delete

[TheWastelander]

(05-18-2015 01:20 PM)DickDastardly Wrote:  

Considering Michael Fassbender is Irish-German, speaks with an Irish accent and grew up in Ireland I'm not so sure he'd be happy with being described as British.

His mom's from Northern Ireland and he lives in London.

[Lord_Perseus]

Definitely when you also throw in the fact he Fassbender a descendant of Michael Collins who lead & won the fight for Irish independence.

[philosophical_recovery]

I thought for a bit about what relatively recent action film had a strong, feminine character in it that didn't fuck the story up.

Shooter was my answer.

Swagger's best bud, who dies, left behind an attractive but overall average woman who manages to support her dead spouse's best friend. She takes care of him, and is all in on getting the sons of bitches that are responsible for her husband's wasteful death.

I bet she had a nice hairy pussy, too.

Can you guys think of another example?

[Slim Shady]

QC, what is your beef with "Million Dollar Baby"?

[Quintus Curtius]

(05-18-2015 08:36 PM)Slim Shady Wrote:  

QC, what is your beef with "Million Dollar Baby"?

I consider it part of the indoctrination program. Stoic, heroic, female boxer overcomes all the odds. Yeah right. I don't need to see women in heroic, physical combat roles. It's fantasyland, and serves to advance the agenda that women are more heroic than men.

My personal experience has been that the vast majority of women are lacking in character. Most of them are quitters, collapsers, and schemers. In other words, exactly the opposite of how they're portrayed in American movies.

[Slim Shady]

Can women never be heroic? Even when they are only fighting other women?

I think MDB is as much about Clint Eastwood's character as it is about Hillary Swank's. Plus, that movie does not end well for her...

[kbell]

I think why Jason Straham is solid is because has a film presence and charisma. He is like a natty Arnold who you know will always bring some wit, crazy action scenes he probably does most of the stunts on, and a simple hard driving plot without a bunch of bullshit shades of gray. He is the closest we have to a 80s film action star.

He would make an interesting Mad Max.

[TigerMandingo]

Statham is awesome. I remember first seeing him in Snatch and being mesmerized by his performance. I wish he'd do more of Snatch-type films instead of going Hollywood retard in recent years, but I realize it's where the money is so can't really knock him. Vinnie Jones has that rough, gritty look too and he cracks me up.

[Quintus Curtius]

(05-18-2015 08:59 PM)Slim Shady Wrote:  

Can women never be heroic? Even when they are only fighting other women?

I think MDB is as much about Clint Eastwood's character as it is about Hillary Swank's. Plus, that movie does not end well for her...

I talked about this in my article today at ROK, and answered this very question. You can find my opinion there.

[CH-Toronto]

With all the talk about Mad Max and "powerful women", I think the new Taylor Swift video slipped under everyone's radar.

It's actually ridiculous, and while I haven't seen Mad Max, I doubt it can be worse than this 4 minute video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcIy9NiNbmo

[Slim Shady]

Right mate, I had read your article which is why I brought up this particular film.

Lines in bold are directly from your piece.

Million Dollar Baby (2004): Heroic female boxer displays incredible virtue against all odds.

...

These are just a small sampling of the unrelenting message coming out of Hollywood. The message is: (1) men must be portrayed in a negative light; (2) men should be viewed with suspicion and resentment; (3) men should play second fiddle to women in everything; (4) women are superior to men in everything, including virtue.

I totally agree that this message is being spread.

Then you describe Theron's character in a more realistic film, The Road :

In other words, she is the typical modern American woman: lacking in character, tenacity, and endurance, and ready to sell out her man the minute that the shit hits the fan.

This has the ring of truth. And this is what makes the scene so disturbing. This is why no critic ever commented on it. If a real apocalypse were to happen, the response of nearly all American women would be: (1) curl up into the fetal position and die; or (2) seek out a male figure to protect her.


Again, I agree.

There is nothing inherently wrong with portraying women as strong and empowered: the old Greek and Roman myths did it, as well as the Norse myths, Icelandic sagas, and the classic novels from old China and Japan. But the difference between those stories and modern Hollywood is this: in the old myths, the story complements, and is faithful to, the true nature of women. In modern movies, the stories are utterly fanciful. They are attempts to ram a degenerate, socially pernicious ideology down our throats.


You cite Euripedes' Medea and the German Nibelungenlied as examples of acceptable/realistic female empowerment.

I have read Euripedes and have studied Medea, but I am familiar with the story of Seigfried in only general terms. Therefore I will only comment on Medea.

Medea is very much the villain of the story. At no point did I root for Medea. She was nothing more than a heartless cunt who showed the absolute lowest level of human character by slaying her own children out of spite and jealousy alone. While I do believe that women can be driven to such low acts of desperation, I do not believe that such a story or character counts as "portraying [a] woman as strong and empowered".

I am not saying that the story itself is unbelievable, or that such stories should not be told. In fact they very much should be told. However is it the only type of story about women that should be told?

It goes back to my original question: Can women ever be heroic?

Can women ever be truly strong? I don't mean physically like a man, and I do not mean mentally in the same way as a man. Yet there are feminine ways in which a woman can [rarely] be as strong as a man mentally. I think that a virtue of female strength is a type of feminine sacrifice, though we don't get to see it today except perhaps in the much older generation of women still around.

Can a woman never persevere? I think sometimes a woman can. Not every woman, but some.

So according to my reading of your point of view the problem with Million Dollar Baby is that the woman does not use femme fetale/ Medea like tools. She uses values that are generally accepted as good and honorable and you are saying that women can never be like that.

I am arguing that while there is certainly a concerted effort to indoctrinate young people in the West that women are superior and men are evil, not every movie is part of the effort. There are good things that one can learn from Million Dollar Baby. It is not a feminist hit-piece. She only boxes against other women, and the point of the movie doesn't really have much to do with boxing at all.

If she were a ballerina, would that have made the movie better? I think she doesn't even have to be a woman to get the true message of the story across. They could have made the same movie about a man and only small parts of the message would have changed.

The movie is as much about Clint Eastwood's character as it is about Hillary Swank's. The movie is in fact a breath of fresh air. It shows an old man as a father figure who comes to truly care for his student and doesn't muddle anything by adding weird sexual tension. While the movie doesn't end well for the main character with it's dark ending - asking an important existential question - the rest of the movie deals with real, platonic, human, familial bonds.

And if we are going to be true to reality then we have to let 1 film out of a 1000 to be about a good woman. I admit that we don't need to encourage more female driven films, there is way too much pandering as is. But amongst the mud and the muck there is some good left. If anyone asked me to name two good recent films with female leads, I would say that Million Dollar Baby is one, and Black Swan is the other.

If you want to call out a Clint Eastwood film then I think the famous "Sudden Impact" from the Dirty Harry series is a bigger culprit.

[Disco_Volante]

^^^Black Swan is an excellent movie. Weird and sexy, it was a enjoyable with women in the lead. Vincent Cassel was about as masculine and dominant a male ballerina director could be.

It's clear to me that women who buy into feminism end up ruining themselves irreparably long term, so I'm really not upset about the stupid female fantasies portrayed in movies.

[eradicator]

(05-18-2015 11:42 AM)TheWastelander Wrote:  

(05-18-2015 10:59 AM)Dan Woolf Wrote:  

A-list used to mean actors that could open any kind of movie, anywhere. Now it's more complicated.

Apart from Pirates of the Caribbean, Johnny Depp can't even open his wife's thighs. And even those films aren't big in the US, but abroad. Put Tom Cruise in a small WW2 drama, nobody cares. Big budget action film? Sure. Liam Neeson in an Taken-like action film will be a hit, but nobody cares if he does a romantic comedy. And his paycheck on different films reflects that. Is Colin Firth a big name in the US or UK? Nope. But Kingsman made +45 million dollars in South Korea mainly because of his presence.

***TRIGGER WARNING***

These faggoty losers are why you should never go to a midnight premiere showing of a popular movie these days. I made the mistake of going to a midnight premiere of the original Iron Man flick back in 2008 when I was still in college and it was jam packed with a bunch of nerdy manchildren and ugly fat nerdy girls wearing costumes and acting like complete retards. Theaters should ban these weirdos.

like it or not, these 'weirdos' are the ones that see the film 10 times in theater and buy t shirts and other overpriced garbage that make up a chunk of the hollywood business. They aren't getting banned.

and disco, I thought black swann was garbage, but different strokes for different folks

[RawGod]

^That's the reality isn't it. We will sit it out, those guys will buy the tickets, and more movies of the same ilk will be forthcoming. In general, pop culture is for the young and impressionable, and the weirdos.

[DickDastardly]

delete

[AnonymousBosch]

(05-18-2015 08:59 PM)Slim Shady Wrote:  

Can women never be heroic? Even when they are only fighting other women?

w00t is right, I waffle too much. So:

- Watched Poltergeist from 1982 last night with a bang

- Average Suburban 1982 family, evil presence in house kidnaps youngest daughter, they can still hear her through the TV

- Researchers come, find evidence of ghosts

- Parents ask 8 year old brother and older teenage daughter to go stay with grandma.

- The boy is scared, but loves his sister and wants to stay with his parents to help rescue her, consistent with boy behaviour in 1982

- Teenager daughter immediately breaks down into tears - she literally can't even! - and seeks her own selfish safe space, abandoning her sister to the ghosts, consistent with teenage girl behaviour in 1982 and 2015. She isn't seen again until then end of the movie.

- Psychic comes, talks to the daughter through the TV, feels the spirits and tells the parents they're fighting The Beast, meaning The Devil, and he's using her goodness to keep lost souls around her, instead of them finding their rest

- Things get out of hand, house is revealed to be built over a cemetery, the young boy is sent away by his parents, in an almost wordless scene you can tell he wants to stay with them and fight.

- Psychic opens entrance and exit portals to afterlife and tells the parents someone needs to go in to save the daughter.

- Mother immediately beats father to the rope.

- The father starts to say he'll go, when the mother takes the rope, saying "I need you to hold the rope".

- Wordless looks. It's clear he understands her love for their daughter means she has the strength to save her.

- She understands that his superior strength and love for both of them is the anchor she needs to bring her and her daughter home, should her strength fail in there.

- None of this is spoken. Great chemistry between the actors. This is the traditional gender dynamic in action. After a few moments, she tells him she loves him and they kiss, before she steps into the portal.

- She's a believable hero, because her heroism is coming from a feminine place, not a masculine one.

- This is the kind of recognisable humanity - love, strength, faith and loyalty - that has been gradually removed from movies in the 33 years since that movie came out.

- It's basically a Christian Film at heart.

- Result: $120 million return on a $10 million budget. Huge word of mouth hit, 'legs', pop culture status.

- We then watched the sequel made in 1986. By this time, the cynicism and suspicion of the 70's New Hollywood directors has truly set into filmmaking, and political-correctness has become in vogue. The film then ticks off each box in what I think of as Cynical Rot that'll you find coming more into vogue through the back half of the 80's.

WHITE CHRISTIANITY IS EVIL

- 'The Beast' now is given literal form: it is no longer 'The Devil' the family is fighting, but 'The Reverend Henry Kane', an Old White Preacher. Rather than offering his flock strength and guidance, he doomed them all to death.

PATRIARCHS ARE ABUSIVE

- Seemingly interminable scenes of The Father being possessed, threatening his family in various ways, almost raping the mother. A year later, 'The Stepfather' becomes the monster in the film of the same name.

NATIVE SPIRITUALITY IS WISER AND DEEPER THAN CHRISTIANITY

- Rather than the psychic from the first film possessing the knowledge, she defers to an Indian Shaman, who gives the family the power to defeat Kane, not through strength, love, faith and loyalty, but mystical magic and a spear.

- There was probably more but it had become the background to banging about a third of the way in, so I only noted bits and pieces.

- Whilst these beliefs would match those of L.A.'s elite at the time, the mass audience can't relate to these experiences as they don't match their experience or worldview.

- Result: $19 million budget, $41 million return. A huge flop.

- I mentioned watching it to a mate, and he said there's a remake coming out soon. Curious, I looked it up, wondering how on earth they'd make a movie about Family Love overcoming evil in 2015. From the Variety review, with my emphasis.

Quote:

DeWitt [actress playing the Mother] is unfortunately rather ill served by the film’s most significant divergence from the original, which robs the character of her great moment of maternal heroism.

This isn't accident, this is exactly the sort of design I mean.

[Simeon_Strangelight]

Anita Sarkesian weighed in on Mad Max.



To her I guess it is not feminist enough. As some other feminists have deplored she would have wanted to see grannies go toe to toe with the muscular Warrior Boys. But it is clear that she liked it, which should give most men food for thought.

The rest is the typical bla bla logic of talking without saying anything.

-----

Also the ratings on IMDB are slipping - each day by 0,1 points as paid hucksters can only pull it up so much without arousing too much suspicion:

Quote:

Worst movie of the year
1/10
Author: pvp_frisa from Londrina, Brasil
19 May 2015
Movie was so bad that some people left the cinema in the middle. Wish I could unseen this ''movie''.

I have to believe that the initial reviews are fake. Especially since there are so many using the same verbiage - like the word "master piece". This film is very very far from a masterpiece. In fact, I think the word garbage would be more appropriate.

Even though most of the action is done practically it doesn't mean anything because you don't care about the characters. One of the strong points of the old Mad Max movies is how they slowed down to give you a chance to take in the world you was in and get to know the characters. It doesn't happen here.

Also when this movie does use CGI it's laughably bad. And from start to finish the movie looks way too polished and cartoon-like.

Tom Hardy is terrible. Laughably bad, Mel Gibson should be very thankful he stayed away from this stinker.

George Miller screwed what could have been a good movie.

and another one who walked out of the movies:

Quote:

Walked out of the cinema
1/10
Author: Alan Entwistle from England
19 May 2015
Didn't rate this film at all. This was the only film I've ever walked out of in the cinema (and I wasn't the only person to walk out). Yes there is loads of action, but there is no storyline. These two factors combined makes the movie drag. I walked out after 90 minutes, which felt like 2.5 hours. It was basically one big action sequence. If you are not bothered about story lines and love pure action then you would probably like it, if not then I would steer clear. If you have to see it for yourself I would probably rent or download it, and save yourself the price of a cinema ticket. Such a shame as the trailer made it look so good, but if you were to watch the trailer for 2 hours, there's probably no difference from the actual movie.

[kbell]

Of course they had to make a video game about it. But oddly enough its not rushed too launch but being released later. The game looks like a rip off of Batman Arkham Asylum. No mention of the chick character, also Max looks nothing like Tom Hardy, so it might not be a direct game, but using the release to draw up attention to it.

[samsamsam]

A new sequel is planned.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/18...10266.html

Quote:

The Road Warrior's road will continue.

"Mad Max: Fury Road" did so well at the box office during its opening weekend that director George Miller says there's already a sequel planned and it'll be called "Mad Max: The Wasteland."

The movie, which cost $150 million to make, earned $45 million domestically and another $65 million overseas for a total of $110 million in its opening weekend.

Miller joined Twitter over the weekend to make the big announcement:

Hello Twitter!
Thanks for all the kind words written and said about the film.
We had a lot of fun making it..and there's more Max to come.
— George Miller (@GMillerMax) May 17, 2015

Although Miller's account is unverified, the tweet echoes comments he made last week in "The Q&A With Jeff Goldsmith" podcast.

“We’ve got one screenplay and a novella. It happened because with the delays (while making "Fury Road"), and writing all the backstories, they just expanded,” Miller said in comments transcribed by The Playlist.

Variety reports that Tom Hardy, who plays Max, has said his contract covers three more films, should they be made.

Warner Brothers has yet to confirm a sequel, the entertainment news outlet reported. However, given the box office numbers as well as widespread acclaim (the film has a 98 percent "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes), a sequel seems like a safe bet.

[joseywales]

Jack Donovan wrote up a review of the movie:

http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2015...ur-war-rig

Quote:

I think of most movies as long, crappy TV shows I watch at home while drinking.

The last big-budget blockbuster I bothered to see in the theater was Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The last film I rented from Amazon that actually moved me was Warrior, starring Tom Hardy. Hardy has been in a lot of my favorite movies in the past few years, notably playing power animal Bane in Dark Knight Rises, the broody bootlegger in Lawless, and the flamboyantly violent British criminal Charles Bronson. I’m the guy who wakes up every morning hoping this despicable civilization has finally collapsed, so when I read that Hardy had been cast in a reboot of the post-apocalyptic Mad Max franchise, I was already in. I don’t think I even bothered to watch a whole trailer, I just knew it was the only movie I cared about seeing this summer.

I’d been ignoring headlines in my feed claiming the film was a “feminist action film” until Aaron Clarey sent me a link to his call for men to boycott “Mad Max: Feminist Road.” While boycotts are a bourgeois form of protest and completely pointless for universally despised fringe groups like “white people” and “men,” the idea that the filmmakers were actually pushing it as a feminist film rubbed me the wrong way. Most of the shows and movies I like have some weasley feminist fantasy woven into them, but if you’re going to open with a big “fuck you” to men in a movie made for men, I figured, “fuck you, too.”

I’d pretty much decided to forgo Fury Road until RADIX asked me to write about it. I took the assignment and went to see it in 3D, and I’m glad I did. I loved it. I’d see it again. I’ve started lifting to the relentless albeit somewhat repetitive Fury Road soundtrack. The film is a fast moving graphic novel, to be sure, but it was an evocative visual spectacle with innovative design and a broad range of grotesque villains and supporting characters. If you can’t lose yourself in a movie dominated by a cult of skull-faced war boys banging on drums and racing through the desert on hot rods, screaming about going to Valhalla...well, chances are we’re probably not going to get along. I will also hook up the first person who comes to my shop asking for a tattoo of the words, “RIDE FOREVER, SHINY AND CHROME.”

Max Max: Fury Road is not a feminist film. Or rather, it’s no more feminist than the hashtag badass shieldmaidens in The “History” Channel’s Vikings, or the wise woman who knows better than a man in basically every sitcom and television commercial made in the past two decades. For that matter, it’s no more feminist than Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, made thirty years ago, with Tina Turner bossing around everybody in Bartertown and yet another naive heroine leading her people to some promised land that doesn’t exist.

That’s a rather polite way to describe any feminist, actually.

A naive heroine leading her people to some promised land that doesn’t exist.

The women calling Fury Road a feminist film have revealed themselves as either cynical opportunists or the useful idiots of marketers. Probably both.

I realized last year, when I read a feminist op-ed arguing that women should never be sent to prison for any reason, that publishers will post just about any damn crazy thing that feminists write. The crazier, the better. While I’m sure they feel “empowered” and they do have far more influence than they should, feminists put on a reliable and apparently irresistible daily freak show for the clickbait Circus Maximus of the mainstream media. “Feminist Freak Out” is a reality TV show that people can’t stop watching.

“What crazy shit will these bitches say next??!!”

The disparity between what women actually want and what feminists pretend to want was made clear when, despite the fact that feminists were pushing Fury Road, North American women waddled in waves to see Pitch Perfect 2 instead. Feminists say they are pleased about this, despite the fact that a musical comedy about a female singing group is exactly the kind of movie that studio executives would have expected to be a hit with women...in 1955. That main difference today is that they let women direct movies for women, which is kind of like bankrolling a woman who wants to open a yoga studio or a fancy cupcake shop. It makes a reasonable amount of sense.

George Miller, who also directed the far more convincingly feminist film, The Witches of Eastwick, probably did mean to make the movie more vagina-positive, in a white knight kind of way. He did invite abyss-gazer Eve Ensler to the set, and Miller is apparently so taken by the strong female lead character “Furiosa” that he’s written the next Mad Max film around her. That may turn out to be a truly feminist film, but some of the logical conclusions that men can draw from Fury Road are anything but feminist. Here are three:

Patriarchal Women are Beautiful and Feminine; Matriarchies Make Women Ugly

The wives kept by Immortan Joe in the Citadel are soft and appealing. Save one youthful, exotic, unlikely beauty, the “feminist” women are indistinguishable from a pack of grizzled old sailors. To survive in the wasteland together, they’ve become as hard as men. Despite the “feminist” theme that warlike men are responsible for “killing the world,” one of the women brags that she’s killed everyone she met in the desert and muses gleefully about shooting men right through the medulla. To survive without the protection of men in a dangerous world, a woman must put aside childish pacifism and become as bloodthirsty as a man. Or Hillary Clinton.

The takeaway here is that when women and men have distinct roles, women can afford to be beautiful and feminine. When they have to fend for themselves, they become hard, ugly and manly.

A Woman Really Needs a Man to Punch Her in the Face and Save Her from Herself

I watched Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome before I went to see Fury Road, and this seems to be a recurring theme in Mad Max movies. In Beyond Thunderdome, Max is found in the desert by a young woman named Savannah and taken back to her village of lost children. They think he is a pilot returning to save them, and Savannah wants to lead a group out into the wasteland to find a world that Max knows is long gone. She has an altercation with Max, and he punches her in the face. Savannah eventually leads some of the kids out into the desert anyway, and Max has to go save them. Then he comes up with a plan to get them out of the desert. They escape the desert by following his plan, and Max gets left behind, so Savannah keeps his memory alive by telling the kids how great he was every night.

When Max encounters #badass lady truck driver Furiosa in Fury Road, they fight, and he beats her up. They establish an uneasy truce and work together to escape Immortan Joe and his war boys. Without Max, she probably never would have made it to reach her clan of women, or discover that the “green place” she was taking the wives to no longer exists. She comes up with a new plan to lead all of the women across the salt plains. Max knows they will die on the plains, so he comes up with a plan to save them from themselves.

Never Let a Woman Drive Your War Rig

Women are not men. They see the world as women, and have their own agendas and hierarchies of values. When you put a woman in a male role with substantial authority, she’s likely to take advantage of that opportunity to advance her own agenda. It doesn’t matter if the best man for the job is a woman.

This is a mistake modern, Western men make over and over. They reduce sex roles to mere skill sets, and ignore the inevitable social changes that occur when you put a woman in a male role. A perfect example is the military. So many men are willing to say, “a woman should only serve in infantry if she can meet the same standards as men,” but are unwilling to address the social changes to male groups that occur when females are included--because social changes are more difficult to quantify than pushups and pullups.

Could some woman drive a war rig as good as or better than a man? Conceivably, yes. Furiosa could very well be the Danica Patrick of the post-apocalyptic world. But the moral of Mad Max: Fury Road is that if you let a woman drive your war rig, she’s going to betray you, steal your wives, kill you and destroy your legacy and everything you’ve ever built. The message to men is clear: don’t trust a woman to do a man’s job, especially if she’s good at it.

The sexes work best together when they complement each other and cultivate a mutual respect for their different natures and roles. Women are not men, and putting a woman in the role of a man invites disaster, but that doesn’t mean women deserve to be chained up and raped or milked like cows. There’s a wide berth for compromise between chastity-belted sex slavery and big-rig riding murder dykes. If there is a rational message about women in Fury Road, it is that if you don’t treat your women with some modicum of decency and respect, maybe you deserve to have your whole world ruined.

[Simeon_Strangelight]

With all due respect to Jack Donovan - someone noted that if you are gay, you would most likely love the movie. It could easily be redone into gay porn as well with the Warrior Boys in the lead.

[Quintus Curtius]

I've just read Jack's review of the movie, and I understand what he's saying. I think he understands where we're coming from, but he was willing to set aside the "message" stuff and see the film as escapist entertainment. And that's fine, as far as it goes.

But I see things a bit differently. I can't separate the messages and gender portrayals from the action of the movie. They are too interlinked, at least for me.

The inescapable reality is that women are portrayed as central to the film, with men serving as ancillary, warped characters, including Mad Max, who emerges as a flashback-haunted sidekick for Charlize Theron.

The symbolic acts of supplication to the Altar of Femininity are embedded right in the movie, from start to finish. It reaches a pathetic low in the film when Max is portrayed as washing himself in "mothers' milk." This to me was both degrading and disgusting.

It just seems like these directors go out of their way to throw repellent images in our faces. They love to portray what we would, in previous eras, confine to circus side-shows: midget freaks, obese women, etc. All of these defective human specimens make an appearance in the movie.

It celebrates not only false feminism, but also freakishness in general.