Film forum off topic/random chat thread

pixelburp

It's sad to see, though when the dust settles I'd hope that his contribution to cinema is at least remembered fondly - as you say JU his contribution has been immense, arguably reshaping mainstream animation into a higher artform.

The discussion over the separation of the art & artist is long, acrimonious & far from agreed, but surely over time Lasseter's output can be assessed on its own merits.

pixelburp

James Mangold has shared some thoughts that mirror my own recent ones; that the obsessions and and fundamentalist backlash from some quarters of fandom is not only going to push away creatives or people with genuine visions, but also more resembles religious zealotry than any kind of fun hobby.

Now, in fairness the highest toxicity seems to be coming form Star Wars fans, which contains a religious devotion to its element anyway; I dunno, I once read a joking remark how, in a more secular society, pop-culture is filling the emotional gap left empty by religious fervor; while I thought it flippant and a bit ludicrous at the time, it becomes more convincing as I read about the asinine boycotts or hounding of actors for deigning to star in XYZ.

https://twitter.com/mang0ld/status/1014891358086160384

https://twitter.com/mang0ld/status/1014895194582454273

https://twitter.com/mang0ld/status/1015005661749379075

Harry Palmr

Once again summer tournament football has laid the UK box-office low - down by 60% on the same week last year, with Jurassic Park 5 (?) about 40% down on the previous instalment after the same time on release.

Sad Professor

https://variety.com/2018/film/news/scarlett-johansson-exit-rub-and-tug-trans-backlash-1202872981/

Obviously there's a whole debate here about actors pretending to be people they are not and where do you draw the line, etc, etc. I'm struggling to care either way since this was obviously intended as an oscar-bait performance for Johannson. However, surely the outcry over this is just going to discourage Hollywood from making films about trans people at all?

Tony EH

Actors are actors. It's their job to pretend to be people they're not all the time.

TBH, it just sounds like a load of loud, whining, fuckers, bleating on again and stinking up the place for their own attention.

Then they'll later whine about a lack of "representation" when these films dry up.

Morons. :pac:

megaten

Tony EH wrote: »

Actors are actors. It's their job to pretend to be people they're not all the time.

TBH, it just sounds like a load of loud, whining, fuckers, bleating on again and stinking up the place for their own attention.

Then they'll later whine about a lack of "representation" when these films dry up.

Morons. :pac:

Why

Sad Professor

Obviously with enough make-up and CGI augmentation, an actor could play any part. Yet society draws the line at certain roles. It used to be acceptable for white actors to put on black face and pretend to be black and mixed race. That's no longer acceptable and rightly so. I don't know enough about the character Johannson was supposed to be playing to say whether it was appropriate for her to be playing that part, but given that trans actors are less likely to be able to get non-trans roles, I can understand them taking issue with this.

I might be wrong, but I just think prestige films in which big stars play transsexual open doors in terms of improving representation. But if you start shooting down these films before they are made then... they may end up being relegated to the indie sector where most people will never see them.

The Black Oil

Funny timing with that RTE showing The Danish Girl recently (or soon, promoted it a bit). Once things kicked off about Johannson's casting and initial response statement you knew she would drop out. Very few actors with any sort of profile would stick that sort of heat.

I'm fine with diversity/representation as something that needs to be explored and can be changed. There has been understandable criticism of this and I'm sure some studios are probably still a bit blinkered. I am getting a little fed up of the need for ownership of some of these things and need to feed the outrage machine. Easy for me to say this, though. What happens to these roles that are not so much in the public eye, say, the theatre - non-famous straight actors on stage, playing LGBT roles? Probably few and far between. Maybe Johannson could have stuck with it and later gone on to help fund a few LGBT projects behind the scenes.

Non-autistic people have played autistic characters which isn't always ideal (and a community not shy in its opinions, if you know where to look), of course, but that's not gender or sexuality.

FunLover18

Rewatched Mission: Impossible last night - it really isn't an action movie and more of an espionage thriller. Someone pointed out on Twitter that Ethan doesn't shoot or punch anyone in the whole film and he wasn't lying; he slaps someone around in the pre-credits scene and kicks Phelps at one point but that's it. I was also struck by the fact that it contains the most unrealistic action scene of the franchise with the helicopter-train finale which was not only shot on green screen but also contains the worst "I'm flying a helicopter through a narrow tunnel" acting from Jean Reno. I presume if it was done today, Tom would actually do it for real and cling to the side of a TGV.

Fysh

RE: the Johansson casting....Taking a Devil's Advocate stance for a minute - consider how many folks around here get annoyed when we get leprechaun-standard Irish characters on screen, more often than not played with a dreadful parody of a stereotypical Oirish accent by a non-Irish actor.

I can understand the frustration that might be caused by this sort of casting, but I don't know if there's a quick way to get from where we are now to an industry where an actor being trans has no significant bearing on the roles they can get. But I can also see how "Just wait another thirty years so that the people who are uncomfortable having to rethink some of their ideas around gender identity don't have to make an effort to change" is unlikely to win much support amongst trans activists...

Tony EH

There's a huge difference between mild, chucklesome, irritation at an actor trying to do an accent and "outrage" because an actor isn't a transexual, but playing the part of one.

Where does that line get drawn? Do we stop gay people from playing straight roles? Because they're not straight? Do we stop all straight people from playing roles outside of their gender?

Into the bargain, this type of "outrage" only serves to put people off even bothering to make films that deal with this subject, or even other subjects of a touchy nature and in the end it becomes more underground, thus helping to defeat any kind of acceptance movement.

Talk about cutting one's nose of to spite your face.

pixelburp

I think ultimately where the problem falls is that this is a decent, legitimate cause, hobbled by an inability to pick the right battlegrounds from those most outraged. It's par for the course though in the culture wars going on over in America, where the zeitgeist seems to be about proving ones ideological purity at all costs, with any remaining bands of subtlety increasingly disappearing.

Though looking at America in a broader scope than Hollywood, I can sorta see where the outrage is coming from: whether it's the continuing legal battles between the courts & Trump administration trying to ban them from serving in the military, or other state-specific attempts at "bathroom bills", I can see why there's a defensiveness in a community that's probably feeling more than a little scapegoated or targeted for a fairly disproportionate amount of discrimination.

It's an incredibly tricky needle to thread, and I'm loath to even start to estimate: by all accounts transgenderism is a relatively unrepresented demographic at the best of times, and from what I understand isn't even guaranteed support from siblings within the LGBT community. Equally, I don't think Boards can claim to have much representation either, and have seen depressing cases of users feeling unwelcome and shunned by the broader membership due to the nastier, more vicious remarks thrown their way.

Sad Professor

I think for most Irish viewers, the Oirish character thing is an issue of authenticity rather than the politics of representation. Nobody really cares whether the actor pretending to be Irish identifies as Irish in real life, just that they can do a convincing Irish accent.

In this case, I don't see many people making the authenticity argument. Having seen pictures of the person Johansson was supposed to be playing, I agree she was miscast, but no more so than Gary Oldman was miscast as Churchill or Johnny Depp was as Tonto.

Native American actors are probably a better comparison in this case, actually. On one hand they are typecast as Indians and on the other tend to lose out on the bigger parts to white actors like Depp and Rooney Mara. I think there's a strong case to be made in that instance, and in the transgender one, that those big roles should go to an actor who is a member of the (extremely small) minority group in question.

The issue is that studios need marketable, bankable stars and the shortlist of actors up for these kinds of big roles are ridiculously small. The solution from the pov of the capitalist corporations that run the film industry is obvious: manufacture a couple of trans A-list stars that will appeal to mainstream viewers and let them mop up all the major trans roles for the next generation.

I'm not entirely whether this is what the social media outrage brigade want, or if their current tactics are the way to achieve it. This seems to be just another front in the culture wars, which is all justified on the belief held by both sides that "politics is downstream from culture", etc, and has nothing to do with film as an art form.

The Black Oil

Maybe one day those THR roundtables will focus on disability, y'know, with disabled actors.

Sad Professor

Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like some progress has been made recently re: disabled actors. I'm thinking mainly of Millicent Simmonds (who is deaf) who had major roles in A Quiet Place and Wonderstruck recently and another actor I can't think of. A first step probably involves getting mainstream audiences used to the idea of disabled characters, which is why I think the social media over-reaction to the Rock playing an amputee has the potential to backfire.

Representation, even bad representation, is usually better than no representation. I'm thinking of The Beguiled remake where it seems Sofia Coppola decided to avoid the potential controversy of getting the slave woman wrong by leaving the character out all together, which ironically resulted in everyone accusing her of rendering black slave women invisible, even though had she included the character they'd have still roasted her for it.

The Black Oil

I haven't seen that reaction. Will check it out. Disability media and politics still seem largely outside of the mainstream 'conversation', even if individual actors have gotten get their foot in the door. Things are further ahead on gender.

CastorTroy

Marlee Matlin has been pretty successful with shows like The West Wing and, lately, Quantico.

RJ Mitte from Breaking Bad is probably one of the more well known actors lately.
And I don't watch it myself but seems that show Switched at Birth has a lot of actors with disabilities, including RJ

Sad Professor

Not sure what's going on with the Coens brother's next project, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. It was originally announced as a mini-series to be released on Netflix, but now Variety is saying it will be released as a 132 minute film to be released theatrically. Not clear if that was always the plan.

tricky D

The Black Oil wrote: »

Disability media and politics still seem largely outside of the mainstream 'conversation', even if individual actors have gotten get their foot in the door. Things are further ahead on gender.

And look at what can happen when disability is well portrayed with Sanctuary which contributed to changing law allowing greater relationship autonomy for the intellectually impaired. Unfortunately it is a very rare thing for so much of a cast to be impaired. Disability is too often viewed as inability which needs to change.


https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/sanctuary-a-forbidden-tryst-with-a-twist-in-the-tail-1.3142974

Sad Professor

Orlando Bloom stopped during a performance of Killer Joe to tell a woman to put her iPad away.

https://variety.com/2018/legit/news/orlando-bloom-stops-play-killer-joe-ipad-1202888393/

From the picture, it seems she was actually using the iPad to prop up a fan because of how hot the theatre was, but it still looked like she filming the play. Really dumb, lucky she didn't get thrown out.

Having been in really small theatres, the smallest things can really distract me from the play, especially when there isn't a booming film soundtrack to cover up most of the smaller noises. I can only imagine what it's like for actors.

sacamano

A while since I've been to the Lighthouse but I read this morning that screen 1 has re-opened after being out of service for six months. Any idea as to what's changed in the meantime?

johnny_ultimate

I don’t think anything has ‘changed’ as such, just essential repair works needed to be carried out AFAIK

megaten

About time, I really missed it, he other screens are fine but I find screen 2 a bit cramped feeling when something popular is showing.

Agent Coulson

A Back to the Future reunion

pixelburp

As mentioned elsewhere, Biff appears to have morphed into Pat Kenny.

Sad Professor

Wow, 28 years later. They look great!

Also only discovered recently that Zoey Deutch is Lea Thompson's daughter.

Tony EH

Lea Thompson is looking well.

Arghus

Tony EH wrote: »

Lea Thompson is looking well.

First thing I thought as well.

pixelburp

And to think, in another universe somewhere, Back to the Future was some obscure film from the 80s starring Eric Stoltz about a time-travelling fridge.

Tony EH

pixelburp wrote: »

And to think, in another universe somewhere, Back to the Future was some obscure film from the 80s starring Eric Stoltz about a time-travelling fridge.