Sound of freedom

You're right. They'll be going after Cesc Fabregas. The cheeky b@stard . How dare he take on Sir Alex.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-11105051/Cesc-Fabregas-reveals-really-happened-Battle-Buffet.html

Be interested in looking at this whenever it's available on DVD.

Couldn't care less about the QANON stuff (whatever that is) or if Jim Cavaziel is a loon (So is Tom Cruise and it doesn't turn me off his films), I just like action films as a way to while away a boring weeknight and seeing as it's got so much attention from the media I'd like to see what all the fuss is about.

Has Prime, Netflix or Apple got the streaming rights?

Or maybe it’s just not a great movie…?

I mean, the trailer alone makes it look like a fairly generic poorly written low-budget actioner…. the type of thing that usually goes straight to VOD, and doesn't warrant a review from any major publication/site in the first place. It's getting more attention because of the political aspect, not in spite of it.

I’d guess it’s probably ‘fine’.

(Also, film review sites can't be taken seriously because they didn't do investigative journalism on child trafficking? It's a movie. It obviously first and foremost has to get judged on the merits of how it stands up as a movie. It can have the best message in the world - but if its an average film, its an average film.)

My point is the film review section of any publication, or any standalone film sites, are for film. I don't think it's realistic to judge a film reviewer's output based on what other completely unrelated people at a publication do. Film critique is it's own separate thing, and the people doing it will have nothing to do with anyone doing anything else at a place.

As for the review - I mean it's a take. I wouldn't call it demented. The movie isn't famous because it's a top quality movie, it's famous because of all the promotional stuff around it (the same reason we have 3 pages of discussion over a random low budget action film that no-one here has actually seen), so it makes sense that that will be part of the coverage. The Guardian is also always going to have a more 'thinkpiece' type review than a more specialised film site like Roger Ebert (2 stars).

As an aside, there is something quite odd and a bit grubby about pushing so hard for more people to go spend money on seeing the movie so they can save the children... if that's really the goal, shouldn't they use their end-credit QR codes to point viewers to charities or amnesty international etc to actually try to save the children, instead of to ticket sites to just buy more tickets? Like, in theory the former would be quite a good active move - you've just shown these specific people the horrors of child trafficking, so they'll never be more open to donating to charity/support organisations... feels like a big opportunity wasted if the goal is to provide help.

There seems to be a concerted effort by a lot of the media to encourage people not to watch the film, not because it's a bad film but because it's creators have the "wrong" political views, very rarely does this happen with any film, generally reviewers say whether its good or not and leave it at that and not judge people for liking the film.

It's got 78% favourable reviews from critics and 99% favorable reviews from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes so if both audience and critics think it's decent it sounds like it might be worth a watch.

It's a pretty unique situation in fairness though... it's rare for a film to hit the mainstream carrying so much ideological/political baggage, and even moreso for that rhetoric to be such a large part of promoting the film.

The makers/distributer must be delighted with the bit of backlash though, any publicity for a film is good publicity really. For instance in a vacuum I'd have watched that trailer, immediately gone 'nah, looks terrible', and that would've been it. Whereas now because of all this, I'm a bit more intrigued - and even from a film-industry-work point of view feel like I should watch it to be able to be part of the conversation.

I also think 'concerted' is the wrong word. Everybody's calling everything concerted these days, as if there are these great conspiracies everywhere, with everyone back-channel communicating over the united action they're all going to take about every topic. Life's not that simple or co-ordinated. If only it were!

Tom Cruise is probably the biggest movie star of all time, I'd argue his career hasn't really been hurt by the Scientology stuff at all .All his films do well at the box office, audiences weren't really turned off by his personal beliefs because his films tend to be entertaining.

For such a small film there has been a huge amount of campaigning against it by the media who supposedly hold the correct opinions on things.They'd have been better off to not say anything ,their telling people they shouldn't watch it only piques peoples interest.

You can view any film in isolation if you want, if it's entertaining then the politics of it's creators are largely irrelevant.

American Sniper wasn't particularly great propaganda for gun worshipping, Chris Kyle came across as a complete asshole in the film and if it was supposed to pro gun/pro US Military I'd argue the end result was the exact opposite

Oh it definitely did, like, in a big way. I'm surprised you don't remember it - he was a laughing stock for a few years.

In the 6 years prior to the release of the most controversial of the Scientology leaks and his insane "jumping on coach" madness, he starred in 5 films produced by companies other than his own. In the 6 years after that point, he starred in none that he didn't make himself. Paramount dumped him in a very highly publicized move, both for his behaviour, and his impact on box office figures for MI:3. Here's a little piece from NPR at the time that talks about it briefly for instance - https://www.npr.org/2006/08/23/5698612/an-ugly-public-split-for-cruise-and-paramount

There were continuous conversations for a good few years about when/if he'd become 'bankable' again. From 2006 onwards he had a run of box office disappointments in MI:3, Valkyrie, Lions for Lambs, Knight & Day, Rock of Ages etc. Then in 2011/2012 it was his own properties of MI: Ghost Protocol and Jack Reacher that finally brought him back - and he pushed on with Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow, and has been pretty much back since.

But again - to actually draw the comparison, you would need to look at a Scientology adjacent film that Tom Cruise would've made. THEN you'd have a comparison to the conversation around this film. It's those two pieces stuck together that make this one quite unique - i've not really seen a similar situation tbh.

As for American Sniper - where you're coming from matters a lot on that one (as it probably does on Sound of Freedom too). I agree that coming from an Irish sensibility, the whole thing comes across as making the guy look like a total jerk. But coming from a US sensibility (and i've lived in the US since before that came out) there was quite a bit of controversy around its portrayal of guns, and of the glorification of killing the character does etc. A quick google of "controversy American Sniper movie" will throw up a bunch of articles on it. But even with that movie having a very high profile, this Sound of Freedom one has that extra ingredient mentioned above.

"You can view any film in isolation if you want, if it's entertaining then the politics of it's creators are largely irrelevant."

That's my point - in isolation i'd definitely be giving this a miss, but will likely watch it now so i'm informed for the conversations on it over here, with the movie being the centerpiece of a larger conversation.

A lot of hardcore conspiracists draw the line at QAnon.

That is only for the craziest of the crazies.

Yeah but they don’t start of with the full crazy, they lure you in with “wont someone think of the children” and then you get to the Hillary Clinton eats kids faces and JFK jr will rescue us all.

https://vozwire.com/the-shadowy-qanon-guru-who-many-believe-is-jfk-jr-including-jim-caviezel-and-roseanne-barr-is-recruiting-in-order-to-control-elections/

Has anyone here actually seen the film. I know nothing about Qanon. Never heard of it until this thread. It doesn't make any difference to me re their beliefs, conspiracy theories. Just wondering is the movie any good? Is it a mystery/thriller type move? If there are political/religious beliefs thrown in there in the movie, it doesn't impact on my assessment of a film. I read someone here say that Nefarious was pressing religious beliefs in-your-face. Went over my head - I just took it for an interesting character study.

They're called cinemas on this side of the pond.

As posted above, the chap himself is not exactly shy about his QANON leanings.

And it's not available because the distributor didn't put it out for release yet. I'd imagine their plan was to focus on the US market first and see how it did, and use any word-of-mouth to springboard further international releases, which looks to have been a good plan. Simultaneous global release only really works if your thing has huge marketing and branding behind it, otherwise you start smaller and build. Would probably expect a limited cinema release in the UK (and maybe ireland) at the end of the summer maybe, around the same time it hits streaming platforms.

Its been invaded by the lizard people.

That, or get him put on a watch list 😅

Nutter.