Patrick R

As far as I know,

Telltale and Lionsgate team up for "Super Show"? This all sounds really odd to me.

Yes! Intersectionality! So important (as Patricia Arquette probably knows right about now)! Feminism achieved through capitalism is very problematic.

It is a dismissive term. That's not an accident. The intent is to dismiss. I am dismissive of Crash so I use that term to dismiss it. It's not criticism, it's shorthand. It's conversational. If I ever read a piece of criticism on a movie that didn't elaborate beyond the phrase "Oscar bait" that'd be a lousy piece of writing, but when you're talking about 2 to 4 sentence posts in a forum, shorthand is totally acceptable. And all Oscars are bought. A big part of why Selma got screwed this year is because Paramount totally botched it's release/campaign. There's never been a movie that won best picture (at least not since the 80's, when the scheming behind these races began to escalate) that didn't have a lot of marketing dollars and strategy behind it. It's comparable to saying "I think Barack Obama won because he was the best candidate" and ignoring all the tactics and money that go into a presidential election campaign. EDIT: Not that Birdman's quality is incidental. It's not like the same amount of money and campaigning behind Transformers 4 would have gotten that best picture. But it's only a single factor.

When the same broad criticisms apply to a wide swath of movies, sometimes shorthand is helpful. I think "Oscar Bait" is a perfectly acceptable term. When someone says that Crash was Oscar bait it doesn't tell the whole story, but it gives you a good idea of what to expect in it's tone and approach. That said, Birdman isn't Oscar bait. Birdman is way too idiosyncratic and singular to fall under that umbrella. If you want to explain why it won best picture, the fact that it panders to the egos of actors and artists is a reasonable explanation. But even if I'm not a big fan of it, it's hard for me to believe anyone got involved because they thought they'd win Oscars. It's not like Crash or The Kings Speech, movies that fall into familiar and well-defined territory when it comes to Oscar voters. Birdman is closer to The Artist, a weird formal experiment that's a paean to show business and art (which helps it's Oscar chances) and with enough energy and humor to sell to mainstream audiences as a minor hit (which also helps it's Oscar chances). But it was by no means a shoe-in way back in 2013 when they started filming.

The only good thing about researching the Academy Awards process is it puts the final nail in the coffin in ever caring about the Academy Awards. How to Train Your Dragon 2 made $Texas at the box office and is part of a highly successful franchise, so you can at least feel good that it's a good movie that people liked that will be seen for years to come. It wouldn't have really gained anything from an Oscar.

Honestly, for me personally, it's more of a problem with minor public figures than anyone else. Like, I follow all the Thumbs and other developers on Twitter, so frequently their conversations with each other fill my feed and it can be hard to remember that they are talking with their friends, of which I am not one, because you listen to a group of friends talk for hundreds of hours they start to feel like your friends. So then Steve and Jake talk about a Dissolve article on a Billy Wilder movie they never heard of and I've seen it I wanna be like "Oo, I've seen it, I can add to this!" but probably I should just let them have their conversation. Which isn't what I did, instead I was like "Oo, I've seen it, I can add to this!" It works the other way too. Listeners of my podcast often butt into my tweets in kind of invasive ways, like when I was depressed one day and someone kept insisting that I shouldn't be because my podcast was great and if he had a podcast like that HE wouldn't be depressed, why can't I just realize how cool my life is, etc. Which is the worst kind of flattering. I just want to yell "WHO YOU, I DON' KNOW YOU". But I think as far as social spaces go, Twitter is still pretty young, so the etiquette is still being formed. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. But a lot of that article isn't about the nuances of social interactions between strangers in public online spaces, it's just "Don't be a pest and try to double-check yourself all the time to catch yourself."

This is very old news but I haven't seen it in here yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-mC1PkYbnM It also does "Isn't She Lovely".

How To Talk To Girls On Twitter Without Coming Off Like A Creepy Rando I think if you removed the gendering this would still be just good advice in general (I've often experienced many of these same things), but as a not-woman I will assume it's a way worse problem for women than it is for men.

I feel like the Starcraft manual had about 50 pages of lore that I was RIVETED by as a tween. And the Warcraft 2 manual had some super gruesome sketches that I also obsessed over.

I only compared the two as a segue, because Q was the movie I originally came into this thread to talk about but... Q has a better grasp of what it is (monster movie), what it is about (seeing neat special effects and people getting destroyed) and what that means (light entertainment). It does not feign profundity. Birdman launches into fevered earnest monologues every 5 minutes as a way of distracting you from the fact that it's ultimately just another movie about show business, and doesn't even focus on that very well. It's very energetic and has some wonderful performances, but the fact that it's an Oscar front-runner is more about how flattering it is to the show-biz people in the Academy than it being a very meaningful movie. It has about as much to say as a comedy like Noises Off, but does so with far less wit or skill. Thus, Q: The Winged Serpent deserves to be this year's Oscar front-runner.

It's a killer quetzalcoatl flick. It's about the triumph of the human spirit over ancient Aztec gods.

No. It's a fine movie but, for all it's sound and fury, it's not ultimately about much. Q: The Winged Serpent, on the other hand...man. Michael Moriarty in that movie is a full-blown Nicholas Cage-style point of chaos, where he's totally unpredictable. , but Moriarty's energy takes it to another level.

Joe Bob Briggs is the only true genius of horror-movie hosting.

When Jake brought up Donald Rumsfeld it reminded me that the actual right context for out-and-out hostility in interviews is Louis CK asking Donald Rumsfeld if he's a lizard person on Opie and Anthony: EDIT: Wow, even this is more civil than that RPS interview.

This is getting ridiculous.

On a different forum I slowly changed my avatar over the course of weeks so it'd look like it was slowly melting. It was very upsetting for some people who didn't know what had changed, but swore that SOMETHING had changed.

It's shameful.

Fine! .

I think the next time I get tickets to a show that sells out I'll just sell the tickets for a little profit. Saw Sleater Kinney tonight and they were amazing, but there was no room to dance and this dude stomped on my toes about 50 times.

When I was a kid everyone in my class went to see Babe and my parents took me to see Gordy instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnlgnwCzt4M For some reason I made defending Gordy and tearing down Babe my 4th grade mission from God. I had all the best Babe slams. "It's not even a real pig in a lot of those scenes! It's a puppet! It's dumb kids stuff!" I would protest. I do identify with what you're saying about obsessing over the weird mundanities in the cracks of those kinds of movies. When I was a kid I would get so covetous any time there was a scene where kids were eating pizza or playing video games that none of my friends had*. I'd have long flights of fancy that were entirely based in how cool it'd be to have friends who swore and had snappy comebacks to lame things parents said and rode bikes in California, The Place Where All The Cool Hills Are. That actually ties into my theory about slasher movies, and about how they were a tremendous catharsis when I was an anti-social teenager with depression, because it'd be all these beautiful people throwing parties I never got invited to, having sex I never got to have, drinking beer I didn't have the guts to drink. Then some maniac in a mask would dismember them and rain on their parade. *Actually, I just watched an episode of Brooklyn 99 and got insanely covetous of a character eating pizza, so I guess that part is still true.

Kids movies like Rambo! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLop82LjV48

The Goonies has that kids movie thing where EVERY! BODY! IS! YELLING! ALL! THE! TIME!

I think, based on what we've discovered, they are all worth watching and none of them are worth watching.

Yeah, I guess we just disagree there because I find it a million times easier to suspend my disbelief with practical effects than CGI. I don't think artists have really figured out how to make CGI look like it's occupying the same space as actors. I feel the same about sets. Physical is just always better for me, unless one is going for something surreal like Speed Racer or something. I think ET and The Thing both look amazing. I don't think the Alien Queen looks good, but I don't find any of the creature effects in Aliens to be very good, outside the Facehugger scene I guess. Scott did an amazing job hiding the Alien in the shadows in ways that implied smoother movement.