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[Weekly Update] March 8th, 2020

🕑 Added 2020-03-09 02:55:39 +0000 UTC

Comments

Michael Everett

Movies like that make my inner eight year old come out and scream. "It's just not fair! I like these actors! Why is this so boring??!!?1?"

Accented Cinema

Homework is such a good way to describe that movie lol...

Michael Everett

I didn't think you were saying they were good, I just think there's more merit in the concept that they are outright terrible than in sexism ruining them. Both TMNT movies had fan outrage for the entire production. The first one clearly had intended for William Fincher to be Shredder, but when he went on a talk show and explained it things changed. There were issues with other casting choices too, like Johnny Knoxville and Tony Shalob. The second one ended up having similar problems when the pre-release footage reminded people of the version of Shredder from The Next Mutation, followed by misunderstood Tyler Perry quotes that made it sound like he wrote his own lines for Baxter (followed by the fact that he was playing Baxter at all). Birds of Prey does seem to have more vitriol than the average one of these, and I've wondered that too. But there are so many reads on what is going on with that film that it's hard to even know where to start. I have the same problem trying to reflect on what I thought about Captain Marvel as well, but to be fair there hasn't been a movie released that was essentially homework for an upcoming second part of a two part movie before.

Accented Cinema

Birds of Prey feels very unfocused. And to this day, I'm not certain if that's a deliberate stylistic choice. It's Harley Quinn, she's crazy, so the narrative is all over the place. You know, it works. The F-Bombs in this movie is not the best written. There's certain humour that have to come with using F-Bombs, which this film fails to capture. If you consider the main purpose of the film probably isn't to sell tickets but to sell clothes... Yeah, I can understand why it's R rated.

Accented Cinema

I'm in no way claiming the films I listed are good movies. If anything, I'm deeply confused as to why female team movies are consistently bad. Rather, I'm more interested in discussing why these films received such massive backlash, which in my eyes, the lack of quality alone does not justify. I don't even remember the live action TMNT causing such aggressive hatred. Most people sound simply disappointed at how ugly the turtles look. And it seems to be a problem surrounds team movies, exclusively. The only solo women movie I can remember to have similar backlash is Captain Marvel, an underwhelming movie indeed. All these films have a thing in common: They were all advertised towards (Non-girly) women. Fandoms collided in these backlashes. At least from what I see, people's distastes against Birds of Prey is not really about its quality. When searching through news about the backlash, there is little to no discuss about the film's own content. Compare that to Justice League, a film I dislike with all my heart. There was backlash, the backlash never left beyond criticizing the film's content and certain behind the scene aspects. My guess is, people don't hate Birds of Prey itself, they hate what it stands for. And that's what I'm interested in finding out why. That said... There is no denying that some studio exec really do think shoving as much female stars into an existing property and it'll do well. It's lazy, and I think this is why these team movies have such consistently terrible quality.

Michael Everett

I feel like the biggest problem with these 'female team box office bomb' films is that they aren't new stories, but instead reimagined versions of existing stories and the biggest change is...that they use all women. Period. No major changes required after that. Then add to that studios selling the narrative that anyone criticing these films is sexist and/or misogynistic, which deeply bothers me. No film has instant audience buy-in. They all need to earn the audience’s engagement, and I think studios are using other tactics than ‘make the best movie we can’ to try and gain this buy-in. When looking at these recent failures I can at least say that Dark Fate was kind of fun and I wish it had been better received, but it didn't bring anything new or interesting to the table. Instead, it was marketed by the director saying the new main character would 'scare the f*** out of closeted misogynists'. The last third of the movie is wonderfully tense and Carl the drapery making Terminator was delightful, but they lost the fight before the first trailer. Ghostbusters really feels like a film that was 90% improv, almost as if it was made the same way Iron Man was with only part of a script built around expensive set pieces. Why is it that the 'ghosts are real!' tape was leaked and not the actual proof of ghosts? How can they afford this equipment? Why is all of their equipment drawn from the original movie but with neon lights or other gimmicks? Is there a single original idea anywhere in here, or is it all just Melissa McCarthy doing fat jokes and Kristen Wiig doing cringe? Instead, we should look at the other end of the spectrum: women in a traditionally male role but not in an established IP. Lots of examples spring to mind for me here. Lucy is a superhero film in all but name, made by a writer/director who loves writing women who upstage their male counterparts. Though, fair warning to anyone who doesn't know that much about this director: do yourself a favor and don't look into Luc Besson's personal life. Just trust me on this. This movie did so well Besson got to make Valerian. Or Atomic Blonde, the next movie one of the two John Wick directors made after that production. This is an existing IP, Theron is amazing in it, and it would not work as well if it was a man in her role. Her vulnerability and strength both intersect in fascinating ways. It’s a bit annoying what they do to Soffia Boutella, but it also feels like an artifact from the time it was created. We could go back a few more years and look at Fury Road, a Mad Max movie in which Max is the lead supporting character. There were some small groups of obnoxious people online talking about Mad Max being (insert sexist concept or insult here) and how it should be his movie, but it isn’t, and it is glorious for it. Fury Road is a full hour of nonstop adrenaline followed by another hour of falling action and resolutions. Warner Brothers needed to simply hand George Miller whatever they owed him because if they had they would already have a Furiosa spin-off in theaters and know if a second is worth making. If we’re talking about Warner Brothers then let’s talk about Wonder Woman. Steve Trevor is written as a damsel in distress frequently, and Chris Pine sells it perfectly, but it’s all really Gal Gadot and her mix of wide-eyed innocence and unerring certainty, both of which are put to the test at the end. But let’s look at one more component of this argument: other films that are from an established IP that hit with assumed audience buy-in and failed. Just taking Wikipedia’s Box Office Bombs list, sorting by date and only selecting items from the last five years that have a widely recognizable IP gives us Dolittle, Dark Phoenix, Terminator: Dark Fate, Mortal Engines, Robin Hood, Solo, A Wrinkle in Way Too Much Time, Justice League Part One, King Arthur: Legend of the British Gangster, The Mummy, Power Rangers, Transformers: The Last Explosion, Alice Through The Looking Desperation, Ghostbusters: Don’t Bother Answering This Call, Huntsman: Winter’s Why Did They Make This, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of Good Ideas, Fantastic Fourth Time A Failure and Pan. Opinions will vary here, but of that list most people would agree the majority of these are simply bad movies. So ultimately I feel the issue isn’t an invasion of a perceived space but an overall lack of quality in certain kinds of movies, and that while toxic fandom or male audiences feeling threatened definitely aren’t blameless in all of this we’ve reached a new era of filmmaking in which creators are now gaslighting the audience over not going to see low quality films that have political ideologies inserted into them first and foremost. https://imgix.bustle.com/inverse/dd/30/a5/73/7a45/4eb7/8bcc/4af18b11d685/johnson-snokejpeg.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&q=70&fit=crop&crop=faces&fm=jpg

Uneducated & Enthused

I watched Charlie's Angels, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn--I didn't see Ghostbusters though simply because I wasn't particularly interested. Can't speak for or against it. I went & saw both Charlie's Angels and Dark Fate with my mother their respective opening weekends: we both had a lot of energetic discussion about CA and the ways it could be improved or benefit from slight alterations but on the whole would say we both enjoyed it. It mostly needed stronger stylization with cinematography and edits or something--like Guy Ritchie's (unfortunate flop) The Man from U.N.C.L.E. She really liked Dark Fate while I was incredibly "meh" on it. I felt like the story could've been tightened up a bit, some scene's given more weight and even arranged differently. BOP, on the other hand, I saw by myself: opening night, the following weekend, and the weekend after that. I came out of the film chewing over most of what I wanted or wished had happened, and ultimately boiled it down (to mix metaphors) to the single complaint that I simply wanted more--of characters, of interactions, of the story, all of it--which all things considered is actually more of a compliment than a criticism. The more I've seen it, the more I've grown to love it and appreciate so many wonderful things that it accomplishes. It isn't terribly deep or nuanced, but it was never meant to be anything but a feel good popcorn flick which it effectively fulfilled. The fight choreography was great, all the characters were fun (and yes, I was never too invested in comic Cassandra Cain so I'm less sensitive to the hard pivot from "source material"), and I can't honestly wait to see more. As I realised after the third screening: there is something to be said for a film that puts Harley Quinn in a white t-shirt, drenched by sprinklers fighting in three inches of water wherein not once did the camera ogle Margot Robbie's quite attractive form. Edit to Add: I hadn't realised that BOP was an R film until I was seeing redband trailers before the screening, and while I do understand the purpose of casual F-bombs, gratuitous violence, and more mature content in its removing the female character's from the societal restraints of what is "ladylike" thematically, narratively there was little to necessitate the higher rating which automatically excludes a larger portion of the populace of consuming the film. It might have done far better PG-13 with a wider audience, wherein parents wouldn't have to decide to purchase their teens tickets or the interested and creative youth wouldn't buy tickets to other films and sneak into BOP which would not help with its boxoffice numbers. In some ways, the rating lowered their potential earnings out the gate.

Accented Cinema

I notice toxic fandoms tends to have a hard focus on numbers. In gaming it'd be resolutions and frame rates. Hell, even in movies people are talking about frame rates, as if higher is always better. It has to be remember that, when you hate something, chances are, you hate it before you have a reason. And your logical brain finds a reason for you to sustain that hatred later on.

Jeff Good

I think even the failure narrative of Birds of Prey is overblown because of toxic fandom. Sure, it didn't meet studio projections or whatever, but neither did Bladerunner 2049 and no one is calling that movie a failure. There is undue focus on box office because those people need it to fail to fit their world view.