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2022 Movies Discussion Thread (v.2.0)


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8 hours ago, Tabe said:

30 Minutes or Less, which I have admittedly not seen, is just a gross concept to me. Making a comedy out of a real, vicious murder like that... no. Just no. 

That and Pain or Gain both made me feel gross after watching

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10 hours ago, odessasteps said:

Did you like To Die For? Or does that not fit since it was only inspired by a real crime? 

Haven't seen it, wasn't aware it had anything to do with a real crime. 

I think "inspired by" is a different animal though. I suppose it's pretty nebulous to me, so depending on how far the movie strays from real life if it's "inspired by". 

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17 hours ago, Contentious C said:

Hey, I watch horror movies, too; it's not all in the Secret Satan thread!  Day 454 (and counting) of...something, It Came from the Eighties Edition.

Your Baby's Dirty Diaper

Wolfen - Man, this probably had potential but steps on itself repeatedly by having too many threads that aren't useful or interesting or well-explored.  Albert Finney is a strange, albeit decent enough pick for a lead, but for as far removed from reality as this becomes, it never features him becoming particularly unhinged over the weird developments.  And Finney was a guy who could have pulled off a role where he's left alone to understand what truly happened, even if everyone else thinks he's lost it.  And, as I'll bring up again later, how are the bad guys the bad guys here?  Killing the ultra-capitalist greedy fuck straight out of the gate?  Good, go do another, please.  If this is a horror movie, it's a thin one, and nearly always due to the gore - maybe only because of the gore, in fact.  The camera stuff that this is probably best known for was obviously done far better by others down the road, but it's OK-ish anyway.  Well, aside from quite possibly the most laughable sex scene this side of a Zack Snyder movie.  But mostly, this is just weakly tropey and obvious by today's standards.

The 15:17 to Paris - Oh, hey, why hadn't I heard much about this Clint Eastwood movie?  Oh, probably because it's fucking awful.  I'm beginning to think that he's like some kind of modern-day Elizabeth Bathory, except he stays alive by sucking off the American military for all it's worth.  This is a particularly egregious example of that, and a bit like Slumdog Millionaire in the worst way possible, by suggesting that 'destiny' or 'fate' or 'mistakes' were supposed to happen to put some U.S. troops on this particular train at this particular time.  That's great...for the attacks that get stopped.  But what, the people who died in other attacks didn't deserve someone to save them before the worst happened?  What the fuck ever, man.  Suggesting intention behind things like this just insults the intention you refuse to read into all the things that didn't work out well for anyone.  Oh, and of particular note is Jenna Fischer; I know there was a discussion before about Bruce Willis and how the Razzies shouldn't exist, but, holy fuck, watch her in this movie and you will change your mind about that.  She is beyond awful and deserves to be laughed at for this movie until possibly the end of time (i.e., another 2.5 years).

30 Minutes or Less - Look, I like Danny McBride, and I usually like Jesse Eisenberg, but when these guys don't have material that's funny and/or chewy, just...no.  I don't want to see them, either of them, basically at all.  And this is got to be close to the nadir of the sort of stoner-centric movie that got churned out with regularity 10 or so years ago.  On the other hand, I kind of wonder if a chunk of comedic sludge like this is a kind of necessary evil so that someone like McBride can eventually do something as funny as the first season of Vice Principals.  Though at the end of the day, no one else in this film tops Aziz Ansari for being unfunny, so I remain baffled as to why he was ever famous in the first place.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle - It isn't a good sign for your movie when, 45 minutes in, your audience might be thinking, "Gee, this feels like a weaksauce Shirley Jackson copycat story" and then the credits roll and it turns out it was a weaksauce Shirley Jackson adaptation.  There are a couple of scenes towards the end that see this get decidedly uncomfortable and considerably more interesting, but much of the rest of it doesn't really work.  Sometimes it's absurd and having a laugh at itself, other times you're supposed to empathize with the central characters (but really only because so many others are so awful), and then it gets dark and disturbing, and the whole thing is far too uneven to hold together in a meaningful way.  Maybe someone who can get into the headspace of Taissa Farmiga's character better than I can would have a higher opinion of this.

AXE Body Spray Instead of Shower

The Starling - Man, Chris O'Dowd and Melissa McCarthy seem like they should be a good fit for a sad movie, but I'm really just done - completely and totally done - with movies where they Fridge a dead kid and then try to show us what the aftereffects are.  This is not a good example of how that's done.  O'Dowd's bit is especially rough, since after everything they show in the film, they just sort of tack on this explanation from him where he was always depressed anyway and this is just One More Thing in His Shitty Life, which is quite the spectacular way to undercut your whole damn movie.  And then the bird thing...Jesus.  It's kind of cute sometimes, but it's annoying far more often than not.  The only unusual-in-a-good-way piece of this is Kevin Kline.  Since the director did St. Vincent, I get the impression that he wanted to cast Bill Murray and couldn't, so maybe he gave Kline the note to do his best old man/understated Bill Murray and...it's the reined-in Kevin Kline that should have been in probably 75% of his films?  Holy shit.

The Keep - Well, here's Michael Mann's worst movie, and honestly, it's still pretty damn interesting for the first 15 minutes, at least while you think it's going to be a vampire movie (and it still almost, maybe, kinda-sorta is).  But then it just...gets...strange.  Again, I would say this doesn't deserve to be called horror, in part because you question if the "bad" guy is doing "bad" things?  He's slaughtering Nazis at the height of WWII!  But then, what is it?  Well, this is an illustration of the recent Twitter meme about sci-fi versus fantasy: the whole point is you can't often tell the difference unless it's very clearly stated, and this film utterly and completely fails to make any such distinctions.  Set in Carpathia, involves a guy who heals when he kills others, locked away by a bunch of crosses?  Sure sounds like fantasy.  But his gatekeeper has glowing blood and a superweapon he carries everywhere?  Sure sounds like they're aliens from a sci-fi story.  There are some interesting thematic elements that could have made a compelling movie, but they're not taken seriously enough for long enough, and there's at least as much bad as good, such as the gross way the only named woman in the movie is treated.  But hey: Mann's Awesome Soundtrack Streak remains unbroken.

That'll Do, Pig

The Slumber Party Massacre - Yep.  This was the best thing I watched all week.  And I think it's funnier and more ridiculous than it has received credit for being.  Whatever the story behind it or what kind of monkey business did or didn't happen with the script, its gender- and expectation-swapping of damn near every slasher trope aside from the killer still work pretty well, and the sight gags are solid.  Is it well-shot or well-acted?  No, it's exactly as amateurish as any other B-movie.  Could it have been more insightful and more biting?  Sure!  But what we got still has something to say, I think.  As an artifact of its time, it's a worthwhile entry to compare alongside some of the more well-known varieties of the genre, and probably the only horror movie or series I've seen (admittedly that isn't that much) that has an ending like this - where you're left truly aware that what you saw wasn't funny or crazy but deeply traumatic to the people who lived it - is probably Halloween, which is decent company to keep.  And given that most of the movie is played for laughs, it's a heck of a trick to pull off for a finish.

Wolfen, to me, just kind of fizzles out and doesn't really know what it wants to be, which coincidentally seems to be your complaint with The Keep. I would argue that The Keep is so bizarre that it doesn't have to fulfill a genre requirement, it's fine as a square peg in a round hole. And if you are looking for a worse Michael Mann movie then Public Enemies is right there. 

Coincidentally Slumber Party Massacre was doing the rounds on Comet yesterday. I'll have to drag it out on Netflix or wherever for the holidays. 

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1 hour ago, Curt McGirt said:

Wolfen, to me, just kind of fizzles out and doesn't really know what it wants to be, which coincidentally seems to be your complaint with The Keep. I would argue that The Keep is so bizarre that it doesn't have to fulfill a genre requirement, it's fine as a square peg in a round hole. And if you are looking for a worse Michael Mann movie then Public Enemies is right there.

I don't think I've seen that and I have probably blocked out the idea of him working with Johnny Depp so efficiently that what were we talking about again?

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Yep.  Once again.  It's Day 461 (and counting) of...something, Things That Are Worse than The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Edition.

Your Baby's Dirty Diaper

Red Riding Hood - Ooof.  There are a couple of things I almost kinda like about this.  First is that it presents a medieval village as a little bit looser and rowdier and freer than some would have you believe, but there's plenty of contemporaneous literature that show that places really were like that.  And conversely, when the religious whackdoodles show up to "protect", they really do so just to exert their dominance.  And...we're done with the positives of this.  The script is boring as shit and thoroughly predictable, the costumes and sets look like something leftover from a high school production, the acting is dreadful aside from maybe Gary Oldman.  Just...nothing works.  At all.  This feels like a dry run of sorts for the even more execrable Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, as though they were trying to put together a Grimm Cinematic Universe or something. 

The Fan (1981) - I've never understood why Lauren Bacall was a big deal, other than her hair being kind of awesome.  Even when I've watched her older movies, like the Sirk I reviewed a while back, she's never impressed me, and this is no different.  But, even if Elizabeth Taylor had stuck to this as she was originally supposed to have done, I doubt it would have been any better, because it's just cheap and tacky and passes up about a dozen more interesting stories it could tell to do the same lame gory slasher garbage that a thousand other movies have done better than this ever could have dreamed.  It was more fun to see the blink-and-you-miss-it appearances from Griffin Dunne, Dwight Schultz, and Dana Delany(!!) than it was to actually follow this.  The only positive is the nasty little speech at the end, which, in my own messed-up head, I imagined would have been quite an excellent response to give to the likes of Arthur Fleck in that boring-ass Joker movie.

Bright - Ooof once again.  Hey, look, I watch a lot of real shit, OK?  And this was real shit.  It's like they tried to redo End of Watch with ham-fisted metaphors and bad practical effects, not to mention CGI stylings they clearly ripped off from superior sources - hi, Jenova-wannabe chick in the wall.  This got precisely one thing right, and that's the look of the elves.  The elves here are...creepy as fuck.  I know a lot of people would say elves have pointy ears or certain complexions or beauty or immortality as their defining characteristic, and I have a certain head-canon about what actually makes an Elf an Elf in various types of media (it's both all and none of those things, ask me about it sometime), but these most definitely qualify, maybe moreso than a number of other pop-culture types.  But otherwise, their lazy archetypes are badly executed.  In fact, anything they might have said about minorities in our real world is entirely undercut by how human minorities are represented in this world.  It's just...yeesh, how can you write something that self-defeating and not notice?  If Netflix is wasting their money on crap like this and Red Notice, they deserve to be in financial trouble.

Men at Work - For the longest time, I actually got this and Repo Man confused in my head, mostly because of the "Man" in the titles and the presence of Emilio Estevez.  Plus, I remember seeing the commercials for this when it came out.  But crap is this ever the anti-Repo Man - just painfully unfunny, completely unoriginal, a total chore to sit through with absolutely nothing to say.  And yet it felt like the 80s and early 90s churned out 10 of these movies every year.  I guess that's part of the problem here: the creepy behaviors and the buddy-cop hijinx feel borrowed from so many other sources: it's like Turner and Hooch only Turner & Turner, which isn't funny, or Tango & Cash without any star power (not that that saved that turd, either).  It feels like Charlie & Emilio took all the jokes they thought were funny growing up and made a movie about it, and they were the only ones laughing.  The only reason this isn't any lower is David Keith, who, let's face it, is great even in terrible stuff.  And it's weird to say it, but I imagine that if the Wayans had made this same movie, it would have been ten times funnier.  Then again, ten times zero is still zero.

Unforgivable Instance of Film Malpractice - No, Really, WTF Did I Just Watch?

The Visitor - I found...

Uh...

THIS...on Kanopy and gave it a spin and...uh...

Yeah.

I guess it's appropriate that the blurb on Kanopy describes it as a mix of "The Omen, Rosemary's Baby, and Star Wars", but that's not because it's so much like any of them (except The Omen).  But what that description does quite effectively is tip you off to how thoroughly unoriginal and ninety-third-rate nearly every single second of this massive turkey truly is, since it clearly had nothing of its own to say for so much as a femtosecond.  Audiences like creepy kids?  Sure, let's put a creepy kid in it!  People liked Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan?  Well, who else is old that we can cast?  Oh, John Huston?  Sure!  Let's have him dodder around at seventy-fuckety-odd years old and have to pretend that he can, I don't know, DEFEND HIMSELF AND THE WORLD from Evil Devil Child when he can barely navigate a goddamned escalator!  And what are his powers?  Oh, he can do star-based Lite Brites on airfields and summon attack birds!  Obviously that makes for a compelling way to present a lazy, rehashed Christianity fable badly cast as intergalactic sci-fi bilge that somehow plays itself out via horror tropes that are half-assed at best!

Just, no.  A thousand goddamned times, no. 

But, in case you're wondering, no, it still isn't as bad as The Crow: Wicked Prayer, because Shelley Winters and Joanne Nail aren't 100% godawful, and the kid who plays Distaff Damien is just gleeful enough about her carnage that her performance is the closest thing there is to a highlight.  Everything else about this, though, is some of the stupidest bullshit possible.  The thumbnail poster on Kanopy is infinitely more interesting as an idea and a thought experiment as to what the movie could have involved than what they actually committed to film.  What a bad joke.

That'll Do, Pig

The Woodsman - Whew, that was a lot of real trash.  This movie?  It's actually rather good, but yikes is it tough to sit through for all sorts of reasons.  Kevin Bacon is one of those guys who, despite being incredibly famous, somehow slips through the cracks in that he can turn in performances like this, where you wonder why he doesn't get Oscar-bait sorts of opportunities (or, at least not anymore).  But this is primarily about child abuse, so you're in for a lot of uncomfortable, awful, awkward stretches throughout this.  If you stick with it, though, it's a really interesting meditation on how we treat ourselves and how we treat other people.  About the only negative is the direction, which is a little much early on with weird cuts and stops that don't actually work.  But those more dissociative elements are frequent enough that, when they happen at the end and happen with *far* greater effect, you kind of understand why Nicole Kassell went that way with the rest of the movie.  Kyra Sedgwick is pretty damn good in this, too, and it's kind of fun to see a married couple who are a couple of solid pros work together this well.

One Maple-Frosted Donut

Tape - Speaking of married couples...I have a couple of things to explain first.  One, I have nearly always hated Ethan Hawke for a long time.  I remember seeing him in Dead Poets Society and calling him "Ratface" and then not shaking that opinion of him for decades, not until First Reformed.  And so I've never entirely understood why Richard Linklater kept casting him, just like I didn't entirely understand why Linklater is treated like some kind of visionary Americana auteur when his most successful and famous movies take place in France. 

And, then I saw this last week.  If Linklater was going to adapt someone else's work and also have Ethan Hawke turn in the most batshit, uncomfortable, ugly, crazy, loathsome performance of his career, then this was the right material for that!  The camera work makes it so that it takes you a good 30 minutes before it dawns on you this was a play at one point, and by then you're hooked anyway.  And you can sort of tell this became a jumping-off point for what he ended up doing with Before Sunset and its long takes, because there are times when the need for constant, dizzying, jarring cuts back and forth for dialogue become so ubiquitous as to lose their ability to affect you, and it seems like the idea of, "Hey, just back off and let them talk, because the dialogue is doing the real work anyway" probably seeded itself in his mind for later use.  If there's a weak point here, it's when Uma Thurman injects herself, but that's only for the first few minutes of her appearance; after that, things get wildly uncomfortable yet again, and she responds to that with one of the nastier and darker performances of her career, too. 

A lot of stuff out there, created by a lot of self-conscious writers and directors and producers, tries to crib structure and ideas from Rashomon, and almost none of them come close to succeeding.  This, on the other hand, kinda does, and it's all in how carefully it's written, and yet how simple it all is.  These three people almost never speak honestly and openly, as if voicing anything directly and with sufficient detail is what would finally, irrevocably, make it real - even more real than the recollected events themselves.  And yet nearly every response is a weaponized question, rather than a simple answer or a correction or a refutation.  It's just mesmerizing stuff.  I've gone on and on at length by now about how the 2000s were a fucking ridiculous decade for good movies, and this just reinforces its hold.  Easy top 100 pick, maybe top 50.

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8 hours ago, Contentious C said:

Red Riding Hood - Ooof.  This feels like a dry run of sorts for the even more execrable Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, as though they were trying to put together a Grimm Cinematic Universe or something. 

To be honest, I think it was. There was a point about 15ish years ago (whenever that gods awful Tom Cruise Mummy film came out) that every studio saw what Marvel was doing and wanted to copy it.

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I bought The Visitor cold and hated it. It's the worst when that happens. 

Ethan Hawke never really came on to me until The Good Lord Bird. I thought he was great in Training Day, incredible in First Reformed, but him playing John Brown told me "this guy can play anything". First Reformed felt so under the radar that you guys had to remind me I'd even watched it by re-reading the Best Movies list. 

Edited by Curt McGirt
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4 hours ago, JLSigman said:

To be honest, I think it was. There was a point about 15ish years ago (whenever that gods awful Tom Cruise Mummy film came out) that every studio saw what Marvel was doing and wanted to copy it.

For the record - Tom Cruise's Mummy came out in 2017

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Yeah, I was going to make a joke about how I noticed the "GCU" happening, but when I looked it up, Red Riding Hood (2011), Hansel & Gretel (2013) and Jack the Giant Slayer (also 2013) were all different studios (Warner, Paramount, New Line).

Lesson: Hollywood is lazy and will do anything to avoid licensing.

45 minutes ago, (BP) said:

The Visitor was supposedly the only John Huston movie that Huston had a copy of in his room when passed away because he loved it so much. Weird guy. 

Well, I seem to recall a number of years ago that there was a Dateline feature or something along those lines where some member of his family accused him of being a child molester.  Granted, the same person also said she thought he was the Black Dahlia killer, so...maybe not a super-reliable source.  But just the notion of that accusation being out there makes his role in Chinatown fairly damned cringeworthy, and spending a chunk of this movie around little kids is a bit squick in that light, too.  Not that there weren't already enough things to hate about it.

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6 minutes ago, Contentious C said:

Well, I seem to recall a number of years ago that there was a Dateline feature or something along those lines where some member of his family accused him of being a child molester.  Granted, the same person also said she thought he was the Black Dahlia killer, so...maybe not a super-reliable source.  But just the notion of that accusation being out there makes his role in Chinatown fairly damned cringeworthy, and spending a chunk of this movie around little kids is a bit squick in that light, too.  Not that there weren't already enough things to hate about it.

I’m not familiar with that, but he killed a woman during a drunken hit and run and his dad got him out of it. 

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On 10/18/2022 at 11:07 PM, Contentious C said:

 

Bright - Ooof once again.  Hey, look, I watch a lot of real shit, OK?  And this was real shit.  It's like they tried to redo End of Watch with ham-fisted metaphors and bad practical effects, not to mention CGI stylings they clearly ripped off from superior sources - hi, Jenova-wannabe chick in the wall.  This got precisely one thing right, and that's the look of the elves.  The elves here are...creepy as fuck.  I know a lot of people would say elves have pointy ears or certain complexions or beauty or immortality as their defining characteristic, and I have a certain head-canon about what actually makes an Elf an Elf in various types of media (it's both all and none of those things, ask me about it sometime), 

 

Love to get your thoughts on elves in other media. Can't recall which d&d related rpg podcast it was, but they discussed Star Trek as having some Tolkien tropes in terms of how the Vulcans with their pointy ears and superiority complex were Elven archetypes and Klingons with their warrior culture ways were orcs. They could have also brought up Gamorreans from Star Wars as Orcs ( warhammer greenskins?) but I don't remember which ones were elves unless it was the Jedi/Superiority Complex guys. Could've also been in the comment section where they talked up Star Wars. This has to be months ago when I heard this.

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Just watched True Romance for the first time ever, and it's funny because other than starring Slater and Arquette I knew almost nothing about this movie. But when Slater takes Arquette to his work and is talking about comic books and shit, I start getting Kill Bill vibes where Bill is talking about Superman and masks, etc. And i'm wondering ok for a 90's movie to talk up comic books that isn't a Kevin Smith film, this has to be Tarantino scripting it right? Fuck yeah! Then you throw in Gandolfini, Sizemore, Penn, Pitt and a fucking all star (imho) cast and I'm pissed at myself for having skipped this when it came out. This movie is everything I love about the 90's, I mean its got fucking BALKI from Perfect Strangers in one of his first non-Balki roles (i imagine???) and I'm just going in my head "fucking young me would've loved this fucking movie back when it came out." 

So for my first time ever watching this, instant fall in love classic movie.

Also caught Clerks III, didn't like it as much even though I sorta like the writing on most of the View Askewverse flicks. But the last two flicks where they follow up on Jay & Silent Bob and then this Clerks 3quel, I feel like dude's got nothing to say so he's pulling a JJ Abrams where he reshoots A New Hope with new characters and a new coat of paint and just, yeah that's not my jam. Feels to me like he lost all creative steam/imagination so he's copying his own shit to peddle to his fans?

Spoiler

Rosario Dawson's character dying because of a car crash seemed fucked up, and for some reason the movie had this whole angsty angry old man yelling at clouds vibe with Randall steamrolling everyone to get his way and Dante being, well Dante. That we get Dante dying at the end was the shit flecked corn on top of a shit sandwich (as OSJ described in The Goon) that I'm disappointed I'll never get that time back that I wasted watching this shit.

Overall feel like I could have skipped this and read some Carlton Mellick and that would've been a better use of my time. 

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35 minutes ago, Hayabusa said:

Just watched True Romance for the first time ever, and it's funny because other than starring Slater and Arquette I knew almost nothing about this movie. But when Slater takes Arquette to his work and is talking about comic books and shit, I start getting Kill Bill vibes where Bill is talking about Superman and masks, etc. And i'm wondering ok for a 90's movie to talk up comic books that isn't a Kevin Smith film, this has to be Tarantino scripting it right? Fuck yeah! Then you throw in Gandolfini, Sizemore, Penn, Pitt and a fucking all star (imho) cast and I'm pissed at myself for having skipped this when it came out. This movie is everything I love about the 90's, I mean its got fucking BALKI from Perfect Strangers in one of his first non-Balki roles (i imagine???) and I'm just going in my head "fucking young me would've loved this fucking movie back when it came out." 

So for my first time ever watching this, instant fall in love classic movie.

Also caught Clerks III, didn't like it as much even though I sorta like the writing on most of the View Askewverse flicks. But the last two flicks where they follow up on Jay & Silent Bob and then this Clerks 3quel, I feel like dude's got nothing to say so he's pulling a JJ Abrams where he reshoots A New Hope with new characters and a new coat of paint and just, yeah that's not my jam. Feels to me like he lost all creative steam/imagination so he's copying his own shit to peddle to his fans?

  Reveal hidden contents

Rosario Dawson's character dying because of a car crash seemed fucked up, and for some reason the movie had this whole angsty angry old man yelling at clouds vibe with Randall steamrolling everyone to get his way and Dante being, well Dante. That we get Dante dying at the end was the shit flecked corn on top of a shit sandwich (as OSJ described in The Goon) that I'm disappointed I'll never get that time back that I wasted watching this shit.

Overall feel like I could have skipped this and read some Carlton Mellick and that would've been a better use of my time. 

Even back then I wanted more movies in the True Romance-verse than any Vega Brothers or Pulp Fiction connected flick. A prequel with the Chris Penn and Tom Sizemore cop characters with Ed Lauter as their Captain would have been gold!

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3 hours ago, Hayabusa said:

Love to get your thoughts on elves in other media. Can't recall which d&d related rpg podcast it was, but they discussed Star Trek as having some Tolkien tropes in terms of how the Vulcans with their pointy ears and superiority complex were Elven archetypes and Klingons with their warrior culture ways were orcs. They could have also brought up Gamorreans from Star Wars as Orcs ( warhammer greenskins?) but I don't remember which ones were elves unless it was the Jedi/Superiority Complex guys. Could've also been in the comment section where they talked up Star Wars. This has to be months ago when I heard this.

I think it's a lot less obvious and probably works better with instances where the people in question are actually called elves rather than being stand-ins.  An "Elf" to me has one quality (or skill, or facet, because maybe it isn't a good thing) other species don't: abnegation of reality itself.  Immortal, unnaturally striking (I liked Bright in the sense that they weren't truly "beautiful", just monolithic in their oddity of appearance), always able to fight without necessarily having spent their lives training.  What they want to do, they do by force of will as much as by skill.  Maybe in a literary sense, they are Mary Sues brought forth as a race.  Certainly true with Tolkien elves, though he had a fairly mundane explanation for why that was so.  But later interpretations have been more interesting and tap into something deeper.  Sapkowski's invocation of them is undeniably grimier than Tolkien's, but the way it plays out with respect to where power (or Power) lies is similar.  Julian May's fey folk in her novels were considerably more rooted in some attempt at explaining them scientifically, but she leans hard in her early books at describing how unnatural and unnerving they are in appearance.  Even the Elder Scrolls games, with its various flavors of Elf, still had a group that stood in defiance of their certain knowledge that Gods existed in their realm and did whatever the Hell they wanted instead (and maybe turned themselves into gods in the process).

Rings of Power has been a bit looser with this, but I think that's more a necessity of storytelling than anything else.  You can't really have Elf captives if they're all perfect.  But that just kind of leans into "Elf-as-Fascist" that's so commonly seen in a lot of fantasy works: it's the Orwellian take of, "All Elves are perfect, but some (like Galadriel) are more perfect than others."

Edited by Contentious C
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True Romance is and will forever be my favorite Tarantino film, even if it's not a directorial role. Had to be a trip seeing it for the first time, you'll probably want to watch it again tomorrow. 

The spoiler about Clerks III makes me think "well I just deleted the original Clerks off my DVR let's just un-trash that and watch it instead"

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