anti_recs | Entries tagged with media: movie

The History of Future Folk: Anti-Rec

I thought I would love this: a silly comedy about a space alien whose plot to colonize Earth is foiled when he discovers music. Unfortunately, the writer, John Mitchell, is one of those people who apparently thinks that stalking is romantic. Don't watch it.

( upsetting details )

sasha_feather

If you haven't already seen "Taken" with Liam Neeson, don't see it, it is awful.

The plot is "Damsel in Distress," and so it may as well be a video game plot. The hero's daughter is kidnapped and his quest is to get her back. Seriously, that's it-- the quest never widens out to anything like rescuing all the other young women also kidnapped by this gang, uncovering corruption, or confronting demons from the hero's past.

The damsel, Kim, is an object for the men to fight over and has little to no agency.

The supposed hero does really awful things like torturing someone. He also shoots a woman who is uninvolved in the kidnapping plot, in order to control her husband, and defends himself by saying "it's a flesh wound." More women as objects/property. Also, there are children in the house when this happens, but they mysteriously don't wake up?

I haven't even gotten to the racism and xenophobia yet. The ~~sex~~ rape traffickers are Albanians. The original danger for the daughter was leaving the States to go to... PARIS.

If you want to watch a better action movie with righteous violence, I recommend "Safe" instead.

sasha_feather

I put this on my Netflix Q because of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who I find interesting and nice to look at.

The narrator, in the beginning of the film, says something like, "There are only 2 kinds of people in the world. There are men, and there are women." Uh whut? Also the word "Bitch" appears in text on the screen before the film begins.

The story seems to be about a young man (JGL) who falls in love with a co-worker (Zooey Deschanel), and then is totally, epically heartbroken when she breaks up with him. I got about half way through the movie until I got incredibly bored and turned it off. There was only one scene I really liked, a musical-style montage with JGL dancing to express that "being in love" feeling. I also liked the comical scenes between the main character and his younger sister, but there weren't many of these. There were several scenes that seemed sexist and gross, such as the main character complaining about pretty girls being stuck up.

It's rare that I don't watch a whole movie; that's why this goes into the anti-recs bin.

aris_tgd

War is one of those movies you're not quite sure how anyone could screw up. It stars Jet Li and Jason Statham, and they fight. How can you get that wrong? A certain percentage of the population wants to see Jet Li and Jason Statham in a movie where they beat each other up, and here it is! We present it to you!

And yet.

War is not a good movie. It's a disappointingly poorly plotted movie for several reasons I'll outline below, and on top of that it suffers from the same kind of systemic racism that most big-budget Hollywood movies do. Which is a shame, because it's star-billing one of China's greatest martial arts stars of the last thirty years, and it has a cast full of Asian and Asian-American actors. If it were a better movie, it would feel refreshing to see a movie more or less about the tense relations of two crime organizations in San Francisco, both operating across the Pacific Ocean; as it stands, it just feels like the titular war between the Triads and the Yakuza is just background for Statham's White Guy Man Pain.

( Spoilers below the fold. )

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anti-recs

What Not to Watch or Read

(no subject)

Anti-Rec: "Taken"

(500) Days of Summer

Anti-Rec: War

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January 2021

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