Yeah, I can see where the Renaissance brought prestige back to the brand- the animation is obviously far more expense and there's a very conscious effort to feel current- but it's often pretty charmless, both in characterization and in animation, relative to some of the looser, rangier things they'd put out in the…

It seems surprisingly genuine, too, not just like 'oh shit she's famous and I don't want to burn bridges.' Still comes off as kind of shitty stuff from a dude I liked a lot but, could be worse I guess

Oh, fair enough, I thought you meant the whole sort of pre-home video era

Mostly true, although repertory and re-release screenings were a lot more common then, and you could rent 16mm prints from college libraries and film archives, I believe

Seeing Wayne pre-Stagecoach is oddly upsetting

there's an interesting distinction, in that it seems like when movies were remade in the 30s and 40s it was more or less on the assumption that everyone forgot the previous versions the minute they left the theater- now, remakes are generally trying to profit specifically on people's memory of them

i mean the entire plot of the scarlet empress is 'marlene dietrich fucks her way into supreme power and that rules'

that penny singleton dance number in the 1930 version is goddamn jaw dropping, even before she reappears doing front flips- the 47 one is much better filmed and tighter, but i feel like the insistence on eg actually having the backup dancers be able to mirror the lead took away from some of the explosiveness of it

oh fuck that i love classic action movies and have probably watched more silent movies than sound ones in the past year but a.) the magnificent seven doesn't scratch anything like the same itch as fast seven and b.) saying shit like that makes you sound like the worst kind of grognard pedant bore

His Mission Impossible movie is legitimately fantastic

Eh, it's more just that he has none too subtle themes of Great Men Struggling Against Mediocrity in a real Randian way show up in his work over and over- most noticably in his Pixar stuff, but in Tomorrowland too.

I feel like the Whedon movies got too quippy for their own good, but the shawarma thing felt appropriately like grinning in the face of death rather than callously failing to acknowledge the scope of tragedy- there's significant difference

yeah if we're going to hire someone with crypto objectivist tendencies let's at least hire the dude who made iron giant and mission impossible 4 with them

i think the other germane thing with this is the arc the box office took- all blockbusters drop, but bvs dropped like a fucking rock. you can get a huge opening weekend on hype and ads alone, but that's not really a sustainable cornerstone for an empire, and bvs is almost nothing beyond the opening

in the commentary, they specifically address that the original Mandarin was a racist caricature, that the apparent Mandarin they created was an updated equivalent (since our current wars are in the Middle East rather than Southeast Asia, the equivalent boogeyman is different) and that their specific goal was a fuck…

i always assumed this show's primary legacy is it's memorably weird title, which presumes that i can tell at a glance what it means to be raven that that 'that' (what? we shall never know) is very much raven indeed

man if you can't relate to the particular hell of retail songs you are forced to hear over and over until you want to trepan yourself to get at whatever part of your brain has them in it you are a pampered person and will never understand

What's the last thing Travolta was actually any good in? Like I get why he's a movie star- I've seen Blow Out- but he feels like someone who has literally never been good in anything except when directed by someone who has a real clear idea of how to get at his charisma and put it on the screen.

black panther's jump isn't bad at all tho, and his is flat footed off the ground

I mean, Bucky more or less voluntarily does what a responsible oversight organization would have had him do at the end of the movie- but apparently, in the MCU, there aren't any organizations capable of that kind of thing. They tend to go for 'forever prison' or 'no questions asked murder' instead, and their liason is…