Welcome back for another episode of Big Red Flix, BigRedBarrel.com’s movie podcast. This week Dave, Jitterbug and Yoshifett discuss Brave, Iron Sky, Prometheus, Screamers: The Hunting, Transformers 3, The Killer Inside, the subject of rape in film, as well as trailers for Taken 2, For A Good Time Call, and Django Unchained. There’s bonus content for BRB iPod and Android app users.
Check back next time because the gang will be discussing the summer popcorn flick Independence Day.
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Jitterbug
Great comment, Jay. Criticism is in the eye of the beholder. As far as why some movies get a pass and others don’t, that’s entirely up to the viewer. I can forgive Highlander because I loved that movie as a child. I will contend though, that Highlander is like Citizen Kane compared to Transformers 3.
We had an interesting discussion on a recent episode of the podcast (yet to be released) about the degradation of modern cinema. We took a quick look at what passed for summer blockbusters of old compared to those of today. It is pretty stunning just how far our movies have sunk. While we still get some gems here and there (The Avengers, Batman, X-Men First Class, etc) the overwhelming majority of them are horrid, mindless crap. Give me Raiders of the Lost Ark over damn near ANY summer blockbuster of the past decade (excluding Dark Knight).
We are all able to make our own decisions about what movies are good or bad, but my role as a pseudo-critic on this podcast requires me to state my opinons. One of my strongest opinions, and one that gets a lot of airtime on our show, is that we shouldn’t have to accept that big blockbuster movies are going to be stupid. That allows a wholesale dumbing-down of our culture, and we shouldn’t stand by and simply accept (and applaud) that. If we demand higher quality out of Hollywood, then we’ll get it. If not, we’ll keep getting Battleship!!!
jaystaeb8
Jitterbug I appreciate the response, and I listen to the podcast because I don’t consider you guys pseudo-critics, I consider you critics, and I enjoy your insight and your delivery. Aside from BRB Flix the only other movie podcast I listen to is How Did This Get Made, and you guys are light years ahead of them. I hope nothing I said made it sound like you shouldn’t have an opinion or criticize the movies, which do deserve criticism, even the best of them. I just felt that your criticism had switched in this case from the movies to the people watching them, and while I agree that our culture is currently not living up to it’s potential you never know which terrible idea is going to inspire the next great idea. Maybe I am wrong but I think we only got the latest Batman Trilogy because the other movies went so far off the rails, somebody had to look at it and say I can do better. It is certainly true that sometimes the bar is set so low, my kids could probably do better, but I don’t think that Hollywood is going to give us better quality just because we demand it. I honestly don’t think that most have it in them to create any higher quality, they turned a completely non-narrative board game into a movie. They took a book about raising children, also with no narrative and made a terrible movie, and people said no to both, but that isn’t going to stop the next producer from looking at the NY Times best seller list with googly eyes or looking at the local kids store shelves and thinking, hey that it my next movie.
Of course this could all be me justifying spending $12 on a movie ticket so I don’t have to analyze how horrible of a decision I made wasting my money.
Jitterbug
No worries, I wasn’t offended by your comment in the least. I like the discussion, and I’m also not pig-headed enough to not want to consider that I might be wrong (every now and again lol). I see your point about being nasty towards people who like movies such as the Transformers. That’s not fair of me, since an older person could just have easily made fun of me as a child for liking Highlander.
However, I do disagree with you that Hollywood won’t change their decisions based on people’s responses. If Battleship had been a giant hit, then we would’ve seen a lot more movies greenlit that had the same premise. I guarantee we would be given a Monopoly movie that was about a real estate developer getting attacked by zombies or some such garbage. Since it flopped, they aren’t going to try and exploit that silly idea of turning board games into movies.
I think the best example I can give about how public response can dictate Hollywood’s decisions is what has happened following The Sopranos on television. TV used to be a wasteland of trite plots and cardboard characters. But HBO changed that when they put a focus on intelligent storylines and high production value. Suddenly, other channels were trying to emulate what HBO had done. Today, TV is better than the movies. Sad to say it, but it’s true. I’d rather watch an episode of Game of Thrones, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Madmen, or The Newsroom than just about any movie coming out for the rest of this year.
Great discussion. And never worry about offending me. It’s really hard to do, and if you do I’ll let you know! 🙂
Jitterbug
And by the way, I caught up with all the episodes of The Newsroom. Episode 2 was a disaster IMO, but Ep 3 was fantastic, and achieved everything I hoped the series could. Ep 4 was pretty good, but was excellent when the news story broke. I love the show, and look forward to seeing where they take it.
jaystaeb8
Did you watch Sports Night? Did you catch the reuse of the water to the face in Ep 4 that they used in Sports Night Ep 7 when Dan had writers block? They even went as far as to use nearly the same line when he gets water in his face. Not only was Ep 3 fantastic but educational, I had not known that the hour for the nightly news was given for use of the airwaves for broadcast TV, and that it was never meant to have commercials to prevent business from influencing how news is covered. It makes sense and it is too bad that this is not the case. That may go a long way to prevent some of the dumbing down of our population.
Jitterbug
I never watched Sports Night, so I missed out on that. I also didn’t know about the original role of the news hour, and am sad that it wasn’t regulated to be non-profit. That would’ve changed a hell of a lot about our news!