I like this little comic.
Keep up with the good work and let them drown in their poison 🗯️✨ pic.twitter.com/RFgiw7FLzD
— renata nolasco 🌺 (@atxnolasco) March 1, 2019
Don’t read the comments though, unless you like to watch target shooting where everyone misses. Lots of people nitpicking and arguing that “But Movie X was a bad movie” — which doesn’t matter. Most of the stuff churned out by Hollywood is objectively bad, a lot of bad movies may be subjectively enjoyable, and the point of this comic is that the gatekeepers who want to tell you what you should like should be ignored. Like what you like, let other people like what they like.
Yeah, I don’t get that kind of thinking at all. There must be a metric ton of movies starring men, that I don’t particularly care for but I do what I always do with such movies; Ignore them. I don’t try to make sure they fail, I don’t castigate the people who like them, and quite frankly, as a Black woman, most movies are not made with me in mind as their audience.
I disliked Wonder Woman intensely, but I respected how much it resonated with other people. I stated why I wouldn’t be seeing it and then I didn’t go see it. I didn’t root for it to fail or harass the people who liked it for having no taste. What a meaningless activity that would have been.
Because the studios are definitely going to have an issue with these people tampering with their bottom line, as regards movies that star women and PoC. Its possible that what these fanboys are doing could cost them money, and these diversely led movies make a helluva lot of money for them.
Similarly, are their brigades of feminists downvoting, say, the Fast and Furious movies? Or any of the male-dominated superhero movies? If you get a kick out of something dumb like the Transformers, go ahead, have a ball, I’m not going to watch it, but you can watch the fuck out of it without hurting me.
That so many people are still angry about the last Ghostbusters movie and can’t just say they thought it was a bad movie or just mediocre and have to use phrases like “legit garbage” or “appalling remake” or “beyond trash” or “disgusting cash grab” makes me wonder if their arguments that they just didn’t like the movie and there’s nothing sexist behind that might not be entirely accurate.
(Full disclosure: I loved the movie, so I also take issue when they say it was “objectively bad.)
I think when someone is using phrases like “legit garbage” and “beyond trash” it’s an indication that they’ve they do have a sexist agenda and are trying to hide it.
The Ghostbusters remake was an enjoyable movie that was okay, but not spectacular. As was the original Ghostbusters.
Ghostbusters (2016) isn’t distinctiveness enough to warrant any of the hot takes. It is a middling comedy that has a couple of laughs. There are dozens of comedies released each year that of roughly the same quality. The hatred for it is surreal and the intensity is only explainable by misogyny.
Relevant data: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/men-are-sabotaging-the-online-reviews-of-tv-shows-aimed-at-women/
IMDB needs to clean this issue up.
Disclaimer, I never watched the Ghostbusters remake. In my defense, I don’t often watch comedy films, and I think the original is vastly overrated. I may watch it if I clear up my Netflix queue, but I’m unlikely to go out of my way.
That said, I feel like this is the same crowd behind gamergate – for a couple years they migrated to the SF/F Hugo awards and tried to fuck things up there with the rabid/sad puppies, and eventually when they were thwarted at that, they moved on to that comicsgate nonsense, and twitter outrage (James Gunn, and a few others I don’t remember off-hand).
I think they’ve been active for at least a few years in trying to trash movies, I remember their being a lot of MRAs outraged about Mad Max: Fury Road (which I thoroughly enjoyed), and a handful of other movies not specifically mentioned in the comic.
This was quite some time ago, but it reminds me of a lot of the noise about Will Smith starring in I Am Legend; people absolutely lost their shit about the main character being black (main character’s race not being really relevant to the plot), but were completely silent about completely fucking up the ending of the movie (which is not only relevant ot the plot, but to the damned title of the story…)
I guess this is the unforeseen drawback of the internet…
I didn’t like the Farce awakens. Though Rey was a bit of a Mary Sue, I could of lived with that. The thing I really disliked was how they essentially remade A New Hope, with all the cliches and unoriginal thought hammered into every plot hole they could find. That’s why I refused to see the next Star wars movie, and grumbled about it here.
I haven’t seen Ghostbusters, but I heard it was okay. I loved Wonder Woman and She-ra. I’ll try and see Captain Marvel when its out.
I loved She-Ra, and so did my kids. I though Ghostbusters was decent, but I didn’t think the original was all that great, either. I mean, it was a decent comedy flick, but I would have never called if a classic by any means. The women in that movie were very good actors, though. The one thing I liked about the original was that they were essentially fighting against malevolent spirits. The 2016 version they had a villain they were tracking who was essentially human.
The Force Awakens was sorta bad in that it was essentially a remake of A New Hope, and I was looking for something new, maybe like something from the Expanded Universe novels (or whatever they were called). That said, I thought Daisy Ridley was fantastic. A lot of the other actors were, too.
I haven’t seen Wonder Woman. I was put off by the recent DC action movies, plus it wasn’t on Netflix at a convenient time (if at all) so I didn’t. I don’t go to the movies except with my kids, really.
I will likely see Captain Marvel once it’s out of theaters, and I’ll probably enjoy it.
Looking at Mike Smith’s link to FiveThirtyEight, I like more shows on the women’s side than the men’s side. I don’t really get why so many sports and reality shows are on the men’s side. I don’t see a single iteration of The Real Housewives on the women’s side, but there are so many sports and reality shows on the men’s side. All that says to me is that men really suck and don’t have their priorities straight, and I say that as a man.
Oh, another thing is, the shows men shit on at IMDB, hell many of them I like much better than the ones men, as a group, tend to love.
Can’t wait till Captain Marvel comes out. The SQW’s in my office have been very bothered about it. Which means it’s going to be great (they don’t like Wonder Woman or Black Panther too)
My problem with their attitude goes beyond it being silly. It’s based in a really childish, disingenuous notion of reality.
We can say “Why do you care? It’s just a movie. Don’t see it if you don’t want to” until the cows come home. When they say “No one wants this”, they’re making a childish jab at an anti-capitalist argument. Their idea is that there’s no authentic reaction to it, it’s all marketing. (Even leftists, of course, can recognize that marketing works precisely because it taps into authentic desires and then misdirects those desires. The problem is that their position has to hinge on pretending even the underlying dream that these films appeal to cannot be sincerely felt, because suddenly that indicates that patriarchy is real and they’re the bad guys). They can’t just let the films fail, let alone risk them succeeding.
They believe that the present state of culture is so ideal that no deviation could possibly improve things. All new ideas must be an attack. But they rarely have the balls to say that out loud, let alone defend it. So they have to defend their prelapserian mythology without admitting that it’s that. Never mind that the character of Captain Marvel is decades old, never mind that we had Mary Marvel and Batgirl all the way back in the Golden Age, never mind any of that. (How many of them will then pose as if they’re comic fans who want to see adaptations of these ideas hit the big screen? Almost like they were happy with that posturing as long as more white male stories got made…)
It’s an anti-art, anti-innovation attitude from people who pretend to care about these things. It clouds actual criticism of corporate art, marketing and cooptation of actual desires. It even prevents the actual criticism of these films. People like RLM, MovieBob, etc. had to acknowledge the shitlord brigade in their commentary to even be able to just discuss the film on its own merits.
Me, I actually like these characters, and this universe, so I am excited for Captain Marvel.
But Rotten Tomatoes (a well known government department responsible for elections or something dontchaknow) taking muh freeze peach! Rodent-themed censorship! Attacks on democracy! A world ruled over by an evil feminist Mouse dictator! You may take my preemptive negative reviews for a movie I haven’t seen yet, but you’ll never take… muh… freedooooooom!!11!!11!!!!Eleventy!
(Warning – this post may contain significant traces of sarcasm. Always read the label…)
Frederic Bourgault-Christie @ 10;
I think this sums up the situation very well. These would be gatekeepers are heavily invested in the maintenance of a profoundly sexist status quo. The reason why the are so especially furious about Brie Larson’s (on balance very mild) statements about things like the over representation of White men among the film journalists covering movies is because they themselves are overwhelmingly White and male, and they like society the way it is, where they (and other pasty, penis owning and operating types like yours truly) are born with privilege they never had to earn, with a leg up relative to others just by virtue of being a bloke who is lighter than a certain hue.
They are so used to such a state of affairs they perceive it as their natural right, and so any attempt to redress the balance in even the smallest particular is seen as an attack on the very existence of Whiteness and maleness, which is why you get idiots proclaiming that Disney and the lead actress ‘hate White men’ even though nobody associated in any regard with the project has said anything that could remotely reasonably be read in such a flagrantly inflammatory manner.
If this is sounding familiar to anyone, it is because we have seen it all before. This is no more about ‘protecting’ Marvel story lines, or comic book movies in general, than Gamergate was about ‘standards in gaming journalism’. This is about circling the wagons and keeping teh wimmins and people of colour in what the assorted MRAs and racists (and shockingly that Venn diagram is pretty much a circle) behind this whole mess consider to be their ‘proper place’. It is just a new mutation of the same push back against modernity and progressive values we have been seeing since the racist, Patriarchal status quo of society first started showing cracks decades ago.
I mean, I refuse to watch Captain Marvel, but that’s because just today I saw a commercial co-branding the movie with the Air Force and encouraging little girls to join the military industrial complex with the tag line “What will be your origin story?” Fucking disgusting and a hard pass from me.