Elysium: everything that sucks about movies these days

boing
41

Oh, do they use the Bechdel Test now?

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42

You should catch The Smurfs 2. They say “Let’s do this” 3 times, from a review I saw.

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43

They changed the name to Pacific Blackberry

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44

…So Elysium is crap, just like 90% of everything, and for the same reasons. Film at 11.

Incidentally, the premise reminds me of Asimov’s “Shah Guido G.”

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45

a movie can still be a great movie and not pass that test. It’s just not AS great a movie because it doesn’t.

I couldn’t possibly disagree more.

46

Care to elaborate?

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47

Art and fiction doesn’t work by meeting some kind of representivity checklist. The artist/writer’s only responsibility is to stay true to what he wants to say/express. If that means it’s a movie about two old men on a bench for 90 minutes with not a single woman in sight, that’s fine. The idea that a piece of fiction or a film must have some pre-defined degree of female representation, regardless of the subject or motivation or meaning is totally ridiculous if you stop and think about it for one minute.

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48

'Better than Transformers," is not a great standard.

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49

The problem doesn’t start with the writing most of the time. It involves a huge number of producers who want to take the safe route that doesn’t have a chance of offending anyone and then strive mightily not to do so.

Add the fact that movies these days are seen as the start of a marketing campaign that will include at least some action figures, lunchboxes, and a video game, possibly turning into a series of films that can make money for years, and you’ll see why nobody wants to take any chances with international audiences. There is a shedload of money to be made and if you risk alienating any crowd your producers are going to say you’re basically throwing money away.

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50

But when I asked him why, for a hundred million bucks, he had chosen to take so few chances,

Because it was a hundred million bucks. Duh.

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51

That’s just stupid. It’s just amazing that people consistently miss the point of the Bechdel Test.

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52

Oh, they use it, but with reversed pass/fail criteria.

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53

Sounds like he prefers women who don’t talk much while they’re serving men.

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54

The whole point of the Bechdel Test is not that every single movie should pass it. It’s that so very few do.

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55

Well - I still want to see it. Formulaic movies, while usually not the “best”, can still be entertaining. Star Wars was fairly formulaic and it turned out ok.

WTF is this Bechdel Test? So a movie fails if two women talk about
something besides men? Make no damn sense.

Never mind the above - I guess I read it wrong when I went to the site. Looks like Alien Resurrection passed that test then.

Finally - fun facts. Ninja of Die Antwoord was originally approached by the director to play Matt Damon’s role. Both Ninja and Yolandi will be in his next film, Chappie.

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56

I can’t speak to the quality of the movie or of the opinions expressed about it, but I found this sentence shockingly naive:

But when I asked him why, for a hundred million bucks, he had chosen to take so few chances, he seemed caught a little off guard.

Do you think studios just hand a director a hundred million bucks, and then just let him go off and do what he wants? Are they that trusting? The more a studio is spending on a movie, the more they’re going to micromanage. “Does she need to die? Does he need to be black? Can we add a “pet the dog” moment? Are there stakes? We need stakes!”

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57

No, it passes. And very, very few do.

I know it’s hard, but you can figure this out.

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58

So if the Bechdel Test is equivalent to BMI (a statistical tool not meant to render a diagnosis on the individual level), isn’t the criticism that one is misapplying the tool if one is only speaking about an individual (person / movie) appropriate?

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59

Nah. It’s just a way of saying, “Here’s yet another movie that didn’t pass the test, and I wish it had.”

Edit: Which, again, is not to say “I wish every movie would pass the test.” But one like this certainly could, and would be better rather than worse for it.

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60

It depends on the movie and what it explores. If it’s only about one or two specific people, or a story about something like an all-male school, failing such a test might not matter. If the context is a broader section of humanity in general, though, then having so few women they never interact on their own terms isn’t such an unreasonable criticism.

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