Ah. I’m glad that I’m not the only one who had that thought upon reading the review. So I guess this is the summer that Hollywood spends ripping off mid-90s anime?
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And Star Trek “The Cloud Minders” which has some debts to “Metropolis”
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Nail, meet Hammer, Hammer- Nail. Oh I see you’ve hit it off quite nicely there,
True, but the post author said that Elysium was “everything that sucks about movies these days” That is certainly not true if we can all agree it is at least much better than anything Michael Bay has done.
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The last summer blockbuster I watched was The Dark Knight, which thanks to Heath Ledger’s performance COULD have been a great film. Instead, it was mostly just a mediocre exercise in mindless violence. And mediocre is about the best we can expect from Hollywood these days, I’m afraid.
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Yes, which is scary, given Andy Warhol’s prescient truism –
“It’s the movies that have been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.”
You claimed earlier that a movie which passes the test is necessarily more ``great" than one which doesn’t (or, strictly speaking, no less great, at the very least).
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This Review: everything that sucks about reviews these days
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Interestingly two writers are fighting for credit for the “Olympus has Fallen” script, Gregg. Also, you don’t have to be a video game writer to come up with a bad plot. Indeed, it seems like most mainstream ‘AAA’ video games are trying their hardest to be more “cinematic” in their visual style and storytelling. A lot of the storytelling tropes (good or bad) in games are being learned from movies in the first place. So either game developers need to embrace the storytelling potential of the medium and follow their own path, or Hollywood needs to set a better example! 
Meh.
Go pick someone else’s nits.
I don’t know… Besides Chronicle (obviously based on Akira) I haven’t really noticed any other anime ripoffs (pacific rim excluded).
When I saw Pacific Rim what came to mind for me was Big O. But that’s probably because that’s the only real mecha anime I’ve ever seen, back when I decided to watch everything Steve Blum had a part in.
“…movie violence is a spreading disease on culture.”
Really? Respectfully submitted: I can appreciate the author pointing a spotlight on a vapid Hollywood blockbuster that’s pretending to be “significant,” but it’s hyperbole like this that makes it harder for me to take the rest seriously.
Is movie violence really “a spreading disease?” Or is it at about the same level as it’s been for decades, or maybe even lower than, say, the 90’s when Tarantino was the standard? Or the bullet-ridden action pictures of the 80’s? How soon do we forget Sam Peckinpah?
Seriously, there is no “spreading disease,” just a generation that gets older (hey-- like me!) and doesn’t find this sort of thing engaging anymore, while the generation coming up gets an adrenaline rush.
So yeah, I applaud anyone willing to point a finger at yet another cookie-cutter “blockbuster” crapped out by the studio system, but can we please rein in the hysteria?
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I really wouldn’t call Pacific Rim as ripping off any specific anime. More of just a giant robot and kaiju film genres really.
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I thought the first/third world dichotemy was a bit silly. If you want to improve your life, why not do it where you live right now? I know that th movie invents reasons not to do that but for me its just a story about any first and third world country. Smart people emigrate to the first world, rather than improve their home land.
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I agree. A tribute to them. Which the director has fully acknowledged.
The Bechdel test is nearly 30 years old. Wikipedia (Bechdel test - Wikipedia) has a quote from Virginia Wolf in 1929 discussing the basic idea:
All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. […] And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. […] They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that […]
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Oh most definitely. Del Toro did an amazing job for me of paying homage without directly ripping off yet still making something original.
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Meh.
It’s not a nit, it’s nearly the entirety of what you (and, note, not I) are arguing about!
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Well, previously I wasn’t that interested, but after reading this, I’ll be there day one.
Well, except that I think TV has taken over for movies. Maybe video games are on the ascent in that influence as well.
But what I find frightening is that it’s not just the mindless shows that inform behavior, but the flippin’ advertisements.
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