Because one has to be competely, 100%, consistently accurate all the time or you can throw away all of their previous points?
Judging from what she said about Fury Road: that, insofar as they are violent, they are not feminist critiques of society.
More relevant is that creative works cannot be expected to be completely, 100% consistent in the messages they send and the responses they evoke.
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I agree that Saints Row is awesome and a must play, but I got very bored with Sleeping Dogs early on and deleted it.
I dunno, I guess I’ll let the review ratings and sales figures do the talking on this one – Grand Theft Auto V - Metacritic – plus the all time game review ratings across all platforms:
(For what it’s worth, I hated GTA 4, never finished it, and I feel 5 is a far better game in every regard.)
I think what worked best for me in GTA 5 was the “heist” setup scheme, where a series of sub-missions (with choices!) set the stage for a larger, more complex mission. And each heist was bigger than the last one, so they also build on each other. In most sandbox games, you play a set of linear random events missions that don’t do much other than advance the written plot. The heist scheme was genius. And it built on a massive foundation of so many heist hollywood movies, including Heat, etc.
Switching between three characters was also incredible. You got to experience the story arc from three very different perspectives, and if you’re bored with one storyline, temporarily switch to the other one. The missions interlock and interrelate, not just as heist setups, but as three perspectives on the same story.
There’s several missions where you help people, for example, there’s a random event mission where you see a crashed car and help someone out of it and drive them home. That person becomes available as a driver as part of the heist setups.
You can also take taxi missions, fire department missions, etcetera.
But if you consider this a crime / heist movie, which it is, it’s natural that these wouldn’t be the most likeable characters in the world. They are criminals, after all.
At some point, if time permits, I should at least play deep enough into the game to meet Trevor, but I lost interest before that point. And the other two guys, even when it occurs to them to take a nobler path, get railroaded by circumstance into bad choices. At least in Red Dead Redemption you’re playing as a “recovering” criminal who is forced to revisit the bandito life in order to save his family. You’re freer to make “good” or “evil” choices in that game, though the cutscenes generally assume that you’re trying to walk the relatively straight-and-narrow path. And in L.A. Noire you play as a flawed but non-corrupt cop. You can go renegade and wreck cars and mow down pedestrians, but you’ll probably end up with a stern talking-to by the Captain back at the station house. Conversely, you can play the whole game by scrupulously following all traffic regulations, and be amazed at how long it takes to cross Los Angeles in 1948 when NPC A.I. has no concept of yielding.
I’m an old fuddy duddy. Sometimes I’ll fire up L.A. Noire just so I can drive around town listening to the radio. I suppose people do that in GTA5 too, except that game has even shittier radio stations than IRL Los Angeles does, and that’s saying something. Would it have killed them to put in a KNAC analogue?
Can I just interject and say I am proud that we can have a conversation like this? Over… Mad max? I am not cynical or snarky, but this gives me hope for the future.
Anyone else think of Oscar Wilde in his prison sentence when you saw the people on the wheels hauling things up and down? Random thought 
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OK, another dude, and I don’t identify as feminist (esp. since some Real Feminists assert that I can never be one) but imho it’s pretty simple: Anita Sarkeesian’s feminism is a very specific subset of feminism. I’m not 100% sure what it is because she tends to dance around it, but if you listen to any of her non-gaming, non-media-critique videos from talks, she has some pretty harsh words for liberal feminism and for conservatives.
(Somewhat amusingly, radical feminists tend to call her a liberal feminist because she recognizes transwomen as women.)
And while you, I, and several others can see the cautionary tale behind Mad Max, and can see the social commentary on the folly of male violence inherent in the story line, what she sees is the glorification of male violence.
That’s her opinion.
The only thing irksome is the notion that saying so under the guise of Feminist Frequency makes it a voice of authority, as well as a voice of authority within feminism. She, like the rest of us, has an opinion. And she’s stating it. And is doing so while identifying as a feminist, first and foremost. And she should be able to, without having a bunch of douchebags threatening to do all kinds of gross shit to her. But none of that makes her opinion any more valid than the people who, imho, may be on to something with the social commentary aspect.
Anyway, that’s just my opinion.
Meh. You have an opinion, too, and your genitals should have no bearing on that. You weren’t a dudebro explaining to an astrophysicist how your uninformed view, as a man, was more valid than her educated view. But maybe the late hour combined with drink has rendered me unable to make sense of shit and stuff.
Oh sweet Jesus if you haven’t “met” Trevor yet, you’ve barely begun. It becomes an entirely different game at that point. You haven’t even started the first of many heists and setup missions.
Just trust me when I say there are reasons for the all-time top 10 videogame metacritic rating GTA 5 has.
Man happy. I am making it a thing. It should be on Urban Dictionary any time now.
While I Prolly won’t see it again, I liked the juxtaposition of max and furiosa quite a lot. It made the movie, with all the utter insanity, more real.
What man and woman doesn’t have hard, terrible, wrenching choices faced to them?
Doesn’t the “birth” scene (if you could call it that) and the ultimate take down scene just scream we are all animals? I am gonna retire to my cabin in the woods, with a healthy spring.
I have no doubt the plaudits are sincere, but I’m about 10 hours in (I do lots of side missions and exploration in big sandbox games) and it was taking too long to get fun. I may get into it again if time permits, but I kind of doubt it.
I’ve been meaning to see Schindler’s List and Se7en and Philadelphia and The Wire and a bunch of other critically-acclaimed movies and TV series for a long, long time, and I’ll probably never get around to those either. Some things I’m never in the mood for, and I feel too old for homework assignments. So I miss out on a lot of really great stuff.
I was surprised at how horrifying the birth scene was, even though you didn’t see any real blood or viscera… just a fleeting glimpse of the baby’s foot (I think), and the umbilical cord. Everything dreadful about that scene was in the attitudes of the actors, not really in anything we actually saw.
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I’ll chalk it up to differing tastes, but seriously that top 10 list is depressing.
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Yeah, the user ratings seem to reflect a reality with which I can relate. Those critic scores, though… bleah. Looks like way too many critics love things that aren’t gonna interest me one bit.
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I don’t put a lot of faith in reviewers who give games ratings of 99%.
FWIW, I enjoyed the first GTA, and also GTA3 and Chinatown Wars, but after starting GTA4 I just got bored quickly and went off to play XCOM and then Skyrim instead. I barely got started. It sits there under the TV with Dishonored reminding me that I really should give it a go again.
GTA4 was a very boring game in my book. I bought it on some Steam sale, played it a bit and then never touched it again. (NB: I also tried and did not finish GTA3, Vice City, and San Andreas.)
GTA5 is a much better experience and a more polished game – mostly because the heist schemes are so amenable to multiple mission storytelling. It’s also nice to get three different perspectives on the same story, and switch between them any time if you get bored with one.
There is no question in my mind at least that GTA5 is the best game in the series.
(It might also be worth mentioning that I love heist movies, too. As should you.)
I love a good heist movie.
I don’t think I actually fell asleep but I feel like I slept through most of Heat - I don’t remember any of it, in any case, I just remember being bored. If GTA V is like Heat, then I’m not sure I’m interested. Based on the trailers I’ve seen (which feature bits from cutscenes showing the characters) it doesn’t really seem like it’s Heat-esque necessarily in tone, but neither the tone it does have or the characters seem interesting or compelling to me.
Heist films I like include The Italian Job (1969 version), The Ladykillers (1955 version), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), Ocean’s 11 (both 1960 and 2001 versions, actually), Rififi (1955), How To Steal A Million (1966), The Great Train Robbery (1979), I’m probably forgetting some good ones. We should have a game that takes the tone of these fun heist films (Rififi is more serious actually) and not boring/serious/ultra-violent type of heist film which I gather is what GTA V is (I could be wrong, haven’t played it at all, but that’s the sense I got from the trailers despite the fact that the characters seem intended to be humorously stupid).
This actually can be construed as a segue into the on-topic things I thought about as I read this thread, regarding violence and feminism in movies. Part of what bores me about movies like Heat is the way violence and machismo is portrayed. I mean, it may very well be realistic, actually, but it’s boring to me. But then of course you couldn’t have a Mad Max movie that actually took the tone of the light-hearted heist movies I listed, though I think they do share many similarities.
When I was 15 I never thought I’d say this, but in my opinion gratuitous violence in movies (and games, for that matter) is stupid. And furthermore, much of the violence and machismo that isn’t normally considered gratuitous because it’s in support of the plot or in support of character-building isn’t stupid but as with Heat it’s usually just uninteresting to me.
I think it’s been years since I’ve watched a new-release action movie, and in that time only a few older action movies. They are unappealing to me in exactly the same way as women are stereotyped as not liking action movies.
There are many classic action movies that do hold up (the original Mad Max movies among them) - and unsurprisingly, these are very often movies that women enjoy too (my 65-year-old mom loved the original Mad Maxes when they came out, and loved the new one).
The best of them do not use violence gratuitously, do not feature unnecessary/shoehorned romance, and keep the objectification of women to a minimum (that in particular is a hard standard to apply to older movies, but many are surprisingly good on that count - and of course many simply don’t have female characters).
It seems to me that the action movies that women stereotypically don’t like have been specifically designed to be that way, perhaps unwittingly. For example, in an effort to get women to see their movies, they shoehorn in a romance - but the female character is one-dimensional and objectified and requires saving by the dumb male hero. Perhaps these bad romances are actually intended for the 13-year-old-male audience that they’re aiming for too, but either way, it makes women turn away.
As a result, the movies just become really stupid, and are often misogynistic (unwittingly, perhaps, in many cases, but not excusably).
So here we have the new Mad Max, which no one should have been surprised hearkens back to the female-audience-friendly aspects of the originals if nothing else (if they’d gotten a new director, I’d have been very worried). Not only did we get that - which is a huge relief in itself - we got something even better, something that feels like it’s breaking new ground.
It’s not specific character types that are new - we’ve had one after another wonderful female lead and supporting characters in action-heavy movies and TV in the past decade or so, of all sorts.
What’s far more rare is having those characters just existing in the film, fully realized and part of the world, and not being paraded for the viewer (in many cases it makes sense to do that and people enjoy it, but often it just feels like pandering, which it is). Rare again is having male and female characters together and there not even being a hint of sexual or romantic tension (there’s a hint of romance with two of the supporting characters, but it’s appropriate and makes sense as part of their character development).
Rare again is having the “strong female characters” actually being strong female characters, i.e. not requiring saving by a male at the pivotal moment (and not unrealistically so, and not relying on the trope of the female proving herself as one of the boys). I could go on. Impossibly rare is to have all of that in a single film - much less in a film which is perhaps the biggest, baddest, most explosive action movie there has ever been.
Pacific Rim came close to this standard, with some missteps (and some other flaws, although I think it’s a great film). Nothing else has come close that I can think of.
The original films (particularly The Road Warrior) clearly had a huge influence on everyone that came after, but the feminist stuff (which is heavily there even in the first film) is not so much what people took from them. Because it’s already part of the current action-heavy-movie zeitgeist to have better female characters, I expect that this new Mad Max will be just as influential now that it’s blitheringly* obvious again that you can do a big-budget action-blockbuster that women want to see and will enjoy (I also hope it’s influential in the aspect of filming things for real instead of doing CGI). The other more recent movies that fit the criteria (Inception among them) should have been enough evidence, but here Mad Max beats you over the head with it (not in a bad way).
. * may not be a real word
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Doesn’t Thunderdome have a strong female presence in Auntie Entity? I was surprised to read that they originally wrote that part with Tina Turner in mind. And there is a whole backstory there with her breaking the chains of her abusive relationship, too, and being an even bigger star than her husband…
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Now that’s a good one. Love the long silent sequence.
I do also love Heat, though. Watched that lots of times.
Have you seen Inside Man?
Not sure what you’re getting at here, bro.
When a woman who identifies as feminist and has studied feminist issues for years tells you that, no, you can’t be a feminist because you’re a man, what are you supposed to do, mansplain to them that, no, woman, you’re wrong, I can be one?
Though to be fair, the ones who tend to say such things also tend to be TERFs, so there is that…but if we then say, “Well, they’re not really feminists,” are we any better than them?
Nah, I figure it’s just fine and dandy if I advocate for my female coworkers (if I had any; I’m self-employed atm) to get the same pay for the same work, respect in the workplace, all that jazz, without looking like this:
And that’s okay. Because if I have to have a tshirt and have to go around telling everyone I’m a feminist, it has a ring of “Let me be honest with you,” to it, to my way of thinking. As in, okay, you’re honest right now; what are you the rest of the time? Well, are you really all for respecting women, or do you think that wearing a shirt will get you cred with the chicks?
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Is that a weird burn on Bill Bailey? 
