Well umm @zenkat will need to do that. I rarely hit the main site directly. I do click out to the articles from here but with RSS and the BBS I don’t think I have regularly hit the BB home page in a long long time.
Buy some shit from the store. 
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When I get a proper job again… also would buying amazon shit that is linked to work?
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That’s always helpful and appreciated as well.
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I do miss Cast a Deadly Spell. (FYI, that’s part of the HBO back-catalog on HBO GO / HBO NOW if you haven’t seen it yet.
The real-world references to the Shrek and Faerie Lives Matter gave the whole thing a grim tone for me. (Is “greenface” acceptable in a kids comedy? Are we trying to minimize the destruction of intelligent faeries, or have a black character minimize the importance of the BLM movement? They’re throwaway jokes that make the whole thing pretty dark if you actually make the mistake of treating it like real world-building.
But they also told me this world is supposed to be "mostly real’, relatable as still “our world, but with orcs and a history of real magic in there somewhere.” Once you accept that, then the rest of the dialog gets downright disturbing. It’s a world where apparently all humans – white, black, latino – are all equal enough that they can all be loudly racist against orcs without a hint of self-reflection. Try imagining a locker-room conversation with a white cop telling a couple of black cops that his family used to kill slightly-different black people by the hundreds back in Russia, and have it accepted like an idle comment from someone in your in-group. Did the Civil Rights movement never happen in Bright’s America? In the screenwriters mind?
So the tone was way off… aside from that, the story was just a bunch of very loosely-connected events, which managed to play out mostly like a shallow cop story, but with weird digressions into extraneous fantasy tropes – There’s a prophecy about a blessed man and an orc is raised from the dead to stop the return of a dark lord – and precisely all of those things contributed nothing to the very simple “evil person (and everyone else) wants dangerous thing we probably shouldn’t let her have” story. They’re just in there to check a box on some “baby’s first D&D story” list. The pacing was poor, the story was cobbled together.
I still gave it a thumbs up in Netflix, because the new rating system sucks, and I have to thumbs up everything that I do not find repellent on some dimension – genre, actors, story keywords – for fear that Netflix will conclude that I don’t like the few things I like, and instead show me another ten rows of “deadliest animals in Australia” and “the Great British Bake-off”. Truly, a terrible algorithm.
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Eh, it had its faults, but at least it was something different. Will Smith has been attached to things that are far worse.
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The thing that I find interesting about Netflix recommendations is how algorithmicly racist they are. If you watch and like one African American centered movie (Will Smith has enough cross-over appeal to not activate this) you are bombarded with recommendations for African American centric movies. After I watched Roll Bounce *at least half of the movies that it suggested starred black people. I assume that is a reflection of how racially divided peoples choices are…
- a black, roller skating, teen movie.
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I am tired of Star Trek to be honest. Humanoid aliens are an old trope which really should go away.
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To be fair, it is much harder to design and get something to move and do so within budget that isn’t a guy in a suit. And since all the guys we have are humanoids…
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Thanks, all! I’m away from my machine, but it was a movie trailer (I
forget which, sorry) on the review of “Bright”. Pretty sure same thing
happened elsewhere.
Is there a preferred channel for reporting these sorts of things?
I missed that! You’d think he’d be too busy for something like that, but…
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I image a Shrek movie in the Bright universe would be seen like the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Which now makes me ask, would there be Christianity in the Bright universe?
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I see similar behavior with Korean, Japanese, Indian, and Chinese movies too. I watched Train to Busan, some anime, and some old Shaolin, and now it’s half of my recommendations.
The system as it stands right now seems to have the following problems:
- Online, you used to have the option – and may still, for all I know – of marking a film as “not bad, not good, but I’m not watching that because it just doesn’t interest me; stop showing it”. It’s sorely missed on all other platforms.
- Thumbs up / Thumbs down is not fine grain enough. They seem to respectively correlate to about 4 stars and 2 stars under the old system. So there’s no 3 star, “a good way to spend an hour before bed or to have on while cooking, but not worth watching again” rating. Which is 90% of all material I’ve ever rated.
- The rating system pulls everything toward the middle. Supposedly this increased viewer engagement with the rating system. It looks like that means they swapped out less data with higher quality by people who care for more data with lower quality by people who don’t.
- When the system changed, I noticed everything I 5 starred was suggested as “98% match,” 4 star was “90% match,” and so on. I dutifully re-rated on the new system so my opinion continued to be locked in and considered more solid than a random 90% suggestion. However, that probably just accelerated the slide toward mediocrity.
- Based on a number of films that left Netflix then came back recently, it looks like ratings are dumped once the movie leaves Netflix. (i.e. The thumbs up/down was not preserved.) So years of profiling are probably inaccessible.
- There’s simply less of what I previously rated good still on Netflix.
- There’s a lot more random foreign television, because they’re the last ones still selling to Netflix cheaply.
- EDIT 1: I almost forgot: it doesn’t understand that tastes change over the course of a decade.
- EDIT 2: it has trouble distinguishing the difference between a 17 year old girl, and a 34 year old man trying to appease a toddler every once in a while.
The algorithm no longer knows who I am, doesn’t have what I want it to recommend anyway, and does have stuff I don’t want.
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Obligs:
On topic; Bright didn’t even look all that good in the preview shown in theaters, so the widespread panning of it is not very surprising to me.
A Wrinkle in Time and Spiderverse, though? I can’t front; as an official ‘Blerd’, I am excited for them both.
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So did I, and in fact everybody I know. I don’t get what’s with all the negative reviews of Bright. Did all reviewers get together and decide to hate this? Everybody else seems to love it. I’m surprised to see even BoingBoing toe the line here, instead of appreciating it as the crazy buddy cop/Shadowrun mashup that it is.
The story was good. 5 groups hunting for the same magical artifact that accidentally fell into the hands of the PCs sounds like a perfect Shadowrun scenario. 4/5.
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Worse? That sounds like an excellent idea. I love self-referential movies.
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I hate Tom Cruise playing Tom Cruise, and Edge of Tomorrow was aimed exactly at me. He’s at his Tom Cruisiest, confident that he can charm his way out of any situation, and instead he gets brutally killed, over and over. Fan service at its finest.
Unfortunately the movie has a narrative arc in which he grows and stops getting killed so often. I realized at the end of the two hours that I really should’ve left after the first hour and gone to a different subtheater to watch the first hour over again.
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I really liked the Blair Witch Project. It really captured the horror of terrain that didn’t make sense. On the other hand, it spawned the whole genre of movies with the conceit of “found footage”, 95% of which have been terrible, so there’s that.
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My wife and I both liked it, while totally understanding the critic reviews. I cannot even explain why we liked it. Okay, I really did like the wand dripping effect. I cannot recall another such messy depiction of a ‘nuclear weapon.’
Spoilers - Thinking back on it all – Why does it take the entire movie for them to realize they have a wand and a magic user elf? I’d be asking crazy-pants elf for help about an hour earlier.
Second related concern – why is everyone trying so hard to take the wand away from our heroes? I mean, one in a million are “bright,” able to even touch a wand. None of those bad cops know a bright and neither do the gang bangers. So the wand is valuable, if you can ever find a buyer, but not “I’m going to be immortal” valuable.
And you know, those points still do not bother me as much as they should. I want to see more sequels/prequels set in the same world. Guilty pleasure?
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