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August and her ragtag group are just like everyone else, simply surviving in the treacherous Crater... When they stumble into what may be an artifact of the ancient past, their lives are thrown into a much bigger loop as they trifle with bounty hunters, monsters and gods.
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It's a pretty rigid format but we keep the content loose, you know?
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A living boy fights to save the City of the Dead.
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Angel's Orchard
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After the events in Demon's Mirror, Gerda has accepted her role as a Demon Hunter, and Cezar has traveled back to the Demon City. Demons have existed alongside humans for millennia, so things begin to return to normal. But an impossibly powerful Relic has been taken by one of the Demon Masters, and a silent war enters its final stages.
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A historical romance with a touch magic and a dash of astronomy. It chronicles the romantic adventures of Sulvain, a sweet tempered necromancer and Raziol, a passionate 17th century astronomer.
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Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
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Kieran Bright is a college student home for the summer and roped into an online reunion with his old neighborhood friends in the most recent update of their favorite childhood MMORPG.
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Join Kieran and his friends as they are pulled into another reality that may or may not be real and are forced to confront their own identities, the nature of simulated universes and reality itself.
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People can be focused on more than one issue at a time (and also be angrily prejudiced about more than one thing at a time). Kind of a weird perspective to say people were too busy thinking about gay marriage to be prejudiced against trans people.
And yet true. People were obviously still prejudiced against trans people – probably more so on a broad level, but they were also just less aware of them.
We lacked the organized campaigns demonizing them for political advantage. That was still focused on gay marriage. When that finally happened and seemed to have broad support, the same people looked around for another target in the culture wars and found trans people.
DVD and Blu-Ray cases are roughly the same shape, and DoA isn’t old enough for the characters to have started with VHS collections, so it should be fine.
Of course these days they’re more likely to not have any physical media at all, because the powers that be would prefer if we subscribe to everything for a “low” monthly fee (or ten) for the rest of our lives…
For the vast majority of movies/shows, I vastly prefer the subscription model or even the old video rental model.
There are only a handful of movies I’d want to watch often enough for buying to make more sense.
Willis giveth: There already was a DofA years ago about some “returning your stuff” drama and a video disc set, but the response was “I don’t care, it’s on Netflix anyway”. Maybe Amber and Ethan?
No? I don’t think. But after a couple of days (often just one), people usually ‘settle in’ to a spot and tend not to change their seat for a given class.
most shouldn’t but it’d be a habit for ppl to sit in the same place. though it’d draw more attention to them if jennifer moved further away assuming there was no other free seats
Of course, Billie/Jennifer being the last into the room, she got the seat that was left. It’s no one else’s fault they picked the same seat they had last time.
Although, I could see Carla choosing between two seats, and deliberately picking the one that would FORCE those two to sit together. I hvae no evidence that she did this, however.
Right. I don’t think we know whose any of the other choices are, at least not for sure, but that one’s well-established. Presumably none of the others listed here are Becky’s, since she isn’t tagged, and we already know Jennifer’s is Attack of the Clones entirely because it has “54 seconds featuring Kit Fisto.” (I’m also assuming none of the ones listed are Ruth’s, entirely because she and Jennifer both seem to be avoiding making any kind of noise here.)
Like, I get that we need to consider films in the context of their era, to avoid demonizing a film based on modern sensibilities and concepts…
…but on the other, no, fuck a film that puts a white guy in brownface and gives him a cartoonish Indian accent. I think we knew that shit was wrong in the late 80’s!
Okay, here’s my Embarassing Confession for the day.
I was 12 when Short Circuit 2 came out. I had seen the original on TV, but beyond that I had literally no idea who Fisher Stevens was. (I still don’t, really. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen him in anything else.)
I spent literally years thinking how cool it was that a subcontinent actor was the main non-robot character.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is one of those movies that everyone keeps telling me is really really good and that I should see but I just can’t bring myself to get around to.
Oh hey, I can mark that response of my “I haven’t gotten around to it” bingo card! All I need is “trust me, it gets good after…” and I win a copy of Elden Ring! (Not a free one; I’d still have to buy it, but I’ve looking for a reason to play it.)
I’ll commit heresy here and say that while it is a good movie, it didn’t work well for me because it was stuck in an uncanny valley of plausibility. It had too much weird and silly stuff apparently for the sake of being weird and silly, but also a lot of semi-sorta-hard alternate timeline stuff, and they didn’t mix well IMO.
I like Rogue One, but it’s a real mess of a film. The characters are great, and the third act is legitimately one of the best third acts in all of Star Wars, right up there with A New Hope even.
But the message and themes are just muddled as hell. Its just a real struggle to work through for the first two thirds of the film, because it feels like the movie has no idea what its really wanting to be about until then, and its just bouncing around between ideas.
It’s extremely Tony Gilroy. Andor has been underlining his fascination with the ways power can be expressed within political machinery; re-watching Rogue One just recently, I couldn’t shake the thought that I was watching Bourne action over the top of power structures that would be right at home in Michael Clayton.
Funny to me the characters are the weakest part. Their motivation switches seemed nonsensical, one guy just decide to die for no reason… It reminded me of Prometheus in that way.
Add to that a few other reasons why the movie wasn’t enjoyable (action scenes in the first half, missed opportunity with the Vader scene, the dad joke…) and I really couldn’t get into it. At the time of release it was my second least favourite SW movie after Episode II.
I have to admit that there are great stuff in the third act though but not enough for me. I was quite baffled by the popularity of this movie but eh, people like what they like.
I’ve seen Rogue One and Hidden Figures, though Everything Everywhere All At Once is high up on my to-watch list. I didn’t get around to it while it was in theaters because I was in my final semester of college and shit was hectic.
Neither was I, until I made the grievous mistake if saying I hadn’t watched some of them in front of the wrong people. Apparently people get really intense about their favorite fiction.
I’ve seen those two and, as noted about, Short Circuit 2. I don’t know why I’ve never got round to BoP, and the rest hold between little and zero interest. (The more people tell me how much I have to see All Kinds of Everything, the less appealing they make it sound.)
Hmm. Well, Jennifer appears to have cut her hair to almost-but-not-quite match Ruth’s, judging by panel 3, so I’m going for Ruth because Jennifer ends up looking like she’s trying too hard and making it very clear she’s not influenced by Ruth at all.
Is she the one who can’t talk good because her brain is full of kill, or the one who was Robin for a few minutes? I’d look it up but wikis have a tendency to beat around the bush on these things.
The Robins were the one thing they DIDN’T reboot, which will always be the most depressing part to me. (I mean, they also left the Green Lanterns and stuff because Geoff Johns, but the Robins made the least sense by far. At least the Lantern stuff was just generally minimizing the reboot.)
The first. Brain isn’t even full of kill, brain is full of martial arts training but learning body language also meant she got a dose of hyperempathy so she REAAAALLY does not want to kill after her evil assassin dad made her do it once. This is also why she’s one of the staunchest believers in and inheritors to The Bat As Symbol.
I get that there are a lot of really iffy tropes in play in that and how it interacts with her race specifically, which is why I don’t begrudge reboots keeping her language disability as dyslexia if anything and canon downplaying the speech aspects of it (her ongoing had someone retool her brain so she could learn speech relatively early in the run as well,) but man does it sting extra to have a Cass without ANY Cass traits at all in a film titled “Birds of Prey”, you know, the team FOUNDED by another disabled Batgirl who was nowhere in sight there. Just makes Oracle’s absence all the harsher.
On the other hand, being totally misrepresented by writers who don’t get the character is actually PERFECT representation for her when you think about it.
I liked a lot of stuff about Birds of Prey and didn’t like other stuff. As a whole I enjoyed it but yeah it played a little too fast and loose with some characters. Honestly Shocked that I liked Harley in it, though. I feel like she’s a hard character to get right.
It was really a Harley Quinn movie. I feel like they just took a bunch of female characters and just threw them in there without really researching them to be supporting cast for Harley.
Yeah, like the worst thing about the movie is how many characters they shoehorned in. It’s not a birds of prey movie, it’s a Harley movie and it worked best when it was being a Harley movie.
I really enjoyed the film, but yeah, that character has nothing to do with the comic version of Cassandra Cain. It wouldn’t shock me if she was named something entirely different at one point, and the name got shoehorned in there because she’s a major character and they wanted some sort of Bat-family-adjacent character in there beyond Harley. And Huntress. And Montoya.
Wait, are we not talking about the 2002 series starring Ashley Scott as Huntress? With Harley Quinn and vague Joker references as the main villain? Well, color me confused.
Is that the one mostly hidden underneath the word balloon that says “Short Circuit 2”?
And my response would have been “The Princess Bride”.
As to why: True love, long pursued but never forgotten. Good guys, bad guys, sword-fights, eminently quotable dialogue – and, of course, the hokeyness of the ROUS. What’s *NOT* to like?
I was going to save this topic for a different tirade further down the line bit this actually feels like a good time
It’s astonishing how far story telling and fiction has come. Back in the day people could look at fiction and fandom as nothing more as escapism and for a lot people it still is that. But with a little nuance a number of fictional properties can also be a gateway into talking bigger meaningful conversations.
Or as another example there’s also writers who go as far as to world build and creat an entirely different world separate from real life but would then make that world mirror real life forms of government and use their world as opinion pieces on how they would go about addressing issues in certain political structures, like in this video comparing the story telling of Rick Riordan and J.K Rolling: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRH9F3fv/
Or my personal opinion on how Jedi council in the Star Wars prequel had strayed far from being in anyway a Virtuous group and contributed to making Anikan Skywalker into Darth Vader more than Palpatine did. Like he should be an example on why child soldiers and military indoctrination is a bad idea. How do you take a kid teach him to suppress his emotions, expect him to fight and kill in war for years be surprised he turns into killing machine.
Honestly, it’s not so much how far fiction and storytelling have come – humans have always used stories to send messages and any narrative more involved than Spot the Dog is going to say a little about our biases as an author and the society we come from. (If only in who we’re choosing to depict and how. I mean, note that Spot’s a dog and not a hawk or something, because we didn’t domesticate hawks, we domesticated dogs.) It’s more about critical analysis of fiction and the rise of “pop culture” as a thing and analyzing THAT, I’d guess more.
I mean, hell, I’ve seen a blog that reviewed every movie that was on Mystery Science Theater 3000 up through Season Eleven and a bunch of movies that were terrible enough to have been on it, and one of the blogger’s central things was to analyze what kind of themes they could get out of these awful movies. (Ranging from “absolutely the intent, there is no question” like Rocket Attack U.S.A. or I Accuse My Parents to “absolutely NOT the intent but goddamn if this doesn’t work even when it’s not 2 AM and severely caffeinated” in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die as a piece about feminism and objectification, or the family dynamics of Manos The Hands of Fate.) You can get meaning out of ANYTHING if you try hard enough, and you’d be surprised how much holds up – not always because it was the writer’s intention, but it’s not hard to see how 50s B-movies about alien invaders secretly infiltrating society might be reflecting attitudes about the Red Scare, for example.
Everything sends a message. Fiction’s evolved over time, but in plenty of different ways and it’s not just a linear “simpler stories -> deeper ones”, even in terms of popular fiction. Remember, Shakespeare was writing at least as much to everyday working class people of London as he was to occasionally flatter the monarch in charge about how their dynasty is TOTALLY the one that had the proper right to the throne in that dispute. Macbeth and Henry V still have plenty of dick jokes. It’s the passage of time that makes popular culture “classics”.
Or like how “Taming of the Shrew” is a twisted power fantasy about how one dude is mentally and emotionally breaking a girl down till she agree’s to be his subservient wife?
Yeah I can see the point of how some works of fiction aren’t getting more profound with their stories and critical analysis and debate is just getting more refined, maybe because it’s not so hard to ask around about opinions about specific things with the internet theses days. Not to mention there are plenty of works of fiction that seem to drive conversation the more time goes by, I’ve seen so many analysis over movie like Fight Club I could right my own essay about I think about the movie and the various different opinions.
For what it’s worth, I’ve only ever seen directors have the Shrew say her domesticated lines sarcastically, or with a twinkle of self-aware humor in her eye, or while taking actions that clarify that, no, she is being funny, or tricking them, or anything except actually being tragically tamed.
Not sure if that’s how Shakespeare intended it or anything, but he’s a pretty funny guy, and it’s possible to fix that more obvious on-paper ending with a strong choice or two.
It’s a subject of longstanding debate and director/critical interpretation as to just how seriously Shakespeare was intending that one to be taken, yeah. And unlike some (*cough Merchant of Venice cough*) it lends itself to reinterpretation like that well enough that it can be performed with at least minimal baggage. But also, yeah, cultural biases. That plot was perfectly acceptable. Shakespeare’s not the only one who wrote off that template at the time and some of them definitely DID mean it in all seriousness. These days most performances do a lot of tweaking in the portrayal and stage directions while keeping the script unchanged, because you can do a lot of that in theater.
Yeah I think also it’s hard for us (unless any of us here are cultural historians, I’m definitely not) to fully appreciate the subtle messages in fiction from earlier times because we don’t have the lived cultural context.
For example, I just read the other night that Beauty and the Beast was written in the context of a culture where arranged marriages were commonplace and women’s rights in France/Europe were not what they are today. That adds a whole extra layer of super relevant cultural context that totally changes how it would be interpreted by audiences of that time period vs. now.
I notice this phenomenon a lot as a parent, when my kid is watching stuff from my youth, and I’m realizing how much cultural context assists a person in interpreting subtler messages of a lot of fiction. So I don’t necessarily think modern media has become more complex, it’s just a lot of that complexity is lost for newer audiences as the context in which it is viewed changes.
And also yeah I think critical analysis is more common and accessible now thanks to the internet. For example: Disney theory YouTube. Which I am convinced spawned as a result of parents watching the same movies 746363658592 times with their kids (since kids like to watch their faves over and over). Parents also possibly spend more time watching stuff with their kids now vs. just letting them watch independently.
But anyway, I have noticed after watching something over and over, you start over-analyzing it just to stave off the boredom of repetition. Like I have ranted to my husband about massive complicated theories about government corruption in Adventure Bay in *paw patrol* of all things just because I got stuck watching it way too often when my kid was obsessed. You come up with wacky interpretations to entertain yourself. And then, thanks to the internet, those parents can now share all that stuff with the world.
I get that Leslie’s a long time Starwars fangirl but if you’re choosing Rogue one, with a MILD amount of Leia at BEST over Alien, with OODLES of Ripley I’m gonna have to call this a bad system.
Rogue One to me was just that one Star Wars movie that made me fall in love with a random one off star wars character only for her to die at the end…and then didn’t give me time to process it because it had that one Vader Scene at the end right aftet
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb it does not pass the Bechdel test but I think it’s a good gender studies movie as it illustrates how toxic masculinity will destroy us all. Also the lack of women in the film except for one who is clearly sexualized it kind reinforces the point that toxic masculinity will kill us all and how men only view women as sex objects and theor only contribution in a post nuclear society is to be attractive and bear children and are treated as trophys. Also how male sexual inadequacy leads to amergedon.
I show my international conflict class this movie every semester it’s scary how close it was to reality (not that a rouge general who felt sexually inadequecy but the truth that individual generals were given command over nuclear weapons) which lstrates the doctrine of MAD isn’t always assured hence traditional deterence theory may not always work and that there is a chance for accidents.
I don’t know you well enough to know if you understand the point of the Bechdel Test, but since there’s always someone who doesn’t, I’m going to use this as an opportunity to say the thing:
The Bechdel Test does not exist to be passed. The point of the Bechdel Test is that it’s an extremely low bar that most movies nevertheless fail to pass. Using it to analyze a single movie is always incorrect, because the entire point Bechdel was making was how many movies failed to pass it. The point is to make you think, “Hold on. Are there really so few?” and to consider how we might change that, not to judge existing movies for failing it.
I know what the Bechdel test is qnd yes many movies fail to pass it. Given the comic that coined the test the last movie the characters saw that passed the test was Aliens an action movie, which is supposed to a macho masculine type of movie. Hence why the joke lands so well.
I Also if I just said Dr.Strangelove was a good movie for gender studies class to analyze. I posted that it doesn’t pass the Bechdel test in case someone said it doesn’t pass the Bechdel test or asked if it passed the Bechdel test beacuse previously in the comic Leslie use this lesson to talk about the test.
When I was a kiddo, “Gorillas in the Mist” was my favorite movie.
Now I have many favorites. I love “Totoro”. “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” is also AMAZING, even though it prioritizes men’s stories.
Even though it is DEEPLY problematic, “Neon Genesis Evangelion” will always be very special to me. …I miss going down to the corner video library and taking home a rented movie.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is the correct film, and shame on Leslie for ignoring it in order to fawn over a deep-fake cameo that makes a good portion of the audience cringe in the uncanny valley.
Shaaaaaame.
Also, Ke Huy Quan is adorable and amazing and I want to punch Hollywood for hurting him so badly!
While I love EEAOO to bits (and I’d consider it a serious contender for best movie of the past decade), I want to shout out Hidden Figures as an underrated gem in that list. Excellent movie and more people should watch it.
Rogue One is so bad. Alien was called out, it’s a movie with strong women doing important things. Everything, Everywhere All At Once is probably the best movie called out, but Alien is comparably good and nostalgic.
Two strips in one. I like the quiet, tense one on the left where Ruth and Jennifer do or don’t interact. The one on the right shows us that the class goes on without being hijacked by drama (yet), and Leslie is leading it comfortably.
I kinda hate being asked what my favorite movie (or book, genre of music, or whatever else) is. I like a lot of stuff, and I find it hard to narrow them down to a single favorite movie or whatever. I’m not sure if that’s an autistic thing or just a weird me thing.
I often have this problem too, and if I say “X” and later recall that “Y” was even better I feel guilty for lying to people. They won’t care, nor will they call me on it when I list a different favorite at a later time.
More recently I am trying to relax and just say the first good candidate that pops into my head, and not worry about precise rankings.
i dont’ think i watched enough movies to really prefer any, i only just finished a few ‘classics’ some years ago and some were nice and others didn’t age well, but i can see something ‘relatable’ being used as a metaphor/sample to study/analyze and implement into a lesson.
Tho be interesting if leslie can use it as an excuse for a ‘tax writeoff’/doing some ‘research’ every few years of the current movies or so to stay relevant
Yeah I can pick 1 fave movie (though I have many overall top movies) just because one was literally responsible for a large portion of my professional and personal identity (the lion king made me want to become an artist) but I can never settle on a fave tv show (maaaaybe top 2 or 3) or band or song. Even book is hard (tho if I had to pick 1, it would be Jurassic Park).
Does Rouge One pass bechdel test? if I remember correctly the only dialogue between the two women in this movie was about killing a man who is a bad daddy
I hate to snark about someone else’s spelling errors, so don’t take this as criticism, but I have to say that the “Rouge One” spelling always makes me think of the elaborate nicknames given to the eponymous ship in Red Dwarf.
Which definitely doesn’t pass the Bedchel test, since I’m pretty sure the only time it even has more than one named women in the same episode is the one where the gag is Rimmer has a sexual magnetism virus.
Well, no, there’s the episode where they meet their female counterparts in the alternate universe and are grossed out by their own behavior. Where Lister gets pregnant.
That’s such a classic thing to ask people a question and tell them to justify it and they don’t, just giving their opinion. Or you ask a question and people give the opposite answer. (Like, “What are some positive things about X?” and then everyone only says negative things.) Teaching can be frustrating.
See this is what I think should be the standard. My current metric for favorite movie is any movie I could picture myself watching if I was stranded on a desert island and only had one form of entertainment for the rest of my life. Hence, my primary pick being Aladdin.
Love Everything Everywhere All At Once. I often struggle with watching movies, especially ones that aren’t part of a franchise I know, but I went to see that one twice.
My dad, on the other hand, thought it was way too weird and fell asleep during part of it. Ah well, can’t please everyone.
And once again, I feel like I’ve missed something that everyone else automatically knows about. Where’s all the Bechdel discussion coming from? Leslie didn’t bring it up, it’s not in the alt text, and even looking through her recent tagged appearances, I can’t find a single in-comic mention of it since she first brought it up way back when.
I’m honestly more confused that a(n apparently) semestral class has the same course in both semesters of a year. Is this a thing that commonly happens in America, or is it just an artifact of narrative convenience?
Some classes – especially first-year ones that fulfill degree obligations – will often be able to be taken in both semesters. Gives more people the opportunity to get into it.
Yes, if they expect everyone to take it, they need enough sections that everyone can get in. IU Bloomington has around 35,000 undergraduate students, so, maybe 9,000 freshmen. I don’t think anybody ever built a lecture hall that big.
It’s very inefficient to make important classes only available in spring OR fall. Imagine if you had to take an intro class for your degree but you started in the spring semester and your class isn’t available until the fall semester.
Or they may have started in Fall but tested out of the intro semester. Lots of intro courses have many sections in the Fall but one or two in the Spring, with the followup course reversed. It works better that way.
Now later on they’ll find that the last course they need to graduate is only offered every two years and was offered just last semester, but such is life.
With no disrespect meant to the late Miss Fisher, the best part of Rogue One was the Vader hallway scene. (And the decades-late plothole-filling about the exhaust port.) But it is objectively the best recent Star Wars movie, so good job, rando.
absolutely nothing against the movies the students called out specifically, but kind of baffled only a couple of them are picking anything older than like 15 years. just expected like one “Wizard of Oz” or “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” sort of shout out. Alien RULES tho so whoever said that is now my favorite character.
It’s not so weird. They are all young and no one seems to be a history of Movies major. It’s also normal (even if very, very sad) that no one seems to consider movies made outside America.
(Which I thinkjust barely scrapes a pass on the Bedchel test on a technicality, since Miss Piggy’s conversation with Eileen (Joan Rivers) moves beyond being about Kermit. I’d be happier about claiming a pass if the same could be said about her conversations with only-other-major-female-character Jenny, but there you go.)
So, I guess Billie was just slightly late to class, rather than completely dropping it and never showing up again. She was briefly stopped by Dorothy earlier, so are we gonna add “ruining other people’s entire academic careers” to the ever-growing list of Dorothy’s bizarrely far reaching sins?
On a more serious note, if the topic of favorite movies is on the table, I gotta throw Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within out there.
Sure, we can add it, but it pales besides first toying, off and on again, with Walky’s emotions and then setting him up in a relationship that can’t possibly end badly for anyone.
maybe she found it tedious/hard to drop a class in college versus changing your schedule in elementary school (then again considering most ppl pay i suppose hopefully they’d make it faster if it’s like “i’m cancelling the check for X class” or so)
i don’t think she’ll get involved more than necessary from what she told dorothy but maybe she’ll get becky to ease up on joyce. or accidentally tell her she might be autistic
Was this meant for someone else? I was being hyperbolic about Dorothy, not making an actual judgement. Sorry, I thought the whole “ruining” part would have conveyed that better.
Suddenly realizing just how behind I am on movies because I have literally only seen one of those (Alien). Slightly ashamed I haven’t even seen Rogue One yet, just super behind on the new SW movies despite being a massive SW fan.
Anyway, my fave movie is The Lion King and I’m trying to think but I don’t think it passes the Bechdel test? Nala’s question to her mom about going to the waterhole is about going somewhere with a boy, and Sarafina and Sarabi’s subsequent brief exchange is about both Nala and Simba.
Lion King 2, however, does barely pass! Vitani and Nala have a brief threatening exchange about Kiara (“where’s your pretty daughter Nala?”) but it is kind of disappointing that the TLK film in which the main character is female still barely passes.
The Lion Guard (the shockingly good but short lived show) does much much better. More examples than I can list/recall.
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 12h
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
confirming that the reason there's been no Galaxy Version female characters in Blokees until now is that they felt they needed to make Round Lady Thighs For Ladies
It's #webcomicday? We have a special day???
Well, my name is Pat McHoarney and I draw 69 Mouse-Ear Blvd, a multigenerational story about women who all have sexy legs and probably other features. There was a grandmother, but she wasn't hot and so she died off-panel.
Elizabeth Holmes is in prison for defrauding investors through her blood-testing company, Theranos. Her partner, Billy Evans, is now trying to raise money for a company that describes itself as “the future of diagnostics.” nyti.ms/3FbtZm9
www.ebay.com/itm/23609767...
selling my netflix war for cybertron megatron -- the walmart exclusive one that came with pinpointer and lionizer (but being sold here without pinpointer and lionizer)
Gran... IS ALIVE?
okay, juliette still has brown hair, so this is probably definitely a flashback
i'm just surprised that the comic has remembered her, at all
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 12h
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 10d
The New York Times @nytimes.com ⋅ 5d
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 2d
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Comic Book Time means everyone already knows about the Bechdel test now, even the 18yos, so Leslie needs some new schtick
When she brings it up, someone can say “We know already! What is this, [the year original comic was published]?”
it was 2011 btw https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/04-the-bechdel-test/thehangover/
Better 2011 than the 22BC I threw out at someone the other day.
Art shock.
I just followed that link, and skimmed through the comments.
Oh, how I miss those naive, innocent days, when gender politics was all, “[Movie] is sexist,” not, “Which f*****g bathroom are people using?”
I’m pretty sure that was a thing people were angry about in 2011 too. It was just less mainstream
I sure some were, but back then we were focused on marriage rights.
People can be focused on more than one issue at a time (and also be angrily prejudiced about more than one thing at a time). Kind of a weird perspective to say people were too busy thinking about gay marriage to be prejudiced against trans people.
And yet true. People were obviously still prejudiced against trans people – probably more so on a broad level, but they were also just less aware of them.
We lacked the organized campaigns demonizing them for political advantage. That was still focused on gay marriage. When that finally happened and seemed to have broad support, the same people looked around for another target in the culture wars and found trans people.
Because of comic book time, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” came out since Leslie assigned them to rewatch a favorite movie, “last week”.
Theatrical release AND to video/BluRay.
Will Willis have to have media vanish from old backgrounds made in 2011 because the format is obsoleted, like a reverse Back to the Future?
DVD and Blu-Ray cases are roughly the same shape, and DoA isn’t old enough for the characters to have started with VHS collections, so it should be fine.
Of course these days they’re more likely to not have any physical media at all, because the powers that be would prefer if we subscribe to everything for a “low” monthly fee (or ten) for the rest of our lives…
For the vast majority of movies/shows, I vastly prefer the subscription model or even the old video rental model.
There are only a handful of movies I’d want to watch often enough for buying to make more sense.
Willis giveth: There already was a DofA years ago about some “returning your stuff” drama and a video disc set, but the response was “I don’t care, it’s on Netflix anyway”. Maybe Amber and Ethan?
I’m waiting for one of the audiophiles, maybe in the music dept, to go old school.
Not to vinyl, but Edison Amberol wax cylinders.
Lots of people saw it more than once in theater. That counts as rewatching.
I mean, even without Comic Book Time, the original Bechdel Test comic came out in 1985. Is it really that much more well known now than a decade ago?
It’s much more prevalent, and more things are being made with it in mind now
Tbf I still have no idea what it is lol
It’s where you rate a movie based on how many steps there are between you and Fred Bechdel.
Leslie explains it here.
Sorry, messed up the link somehow. Here:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/04-the-bechdel-test/indicator/
Leslie is a pretty good teacher but she never mentioned Fred Bechdel (formerly Frédéric Bechdel) at all.
did they have pre-assigned seats ? I forgot
No? I don’t think. But after a couple of days (often just one), people usually ‘settle in’ to a spot and tend not to change their seat for a given class.
Unless there’s strong reason to, like sitting next to your ex.
And why was she sitting there in the first place. They haven’t been on good terms since the semester started.
most shouldn’t but it’d be a habit for ppl to sit in the same place. though it’d draw more attention to them if jennifer moved further away assuming there was no other free seats
And from a Doylist perspective, it’s funnier if their seats are next to each other so they can share panels.
Of course, Billie/Jennifer being the last into the room, she got the seat that was left. It’s no one else’s fault they picked the same seat they had last time.
Although, I could see Carla choosing between two seats, and deliberately picking the one that would FORCE those two to sit together. I hvae no evidence that she did this, however.
Short circuit 1 is wau better
Counterpoint: 2 has Bonnie Tyler. 1 has El DeBarge.
The winner is clear.
Huh, I actually like all of those movies. Some good taste in that class.
Wow, I thought I was the only person who ever saw Birds of Prey.
You aren’t alone.
Saw and liked. In large part because of Black Canary.
The Whitest Movie Ever, La La Land!
Short Circuit 2 is Carla, right?
Right. I don’t think we know whose any of the other choices are, at least not for sure, but that one’s well-established. Presumably none of the others listed here are Becky’s, since she isn’t tagged, and we already know Jennifer’s is Attack of the Clones entirely because it has “54 seconds featuring Kit Fisto.” (I’m also assuming none of the ones listed are Ruth’s, entirely because she and Jennifer both seem to be avoiding making any kind of noise here.)
It’s Willis, answering the question from beyond the fourth wall.
I’d hope so, because that film has not aged well.
Like, I get that we need to consider films in the context of their era, to avoid demonizing a film based on modern sensibilities and concepts…
…but on the other, no, fuck a film that puts a white guy in brownface and gives him a cartoonish Indian accent. I think we knew that shit was wrong in the late 80’s!
Okay, here’s my Embarassing Confession for the day.
I was 12 when Short Circuit 2 came out. I had seen the original on TV, but beyond that I had literally no idea who Fisher Stevens was. (I still don’t, really. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen him in anything else.)
I spent literally years thinking how cool it was that a subcontinent actor was the main non-robot character.
I’ve read that before — apparently it was a common reaction.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is one of those movies that everyone keeps telling me is really really good and that I should see but I just can’t bring myself to get around to.
If/when you do eventually see it, go in as blind as possible. It’s a unique one.
Oh hey, I can mark that response of my “I haven’t gotten around to it” bingo card! All I need is “trust me, it gets good after…” and I win a copy of Elden Ring! (Not a free one; I’d still have to buy it, but I’ve looking for a reason to play it.)
*Off my, *I’ve been
I am sloppy today.
If/when you do, enjoy! And don’t worry about spoilers or other such nonsense, it’s just as fun whether or not you know what’s coming.
Just like everything else.
I’ve always found “Everything ends. Entropy always wins in the end” to be a huge spoiler.
If entropy always wins, how come Final Fantasy 14 didn’t shut down instead of releasing Patch 6.1? Checkmate, Meteion.
I’ll commit heresy here and say that while it is a good movie, it didn’t work well for me because it was stuck in an uncanny valley of plausibility. It had too much weird and silly stuff apparently for the sake of being weird and silly, but also a lot of semi-sorta-hard alternate timeline stuff, and they didn’t mix well IMO.
I liked Rogue One too.
I liked Rogue One three.
Red Five checking in.
Man. Disney just can’t stay away from milking the Star Wars cow, can it. Already up to thirteen movies, on a spin-off?
I really only care about getting more animated and clone centric content. Bad batch season 2 let’s goooo
I like Rogue One, but it’s a real mess of a film. The characters are great, and the third act is legitimately one of the best third acts in all of Star Wars, right up there with A New Hope even.
But the message and themes are just muddled as hell. Its just a real struggle to work through for the first two thirds of the film, because it feels like the movie has no idea what its really wanting to be about until then, and its just bouncing around between ideas.
It’s extremely Tony Gilroy. Andor has been underlining his fascination with the ways power can be expressed within political machinery; re-watching Rogue One just recently, I couldn’t shake the thought that I was watching Bourne action over the top of power structures that would be right at home in Michael Clayton.
Funny to me the characters are the weakest part. Their motivation switches seemed nonsensical, one guy just decide to die for no reason… It reminded me of Prometheus in that way.
Add to that a few other reasons why the movie wasn’t enjoyable (action scenes in the first half, missed opportunity with the Vader scene, the dad joke…) and I really couldn’t get into it. At the time of release it was my second least favourite SW movie after Episode II.
I have to admit that there are great stuff in the third act though but not enough for me. I was quite baffled by the popularity of this movie but eh, people like what they like.
Hey, she’s the teacher. She can be as arbitrary (or not) as she so chooses.
I’ve only seen Rogue One and Captain Marvel, out of all of those. That probably has deep moral implications.
I’ve seen Rogue One and Hidden Figures, though Everything Everywhere All At Once is high up on my to-watch list. I didn’t get around to it while it was in theaters because I was in my final semester of college and shit was hectic.
Damn, that means you just graduated yeah? That’s awesome! Congratulations!
I’ve only seen Rogue One and Alien.
I doubt any of the characters we know are likely to have even seen my favorite movie, though: The Taking of Deborah Logan.
Ooh, good creepy pick with The Taking of Deborah Logan!
I’ve seen those two movies, and Alien. I wasn’t aware that watching some sci-fi and superhero movies had any moral implications.
Neither was I, until I made the grievous mistake if saying I hadn’t watched some of them in front of the wrong people. Apparently people get really intense about their favorite fiction.
I haven’t seen any of them. Am very glad my friends have finally got used to the amount of films I just don’t watch
Got to see a free showing of bird of prey because they sponsored a roller derby bout for my league. It was a lot of fun.
I’ve seen those two and, as noted about, Short Circuit 2. I don’t know why I’ve never got round to BoP, and the rest hold between little and zero interest. (The more people tell me how much I have to see All Kinds of Everything, the less appealing they make it sound.)
Great, now I have no idea who won the breakup!
We did. We won the breakup. It was us
The breakup were the friends we made along the way!
I expect a re-match. (Double entendre? You decide.)
Asher and Jason.
Hmm. Well, Jennifer appears to have cut her hair to almost-but-not-quite match Ruth’s, judging by panel 3, so I’m going for Ruth because Jennifer ends up looking like she’s trying too hard and making it very clear she’s not influenced by Ruth at all.
(This comment is intentional nonsense.)
I didn’t care for Birds of Prey actually. I feel like Cassandra Cain was totally misrepresented!
Is she the one who can’t talk good because her brain is full of kill, or the one who was Robin for a few minutes? I’d look it up but wikis have a tendency to beat around the bush on these things.
Yeah, she had murder instead of language skills. It’s like the kids who were raised on Barney instead of Sesame Street.
She was Batgirl for a time, not Robin. Unless I missed a Robin, there’s like 20 of those now.
Stephanie Brown’s the Batgirl who was briefly a Robin.
There have been too many Robin’s. We need a reboot.
What?
The Robins were the one thing they DIDN’T reboot, which will always be the most depressing part to me. (I mean, they also left the Green Lanterns and stuff because Geoff Johns, but the Robins made the least sense by far. At least the Lantern stuff was just generally minimizing the reboot.)
The first. Brain isn’t even full of kill, brain is full of martial arts training but learning body language also meant she got a dose of hyperempathy so she REAAAALLY does not want to kill after her evil assassin dad made her do it once. This is also why she’s one of the staunchest believers in and inheritors to The Bat As Symbol.
I get that there are a lot of really iffy tropes in play in that and how it interacts with her race specifically, which is why I don’t begrudge reboots keeping her language disability as dyslexia if anything and canon downplaying the speech aspects of it (her ongoing had someone retool her brain so she could learn speech relatively early in the run as well,) but man does it sting extra to have a Cass without ANY Cass traits at all in a film titled “Birds of Prey”, you know, the team FOUNDED by another disabled Batgirl who was nowhere in sight there. Just makes Oracle’s absence all the harsher.
On the other hand, being totally misrepresented by writers who don’t get the character is actually PERFECT representation for her when you think about it.
Cassandra Cain is in the movie. It’s just the socially awkward adorable girl martial arts master trained from birth is named Helena for some reason.
I liked a lot of stuff about Birds of Prey and didn’t like other stuff. As a whole I enjoyed it but yeah it played a little too fast and loose with some characters. Honestly Shocked that I liked Harley in it, though. I feel like she’s a hard character to get right.
That first sentence describes how I feel about it. On the whole, it was fantastic, and that’s good enough for me.
It was really a Harley Quinn movie. I feel like they just took a bunch of female characters and just threw them in there without really researching them to be supporting cast for Harley.
Yeah, like the worst thing about the movie is how many characters they shoehorned in. It’s not a birds of prey movie, it’s a Harley movie and it worked best when it was being a Harley movie.
I really enjoyed the film, but yeah, that character has nothing to do with the comic version of Cassandra Cain. It wouldn’t shock me if she was named something entirely different at one point, and the name got shoehorned in there because she’s a major character and they wanted some sort of Bat-family-adjacent character in there beyond Harley. And Huntress. And Montoya.
Wait, apparently we’re not talking about the film with David Janssen as a trucker hauling secret cargo, being pursued by sinister helicopters.
Wait, are we not talking about the 2002 series starring Ashley Scott as Huntress? With Harley Quinn and vague Joker references as the main villain? Well, color me confused.
sigh Research, then post! There is a movie by that name with David Janssen and a helicopter, but it isn’t the story I was thinking of. Sorry.
I just realized Carla is 100% the one who said Short Circuit 2
Oh, indisputably.
I think its irresponsible for Leslie to let those two sit together.
“Those two”? Do you mean Carla and Johnny Five?
Who else would they mean?
She is tagged, yeah.
I’m the person who shouted “Alien“
Hol’up
Bridesmaids?
“Who said Rogue One?” I’ll take Jennifer for 500, Bob.
Is that the one mostly hidden underneath the word balloon that says “Short Circuit 2”?
And my response would have been “The Princess Bride”.
As to why: True love, long pursued but never forgotten. Good guys, bad guys, sword-fights, eminently quotable dialogue – and, of course, the hokeyness of the ROUS. What’s *NOT* to like?
Of course, the first Patlabor movie.
I was going to save this topic for a different tirade further down the line bit this actually feels like a good time
It’s astonishing how far story telling and fiction has come. Back in the day people could look at fiction and fandom as nothing more as escapism and for a lot people it still is that. But with a little nuance a number of fictional properties can also be a gateway into talking bigger meaningful conversations.
For example how people see animated stories as nothing more than a child’s medium for entertainment but there are a number of animated stories that do a better job at addressing more mature themes. Like the classic movie “The Iron Giant” and how it depicted war related issues like “The red scare” and the dangers technological advancements being focused only for war instead of something better. Best explained example here: https://www.tiktok.com/@_leeputman/video/7129587025996516614?_r=1&u_code=dc14fa7d746m38&preview_pb=0&language=en&_d=dj724mk30d2k3g&share_item_id=7129587025996516614&source=h5_m×tamp=1666239471&user_id=6816594540365366277&sec_user_id=MS4wLjABAAAAZEKfdYBu8j1g8MzN6jS30CpUVZ6iGSyhykpKloRAOFaIYYxQ5tPf8kO-ss9JzLVc&utm_source=copy&utm_campaign=client_share&utm_medium=android&share_iid=7154713779292604203&share_link_id=eb7a1de1-5f69-4a81-a1c5-4d70f485651a&share_app_id=1233&ugbiz_name=Main&ug_btm=b8727
Or as another example there’s also writers who go as far as to world build and creat an entirely different world separate from real life but would then make that world mirror real life forms of government and use their world as opinion pieces on how they would go about addressing issues in certain political structures, like in this video comparing the story telling of Rick Riordan and J.K Rolling: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRH9F3fv/
Or my personal opinion on how Jedi council in the Star Wars prequel had strayed far from being in anyway a Virtuous group and contributed to making Anikan Skywalker into Darth Vader more than Palpatine did. Like he should be an example on why child soldiers and military indoctrination is a bad idea. How do you take a kid teach him to suppress his emotions, expect him to fight and kill in war for years be surprised he turns into killing machine.
Yeah. Remember when novels were exclusively “for women” because they were frivolous pursuits for unserious people?
Fiction has been a “gateway” since the Epic of Gilgamesh, friend. That’s what parables are.
Honestly, it’s not so much how far fiction and storytelling have come – humans have always used stories to send messages and any narrative more involved than Spot the Dog is going to say a little about our biases as an author and the society we come from. (If only in who we’re choosing to depict and how. I mean, note that Spot’s a dog and not a hawk or something, because we didn’t domesticate hawks, we domesticated dogs.) It’s more about critical analysis of fiction and the rise of “pop culture” as a thing and analyzing THAT, I’d guess more.
I mean, hell, I’ve seen a blog that reviewed every movie that was on Mystery Science Theater 3000 up through Season Eleven and a bunch of movies that were terrible enough to have been on it, and one of the blogger’s central things was to analyze what kind of themes they could get out of these awful movies. (Ranging from “absolutely the intent, there is no question” like Rocket Attack U.S.A. or I Accuse My Parents to “absolutely NOT the intent but goddamn if this doesn’t work even when it’s not 2 AM and severely caffeinated” in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die as a piece about feminism and objectification, or the family dynamics of Manos The Hands of Fate.) You can get meaning out of ANYTHING if you try hard enough, and you’d be surprised how much holds up – not always because it was the writer’s intention, but it’s not hard to see how 50s B-movies about alien invaders secretly infiltrating society might be reflecting attitudes about the Red Scare, for example.
Everything sends a message. Fiction’s evolved over time, but in plenty of different ways and it’s not just a linear “simpler stories -> deeper ones”, even in terms of popular fiction. Remember, Shakespeare was writing at least as much to everyday working class people of London as he was to occasionally flatter the monarch in charge about how their dynasty is TOTALLY the one that had the proper right to the throne in that dispute. Macbeth and Henry V still have plenty of dick jokes. It’s the passage of time that makes popular culture “classics”.
Or like how “Taming of the Shrew” is a twisted power fantasy about how one dude is mentally and emotionally breaking a girl down till she agree’s to be his subservient wife?
Yeah I can see the point of how some works of fiction aren’t getting more profound with their stories and critical analysis and debate is just getting more refined, maybe because it’s not so hard to ask around about opinions about specific things with the internet theses days. Not to mention there are plenty of works of fiction that seem to drive conversation the more time goes by, I’ve seen so many analysis over movie like Fight Club I could right my own essay about I think about the movie and the various different opinions.
For what it’s worth, I’ve only ever seen directors have the Shrew say her domesticated lines sarcastically, or with a twinkle of self-aware humor in her eye, or while taking actions that clarify that, no, she is being funny, or tricking them, or anything except actually being tragically tamed.
Not sure if that’s how Shakespeare intended it or anything, but he’s a pretty funny guy, and it’s possible to fix that more obvious on-paper ending with a strong choice or two.
It’s a subject of longstanding debate and director/critical interpretation as to just how seriously Shakespeare was intending that one to be taken, yeah. And unlike some (*cough Merchant of Venice cough*) it lends itself to reinterpretation like that well enough that it can be performed with at least minimal baggage. But also, yeah, cultural biases. That plot was perfectly acceptable. Shakespeare’s not the only one who wrote off that template at the time and some of them definitely DID mean it in all seriousness. These days most performances do a lot of tweaking in the portrayal and stage directions while keeping the script unchanged, because you can do a lot of that in theater.
Yeah I think also it’s hard for us (unless any of us here are cultural historians, I’m definitely not) to fully appreciate the subtle messages in fiction from earlier times because we don’t have the lived cultural context.
For example, I just read the other night that Beauty and the Beast was written in the context of a culture where arranged marriages were commonplace and women’s rights in France/Europe were not what they are today. That adds a whole extra layer of super relevant cultural context that totally changes how it would be interpreted by audiences of that time period vs. now.
I notice this phenomenon a lot as a parent, when my kid is watching stuff from my youth, and I’m realizing how much cultural context assists a person in interpreting subtler messages of a lot of fiction. So I don’t necessarily think modern media has become more complex, it’s just a lot of that complexity is lost for newer audiences as the context in which it is viewed changes.
And also yeah I think critical analysis is more common and accessible now thanks to the internet. For example: Disney theory YouTube. Which I am convinced spawned as a result of parents watching the same movies 746363658592 times with their kids (since kids like to watch their faves over and over). Parents also possibly spend more time watching stuff with their kids now vs. just letting them watch independently.
But anyway, I have noticed after watching something over and over, you start over-analyzing it just to stave off the boredom of repetition. Like I have ranted to my husband about massive complicated theories about government corruption in Adventure Bay in *paw patrol* of all things just because I got stuck watching it way too often when my kid was obsessed. You come up with wacky interpretations to entertain yourself. And then, thanks to the internet, those parents can now share all that stuff with the world.
I get that Leslie’s a long time Starwars fangirl but if you’re choosing Rogue one, with a MILD amount of Leia at BEST over Alien, with OODLES of Ripley I’m gonna have to call this a bad system.
Seconded.
Rogue One to me was just that one Star Wars movie that made me fall in love with a random one off star wars character only for her to die at the end…and then didn’t give me time to process it because it had that one Vader Scene at the end right aftet
By the way this whole list fails the yoto scale of approval cuz not a single one of these films is animated.
They didn’t mention even Ghibli or Disney movie which is like the lowest hanging fruit of animation. Kids these days are gosh dang punks!
No one said Spiderverse? Throw the whole class away
Yeah like what is this the Oscar’s?
Preach. All this and no Mononoke?
I wonder what Leslie thinks about horror movies. I kinda judge people by how they judge horror.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb it does not pass the Bechdel test but I think it’s a good gender studies movie as it illustrates how toxic masculinity will destroy us all. Also the lack of women in the film except for one who is clearly sexualized it kind reinforces the point that toxic masculinity will kill us all and how men only view women as sex objects and theor only contribution in a post nuclear society is to be attractive and bear children and are treated as trophys. Also how male sexual inadequacy leads to amergedon.
I show my international conflict class this movie every semester it’s scary how close it was to reality (not that a rouge general who felt sexually inadequecy but the truth that individual generals were given command over nuclear weapons) which lstrates the doctrine of MAD isn’t always assured hence traditional deterence theory may not always work and that there is a chance for accidents.
I don’t know you well enough to know if you understand the point of the Bechdel Test, but since there’s always someone who doesn’t, I’m going to use this as an opportunity to say the thing:
The Bechdel Test does not exist to be passed. The point of the Bechdel Test is that it’s an extremely low bar that most movies nevertheless fail to pass. Using it to analyze a single movie is always incorrect, because the entire point Bechdel was making was how many movies failed to pass it. The point is to make you think, “Hold on. Are there really so few?” and to consider how we might change that, not to judge existing movies for failing it.
I know what the Bechdel test is qnd yes many movies fail to pass it. Given the comic that coined the test the last movie the characters saw that passed the test was Aliens an action movie, which is supposed to a macho masculine type of movie. Hence why the joke lands so well.
I Also if I just said Dr.Strangelove was a good movie for gender studies class to analyze. I posted that it doesn’t pass the Bechdel test in case someone said it doesn’t pass the Bechdel test or asked if it passed the Bechdel test beacuse previously in the comic Leslie use this lesson to talk about the test.
I kind of prefer the Mako Mori test.
When I was a kiddo, “Gorillas in the Mist” was my favorite movie.
Now I have many favorites. I love “Totoro”. “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” is also AMAZING, even though it prioritizes men’s stories.
Even though it is DEEPLY problematic, “Neon Genesis Evangelion” will always be very special to me. …I miss going down to the corner video library and taking home a rented movie.
That’s a sharp analysis. Thank you for sharing it.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is the correct film, and shame on Leslie for ignoring it in order to fawn over a deep-fake cameo that makes a good portion of the audience cringe in the uncanny valley.
Shaaaaaame.
Also, Ke Huy Quan is adorable and amazing and I want to punch Hollywood for hurting him so badly!
Nobody said “Return of the Jedi” so obviously she had to start with Rogue One.
But EEAAOO is pretty darn good.
I had to google this and it looks quite good.
While I love EEAOO to bits (and I’d consider it a serious contender for best movie of the past decade), I want to shout out Hidden Figures as an underrated gem in that list. Excellent movie and more people should watch it.
Rogue One is so bad. Alien was called out, it’s a movie with strong women doing important things. Everything, Everywhere All At Once is probably the best movie called out, but Alien is comparably good and nostalgic.
Alien was also the movie in the original Bechdel Test comic, so it’s a callback to that.
Two strips in one. I like the quiet, tense one on the left where Ruth and Jennifer do or don’t interact. The one on the right shows us that the class goes on without being hijacked by drama (yet), and Leslie is leading it comfortably.
Doesn’t need to be arbritary if you’re objectively right.
I kinda hate being asked what my favorite movie (or book, genre of music, or whatever else) is. I like a lot of stuff, and I find it hard to narrow them down to a single favorite movie or whatever. I’m not sure if that’s an autistic thing or just a weird me thing.
I often have this problem too, and if I say “X” and later recall that “Y” was even better I feel guilty for lying to people. They won’t care, nor will they call me on it when I list a different favorite at a later time.
More recently I am trying to relax and just say the first good candidate that pops into my head, and not worry about precise rankings.
(Howl’s Moving Castle)
Calcifer for best supporting cast.
i dont’ think i watched enough movies to really prefer any, i only just finished a few ‘classics’ some years ago and some were nice and others didn’t age well, but i can see something ‘relatable’ being used as a metaphor/sample to study/analyze and implement into a lesson.
Tho be interesting if leslie can use it as an excuse for a ‘tax writeoff’/doing some ‘research’ every few years of the current movies or so to stay relevant
You are not alone in this. I like things, and I dislike other things, but I tend not to have favorites. If asked to name one, I find it is hard work.
I usually ask about genre or period. I can’t answer “M” to everything!
Then again, it does go in a lot of genres
I struggle with this as well. How can you have one favorite?
Yeah I can pick 1 fave movie (though I have many overall top movies) just because one was literally responsible for a large portion of my professional and personal identity (the lion king made me want to become an artist) but I can never settle on a fave tv show (maaaaybe top 2 or 3) or band or song. Even book is hard (tho if I had to pick 1, it would be Jurassic Park).
[clueless_old_guy]
What is the “***** Maids” movie hidden behind the other bubbles?
I’ve seen five of the eight, and recognize the other two.
[/clueless_old_guy]
My guess is probably Bridesmaids
Yep, I had to think about it for a bit, but yeah, I believe it’s likely to be Bridesmaids.
That’s very disappointing. I was hoping for Ride of the Motermaids: Chicks and Machines.
I’d go for Mermaids, the 1990 movie with Cher and Winona Ryder, but there were too many letters.
Clearly a reference to the 1960s movie, “The Maids.”
Does Rouge One pass bechdel test? if I remember correctly the only dialogue between the two women in this movie was about killing a man who is a bad daddy
I hate to snark about someone else’s spelling errors, so don’t take this as criticism, but I have to say that the “Rouge One” spelling always makes me think of the elaborate nicknames given to the eponymous ship in Red Dwarf.
Which definitely doesn’t pass the Bedchel test, since I’m pretty sure the only time it even has more than one named women in the same episode is the one where the gag is Rimmer has a sexual magnetism virus.
Well, no, there’s the episode where they meet their female counterparts in the alternate universe and are grossed out by their own behavior. Where Lister gets pregnant.
That’s such a classic thing to ask people a question and tell them to justify it and they don’t, just giving their opinion. Or you ask a question and people give the opposite answer. (Like, “What are some positive things about X?” and then everyone only says negative things.) Teaching can be frustrating.
This’ll be a nice time capsule in DoA.
I appreciate all opinions as valid, but whoever said Birds of Prey is objectively wrong.
Oh nice, I love Rogue One.
Dracula: Dead and Loving It… that or Spaceballs
Ugh, I don’t think I can pick a SINGLE favourite movie.
Can I pick 1 per genre?
See this is what I think should be the standard. My current metric for favorite movie is any movie I could picture myself watching if I was stranded on a desert island and only had one form of entertainment for the rest of my life. Hence, my primary pick being Aladdin.
Guy with a username referencing Rogue Squadron has Rogue One as one of his favorite Star Wars movies. In other news, water is wet.
I think Rogue One passes, if I recall Jyn and Mon Mothma discussing the rebellion correctly.
Love Everything Everywhere All At Once. I often struggle with watching movies, especially ones that aren’t part of a franchise I know, but I went to see that one twice.
My dad, on the other hand, thought it was way too weird and fell asleep during part of it. Ah well, can’t please everyone.
Speed Racer is the perfect movie.
And once again, I feel like I’ve missed something that everyone else automatically knows about. Where’s all the Bechdel discussion coming from? Leslie didn’t bring it up, it’s not in the alt text, and even looking through her recent tagged appearances, I can’t find a single in-comic mention of it since she first brought it up way back when.
It’s the same lesson she used last semester, so the assumption is that it’s going to go the same way.
I’m honestly more confused that a(n apparently) semestral class has the same course in both semesters of a year. Is this a thing that commonly happens in America, or is it just an artifact of narrative convenience?
Some classes – especially first-year ones that fulfill degree obligations – will often be able to be taken in both semesters. Gives more people the opportunity to get into it.
Yes, if they expect everyone to take it, they need enough sections that everyone can get in. IU Bloomington has around 35,000 undergraduate students, so, maybe 9,000 freshmen. I don’t think anybody ever built a lecture hall that big.
It’s very inefficient to make important classes only available in spring OR fall. Imagine if you had to take an intro class for your degree but you started in the spring semester and your class isn’t available until the fall semester.
Or they may have started in Fall but tested out of the intro semester. Lots of intro courses have many sections in the Fall but one or two in the Spring, with the followup course reversed. It works better that way.
Now later on they’ll find that the last course they need to graduate is only offered every two years and was offered just last semester, but such is life.
Or it’s just a class that’s popular enough to offer twice a year.
Yep, make sure you add movies that just came out. It might not even go out of date by the time the comic is finished in 15 years.
heh, I love seeing Short Circuit 2 on that list, since it is my choice
Teenagers in 20XX love short circuit 2
That’s got to be Carla’s answer.
Is that really Jennifer or is Billie? I’m afraid this class could end very bad. Or just be very, extremely awkward for her and Becky.
They’re the same person.
That’s what they want you to believe!!!
Jennifer is Mike.
“Imma head out.”
– The strings that used to be on Ruth’s shirt
Good catch, though they were already gone in yesterday’s strip.
In panel 2, but not panel 5.
With no disrespect meant to the late Miss Fisher, the best part of Rogue One was the Vader hallway scene. (And the decades-late plothole-filling about the exhaust port.) But it is objectively the best recent Star Wars movie, so good job, rando.
Also my favorite movie is Aladdin (the original animated one). Do with that what you will.
That’s a good movie. Too bad the sequels sucked so hard.
There’s always “If…” and “Fantastic Planet,” oooh,… and “Wizards,” “Harold and Maude,” “Close Encounters,”…
*stares at box labeled “complicated feelings on Leia in the last Jedi””*
Hmmmmm
*shakes head and chuckles*
No, not today
absolutely nothing against the movies the students called out specifically, but kind of baffled only a couple of them are picking anything older than like 15 years. just expected like one “Wizard of Oz” or “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” sort of shout out. Alien RULES tho so whoever said that is now my favorite character.
It’s not so weird. They are all young and no one seems to be a history of Movies major. It’s also normal (even if very, very sad) that no one seems to consider movies made outside America.
they’re probably all in film/theatre class (if this uni has one)
Breakfast at tiffany’s? I haven’t heard of it. (I’m older than Carla and younger than leslie)
I would have been the person answering Alien. Or maybe The Lion King. Or maybe…
Shoot, don’t make me pick just one!
These are the times I wish Leslie was a real person. I think she and I would be good friends and colleagues.
The Muppets Take Manhattan.
(Which I thinkjust barely scrapes a pass on the Bedchel test on a technicality, since Miss Piggy’s conversation with Eileen (Joan Rivers) moves beyond being about Kermit. I’d be happier about claiming a pass if the same could be said about her conversations with only-other-major-female-character Jenny, but there you go.)
So, I guess Billie was just slightly late to class, rather than completely dropping it and never showing up again. She was briefly stopped by Dorothy earlier, so are we gonna add “ruining other people’s entire academic careers” to the ever-growing list of Dorothy’s bizarrely far reaching sins?
On a more serious note, if the topic of favorite movies is on the table, I gotta throw Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within out there.
Sure, we can add it, but it pales besides first toying, off and on again, with Walky’s emotions and then setting him up in a relationship that can’t possibly end badly for anyone.
As long as we’re only adding things that didn’t happen, yeah. Y’know, for the bit.
maybe she found it tedious/hard to drop a class in college versus changing your schedule in elementary school (then again considering most ppl pay i suppose hopefully they’d make it faster if it’s like “i’m cancelling the check for X class” or so)
i don’t think she’ll get involved more than necessary from what she told dorothy but maybe she’ll get becky to ease up on joyce. or accidentally tell her she might be autistic
Was this meant for someone else? I was being hyperbolic about Dorothy, not making an actual judgement. Sorry, I thought the whole “ruining” part would have conveyed that better.
The Great Race! Which does pass Bechdel pretty early on though it really feels like it shouldn’t.
Suddenly realizing just how behind I am on movies because I have literally only seen one of those (Alien). Slightly ashamed I haven’t even seen Rogue One yet, just super behind on the new SW movies despite being a massive SW fan.
Anyway, my fave movie is The Lion King and I’m trying to think but I don’t think it passes the Bechdel test? Nala’s question to her mom about going to the waterhole is about going somewhere with a boy, and Sarafina and Sarabi’s subsequent brief exchange is about both Nala and Simba.
Lion King 2, however, does barely pass! Vitani and Nala have a brief threatening exchange about Kiara (“where’s your pretty daughter Nala?”) but it is kind of disappointing that the TLK film in which the main character is female still barely passes.
The Lion Guard (the shockingly good but short lived show) does much much better. More examples than I can list/recall.