Short thoughts about some recent films.
Sep. 15th, 2012 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptSo, I saw some movies recently. And I have Thoughts on some of them. Before that, though - there's a love meme going on - here's my thread. To nominate your own or examine the index, follow this link instead.
I have seen two movies with Justin Timberlake as the lead. His acting career appears to be at least as successful as his music career. That said, the first movie (Friends With Benefits) had all the hallmarks of being a glorious subversion and/or lampshade hanging on the tropes of a romantic comedy...and then it played all the tropes entirely straight in the second half of the movie. Which lowered my opinion of it considerably.
In Time was better - it chose to give us The Prince and The Pauper instead. One thing that bothered me, though - it's too easy to transfer time between people. Living with things for as long as they have, the best they've come up with is...bodyguards? Obviously, polite society doesn't steal time, but one would think there would have been security protocols or equipment built by someone sufficiently paranoid.
I watched the Hunger Games movie. I think The Capitol would be proud of it as a production. They left out some very important things, like the significance of mockingjays, or the salute, or a lot of other things that would have made more sense with a little context. (At this point, I've only read up through the Reaping - even so, I could tell we were in for a rough ride.) And, in hunting for their preferred rating to market the movie, PG-13, the filmmakers turned a story of brutal horror and suppression and children killing each other into an Action Girl movie. While some deaths happened on-screen, none of them (that I recall) involved the spilling of blood (an arrow, an insect swarm, a broken neck). The ones performed with blades and things likely to bleed happened off-screen - even one where there was a splashing of blood on the area, but again, the death part was mostly sanitized, with the gory bits happening conveniently out of frame. I would assume that the watchers in the various districts are not spared things like that. But we are, because our movie media industry doesn't want us to think too hard about the idea of children killing children for the entertainment of some. If we did that, we might start thinking about whether we really want to see that kind of thing.
Funny enough, the book trilogy made #3 on the banned/challenged list for 2011. Apparently, textual depictions of child violence, poverty, and dystopian living were sufficient for people to complain that it is unsuited to the agegroup it was published for, but visual depictions of the same? Entirely okay, and mostly sanitized, anyway.
Take a look at the banned/challenged list this year - you'll see a lot of "sexuality" and a lot of "unsuited to age group" and a little bit of "religious viewpoint". Textual depictions of these things are unacceptable for would-be censors, and illustrations of the same are definitely Not Okay... but we get farther along than many of those challenged books in the movies without getting explicit, with real people in the movies...and that's apparently okay. Consistency would be nice, sometimes...
I have seen two movies with Justin Timberlake as the lead. His acting career appears to be at least as successful as his music career. That said, the first movie (Friends With Benefits) had all the hallmarks of being a glorious subversion and/or lampshade hanging on the tropes of a romantic comedy...and then it played all the tropes entirely straight in the second half of the movie. Which lowered my opinion of it considerably.
In Time was better - it chose to give us The Prince and The Pauper instead. One thing that bothered me, though - it's too easy to transfer time between people. Living with things for as long as they have, the best they've come up with is...bodyguards? Obviously, polite society doesn't steal time, but one would think there would have been security protocols or equipment built by someone sufficiently paranoid.
I watched the Hunger Games movie. I think The Capitol would be proud of it as a production. They left out some very important things, like the significance of mockingjays, or the salute, or a lot of other things that would have made more sense with a little context. (At this point, I've only read up through the Reaping - even so, I could tell we were in for a rough ride.) And, in hunting for their preferred rating to market the movie, PG-13, the filmmakers turned a story of brutal horror and suppression and children killing each other into an Action Girl movie. While some deaths happened on-screen, none of them (that I recall) involved the spilling of blood (an arrow, an insect swarm, a broken neck). The ones performed with blades and things likely to bleed happened off-screen - even one where there was a splashing of blood on the area, but again, the death part was mostly sanitized, with the gory bits happening conveniently out of frame. I would assume that the watchers in the various districts are not spared things like that. But we are, because our movie media industry doesn't want us to think too hard about the idea of children killing children for the entertainment of some. If we did that, we might start thinking about whether we really want to see that kind of thing.
Funny enough, the book trilogy made #3 on the banned/challenged list for 2011. Apparently, textual depictions of child violence, poverty, and dystopian living were sufficient for people to complain that it is unsuited to the agegroup it was published for, but visual depictions of the same? Entirely okay, and mostly sanitized, anyway.
Take a look at the banned/challenged list this year - you'll see a lot of "sexuality" and a lot of "unsuited to age group" and a little bit of "religious viewpoint". Textual depictions of these things are unacceptable for would-be censors, and illustrations of the same are definitely Not Okay... but we get farther along than many of those challenged books in the movies without getting explicit, with real people in the movies...and that's apparently okay. Consistency would be nice, sometimes...
