#Movie Critique

[ki11tr4p]

Like c’mon what were they expecting?

[legendary-lunatic]

Okay, So I just finished binge watching all four Despicable Mes in one day, and I gotta say that I did not care for the fourth movie.

It was disappointing… which is a shame, because Maxime Le Mal is awesome.

The concept of a cockroach villain, is epic. He had a great character design, a fun personality, and he had past conflict with Gru.

The problem with the fourth movie is that it is not plot driven enough and instead keeps splicing screen time for family fluff moments and side characters like Poppy.

Poppy, as much as I thought she was a fun presence, was NOT needed in the movie, and neither was all of that Safe House Country Club shit. Why would they go out of their way to say ‘Hey Gru? Let’s stop acting like the grumpy protagonist we love and instead behave completely out of character so you can pretend you like playing tennis.’ It was unnecessary and not what we needed from a character we have grown to find charming because of the way he can be both kind and a grumpy asshole. (Like Shrek.) Shrek does not belong at a country club, and neither does Gru.

We introduce a villain school that Gru went to only to not only completely avoid talking about him or the school in that context, but bring it up again solely for an irrelevant character who overall contributes nothing the the story at hand.

All of the other films in some way had a proactivity to them that kept the main antagonist in mind, and this film does not work because they keep shoving Maxime to the side. They should have completely scrapped all the minion fantastic four hero parody crap and stayed focused on the overall narrative and developing the new central antagonist.

It would have been fantastic if we had gotten more background on the conflict between Gru and Maxime. Apparently they had a little rivalry or just generally were jerks to each other in school as we find out that not only did Gru steal his song, Maxime pantsd him in front of the school, not to mention how they interacted in the beginning of the film, so clearly there is bad blood. This is the first villain that had conflict with Gru specifically, and it would have been an excellent central plot point to focus on his early life, or a great way to develop a villain that’s built out of personal grudge rather than inherently destructive ambition like the others.

And instead that was SQUANDERED by this absolutely directionless travesty. Maxime’s girlfriend, first of all, was useless and distracting. All the little cutaway moments and side stories were unnecessary, and overall it was incredibly disappointing to have a guy that can CONTROL COCKROACHES do absolutely nothing with them. He could be strong and invulnerable, He could have been mutating more people, controlling swarms, he could have been going after Gru more intensely and talking about how they bullied each other and that could have been very interesting.

But no. This is the only film in which the main antagonist takes such a back seat that he can effectively be cut from the film and it would hardly impact a thing. Maxime had potential and stage presence, and they did nothing with it in favor of fluff.

And Listen, LISTEN, fluff isn’t bad, I love their family- but it should not comprise 98% of the film!!! It should be wedged into little moments between plot points. Even Despicable Me 3, which had a bizarre out of left field twin plot, handled their villain with more respect and managed to tie in the two narratives in a way that culminated in a final act that was satisfying to all the characters.

Brat had charisma and was a genuine threat and was present enough in the story that he was still necessary to the story overall because he and his diamond were the reason Gru lost his job and he and his brother did the heist to retrieve it. By the end of the first half of the film we knew that Brat was a washed up star that peaked in his childhood and was trapped in his nostalgia, and he had a fully fleshed out motivation and draw to him despite being rather simple that allowed us to indulge in his quirks. His pathetic nostalgic personality CARRIES that film because it’s funny and endearing and believable because we’ve all met someone like that.

But Maxime is not such a simple character by design because his motivations are relationship focused- and in this film they spend most of the time running away from Maxime, which is counter intuitive and lets us understand absolutely nothing about the guy. Because they didn’t delve deeper, Le Mal’s motivations were weak, and thus the overall STORY was weak. We don’t even know why he has such an intense hyper fixation on cockroaches that he would literally roachify himself and make that his central theme!!!

Why didn’t Lucy and the kids go to the safe house and Gru could stay to deal with his rival? It doesn’t make sense!!! And the AVL was doing nothing about the threat at all and instead was being ridiculous by giving the minions super powers? Ineptitude to the point of absurdity. What is the point of going to a safe house if they aren’t trying to resolve the issue and then Gru does it anyway?!!!!

Brain dead. Disappointing. On every level.

They didn’t even resolve the personal conflicts the girls were having, what with Margo having trouble at school and Agnes not liking telling lies! What was the point?!

The animation may have been pretty, but the plot was weak. The character motivations were weak because they didn’t expand on them. There were thousands of directions they could have gone with this film and they chose to go NOWHERE.

The best part of the film is the end, and only because we got to see Maxime be relevant for three minutes and it implies that they’ve managed to wrap up their implied but borderline nonexistent rivalry. And we got two seconds of Brat dancing way too over sensually to ‘Rule the World’ because it’s an 80s song (the power of character consistency)

I don’t like hearing ‘ItS JuSt a KiDs FiLm’- NO. Pandering to children is not an excuse for bad writing in family media, and this franchise has been out long enough that it has an audience larger than just kids. Kids media and family media deserve better and should still have good narrative standards. Do not insult our intelligence by giving us content without purpose. It costs millions of dollars and months upon years to make a film nowadays, there is no excuse for not sitting down and coming up with a decent story direction and cohesive plan. A family film can be enjoyable for little ones and still have depth to it-

Family movies have been getting insanely messy lately with their story content because they think seeing characters we like regurgitated at us with good animation is enough to keep the company afloat and appease everyone, and it’s irritating. Dig deeper, have some respect for your craft. Keep our expectations high to keep us coming back!

I love the Despicable Me world and characters, but honestly this was such a disjointed film that it was almost hard to enjoy because I just kept waiting for something, anything to happen, and was utterly let down.

Maxime Le Mal deserved better as a villain, and this film deserved better. This franchise deserved better. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

[hildegardladyofbones]

I think the reason why I almost cried over the boy and the heron's animation is because it's hand drawn in a world full of 3d animation that tries to impress you at every stage.

(Minor spoilers for the boy and the heron, no plot points tho)

Encanto's animation was impressive for the first few minutes, then it looked every other animates movie from the 2020s. The boy and the heron does a lot less than western (and 3d) animated movies for most of the movie (excluding the backgrounds because those were paintings. Like, actual paintings.) But when it needs to, it can do more than you thought possible. They clearly spent more time on making the movements human than making it colourful and flashy.

This subtlety is also extended into the character designs. In anime especially, but to some extent pixar as well, they make regular people look like humans have sexual dimorphism, but I couldn’t tell what gender Kiriko was supposed to be until she started to speak and until my suspicions were confirmed that the clothes she wore were in fact the same ones she wore in the other world. I am also a big fan of old wrinkly people so I'm glad they were once again present in a ghibli film. I think they have a knack for portraying people from different stages of life realistically. Also a big fan of how Mahito had so much personality, especially for a 12 yo protagonist of an adventure movie. Those tweens are usually given the cookie cutter hero personality, but robbed of actual humanity.

[zebracorn-chan]

If you're upset the FNaF Movie got low ratings by critics I would like to remind you what they think about "Cuties".

[virginia-the-opossum]

Im not seeing alot of posts on here about this, but i have on youtube sooo...

Doctor Skipper, Nerdstagic, Cinema Sins, Rotten tomato critics, other movie critics and youtube movie reveiwers have ruined media literacy by their need for money.

All they do is sit around and hypercritic movies that they know jack shit about while pretending they do, some of them havent even watched the movie, they just want attention and to ruin the movie for its fandom and its chance in the box office.

Doctor Skipper and Nerdstagic have both made videos shitting on the Monsterverse and American Godzilla in general because Godzilla Minus One was "better". Yeah, the movie was awesome! And it deserves all the attention and The Oscar it got. But GxK: The New Empire isnt even out yet, stop bullying it, telling people something is going to be trash before they see it, means theyre going to view it as trash through the lense of your opinion.

Godzilla Minus One and GxK: The New Empire dont compare, they are two separate genres. Godzilla is allowed to be goofy or serious. There is no right or wrong Godzilla. If you like goofy, good for you! If you like serious, good for you! People are allowed to enjoy the two genres separately or together. I love both! But critics dont look at the fact that in the og showa era made by ToHo, it was goofy as hell, he was doing dances and flying using his breath.

The directors of both movies support each other and love each other's work.

Yes, all the shitty sequel cash grabs we've been getting are awful. But Godzilla isn't that,.... yet. If we keep getting divided on these issues and only viewing them to trash and meme, that spreads negative interest, but more profits. More profits means theyre gonna do it again. Boycott movies you know you wont like, but leave other people alone about it, and especially don't make videos without researching the subject or even watching the movies. Just like some of the recent Marvel movies and shows, if we let it turn into a cash grab, our fandom will inevitably die. Like the posters and trailers for GxK- "Rise together or fall alone".

Sidenote: theres nothing funny about the Lucky Dragon Incident.

Sidenote 2: Please stop spoiling GxK

Edit Sidenote 3: stop using ai for your clickbait thumbnails for your edits of GxK trailers

[yrrtyrrtwhenihrrthrrt]

Me: God I hate romance movies. They're so boring and all the same, the characters are never likeable, and romance isn't even a compelling concept for a movie! I don't give a shit about people falling in love, show me a story about friendship, about the senseless cost of war, about the evil and the good of humanity. There are more interesting and important things in this world than romance!

Also me: *literally only writes romance*

[woodswalker96]

Don’t take the wrong way. This franchise (specifically the rebooted version) is up there with my favorite franchises.

But I have one critique that has been eating me up lately since I saw the newest one: I want the apes to be, in a way, more ape-like.

Let me explain: I simply want them to incorporate more of the species-specific behaviors we recognize in the apes to shine through in conjunction with their heightened intelligence.

For example, if modern gorillas have a social structure dominated by a dominant male (the silverback), with a harem of females and associated lesser males (known as blackbacks), then I’d like to see that translated into a higher intelligence gorilla society. Perhaps you could have them be a largely agrarian species with a focus on agriculture (since they’d still be vegetarian) and a strength based culture where a wanderer male could ritualistically challenge a silverback for the harem.

Another example could be how in some species, it’s the females who leave to find new troops, so perhaps there could be ceremonies where different ape tribes (of appropriate species) come together and exchange females.

Another thing related to this statement is that I want the main ape characters to look more ape-like. Like you can literally see it in Caesar and Noa how the creative team made them more appealing to the human audience (I get why they did this, I’m not stupid, but I just want them to appear just a little more like actual chimpanzees). Such traits I focus on are the eyes. If you look at a chimpanzee, they have instead of whites in their eyes, they have “darks”. I wish this would’ve been more incorporated into the designs. The other apes also have whites but in some species this may be present versus with chimps. And if it isn’t then it’s done less obviously than with the main ape characters.

Anyways, those are my only two real critiques, which aren’t even really critiques as in nitpicks or “this is how I would’ve done it”. I was a little sparse about the details about ape eyes and social structure but that’s because I primarily know only bare basics of those subjects and did not have time to research them properly (this was written on the fly). I may rewrite this and add more details later if this is received well.

Thank you.

[katmajik]

[...] I feel like I’m watching especially long ads for probiotic yogurts or luxury salon shampoos or hot people vacations, not immersing myself in how people fall in love and how that kind of Hollywood fairytale is, in fact, attainable in real life.

[mer-acle]

There are shows that are good, there are shows that are bad, there a shows that are so bad they're good and then there's shows I wish would get a second season for the sole reason that every single review of it is fucking hilarious bc the reviewers are so done with their lives.

[ellephantseals]

Anybody notice how nothing really happens in Disney movies anymore? I haven’t watched the second inside out yet so i’m not including that here, but for the past few years disney movies just suck. The only good ones in my opinion have been Encanto, Luca, and Turning red, something happened in those movies, there was a message in them, and even if they only took place in this one very specific spot, you really got the world.

But then every other animated movie just doesn’t have anything. Onward (2020) is i think what started this, interesting concepts, could be because chris pratt was one of the main characters, but it just didn’t feel engaging, i wasn’t engaged. They present us with an entire fantasy world and then they’re like “oh yeah look at that character! Look at that character! Look at this thing!” And then its just a regular world but every single person looks different. And by the end literally nothing happened, nothing has changed.

And then there was Raya and the last dragon (2021), who has the exact same problem except chris pratt is replaced with awkwafina, and i agree that that would have been better as a series, because they’re just throwing stuff at you going “look how cool this worldbuilding is!” And then its just that there happens to be dragons that dont influence the world whatsoever.

Then Soul (2022), i don’t remember most of this movie, but it was the “by the end nothing changed” kinda thing. It also has the same problem as princess and the frog where they have a black main character and then go “yeah but what if they werent human for like the entire movie”, it was a cute movie, but other than that i don’t have anything to say

And for a while that had a pretty good run, then strange world came out, lightyear was also there but i never watched it. Strange world (2022) had this amazing concept, and it had a meaning, multiple, but everything once again felt so empty, instead of showing you stuff they explain it to you like you’re a child that just doesn’t get it. “Oh yeah the energy berries” “oh yeah he has a crush on that guy” “oh yeah he hates his dad” “oh yeah generational truama” “okay the world is dying”. Despite being an entire massive “island”, Encanto somehow did it so much better within a small town.

And Elemental (2023), same exact problem, but add on “what if straight people couldn’t be in love 😧” and i agknowledge there was probably a racial aspect to that, but DISNEY! YOUR RACIAL ALLEGORIES ARE REALLY BAD! STOP MAKING PEOPLE OF COLOUR LITERAL DIFFERENT SPECIES TO EVERYBODY ELSE?! And then at the end nothing changed except the main character like? Got a job? And nobody agknowledges anything changed, also eyy generational truama disney’s latest favourite trope.

I can’t even talk about Wish, i think it’s been talked about enough and i haven’t even watched it, but just the way people talk about it i can tell it’s bad and soulless, and it being a disney anniversary present?!

Why are Disney movies so soulless these days?

[giveamadeuschohisownmovie]

I’ve watched the 2004 Van Helsing movie multiple times, and it’s only occurred to me now that Dracula and his wives were being really stupid in not wiping out the Valerious bloodline as soon as possible. Because at the start of the movie, it’s clear that Velkan and Anna can’t do shit without Van Helsing and Carl. Velkan got wrecked by the werewolf and there were so many moments where Anna was about to get killed by the wives. The only reason the wives stopped short of killing Anna was that Van Helsing and Carl showed up. In fact, there’s a moment in the village square fight where Anna was about to fall to her death and the only reason why she survived was that one of the wives caught her.

All of this just tells me that Dracula and his wives could’ve just invaded the village and ended the Valerious bloodline for good. In fact, the alien-bat-vampire babies could’ve wiped the village out on their own! Instead, Dracula and his wives just…let the Valerious siblings roam freely? And even when they’re actively trying to kill her, they act so stupid that Anna survives by sheer luck (which the movie does point out).

Still a fun movie, but as soon as I realized this, it changed how I saw the plot.

[calamityjimao3]

Tauriel *glares*

So I find the Tauriel's existence within the narrative of the Hobbit as problematic. As someone who just exists I have no issue with her. The Hobbit only had 2 named Mirkwood Elves which is obviously not a lot to work with so thinking up a few more is a good idea. No, I have 1 issue and it is that stupid romance with the dwarf. The Hobbit movies had a lot of high points but they also had a lot of low points. Stretching one book into three movies, using cheap CGI instead of practical effects, and shoeing in a love story were all obvious buffs to make money. Everything was shot by green screen. It lack the love of Lord of the Rings, which would be fine. if it had just been ONE MOVIE. Seriously, if you are going to give me 3 movies of your made up Orc at least put him in make up.

Sorry, distracted. Back to Tauriel. The problem with Tauriel and her dwarf romance was that it devalues the importance of the friendship Legolas and Gimli have. Yes, they bridge the racism gap and found solidarity and became best bros but they did that despite centuries of bad blood between their people. They were the first to take that step. Tauriel falling in love with a dwarf 1. sets her up as having taken that step first and in a far more dramatic way, at least in North America where romance is often valued more highly than platonic love and 2. made Legolas and Gimli both peripheral to those events. Not only did a dwarf and an elf become friends in their life time, but Legolas was there when it happened and Gimli's dad was around. I just feel it cheapens the impact of Gimli and Legolas's relationship, which is further frustrated by the fact that it was obviously done because Blockbusters Have Romance. I dunno. It just makes me mad. I think I am done my rant and gonna go sleep cause it's 1 am. Thank you for reading my TED talk

[yogerbopen]

just read some discussions on promising young woman from a reddit thread and it really showed me how dumb some people are. I genuinely do really believe that all movies are up to critique and interpretation but some of the things people were criticizing were just not true at all. I think the movie does an absolutely amazing job in all fronts, it shows a normal but traumatized woman just try and make people feel accountable for their actions, to acknowledge them at the least. Cassie isn't a superhero, or some badass girl that murders r*pists, she's a woman who "coped" by just asking people to acknowledge and reflect, even when things got morally grey. I even think that moral greyness adds to the film and the director HERSELF speaks about why it was so deliberate that Cassie wasn't a nice person. not only that, but it takes lovable, well known, actors/men and puts them in these uncomfortable but very real roles. anyways that's my rant, I loved that movie, continue on.

[fitrahgolden]

So, I really liked the Disney The Little Mermaid remake. My biggest gripe by far is that they minimized the role of the sisters, which is saying a lot because they already had next to nothing do in the original. They spent so much time and money developing gorgeous, individual character design for each of them in the new one and then you barely see them on screen enough to know what they even look like.

"Daughters of Triton" was cut (you know Simone would have nailed her vocal run, considering her opera background), and they literally don't speak (!) in the replacement scene that introduces them. The writers made progress in making them the rulers of the seven seas, but then didn't give them anything to do with that. Why not have each of them give their father a brief report of what was happening in their domains during that introduction scene? They cut Ariel's line where she acknowledges sadly that becoming human would mean she would never see her father or sisters again. And why not have one scene in which Ariel has an actual conversation with her sisters? Part of the reason for this onslaught of Disney remakes, besides the business if making money, is supposedly to add/remove things from the story to make it reflect the values of current society.

Anyway, today I found this book, based on the movie. The Little Mermaid: Guide to Merfolk. First of all, it's a really good book for merfolk world building in general, Disney or not. I definitely plan to use it for tabletop roleplaying. Additionally, they actually go into each sister's domain in detail. It's very cool.

(Please keep in mind that all of this is referring to Disney's version of the The Little Mermaid story, not the original folklore.)

[stuckasmain]

Jaws 2 really had the entire town be terrible to a man with very clear PTSD. Yes he did cause a panic (which did endanger people) but also to active downplaying and dismissal when he has a very clear reason to be like this? Didn’t listen to him the last time and four people died- decide to do it again and then get shocked at the outcome?

In the first movie they had a reason to want the beaches to stay open, it was a very shitty reason but a understandable reason. Money. It’s their biggest week of the year and it’s a tourist town, it’s understandable however “some may die but I need the cash” isn’t a good look.

In the second it’s “there’s no shark because I don’t want their to be one.” There’s absolutely no reason to be so against the fucking possibility besides stubbornness? I guess. Just—

[jomtones-bussy]

list of Incredibly white actors that SHOULD NOT play incredibly not-white steve minecraft:

jack fucking black

list of black actors eligible for this role:

FUCKIN ALL OF EM