Yeah and it's not like he filled half the episode with that rambling either.Lvl 64 Klutz said:
Oh wait, he did.
Escape to the Movies: Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
- Thread starter MovieBob
- Start date
Oh wait, he did.
Based on the trailers it looked dumb but potentially with some fun bits, and it's supposedly dumb with some fun bits. And people say that trailers aren't representative of the actual movies. Heh.
Probably going to see this sometime soon.
Probably going to see this sometime soon.
DVS BSTrD said:
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Back on topic, I had no idea about this film, but after Bob's review it's definitely on my "To rent" list. I've always had a soft spot for Anachronistic Action films (does that even count as a genre?) having liked both Brothers Grimm and Val Helsing so will definitely get round to watching this at some point.
Like every revenge movie, violence by a female is justified by past abuse. You can also assign it to Julia Roberts' final scene in Sleeping With the Enemy. And basically every Lifetime thriller aired in the last twenty years.Sylveria said:
I'm not necessarily saying it's good or bad, I'm just saying that's the pattern laid out by movie writers.
Well obviously the best way to avoid sexism is to make sure that white men get all the best parts.erttheking said:
You just can't comprehend the amazing mind of Movie Bob, a man who spent his Phantom Menace review telling everyone to get over it but is clearly still mad about the Star Trek reboot, a man who supports feminism but thinks anyone who disliked Metroid Other M is racist.
Bobs ability to hold completely contradictory opinions makes it clear that he exists on a higher plain of existence than us mere mortals, and it is not for us to judge him.
THANK YOU !!MacNille said:Oh good. Another fucking Lens flare joke. It is like it was not played out in 2009....
And in all fairness, JJ was able to make Star Trek interesting for me, and I didn't even care (at all) about Star Trek.. So with material I genuinely want to see come to life, I do believe he is gonna do very well.. I hope x
From what I gathered from his review, there wasn't much else to say about the movie and he had to talk about *something* for five minutes.GrungyMunchy said:
Crappy lens flare joke? Followed by an even worse review centering not on the movie, but why the idea of hunting witches should be taboo? Sure, there is a review eventually, but it's lost after 2 minutes of uselessness. Bob, what were you thinking in making this? You have lost me. Your constant complaining about the Spider-man movie (which was ok) didn't do it, your over the top love of the Tim and Eric movie (which was terrible) didn't do it, but this? Abrams made an interesting star trek movie, and I think the second is going to be great from what I've seen. I think his style would actually fit better into the star wars universe, so I see this as a good thing. And even HE admitted the lens flares went a little crazy in star trek and won't make the same mistake again, so your biggest criticism of him is something that won't... freakin... happen. I am actually going to go and watch this seemingly terrible movie now just to spite you... yes, spiting you is worth 10 dollars plus overpriced beer and nachos.
Hmmm, to be honest I don't agree much with either of the central "issues" here. In a fantasy context if you have evil monsters/sorceors having heroes that fight them just goes with the territory. In this case them fighting witches in a world where they, along with monsters like trolls, are real is pretty cool. It's by no means unique of course, while "The Brothers Grimm" is mentioned, I tend to look back to the old Julian Sands movie "Warlock" as an example of
a literal witch hunter being the hero (and it got several sequels). As far as a girl getting beaten up in movies, well, to put it bluntly if your going to have women out there kicking butt, there is no reason why they shouldn't get their butts kicked also, equal presentation all around. I find it laughable to not have people complain about movies where a girl clobbers a bunch of dudes, but then scream for justice when dudes beat up a girl, especially if the girl was trying to be violent first.
On the latter point I think it goes back to the general understanding that in RL girls are generally a lot weaker than guys, and as a result it's typically better for them to run away than trying to fight some dude. Given equal training and time working out a guy will just about always win, not to mention maxing out higher and yeah... it's unfair but true, as much as people might wish otherwise, as demonstrated by most of the times when groups like ESPN have given female martial arts champions chances to fight against similarly ranked men and "prove a point". Thus when we see a girl getting hammered by a really rugged dude it seems kind of unfair. In a fantasy context though where we're omitting all of the reality of women in combat, and have some girl clobbering dudes that outweigh her by a hundred pounds of more in addition to being tough/trained, it's less of a big deal because of the character. You step into that arena, you open yourself up to be on the receiving end.
To be honest I feel things like the "Hitman: Absolution" trailer are kind of refreshing actually, even if the outcry is going to probably move things backwards. Right there we saw equality with women being used the same way guys are in an action scene. Compared to other even more obnoxious and definatly sexist "tropes" where girls can only fight other girls for the sake of a male character retaining his purity, it's kind of refreshing. In a lot of movies you can pretty much assume that if the bad guy has a girl working with him and doing stuff, by the time the credits roll the hero's love interest will probably have taken her down in a cat fight. Sometimes even leading to painful scenes where a guy doofily proclaims "I cannot hit a girl" (despite this girl having like mass murdered 20 people), right before his girlfriend steps up and says something like "but I can!" as the cat fight commences... which is exactly what we'd be going back to if guys like Bob get their way.
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As far as the real witch hunts go, my opinions are mixed. The political correct brigade has pretty much taken the worst excesses of the entire period, and the cases where we suspect the wrong desician was made, and used that to create a portrayal of what the entire thing was like, all the time, which isn't entirely accurate.
At the end of the day remember differant morality prevailed, and things like the US's "seperation of church and state" did not exist. Following a non-christian religion was pretty much a crime, and at this point all punishments were pretty heinous. What the church did to Pagans seems unusually bad, but wasn't all that singularly unusual, the authorities torturing people for crimes of any sort was a matter of course and why nations like the US have created laws against "cruel and unusual punishment". Truthfully the church was just as bad, if not worse, to other Christians than they were to the so called "witches", if you look at some of the crap that went down between the Catholics and Protestants (which still fuels conflicts today) that should be obvious.
On top of this a lot of those early pagans were pretty bloody nasty when you get down to it. Today when a liberal goes off about this, they try and draw analogies to modern new agers and such, but truthfully that wasn't what it was like (and everyone knows it, even today you can find some remaining records of what people believed was black magic and such, and people in New Age shops and such might not practice it but have an understanding of it, you can have some interesting conversations on the subject). If you watch TV and a lot of the stuff on the history channel or whatever they occasionally do shows going through sites of mass graves where dead babies and such were buried in early pagan rituals, and find all kinds of wierd crap in basements in rural england and such. I remember seeing one show where they had this room in one basement where there were hundreds of skulls in the walls, some of which dated back to the middle ages, and an altar-pit in the middle of the floor. The bottom line is that in many cases The Church was going after some really, really, bad people who were basically engages in seriel murders in the name of their religion... which isn't surprising when you look at what some of those religions were like before the civilization of the area. The portrayal of say a "Druid" tends to vary with whether someone wants to defend it in connection with New Age traditions and tolerance, and say talk about it in context of Celts going to war against the Romans all of the horrible things they did to the soldiers they brought down as part of religious observances (and to their own people when they didn't have prisoners).
The point I'm getting at here is that I don't find The Witch Hunts to be inherantly offensive, it was a differant time, with differant principles, and by modern standards everyone on all sides of things like that were morally abhorrant. Sure, innocent people probably died, but that can be said about most things, and I honestly don't think that most of the people on the receiving end were innocent by the standards used, and a lot of them were probably people that would fall into modern seriel killer profiles (with a religious motive), the kinds of people that we sometimes wish would could regress society on to punish them more adequetly. Over the years I've heard both sides of it, as well as some stuff not intended in this context that can be applied. Rather than QQing about the Inquisition and any mention of it it's better to just summarize it as "the ancient world sucked, I'm glad I didn't live then".
To me, being a good Witch Hunter is no differant than say an exorcism movie. I'm not a big believer in empowered witches or demons possessing people. In the context of a movie the mythology of it can be fun though. Hansel and Gretal killing witches, or the time travelling antics of "Warlock" are really no differant than a movie like "The Exorcist" or any of it's numerous imitations and knockoffs where girls are pretty much tortured in the name of getting the evil out of them. It's based on real practices, but instead of a wayward daughter, we're making a movie where actual supernatural evil is involved.... same thing pretty much.
a literal witch hunter being the hero (and it got several sequels). As far as a girl getting beaten up in movies, well, to put it bluntly if your going to have women out there kicking butt, there is no reason why they shouldn't get their butts kicked also, equal presentation all around. I find it laughable to not have people complain about movies where a girl clobbers a bunch of dudes, but then scream for justice when dudes beat up a girl, especially if the girl was trying to be violent first.
On the latter point I think it goes back to the general understanding that in RL girls are generally a lot weaker than guys, and as a result it's typically better for them to run away than trying to fight some dude. Given equal training and time working out a guy will just about always win, not to mention maxing out higher and yeah... it's unfair but true, as much as people might wish otherwise, as demonstrated by most of the times when groups like ESPN have given female martial arts champions chances to fight against similarly ranked men and "prove a point". Thus when we see a girl getting hammered by a really rugged dude it seems kind of unfair. In a fantasy context though where we're omitting all of the reality of women in combat, and have some girl clobbering dudes that outweigh her by a hundred pounds of more in addition to being tough/trained, it's less of a big deal because of the character. You step into that arena, you open yourself up to be on the receiving end.
To be honest I feel things like the "Hitman: Absolution" trailer are kind of refreshing actually, even if the outcry is going to probably move things backwards. Right there we saw equality with women being used the same way guys are in an action scene. Compared to other even more obnoxious and definatly sexist "tropes" where girls can only fight other girls for the sake of a male character retaining his purity, it's kind of refreshing. In a lot of movies you can pretty much assume that if the bad guy has a girl working with him and doing stuff, by the time the credits roll the hero's love interest will probably have taken her down in a cat fight. Sometimes even leading to painful scenes where a guy doofily proclaims "I cannot hit a girl" (despite this girl having like mass murdered 20 people), right before his girlfriend steps up and says something like "but I can!" as the cat fight commences... which is exactly what we'd be going back to if guys like Bob get their way.
-
As far as the real witch hunts go, my opinions are mixed. The political correct brigade has pretty much taken the worst excesses of the entire period, and the cases where we suspect the wrong desician was made, and used that to create a portrayal of what the entire thing was like, all the time, which isn't entirely accurate.
At the end of the day remember differant morality prevailed, and things like the US's "seperation of church and state" did not exist. Following a non-christian religion was pretty much a crime, and at this point all punishments were pretty heinous. What the church did to Pagans seems unusually bad, but wasn't all that singularly unusual, the authorities torturing people for crimes of any sort was a matter of course and why nations like the US have created laws against "cruel and unusual punishment". Truthfully the church was just as bad, if not worse, to other Christians than they were to the so called "witches", if you look at some of the crap that went down between the Catholics and Protestants (which still fuels conflicts today) that should be obvious.
On top of this a lot of those early pagans were pretty bloody nasty when you get down to it. Today when a liberal goes off about this, they try and draw analogies to modern new agers and such, but truthfully that wasn't what it was like (and everyone knows it, even today you can find some remaining records of what people believed was black magic and such, and people in New Age shops and such might not practice it but have an understanding of it, you can have some interesting conversations on the subject). If you watch TV and a lot of the stuff on the history channel or whatever they occasionally do shows going through sites of mass graves where dead babies and such were buried in early pagan rituals, and find all kinds of wierd crap in basements in rural england and such. I remember seeing one show where they had this room in one basement where there were hundreds of skulls in the walls, some of which dated back to the middle ages, and an altar-pit in the middle of the floor. The bottom line is that in many cases The Church was going after some really, really, bad people who were basically engages in seriel murders in the name of their religion... which isn't surprising when you look at what some of those religions were like before the civilization of the area. The portrayal of say a "Druid" tends to vary with whether someone wants to defend it in connection with New Age traditions and tolerance, and say talk about it in context of Celts going to war against the Romans all of the horrible things they did to the soldiers they brought down as part of religious observances (and to their own people when they didn't have prisoners).
The point I'm getting at here is that I don't find The Witch Hunts to be inherantly offensive, it was a differant time, with differant principles, and by modern standards everyone on all sides of things like that were morally abhorrant. Sure, innocent people probably died, but that can be said about most things, and I honestly don't think that most of the people on the receiving end were innocent by the standards used, and a lot of them were probably people that would fall into modern seriel killer profiles (with a religious motive), the kinds of people that we sometimes wish would could regress society on to punish them more adequetly. Over the years I've heard both sides of it, as well as some stuff not intended in this context that can be applied. Rather than QQing about the Inquisition and any mention of it it's better to just summarize it as "the ancient world sucked, I'm glad I didn't live then".
To me, being a good Witch Hunter is no differant than say an exorcism movie. I'm not a big believer in empowered witches or demons possessing people. In the context of a movie the mythology of it can be fun though. Hansel and Gretal killing witches, or the time travelling antics of "Warlock" are really no differant than a movie like "The Exorcist" or any of it's numerous imitations and knockoffs where girls are pretty much tortured in the name of getting the evil out of them. It's based on real practices, but instead of a wayward daughter, we're making a movie where actual supernatural evil is involved.... same thing pretty much.
Especially considering most fairytales have much darker origins than children are familiar with. The edgy revamps completely ignore those themes in favor of action and digital color saturation, rendering them less mature than even the kids' versions.PsychedelicDiamond said:
I have to say, bashing Abrams and pointing out anything that could be remotely perceived as misogyny are pretty close to the top of the list of "Boring Opinions that Movie Bob Has." That and "Sucker Punch was a good movie, really."
Wrong. Incredibly, monumentally, unforgivably wrong.MovieBob said:
It sounds like you've been listening to half-educated idiots on Tumblr instead of studying the actual history of medieval religious persecution, which in the final analysis claimed the lives of far more men than it did women. You would be correct to point out that most of those men were convicted of "heresy" rather than "witchcraft" (because women were not generally considered to be legally capable of espousing the kind of doctrinal positions which the label of "heresy" was supposed to describe), but they were hunted by the same organizations for the same reasons, given the same sham-trials, tortured in the same prisons and subject to the same methods of execution.
Also, while it sounds like this may have gone overboard in the other direction, Hollywood's culturally-ingrained fear of having women, especially female protagonists, harmed on screen for anything less than a dramatic tragedy is one of the reasons most English language action movies centered on female leads are so bad (the exceptions being Doomsday and Kill Bill, which were't afraid to let their leads struggle and sustain injury). Can you think of a really good male lead in an action movie who didn't take a lot of (often pretty horrific) punishment by the end of the film? John McClane had to crawl over broken glass. Jackie Chan takes five punches for every one he dishes out. James Bond gets tortured, burned, drowned, stabbed, and shot. Django of Django Unchained is humiliated, beaten, tortured, and threatened with probably fatal sexual abuse, and his namesake might have actually had it worse off by the end of the original film. The action hero is by necessity a character who reaches the end of the film having sustained so much violence that you're amazed they can even stand. Because of that, as long as you view violence sustained by a woman as uniquely terrible, you prevent women from taking similar roles and further the endless succession of interchangeable damsels in distress.
I have to say, you're really only making your side of the "argument" seem very unattractive.Sylveria said:
Anyway, :/ shame about the movie. I was hoping it would be a bit fun, but then again I guess even a one trick pony can be fun at least once.
Also, lets hope Mr. Lens Flare can dial it down a bit for Star Wars. I liked the Star Trek movie, but there were times in it I had to shield my eyes, or go blind.
I don't understand why everyone hates on JJ Abrams. Sure he's no Ridley Scott but personally i thought the new Star Trek movie was pretty great, certainly miles better than all of the other ones since first contact. I see no reason to expect any less from his treatment of Star Wars. He clearly cared about the source material and paid it due respect while creating something new. Sure it wasn't perfect but it was a whole lot of fun, and really what more can you ask for from a reboot of a tired decades old franchise? Plus, it could have been Michael Bay. Think about that.
I like J.J. Abrams though!
I never watched Star Trek before his movie, and I really enjoyed it, enough to go back and have an appreciation of the old franchise (especially Bones).
Maybe lightning will strike twice with Star Wars. I've always viewed them as an overrated B-Movie.
I never watched Star Trek before his movie, and I really enjoyed it, enough to go back and have an appreciation of the old franchise (especially Bones).
Maybe lightning will strike twice with Star Wars. I've always viewed them as an overrated B-Movie.
Aww, I was hoping you'd review John Dies at the End. I mean, I knew Hansel & Gretel would be bad, but I have no idea what to expect with JDatE.