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Kurt's Replies
What did they expect, it's a Ocean's movie without Clooney (yeah Sandra is Ocean, that's just a cop out). Dropping the big stars makes this a second rate effort. Despite that, the reviews aren't that bad, and 67% fresh is much better than Ocean's twelve, which has 55% on the tomatometer. Ocean's thirteen has 70%, which is only a bit better than Ocean's Eight.
They only use the White Male (Why WHITE, I can understand male, but not WHITE) excuse simply based on the fact that they changed the entire main cast to women. That's kind of circular reasoning, but I suppose it makes sense to them, in some convoluted way.
This is the fourth Ocean's movie, which means they dropped the entire cast which they had otherwise managed to keep in all the other movies. That's a cheap-out. It does influence how the movie may be viewed. This essentially makes this movie a reboot.
I don't know the demographics of the audience for the previous movies, but no matter what, they basically say that this movie is for women specifically, and that men won't understand the movie and therefore should have no opinion about the movie. This means they have no regard for the previous movies' core audience (at least those who were men). Despite this, this movie did OK at the BO for a fourth movie.
I'm actually surprised Bullock argue this, I thought she was smarter than that!
The novel is vastly different, there's almost no similarity between the movie and the novel. In fact, in some sense the book has some thematic similarity with Ex Machina rather than Blade Runner. I guess that's why it's called "Blade Runner" and not "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?".
I believe Blade Runner should be viewed as a stand alone work and not as a simply a film version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It's just too different from the book.
She looked good as a robot though.
That was exactly what I thought, he really sounded like Bane
The movie was really badly made and acted, it just reeked of "Uwe Boll quality", so I didn't watch the whole thing.
Yeh, it probably really just was a week of many discount screenings. If only they did the same discount thing with BP.
Actually I found the movie dissapointing in general. I find such cop out witch stories very contrived, because actual witches were women and some men who were persecuted by exactly Protestant fundamentalists during the witch hunts like in Salem. The witch segments are like the enactment segments in Haxan, the old B&W movie about witches. Those segments enact the myths, rather than the reality.
This movie is analogous to a WWII movie where the innocent Nazis try to escape an angry mob of evil Jews, exactly because the author choose a fundamentalist Puritan protagonist, who actually represents the very people who persecuted accused witches.
That could explain it, though it's odd the count went down again right after. Are they only in the discount theatres in one week?
Pretty sure, watch the start of the movie once more and consider why they're thrown out of the town, they are essentially a family cult .
It's kind of annoyingly close to 700 million, lol. They did it with a Wrinkle In Time (also Disney), they gave it some more seats and the BO exploded in that weekend (june 15-17) and so it passed 100 million. I have no clue how they could do that stunt, but it shows they're willing to do this kind of manipulation.
RAJH, it does not matter what the reason is, it is still in the movie. (see the other answer, the quote)
Kuku, that's a good point, it is true, it can be seen as the rational answer to the supernatural threat, from within a fairytale story - though it failed. But what I'm getting at is IF you remove the supernatural, the witches, the devil, there remains a story about the religious fanaticism, hunger, food poisoning (apparently) and pride and I'm sure other such concepts as well. Regardless of whether there's a supernatural factor involved, those themes are still present no matter what.
Rajh, I already mentioned twice that I do not agree with the second interpretation.
In the meantime I looked up what he said, and he said stuff like this:
"But there are clues about different interpretations. So, for example, the rot on the corn is ergot, which is a hallucinogenic fungus, so if you wanted to take that route, you could. It’s not necessarily my route, but there are multiple ways in."
Straight from the horse's mouth.
Kuku, I do agree, that's exactly how the movie is, in the beginning it's their increasing fanaticism which causes all their problems, including being thrown out of their community, but in the end it turn out it was indeed the devil all along, and that the mother was right and the daughter is indeed a witch. But in the first part, if we ignore the weird witches imagery, there's a lot of strong indication that it's all their own fault, and that the mother is the main cause because she interpret everything that happens as a punishment from god, due to a perceived lack of pure faith, so they don't do anything about their misery. I wrote something like what you wrote in another thread here, it's how I see it too.
However. - that's just the story as it is, the author still does show the family as an insane bunch of fanatics who cannot get anything done because they expect God to help them directly, which does not happen no matter how pious they are or how much they pray, they still suffer and eventually perish, because even if the devil wasn't in the movie, and no witch was there, the family is still doomed due to a failed harvest and unwillingness to accept the defeat and return to the village and ask forgiveness. All that does not disappear from the story just because it turns out the devil and the witches are real in the movie.
Ps. finally, I recommend looking at pictures of ergot on wheat, it looks exactly like the spoiled crops the father looks at, at some point in the movie. After someone mentioned it I actually looked up how it looked and compared it and there's no doubt in my mind, the director meant it to be ergot, because it looks just like ergot. I wasn't aware of how it looked, so I didn't notice it initially, but it is obviously meant to be ergot.
Now, I still consider the story a supernatural horror, based on the overall movie, but it does have a lot of things thrown into the movie that suggests otherwise.
I already wrote that it cannot be the second interpretation, but the movie has many elements thrown in which point in that direction anyway, such as the absurdly extreme fanaticism in the mother's actions as the story progress, she does indeed seem very obviously insane at some point. Also the wheat does look like it has an ergot attack. I didn't even notice this during the movie, I considered hunger and imminent death to be the reason why they fell apart, but I rewatched the bits because someone mentioned it, and it sure looks like it has ergot - which just seems unlikely to be happenstance. But who knows, maybe it is?
It is a fact in the movie that their harvest failed, they already starve and that they will die of hunger, unless they return to the town where they were thrown out by other puritans, supposedly because the family were too fanatical in their religiousness. They choose to stay, which means they choose death rather than humiliation, and this was completely independently of the concurrent witches story. Now you may think that it was all the witches fault or the fault of the devil, and maybe that's how it's supposed to be, but it's actually not a fact in the movie.
Just because they contradict what happens on screen doesn't eliminate the elements he put there, it just makes them literally impossible, but they're still there. It's like a two layered story. It's clearly based on an interpretation, but it's not based on Zero indication, as you write, it's just you who do not see it, because you eliminate the possibility based on the fact that we see the witches, which we indeed do.
Well, the movie suggests that it is their extreme fundamentalism which is the root of everything - notice how they are very quick to accuse family members, and how the mother explains everything bad which happens as being the result of sin and lack of faith, yet despite their religious fanaticism, Ie extreme puritanism, it is exactly them who get tormented by the devil, not the townsfolk, exactly because they believe he is the cause of everything.
I don't know the point the makers of this movie tried to get across, if any. I feel it could go in two directions:
1: The goat was indeed the devil, who corrupted the children and eventually enticed the daughter to become a witch, via a deal with the devil. The whole story is the daughter becoming a witch, which was the whole purpose of everything that happens. Thus it becomes a coming of age story, which is kind of a common movie trope for American movies, for some reason.
2: The whole thing was caused by their stressful situation combined with their extreme religious approach to reality; nothing really happened except they went insane and killed each other, after their harvest failed, which meant certain death anyway, because they could not bear the shame of coming crawling back to the town begging the others for mercy. The movie is based on how they saw it all via their increasing delusions. In the end they all died, including the daughter who ended up completely removed from reality, IE psychotic, and it's her final delusion we see.
The problem with this is that we see the witches independently of the people, even before anything happens. Perhaps it's supposed to be how the family just imagined the witches, but the movie actually seems to suggest that it was all real, despite it has many elements which suggests the second interpretation, IMO.
Ps. Another poster in another thread here noticed the ergot on the wheat, which could've been a contributing factor for the delusions.
Wow, I took a peak at BO Mojo, the increase in theatres can be explained by this, but how can the huge BO increase this weekend be explained by anything? Did they buy their own tickets to get it over 100 million?
It may seem so, but the movie obviously tried to juxtapose modern views with the situation around that time, which is WWI. This is mostly done via Wonder Woman, but here it should be seen in the context of more recent events which had happened shortly before the movie takes place, as this is the war 1914-18. Sure, their complaints are obviously based on how things are viewed now, and maybe they are meant to say something about the current situation, but within the context of the movie it's actually about the situation right then and there.
No way! While it has sci-fi elements, it is first and foremost a superhero movie and that's that. It does in no friggin way compare to real sci-fi movies, not because they are better, but because they are different.
True, her core fans were always the Dark Angel fans. She never made anything comparable and she never played that kind of "outsider" role again. She was kind of an outsider in An Invisible Sign - but that was obviously a different kind of outsider and not a mainstream movie.