dev_chieftain (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dev_chieftain) wrote2012-07-04 02:54 pm
dev_chieftain) wrote2012-07-04 02:54 pm
Waterworld and Sorority Boys (AKA boring movie post)
So last night I guess I decided it was bad movie night. Danny and I watched Waterworld, since it did seem to have fantasy elements, and then I watched Sorority Boys because I knew Danny didn't want to have to suffer through it.
Waterworld is a tragic case of potential wasted. The story suffers from a lot of internal contradictions, the protagonist is too cruel to other people to be likeable (which doesn't ruin a movie, but definitely can hurt a movie if watching someone be callous gets boring after a while), and is longer than it needs to be. The Dennis Hopper villainous sideplot is all right, though if they were going that route, I think they could have done a better job explaining why people followed him, and taking steps to legitimize the "Smokers" as a culture (since, it being a post-apocalypse and all, they really were no better or worse than the group that nearly murdered The Protagonist because he was a mutant and that creeped them out.
Problems with the movie:
-there was a love interest female character. I really could have done without that. Or with her being ever once portrayed as capable of handling herself once they left her home. (She was a badass in her hometown.) Or with her not falling in love with Asshole McFuckface. (You know, the guy who nearly killed her a couple of times, briefly considered selling her to be raped by a madman, and oh, threatened her with bodily harm and cut her hair to prove he meant it when he wanted her to shut up and sit silently. Somehow, she fell in love with that.)
-Same madman abovementioned making an attempt to rape the little girl because he's a pedophile. Wow. That could have been left out and I would still have believed it was a post-apocalyptic setting, guys.
Things I wish had been done:
-if the world really has been totally flooded permanently, it'd have to be something more than just the polar caps melting. The size of the planet would need to shrink a little, I think, or at the very least, we'd need an explanation for why things didn't start to cool back down after a while.
-There ought to be a lot more clouds and mist in a world whose surface is completely water; I would have liked to see some effort to portray this.
-After the filtration device was broken and it was established that Protagonist, Love Interest, and Plot Protected MacGuffin Girl were going to die of thirst, they never really had to deal with that, despite traveling for at least twelve days apparently without water. I guess they were drinking their own urine, perhaps, since the movie really enjoyed making a point that they'd have to do this.
-Which didn't make sense, really, because if you can filter out the stuff you don't want in urine, you could do it with the seawater EVERYWHERE, and you could get more of it easier. So that was just illogical.
-Also, how are people surviving hundreds of years later without having discovered land? It doesn't make sense that a sunk ship would have risen back up (with oil still in it!) in the first place, and it really doesn't make sense that such a ship would do them any good in terms of producing food. It wasn't implied that people were eating each other and I wasn't really clear on how they were supposed to be getting seeds to plant in the dirt they found.
-Everyone's talking about this mystical "Dryland", but Protagonist tells us he's never seen the Dryland they're talking about; he's a mutant, so he can see the cities below the water when he goes diving for cool shit and all, but despite "sailing further than anyone ever has" he hasn't seen actual land. This doesn't make sense because it takes less than a month to find the place they're looking for once they figure out the map tattooed on the little girl's back-- and they're traveling pretty damn slow, like primitive sailboat slow. So either nobody knows how to travel the ocean despite growing up on it, or there's really only this one spot of dry land. It would have made more sense if there was lots of it and they were just misfortunate enough to be far away from those areas of dry land, so they were isolated by it. (I just am making that my personal canon, basically.)
-Speaking of the map on the little girl's back, why the heck did her parents write in Japanese or Chinese when she's a little white blond-haired blue-eyed girl? The cataclysm happened hundreds of years ago, as we're told in the film, so it doesn't even really make sense that her parents understood how to read and write in a writing system long outdated, giving coordinates that no longer held any meaning to the modern world. It just doesn't quite fit, in multiple ways.
-And apparently there's like mutant scary seamonsters? Okay, whatever. I don't know how or why, but that's fine.
It was too long and I don't think I like Kevin Costner too much, but it still had certain interesting aspects, and Dennis Hopper makes a fine villain, even when they don't make a whole lot of sense.
As for Sorority Boys, the concept is of course offensive to its core. The outcome of the movie, however, was kind of interesting. The heteronormative nature of that ending was pretty shitty, but otherwise it was sort of positive; through the experience of being sorority girls, the three guys basically learn that they can be friends with women, that they don't like the way their frat friends treat each other OR women, and they make changes in the way that the fraternity is run to fix that. However, the movie demonizes the kinds of girls who are pretty and go to frat parties without ever characterizing THEM; so while the frat guys actually get developed, and the sorority that the main characters infiltrate is a pretty interesting cast of ladies with actual characters, there's still that whole side group put in to be tits for staring at and laughing about how they're so dumb and bitchy. Not so cool.
The girls in the sorority that the guys temporarily join whilst dressing in drag to go undercover include one girl I was afraid would turn out to be a straw feminist; she actually was pretty cool. Her storyline is more or less that the least douchey and most likeable of the frat guys falls for her while he's in drag, and she falls for his lady alter ego. They briefly attempt to initiate some romance, but he feels guilty about deceiving her so calls it off before it can get too sexual, not wanting to take advantage of their romance or, worse, lose her friendship if she finds out he's a guy. So, that storyline, while somewhat predictable (in the end he reveals himself to save her from being hazed by frat guys and get them to quit being dickbags, and they talk it out and become friends/lovers of a heterosexual sort) was pretty decent.
The storyline with Michael Rosenbaum's character was a little more difficult. All of the trigger warnings I'd give that don't just come from the movie being about how awful fraternities are come from this storyline. Rosenbaum's character is a totally shallow dickhead, and through being forced to dress in drag realizes how much of an asshole HE was because the people who were his friends before are specifically the same ones calling him a fat, ugly whore every day (even though he's not actually fat, which makes him pretty sensitive about it, unsurprisingly). It's sort of justice, I suppose, but it's also difficult to watch, you know? The worst part is basically the subplot where he's trying to get a tape from his old room in the frat house that will prove his and the other guys' innocence in the matter of being framed for stealing money that they didn't steal, and is slipped a roofie by the same guy he's slipped a roofie. He more or less wakes up not sure if he was raped and has to go through the "walk of shame", and while he manages to sock one of the guys that's especially annoying, I still feel like the resolution (he is made president of the club, and decides he's going to run the club differently from now on, without permitting the disrespect of women) is not enough of a solution for such a deep problem. I did feel like the character was written in a way that definitely illuminated how much he'd dehumanized women in his mind, comparing them to food, and comparing seeing about their actual lives and problems to being forced to acknowledge that the meat you're eating was just harvested from a slaughtered animal. What can I say? Rosenbaum's good at playing a villain.
The third guy, who is comic relief guy, is the least potentially offensive of the three characters because aside from being a slackabout who likes to masturbate and smoke pot he hasn't really got any faults (and some, like myself, would argue that such things are really not faults, just perceived as faults by those who demonize those things). His plot mostly revolves around getting to know all the girls of the sorority better and befriending them to the point that he eventually throws a party with them where they smoke pot and dance together until he passes out. He ends up being pretty motherly to them, trying to help them with some of their problems and realizing that he actually does care about them.
The movie does deal with self-image, and I think handles it pretty well-- of the three guys, Rosenbaum actually has a lot of potential to look very pretty. But because his character's kind of a jerk and not really just being himself as a woman (letting his own sexism pervert how he acts, etc) he's really not very attractive as a friend, and to the people he's trying to endear himself to, he's treated really poorly, as if he's ugly. When he finally gets into it, during a football game, he looks really attractive (at least, I felt like he looked much more natural and attractive in that outfit, like an actual sporty girl). Granted, our shallow friends still call him horribly offensive nicknames, but I thought he looked much better in drag in that scene than any previous.
The Decent Guy is sort of attractive, but sort of homely, too, but embraces being a lady the most of the three and is the most sought-after of the three because of it. And comic relief guy is comic relief guy, so that doesn't really come up aside from comic-relief guy being pretty into trying to look nice and enjoying the freedom of dressing as a lady.
I guess I have a lot to say about it; I figure nobody I know will have watched it, or will watch it, because it's really just a bawdy teen comedy that tries in a couple of places to be a little more serious than that. Still, I don't regret watching it. It wasn't the worst thing I've ever seen, and I actually really liked the subplot about Decent Guy falling in love with Main Character Girl while disguised as a woman. I sort of wish that he'd actually been trans, because that would have been an interesting story to see unfold; though I suppose if he was actually a lady he'd just have gone for it because that character WAS in love with Main Character Girl.
If the movie's message is taken at face value, it still implies that women aren't as good at handling themselves as men; the girls are motivated by the presence of the frat guys (unknowingly) to stand up for themselves, and the resolution is that the frat is run less assholishly-- but in this situation, I think the problems pretty much stem from the way the frat is run. Is it really the problem of these women that the guys are being such asshats to them, or is it the responsibility of the men to realize what hellish shitheads they are and change that so they can be better people? So in this case, I think the women are portrayed as doing the best they can with a bad situation, since the Main Character Girl is actively protesting the way the frat is run and the way it treats women, and the other girls are with her on that, even if most of them are less assertive about it.
Waterworld is a tragic case of potential wasted. The story suffers from a lot of internal contradictions, the protagonist is too cruel to other people to be likeable (which doesn't ruin a movie, but definitely can hurt a movie if watching someone be callous gets boring after a while), and is longer than it needs to be. The Dennis Hopper villainous sideplot is all right, though if they were going that route, I think they could have done a better job explaining why people followed him, and taking steps to legitimize the "Smokers" as a culture (since, it being a post-apocalypse and all, they really were no better or worse than the group that nearly murdered The Protagonist because he was a mutant and that creeped them out.
Problems with the movie:
-there was a love interest female character. I really could have done without that. Or with her being ever once portrayed as capable of handling herself once they left her home. (She was a badass in her hometown.) Or with her not falling in love with Asshole McFuckface. (You know, the guy who nearly killed her a couple of times, briefly considered selling her to be raped by a madman, and oh, threatened her with bodily harm and cut her hair to prove he meant it when he wanted her to shut up and sit silently. Somehow, she fell in love with that.)
-Same madman abovementioned making an attempt to rape the little girl because he's a pedophile. Wow. That could have been left out and I would still have believed it was a post-apocalyptic setting, guys.
Things I wish had been done:
-if the world really has been totally flooded permanently, it'd have to be something more than just the polar caps melting. The size of the planet would need to shrink a little, I think, or at the very least, we'd need an explanation for why things didn't start to cool back down after a while.
-There ought to be a lot more clouds and mist in a world whose surface is completely water; I would have liked to see some effort to portray this.
-After the filtration device was broken and it was established that Protagonist, Love Interest, and Plot Protected MacGuffin Girl were going to die of thirst, they never really had to deal with that, despite traveling for at least twelve days apparently without water. I guess they were drinking their own urine, perhaps, since the movie really enjoyed making a point that they'd have to do this.
-Which didn't make sense, really, because if you can filter out the stuff you don't want in urine, you could do it with the seawater EVERYWHERE, and you could get more of it easier. So that was just illogical.
-Also, how are people surviving hundreds of years later without having discovered land? It doesn't make sense that a sunk ship would have risen back up (with oil still in it!) in the first place, and it really doesn't make sense that such a ship would do them any good in terms of producing food. It wasn't implied that people were eating each other and I wasn't really clear on how they were supposed to be getting seeds to plant in the dirt they found.
-Everyone's talking about this mystical "Dryland", but Protagonist tells us he's never seen the Dryland they're talking about; he's a mutant, so he can see the cities below the water when he goes diving for cool shit and all, but despite "sailing further than anyone ever has" he hasn't seen actual land. This doesn't make sense because it takes less than a month to find the place they're looking for once they figure out the map tattooed on the little girl's back-- and they're traveling pretty damn slow, like primitive sailboat slow. So either nobody knows how to travel the ocean despite growing up on it, or there's really only this one spot of dry land. It would have made more sense if there was lots of it and they were just misfortunate enough to be far away from those areas of dry land, so they were isolated by it. (I just am making that my personal canon, basically.)
-Speaking of the map on the little girl's back, why the heck did her parents write in Japanese or Chinese when she's a little white blond-haired blue-eyed girl? The cataclysm happened hundreds of years ago, as we're told in the film, so it doesn't even really make sense that her parents understood how to read and write in a writing system long outdated, giving coordinates that no longer held any meaning to the modern world. It just doesn't quite fit, in multiple ways.
-And apparently there's like mutant scary seamonsters? Okay, whatever. I don't know how or why, but that's fine.
It was too long and I don't think I like Kevin Costner too much, but it still had certain interesting aspects, and Dennis Hopper makes a fine villain, even when they don't make a whole lot of sense.
As for Sorority Boys, the concept is of course offensive to its core. The outcome of the movie, however, was kind of interesting. The heteronormative nature of that ending was pretty shitty, but otherwise it was sort of positive; through the experience of being sorority girls, the three guys basically learn that they can be friends with women, that they don't like the way their frat friends treat each other OR women, and they make changes in the way that the fraternity is run to fix that. However, the movie demonizes the kinds of girls who are pretty and go to frat parties without ever characterizing THEM; so while the frat guys actually get developed, and the sorority that the main characters infiltrate is a pretty interesting cast of ladies with actual characters, there's still that whole side group put in to be tits for staring at and laughing about how they're so dumb and bitchy. Not so cool.
The girls in the sorority that the guys temporarily join whilst dressing in drag to go undercover include one girl I was afraid would turn out to be a straw feminist; she actually was pretty cool. Her storyline is more or less that the least douchey and most likeable of the frat guys falls for her while he's in drag, and she falls for his lady alter ego. They briefly attempt to initiate some romance, but he feels guilty about deceiving her so calls it off before it can get too sexual, not wanting to take advantage of their romance or, worse, lose her friendship if she finds out he's a guy. So, that storyline, while somewhat predictable (in the end he reveals himself to save her from being hazed by frat guys and get them to quit being dickbags, and they talk it out and become friends/lovers of a heterosexual sort) was pretty decent.
The storyline with Michael Rosenbaum's character was a little more difficult. All of the trigger warnings I'd give that don't just come from the movie being about how awful fraternities are come from this storyline. Rosenbaum's character is a totally shallow dickhead, and through being forced to dress in drag realizes how much of an asshole HE was because the people who were his friends before are specifically the same ones calling him a fat, ugly whore every day (even though he's not actually fat, which makes him pretty sensitive about it, unsurprisingly). It's sort of justice, I suppose, but it's also difficult to watch, you know? The worst part is basically the subplot where he's trying to get a tape from his old room in the frat house that will prove his and the other guys' innocence in the matter of being framed for stealing money that they didn't steal, and is slipped a roofie by the same guy he's slipped a roofie. He more or less wakes up not sure if he was raped and has to go through the "walk of shame", and while he manages to sock one of the guys that's especially annoying, I still feel like the resolution (he is made president of the club, and decides he's going to run the club differently from now on, without permitting the disrespect of women) is not enough of a solution for such a deep problem. I did feel like the character was written in a way that definitely illuminated how much he'd dehumanized women in his mind, comparing them to food, and comparing seeing about their actual lives and problems to being forced to acknowledge that the meat you're eating was just harvested from a slaughtered animal. What can I say? Rosenbaum's good at playing a villain.
The third guy, who is comic relief guy, is the least potentially offensive of the three characters because aside from being a slackabout who likes to masturbate and smoke pot he hasn't really got any faults (and some, like myself, would argue that such things are really not faults, just perceived as faults by those who demonize those things). His plot mostly revolves around getting to know all the girls of the sorority better and befriending them to the point that he eventually throws a party with them where they smoke pot and dance together until he passes out. He ends up being pretty motherly to them, trying to help them with some of their problems and realizing that he actually does care about them.
The movie does deal with self-image, and I think handles it pretty well-- of the three guys, Rosenbaum actually has a lot of potential to look very pretty. But because his character's kind of a jerk and not really just being himself as a woman (letting his own sexism pervert how he acts, etc) he's really not very attractive as a friend, and to the people he's trying to endear himself to, he's treated really poorly, as if he's ugly. When he finally gets into it, during a football game, he looks really attractive (at least, I felt like he looked much more natural and attractive in that outfit, like an actual sporty girl). Granted, our shallow friends still call him horribly offensive nicknames, but I thought he looked much better in drag in that scene than any previous.
The Decent Guy is sort of attractive, but sort of homely, too, but embraces being a lady the most of the three and is the most sought-after of the three because of it. And comic relief guy is comic relief guy, so that doesn't really come up aside from comic-relief guy being pretty into trying to look nice and enjoying the freedom of dressing as a lady.
I guess I have a lot to say about it; I figure nobody I know will have watched it, or will watch it, because it's really just a bawdy teen comedy that tries in a couple of places to be a little more serious than that. Still, I don't regret watching it. It wasn't the worst thing I've ever seen, and I actually really liked the subplot about Decent Guy falling in love with Main Character Girl while disguised as a woman. I sort of wish that he'd actually been trans, because that would have been an interesting story to see unfold; though I suppose if he was actually a lady he'd just have gone for it because that character WAS in love with Main Character Girl.
If the movie's message is taken at face value, it still implies that women aren't as good at handling themselves as men; the girls are motivated by the presence of the frat guys (unknowingly) to stand up for themselves, and the resolution is that the frat is run less assholishly-- but in this situation, I think the problems pretty much stem from the way the frat is run. Is it really the problem of these women that the guys are being such asshats to them, or is it the responsibility of the men to realize what hellish shitheads they are and change that so they can be better people? So in this case, I think the women are portrayed as doing the best they can with a bad situation, since the Main Character Girl is actively protesting the way the frat is run and the way it treats women, and the other girls are with her on that, even if most of them are less assertive about it.