SympathysSilhouette

Heya Pinky, how are you doing?

I think where we disagree is that I don't really see a woke agenda in a lot of the bad media we are being confronted with. There are reasons for why things are shitty, but I have given my perspective on why I think that is above. I see the direct influence of "wokeness" a lot more in stuff like SISE (MJ's activism through swimsuit issue) than I see it in TV and movies. A good movie is a good screenplay adapted to the screen by an able director, who marshals the various departments to create something special. But I am not overly preoccupied with the exact nature of the story or who the cast is (as long as they are good). Probably my favorite film of the past few years was "Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu" and that barely has any lines for male characters. But it is a beautiful story, incredibly well-shot, with some inventive scenes and a terrific soundtrack.

But this is conflating two things. Your original objection was to the character itself (her and Rey) and not to the actress who portrays her. I haven't read many American comics, but I did read quite a bit of the older Miss Marvel runs (back when Captain Marvel was still Miss Marvel). The Brian Reed run from the mid noughties. And she was already pretty high-powered even back then.

The cast is about the only thing I like about it. Especially Kate McKinnon doing a "female Egon" thing. But it is one of the worst-written movies I can remember seeing. Written by someone who clearly does not care about nor understand Ghostbusters. Before he himself was cancelled for apparently being a sexual predator, Max Landis wrote a good critique of it. Including the fact that a supposedly "progressive" movie had made the black character the only one who did not have an advanced degree (remember that she worked for the MTA whilst all of the others had a STEM background).

But Cap Marvel isn't the only overpowered character? So do you also hate say Superman then? Or Supergirl?

But what is woke about Afterlife? It's just a bad Ghostbusters movie. That sort of tried to make "Stranger Things, but it's Ghosbusters!" instead of a proper Ghostbusters film.

Captain Marvel is one of the most powerful characters within the Marvel universe. So you think they should diminish her powers when adapting her story for a movie? But why? They don't really do this for any other character. In fact, they do the opposite. e.g. Captain America should last about three seconds in a fight with Thanos if comics canon is applied.

In general I think that a lot of the "wokeness ruined this" debate is about other things. Like I hate the 2016 all-female Ghostbusters, but my problem with that film was not the cast. It was how poor the screenplay was and how visually unimaginative it all looked. It looked just like any other Paul Feig film. Whereas the original Ghostbusters was a comedy, but it wasn't shot like a comedy. It looked more than The Thing than it did like Caddyshack. I don't like Ghostbusters Afterlife either, another movie that suffers badly from terrible writing. Though at least Jason Reitman tried to recreate/update his father's visual style a bit more. So at least it looked more like a Ghostbusters movie than Feig's effort.

I do think it's a bit apparent, mostly in her face and her chest that she has lost a considerable amount of weight.

Her attire of these chores is always on point.

She has definitely lost weight. Too bad!

It isn't very good. If not for Sir Patrick Stewart, I'm not sure if if would have stuck around for the entirety of season one. But I also think Discovery isn't that great. Part of the problem is that the people running those shows aren't real Trekkies and they have been influenced more by JJ Abrams bad movies than by the prior Trek series (which were primarily about utopian humanism and an optimistic view of the future). I do have some hope for the upcoming Captain Pike series, starring Anson Mount as Pike.

Well it's more about the fact that the trend to turn male characters into female ones isn't exactly new? And people back then didn't care.

If you are referring to Daniel Craig's Bond dying, I'm pretty sure that has more to do with Craig being done with the role!

It's interesting that you use her as an example, that character was originally meant to be a man.

Also, for all of the supposed woes of the white male lead, a great number of the top ten biggest grossing movies of 2021 starred white men: 1. Spider-man: No way home - white male lead 2. Shang-chi - Asian lead 3. Venom - white male lead 4. Black Widow - female white lead 5. F9 - diverse ensemble 6. Eternals - diverse ensemble 7. No Time to Die - white male lead 8. A Quiet place II - white male lead 9. Ghostbusters: after life - largely white ensemble 10. Free Guy - white male lead

Honestly I have never watched a movie and thought "I wish the lead wasn't black". I have watched a lot of movies and thought "fuck me, this is poorly written" or "the director cannot even properly frame a shot", or "who edited this, a crazy person?" As for the supposed "left-wing" nature of Hollywood, that is bullshit. Or if it is true, then it's a shared ideology that as shallow as a puddle. Everyone in that town is interested in one thing: making money. Hence why they pander to China to an embarrassing degree. Hence why they don't care if they have to tolerate a serial rapist like Weinstein in their midst, as long as they can make money off him. I don't think they personally care much about representation (the leaked Sony emails confirmed this). But it's in vogue right now to appear to care about that stuff, so they pretend to care. But it's pretty clear that this is not something that preoccupies the people in charge of the studios.

Sapowski had to sue to get the extra money. His original deal prior to Wild Hunt's release wasn't that great.

I think the anemic quality of much of the U.S. based entertainment is more to do with the fact that all of the IPs are now owned by a very small number of companies. All of those companies are very risk-averse. Thus you get utterly sexless, uninspired films, like much of the MCU franchise. It's also how you get a situation where immature "movie critics" ask Paul Verhoeven if a movie really needs to have sex in it. Art literacy is a lost skill, so you also get morons criticizing directors who have protagonists who are evil or unsympathitic, because they have somehow lost the ability to differentiate between the text and the moral world view of the text's creator. I think audiences have been infantilized by decades of stupid entertainment catering to nothing more than the lowest common denominator and they wouldn't recognize real cinema if it bit them in the ass.

Sapkowski has never publicly criticized the show, this is mainly based on what haters of the adaptation claim online. I don't think he cares particularly much, like GRRM before him, this adaption will have made him a lot of money. Especially since he didn't make all that much out of his CDPR deal.

I was addressing the fact that whilst that meme presented Jackson's LotR as a universally beloved and admired adaptation, this was not the experience at the time and there were quite a few dissenting voices, especially among the purists who were devoted to the source material. It has little to do with "wokeness" (a term that did not even exist back then).

I haven't played any CoD games in about a decade now. They are garbage. Especially the single player campaigns (and their writing) were getting offensively bad.

To be fair, I know plenty of Tolkien purists who hated a lot about Jackson's adaption. e.g. the expansion of the Arwen role compared to the novels. Or the total omission of the Tom Bombadil section. But I expect the Prime series to be hot garbage, mostly because all of the "next GoT" shows have failed miserably at capturing even a fraction of the cultural significance of the HBO show.

I like Joy. Didn't know she had a sister.

Well it hasn't been about casting good swimwear models for a while now, so this is just another new way MJ can do her woke flag-waving. I am sure that had someone else been in charge, SISE would have been diminished too by 2022, but not by this extent. Much of its decline isn't just about cultural shifts, it's entirely self-inflicted.