![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Things watched
Mar. 12th, 2012 04:23 pmI watched Metropolis
Long film is looooong.
And slow. Very, very slow.
It had lots of excellent imagery that I recognise from, like, everything ever since.
The bit where the robot gets a face was cool.
It had one female character and her evil twin doing the virgin/whore dichotomy. With saint imagery and whore of babylon references. And quite a lot of dancing while wearing only tinsel.
Also, while it has all those images where the workers get ate by the machines, it is pretty heavily against doing anything about it. Like, if they stop work, or blow up the machines, all their children die.
The suggested solution is basically wait for an angsty middle class white boy to save you.
*facepalm*
dude falls for a worker girl, does part of one shift of work, and now he's the worker's hero?
Balls.
The city looked cool. It was all very huge and striking images. The robot rocked.
It just... wasn't very good, added together.
Then I watched Dirk Gently, recorded from last week.
... I very swiftly started fast forwarding through it, and then forwarding even faster.
Booooooooored now.
I think Bechdel fail was the only thing those two had in common.
It isn't like the Bechdel test is the be all and end all of textual quality, it's just that failing it correlates pretty strongly with things that will be at best blah.
Metropolis we will be studying in lessons this week.
I mentioned before about 'enthralled by her beauty'. All the films thus far have that in common. Dude is wandering along being evil, or at least capitalist in a conscience free way, and then Enthralled by Her Beauty he blah blah blah, and then quite often there's carrying her around fainted. Nosferatu involved her winning though, that was good. Metropolis was just Wait For A Man To Save You. Like, the city is flooding, the lifts are busted, and she sounds the alarm, but then she stands around next to the alarm surrounded by children. So then men turn up and suggest they use the stairs. She's the one that actually works there, she has to be told to use the stairs? :eyeroll:
I guess if you edit the hell out of Metropolis you'd get a story that was merely annoying rather than deathly slow and annoying. But apparently it used to take ten minutes of children being soaked and splashed and making wah face before the idea that children are in the flooding city is adequately conveyed.
Sometimes I wonder about the smarts of people from the past.
Other times I wonder what we've done to our brains that we can take stuff in all blinky now.
Possibly we swapped out the long term storage people used to keep, because we can't memorise epic poems now, or indeed phone numbers, we just use computers to look them up, even tiny ones in our phones.
Living in the future.
Long film is looooong.
And slow. Very, very slow.
It had lots of excellent imagery that I recognise from, like, everything ever since.
The bit where the robot gets a face was cool.
It had one female character and her evil twin doing the virgin/whore dichotomy. With saint imagery and whore of babylon references. And quite a lot of dancing while wearing only tinsel.
Also, while it has all those images where the workers get ate by the machines, it is pretty heavily against doing anything about it. Like, if they stop work, or blow up the machines, all their children die.
The suggested solution is basically wait for an angsty middle class white boy to save you.
*facepalm*
dude falls for a worker girl, does part of one shift of work, and now he's the worker's hero?
Balls.
The city looked cool. It was all very huge and striking images. The robot rocked.
It just... wasn't very good, added together.
Then I watched Dirk Gently, recorded from last week.
... I very swiftly started fast forwarding through it, and then forwarding even faster.
Booooooooored now.
I think Bechdel fail was the only thing those two had in common.
It isn't like the Bechdel test is the be all and end all of textual quality, it's just that failing it correlates pretty strongly with things that will be at best blah.
Metropolis we will be studying in lessons this week.
I mentioned before about 'enthralled by her beauty'. All the films thus far have that in common. Dude is wandering along being evil, or at least capitalist in a conscience free way, and then Enthralled by Her Beauty he blah blah blah, and then quite often there's carrying her around fainted. Nosferatu involved her winning though, that was good. Metropolis was just Wait For A Man To Save You. Like, the city is flooding, the lifts are busted, and she sounds the alarm, but then she stands around next to the alarm surrounded by children. So then men turn up and suggest they use the stairs. She's the one that actually works there, she has to be told to use the stairs? :eyeroll:
I guess if you edit the hell out of Metropolis you'd get a story that was merely annoying rather than deathly slow and annoying. But apparently it used to take ten minutes of children being soaked and splashed and making wah face before the idea that children are in the flooding city is adequately conveyed.
Sometimes I wonder about the smarts of people from the past.
Other times I wonder what we've done to our brains that we can take stuff in all blinky now.
Possibly we swapped out the long term storage people used to keep, because we can't memorise epic poems now, or indeed phone numbers, we just use computers to look them up, even tiny ones in our phones.
Living in the future.