One of you is gonna fall and die, and I'm not cleaning it up!

Mal ,'War Stories'


Buffista Movies 5: Development Hell  

A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.


Beverly - Jul 04, 2007 6:21:57 am PDT #9860 of 10001
Days shrink and grow cold, sunlight through leaves is my song. Winter is long.

Bullitt as the gold-standard car chase through San Francisco hills.

Saw Die Hard 4 yesterday. It was fun, about what I'd expected, and I liked it much more than DH2, not as much as the original. Justin Long did a good job sustaining his character (or he was reeeeally well cast). But I may have been thrilled most that Cliff Curtis has a really good role in it, and does a credible US accent. I hope he gets lots more work from this.


DavidS - Jul 04, 2007 6:46:28 am PDT #9861 of 10001
"Look, son, if it's good enough for Shirley Bassey, it's good enough for you."

HBO has a 15 minute First Look at OOTP which you can see here.

Lots of clips interspersed with interviews.


§ ita § - Jul 04, 2007 7:01:03 am PDT #9862 of 10001
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

there was never any debate as to whether people "choose" to be black, as opposed to the debate over gay.

You'd be surprised. Certainly nothing on the scale of homosexuality, but there are huge racial identity kerfuffles.

No need to defer to my interpretation. Chris Claremont (wrote a bunch fo the comics) has said much the same.

I'm not trying to take away the gay interpretation--just that I don't think it's a gay movie any more than it'd be a black movie if you changed nothing but the race of the director.


Scrappy - Jul 04, 2007 7:42:20 am PDT #9863 of 10001
Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

I think The comics were dealing with a racial metaphor but Singer felt it as a gay metaphor and chose the events of the film to go more to that place. The whole bit of the family wanting to keep it a secret and being disgusted directly maps to gay experience and I know Singer was interested because of that and wanted the films to address that.


§ ita § - Jul 04, 2007 7:45:16 am PDT #9864 of 10001
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

Writers of the comic have cited both race and sexual orientation as the mapping. I guess I didn't see enough different from the comics to shift it in one direction or the other. Magneto is no less Malcolm X for having been directed by a gay guy.


Sean K - Jul 04, 2007 7:49:27 am PDT #9865 of 10001
You can't leave me to my own devices; my devices are Nap and Eat. -Zenkitty

If Bryan Singer had been a black gay man, would that have made this discussion more difficult, or less?


erikaj - Jul 04, 2007 9:34:33 am PDT #9866 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!

And of course, I think there are a lot of disability metaphors in the X-Men films as well. We're a shock to our parents, too, after all.


§ ita § - Jul 04, 2007 10:13:09 am PDT #9867 of 10001
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

I'm not sure what you mean by "difficult," Sean.


Sean K - Jul 04, 2007 10:25:08 am PDT #9868 of 10001
You can't leave me to my own devices; my devices are Nap and Eat. -Zenkitty

Just that everybody seemed to be a little possessive of how the X-films mapped to self-identity. I may have read too much into things.


Matt the Bruins fan - Jul 04, 2007 12:45:23 pm PDT #9869 of 10001
"I remember when they eventually introduced that drug kingpin who murdered people and smuggled drugs inside snakes and I was like 'Finally. A normal person.'” —RahvinDragand

Eh, not really. I mean, I noted the parallels as they were happening, but I don't regard either of the Singer X flicks as Important Gay Films like, say, Philadelphia or anything.