Confused Matthew

captainbrass · 2012-01-22 11:27:04

"valuable internet culture"

"important troll history"

Lol. I read ED sometimes, but I wouldn't claim it's anything more valuable than an amusing record of dickery by deranged/idiotic people and 13 year olds, and even that's marred by the gratuitous racism and general offensiveness that the editors think is funny.

Myrmidon · 2012-01-22 17:09:12

Thank you for pointing out that thing about emotions vs. logic.

I should have noted that we still need emotions anyway. Not just because you'd be denying yourself a part of the movie, but because we wouldn't be as "human" without them.

A world without emotions, would be a cold and cruel place, and if you think that this world is already cold and cruel... Well, you should really think about how cruel a world without emotions is. In fact, part of the reason this world is so cold and cruel, is because of a lack of emotions.

Let's go back to Aristotle in views on playwrighting, which contrasted Plato, because Plato did not believe in theater or any kind of fiction. "No lies in my perfect world!" says Plato.

Aristotle believed that art and theater should mimic life as closely as possible. Which, of course, rules out all fantasy, and any science fiction that doesn't rate a 10 on the mohs scale of hardness.

However, the point of playwrighting, as Aristotle dictated, was to make the audience experience a catharsis. All so that they feel emotions. However there is a balance you see? It must be completely real so that the emotions felt are genuine.

Now of course, we have willing suspension of disbelief in regards to things in fiction that don't match up with the laws of our world. Such as "visible lasers and 180 degree turns and sounds in space" and "fire breathing monsters." Indeed everyone has a varying scale of it. For those that accept such nonsense have the good excuse that the fictional world has different laws from us. But if there is a movie that breaks its own established rules that tries to get emotion out of you, it is not being genuine and it can be argued that the writer is treating you like a dog, a sucker that way.

So you see, emotion is important to us, but it is also a weakness. Emotions make us weak, yet we need them otherwise we are monsters without them. Yet, emotions make us vulnerable to emotionless monsters, so we need to hide our emotions and build upon our logic to combat such monsters, yet we still need to retain our emotions.

"With films like Disaster Movie and Baby Geniuses 2, you "know" what you are getting into... But a film like this lies to you."- Matthew, on Minority Report

Note that Matthew's main complaint on Minority Report is that "it lies to you." He made a point on how Minority Report breaks so much willing suspension of disbelief. There are so many points in the film where the character is given the idiot ball, so many points where outcomes are illogical in regards to the situation, that whatever emotions that the movie was trying to get from the audience, it got with dishonesty. Yet people took Minority Report as a brilliant work of science fiction.

The same can be applied to the other films.

The Lion King dramatized the death of Mufasa to make us overlook and forget about Simba's misdeeds, and more importantly, the first half of the film. And the whole fun Haakuna Matata song was made to distract us from what Timon and Pumbaa are doing to Simba, which is corrupting him. When Simba grew up, he was practically a new character with nothing to write about, a blank slate. Yet, we are supposed to feel the romance between him and Nala during the song "Can You Feel The Love Tonight". If the Oscars are to be trusted, we fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.

The over abundance of special FX and epic space battles in the Star Wars prequels distract us enough to sit through all three of them. And the hopes everyone had of "it'll get better" led to the praise the third one got... Even so it was just as bad as the first two.

The fights in the Matrix distract us enough to sit through them as well. The pseudo-philisophical speak confuses us enough to let it pass until a philosophy major like Matthew corrects us. In addition, awesomeness of a giant mech wielding two gattling guns is "cool" enough to make sheep-like audiences forget that such a weapon would be totally impractical in that situation.

The animation and soundtrack in Spirited Away was apparently good enough to make us forget that zero character development was being made and that the process of story writing was thrown out the window. Yet we cried, and felt emotion. But those emotions were not genuine because "what" were we crying about? Well,we were sad, because the music was sad. That's my guess.

See a pattern here? It is a pattern of dishonesty.

To give an example of a scene that brings out genuine emotions, I'm going to bring up a scene from Watchmen. Namely, Rorschach's psychoanalysis from chapter VI.

Now Rorschach, is a well written character. He has a personality. Not a pleasant one, but a personality non the less. Basically, he is an angry, beige prose speaking, resourceful, violent, asexual, misanthropic, ultra nationalistic Objectivist who doesn't like taking the easy road.

The characterization does not stop there. We learn about Rorschach's entire life during his psychoanalysis. We learn the origin of every single aspect of his identity. Like the fact that he was a bastard child of a whore who admitted to regretting having him right in his face. We learn about his fear of sex and his need to cover up. We learn how his mask was originally a piece of dress that was intended for Kitty Genovese, the subject of a real life murder case. We learn his need to always be in action because he was disgusted by how every one in the apartment buildings "watched and did nothing", a theme in the book that is played about. We learn that he wears the mask, because he is disgusted to be human being. Then we learn about his breaking point... The Blair Roche case, in where his self loathing, his misanthropy, and his call to action, culminated to such an all time high, it changed him into the faceless terror that devotes every second of his life to prowling the streets, and stalking and torturing criminals. Now, you see how that works? There was not a single jump to anything in regards to personality. Nothing in that chapter was there to distract you into the emotions it was aiming for. The emotions came naturally.

Now knightofthecolossus, on your request.

Matthew does do requests... but only for 25 dollars because it keeps the site running and it pays for the movie in question. He isn't accepting requests right now at the moment because he already has a bunch of them to do, and he wants to get bunch of them done before he accepts any more requests. And this will be a long time because like I said, he is a slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow updater.

Spice and Wolf doesn't seem like a bad choice...

Personally I'd suggest "Serial Experiments Lain" or "Millenium Actress". Both are praised for their "intellect", but I do wonder if they really are as good as people say they are, or just obscurantist trash. I might need to watch Millenium Actress a second time, I did not quite follow it the first time. I don't think my choices are any better, but if he proves them obscurantist, it will still be fun, nonetheless to see him nerdrage on obscurantism!

DYRE · 2012-01-22 17:14:22

Both are praised for their "intellect", but I do wonder if they really are as good as people say they are, or just obscurantist trash.

This line amuses me a lot. It's like this person is aware that he doesn't really have any thoughts of his own and needs Confused Matthew to tell him what to think.

mathias · 2012-01-23 03:44:51

I don't really like Confused Matthew, not necessarily because he dislikes critically acclaimed movies, but because his arguments generally suck. I mean, doing a serious review of 2001 where all the criticism can basically be boiled down to "it's boring and I don't get it" doesn't do favours for your intellectual integrity.

Personally I'd suggest "Serial Experiments Lain" or "Millenium Actress". Both are praised for their "intellect", but I do wonder if they really are as good as people say they are, or just obscurantist trash. I might need to watch Millenium Actress a second time, I did not quite follow it the first time. I don't think my choices are any better, but if he proves them obscurantist, it will still be fun, nonetheless to see him nerdrage on obscurantism!

Stop using the word obscurantism, goddamnit. Now, I don't necessarily disagree with the point, some movies do just throw a bunch of obscure references at you, without making any internal sense, but you can't dismiss every movie you don't understand as simply being this. Also, Millennium Actress, really? If he couldn't follow that movie, it's no wonder he is so willing to eat up confused Matthew's opinions, he is apparently incapable of following any movie that doesn't have a completely straight-forward narrative. Seriously, the actual story of Millennium Actress is simple and straight-forward, it's just that it's told in an unconventional way. Understanding it is not hard - at all. If he wanted to do a Kon movie, Paprika would be a better candidate. Not that I necessarily agree, but I can see where he would be coming from and Paprika is, in my opinion, Kon's weakest movie.

Hell, I even agree that Miyazaki is somewhat overrated, but even then his criticisms of Spirited Away were pretty nonsensical.

It's kind of scary, but also very sad that the guy Myrmidon is quoting is letting Matthew completely dictate his opinions on everything and seem to be taking said opinions as the god, sorry Matthew-given truth about cinema, where anyone who argues against it simply has yet to see the light.

Nova · 2012-01-23 04:02:22

His problem was that he thought the movie was too dark and unpleasant and, in his words, cynical,

what

Legionnaire · 2012-01-23 04:08:06

Now pussies, they get fucked and shitted on all the time by assholes and dicks

Ewwwwwwww.

Anyway. This

"Matthew gives a simple reason for his detesting of anime. "It's stupid, it's stupid. I hate it I hate it." Which is not far off."

, whilst it doesn't make me ignore a person's opinions outright, certainly reduces the weight behind them, and basically led to me semi-skimming (read as: glancing at them as I scrolled passed them) everything quoted, because I'm both a lazy sod and, after that, certainly doubt I'll be very much swayed by anything he has to say.