On lots of stuff

[thebruce0]

Shutterfly
Srsly, sign up for Shutterfly. They have occasional promotions where you can either redeem or earn free prints. 20-40 prints a couple times a year, imo, is a great deal :D Got my next batch of free Shutterfly prints to put up in my little office cubicle.

CakeDoes PC-Cola (basically no-name coke) and microwavable chocolate cake mix sound

Comments

[coffeejedi]

I really liked the movie, and I agree with you on the gratuitous violence actually. Some of it was necessary to show the brutality of violence, but some was just Snyder going over the top needlessly, which annoyed me because I felt it distracted from the message.

I suppose that the graphicness of the gore was designed to provoke a certain mindset in the audience. A certain uneasiness mixed with a visceral reaction. It kept you on your toes because you were never quite sure how any given scene was going to end up, and you had to constantly mentally prepare yourself for seeing something horrible. That unease could be a way to convey the uncertainty of the characters' situation, never knowing when the first nuke would drop. That's certainly present in the graphic novel, though more through dialogue and background details like newspapers and TV reports.

[thebruce0]

Exactly. And I think good arguments could be either way about what, out of all that, was really necessary to see. Some still firmly believe that making something visual takes away from the impact where the mind would otherwise fill in the detail. But then you don't have the visual shock of seeing something you don't expect to see. I think the boundary between those two styles is a matter of ethics and/or morals. They're just different kinds of shock value. The former is more mental, more imaginative, more viewer created, but harder to achieve the same level of shock. The latter is quicker, more abrupt, immediate, blunt, more controlled. Unbiased, I'm torn, and it could be argued either way.

But I have to admit that I'd rather not see gratuitous content, or rather, I'd rather directors opt for implied content, rather than visual content. Not just on the grounds of not wanting to see things, but mainly because I prefer to think about things, visualize for myself, analyze, dig into the effect of an event, rather than the shock value of

[vortech]

Part of the message was critique on the concept of a super hero film (as the novel was a critique on the super hero comics). The violence was fully necessary, because that's what would really happen when a highly trained or super powered person beats up a mugger. I mean, what would really happen to someone's face when the man of steel, or batman punches it? It's not a reddening and a welt. And the reality of the brutality of heroes is also important for understanding the Law (I want to say Keene act, but I know that's the wrong one) as a normal response. The Incredibles mocked the banning of heroes as a function of a litigious society, but there is something inherently dangerous about a top-down class based vigilante system. This is not a work of happy endings and actions free of consequence. A major theme of the novel is that every act of trying to do good comes with bad consequences, and the more broad the scale when you try, the worse the bad, disproportionately

[thebruce0]

I think the question I'm raising is not the importance of the concept, but rather the method of its portrayal. Is it really necessary to visually barrage the viewer with no-holds-barred gruesome content to get the point across

[vortech]

I don;t really understand how you can imply something like that. I especially don't understand the critique of super realism if the whole point was to show the realistic outcome of accepted "toned down" superhero flicks. I mean the whole point of a visual medium is to show things. if the work is going to shy away from representing the things that happen it may as well be in a different medium.

I think most people are complaining about how the sex scene was ridiculously composed or how it's missing the symbolism of the book, not that they saw boobies.