Arguably it matters to distinguish content from art. I’ve never left the theater after a franchise movie feeling thoughtful or changed in some way.
There’s also nothing wrong with entertainment for its own sake. Sometimes you want to watch a spectacle that has no deeper value because it doesn’t need to be weighted down.
If there’s any criticism of marvel movies it’s that they display absolute unswerving fealty to the status quo and their writing suffers for having good villains occasionally blow up orphanages so the audience doesn’t think.
Citizen Kane is arguably art — some say it’s the best movie ever made. I think that’s a bit of a stretch, but it was good. I’m still torn on whether they should have revealed the MacGuffin at the end. But that didn’t change me, either.
I don’t really know that any movie has changed me, per se. But I think Wolf Children — a foreign film, an animated film at that, and an anime film (so, it’s gotta be “for kids” to guys like Scorsese) — has the potential to change people more than Citizen Kane does. It’s a love letter to single moms, and I mean that quite literally with no sarcasm. It’s about a young mother who is raising two special-needs children. Because it’s a sort of fable, the “special needs” is that they’re werewolves, but that also means it can be any special need an audience member chooses to insert. You could say it’s neurodivergence, though the film never attempts to do so. It leans 100% into the werewolf lore, or its own take on it (or maybe Japan’s, I’m not sure). One child wants to live as a wolf, the other, as a human. So they seek out what it means to be either one and find their place in the world, while their mother is basically forced to move the family out to the country when she finds city life with a pair of werewolf cubs impossible. While it is a fantasy film, an anime film, a cartoon, and a fable, it also highlights the real struggle real single mothers go through every day. That’s something a lot more people can relate to — either as mothers themselves, or as someone who has a mother, or whose sibling or friend is a mother. I mean, as opposed to Orson Welles’ take on Howard Hughes. This guy was basically Caesar — TF do we care about his problems? Because of what the MacGuffin reveal in the final scene tells us about him? Now he’s just like any of us? Nah. Good movie though, especially for its age. And clever, too. But if it’s art, it feels like art for art’s sake, and that rings about as hollow to me as a superhero movie that knows exactly what it is — and what it is not. And I can name a few animated films I think are better than either. Wolf Children isn’t even my favourite, it’s just an easy pick for the sake of argument.
Arguably it matters to distinguish content from art. I’ve never left the theater after a franchise movie feeling thoughtful or changed in some way.
that has probably happened for people with some of the old star trek movies or that one animated batman movie in the 90s. maybe Blade was the last one.
A movie can be rad as fuck and still have artistic merit, they’re not all Wavelength (1967). I feel a need to distinguish modern franchise films separate from most other movies because they’re made by committee, slapped together in post, with the actual workers producing it reduced to cogs in the machine. If Disney could get away with it they’d be making the actors CGI as well, and every director that’s worked on a marvel movie has said that it’s a constant battle against the executives, who decided two years before the script was written which characters would punch which other characters in order to sell toys.
Arguably it matters to distinguish content from art. I’ve never left the theater after a franchise movie feeling thoughtful or changed in some way.
There’s also nothing wrong with entertainment for its own sake. Sometimes you want to watch a spectacle that has no deeper value because it doesn’t need to be weighted down.
If there’s any criticism of marvel movies it’s that they display absolute unswerving fealty to the status quo and their writing suffers for having good villains occasionally blow up orphanages so the audience doesn’t think.
Citizen Kane is arguably art — some say it’s the best movie ever made. I think that’s a bit of a stretch, but it was good. I’m still torn on whether they should have revealed the MacGuffin at the end. But that didn’t change me, either.
I don’t really know that any movie has changed me, per se. But I think Wolf Children — a foreign film, an animated film at that, and an anime film (so, it’s gotta be “for kids” to guys like Scorsese) — has the potential to change people more than Citizen Kane does. It’s a love letter to single moms, and I mean that quite literally with no sarcasm. It’s about a young mother who is raising two special-needs children. Because it’s a sort of fable, the “special needs” is that they’re werewolves, but that also means it can be any special need an audience member chooses to insert. You could say it’s neurodivergence, though the film never attempts to do so. It leans 100% into the werewolf lore, or its own take on it (or maybe Japan’s, I’m not sure). One child wants to live as a wolf, the other, as a human. So they seek out what it means to be either one and find their place in the world, while their mother is basically forced to move the family out to the country when she finds city life with a pair of werewolf cubs impossible. While it is a fantasy film, an anime film, a cartoon, and a fable, it also highlights the real struggle real single mothers go through every day. That’s something a lot more people can relate to — either as mothers themselves, or as someone who has a mother, or whose sibling or friend is a mother. I mean, as opposed to Orson Welles’ take on Howard Hughes. This guy was basically Caesar — TF do we care about his problems? Because of what the MacGuffin reveal in the final scene tells us about him? Now he’s just like any of us? Nah. Good movie though, especially for its age. And clever, too. But if it’s art, it feels like art for art’s sake, and that rings about as hollow to me as a superhero movie that knows exactly what it is — and what it is not. And I can name a few animated films I think are better than either. Wolf Children isn’t even my favourite, it’s just an easy pick for the sake of argument.
that has probably happened for people with some of the old star trek movies or that one animated batman movie in the 90s. maybe Blade was the last one.
A movie can be rad as fuck and still have artistic merit, they’re not all Wavelength (1967). I feel a need to distinguish modern franchise films separate from most other movies because they’re made by committee, slapped together in post, with the actual workers producing it reduced to cogs in the machine. If Disney could get away with it they’d be making the actors CGI as well, and every director that’s worked on a marvel movie has said that it’s a constant battle against the executives, who decided two years before the script was written which characters would punch which other characters in order to sell toys.