I meant to jump back in sooner, but I knew it was going to take a while to gather my thoughts, which meant putting it off until Sunday. 

First off, regarding The Little Mermaid as an anti-feminist work, I've heard this argument many, many times. I disagree heartily with the idea that it's anti-feminist and don't see it as problematic. Without straying too far into strawman territory, the primary complaint usually I usually hear is about how Ariel "gives up everything for a man," which seems to me an inaccurate and reductivist reading of the story. Personally, I think Ariel's motivations are fairly complex for a 90 minute kids' movie. For one thing, Ariel never directly says, "I'm doing this for love of Eric!" It's implied, and Ursula, Flotsam, and Jetsam use it as the primary focus of the argument to convince her, but she never echoes their point. And once she becomes human, a great deal of time is spent focused on Ariel enjoying the human world in addition to her efforts to woo Eric. There's also the fact that two women are driving the action in film in which two men are the prize, which is just brilliant.

This is a big point for me. I'm not willing to judge a story with a female protagonist by standards well above and beyond those by which I would judge a male-driven story. I mean, honestly, when was the last time you heard someone complain about the lengths to which Aladdin goes to win over Jasmine? Movies have a limited time to get you from point A to point B, and that often means a lot of tropes are employed to move the narrative along swiftly, including the idea of love at first sight. This works very well for children (I've had plenty of kids tell me that they love me by the end of a 50 minute English class), but may stretch credulity with an older audience.

Now for my part, the complaints against The Little Mermaid have largely come from other women, and I don't typically see a lot of men adopting feminist language to disparage its quality. Bathilda is so right to acknowledge that this forum really is very different when it comes to the nature and quality of the conversation. More often than not, though,  feminist issues in "mainstream" media are largely overlooked, and media for women and girls just isn't taken seriously at all.  I've long been a big fan of romance novels and the sort of paranormal young adult stuff of which Twilight is a part, and I don't remember any of this sort of talk when I was a kid. That may be because, as redxavier points out, kids often take away a different message than their parents. And as much as she hated them, my mother has never asked my why I like romance novels so much, nor bothered to read one herself.

I never finished reading Twilight because it's a very poorly written book. But I have read a lot of poorly written paranormal romance, and I don't think it's a particularly egregious example. I actually got much farther into Twilight than I did The Da Vinci Code or that ridiculous POS Eragon. Much like claims that violent video games turn kids into murderous psychopaths, overall, I think questions of Twilight's manifest evil are greatly exaggerated. Would I prefer that a better book had gotten all of that acclaim? Hell yes! But I promise you, regardless of its dubious quality, there are very few young fans out there planning their future romantic exploits based on the scrawlings of Stephanie Meyers.

With regards to the male point-of-view in a feminist dialogue, I'd probably require a more rigorous argument from a guy, but I like to think I'm willing to listen to all perspectives. Same with race. Prove that you know your stuff, and we'll see where the conversation takes us.

I'm not sure if I can agree that any of these are problems.

I can see a version of the story in which Mulan exists in a world where there were female warriors, but defying  social norms is a major theme of the movie. You'd basically have to rewrite the whole first act.

"I'll Make A Man Out of You" is pretty much a textbook example of dramatic irony. Shang sings passionately about turning his troops into "Men," but the first and most successful of them is a woman.

And Mulan's entire motivation for going to war in the first place was to save her father. There's no way the movie could've ended without resolving that through-line by having her return home.

No it's not.

As I said, I couldn't read her blog post. It wouldn't load for some reason.

But, he clearly says,

He then accuses her of the same thing and provides a ton of shoddy evidence to support his argument. And I say his evidence is shoddy because he qualifies it by saying that the numbers are basically bullshit and everything is based on perception anyway. So, if that's the case, why bring out the numbers in the first place? Because that makes his argument sound less emotional than hers, even though it isn't.

The expectation is that the high-status woman is going to "throw everything away" for the love of her low-status guy. Rarely do you see a movie or tv show where the man's position is elevated due to his involvement with a high-status woman unless he's depicted as sniveling, weak, or villainous. A heroic male lead isn't going to rely on the female lead's position to gain any advantages. But it's perfectly acceptable for a female lead to be won over by a high-status male and enjoy the privileges of his position.

The Action Girl who comes to the rescue of her helpless male love interest is a very common trope in anime. Unfortunately, it tends to happen in shows in which the male character is the lead, and therefore the male character's needs become the primary motivator for much of her badassery. Just as likely, prioritizing his needs directly leads to her sacrificing her own goals. Unless, of course, her skills were developed specifically to meet his needs, which is also common.

I've never thought there was any magical realism in this show, but dream logic, sure. That's part of what makes this a psychological thriller. This is a show about occupying and manipulating other people's head space. I get it, and I love it.

But it's also a procedural crime drama set in the real world; not everybody should be sleeping.

I get that this season was focused on a fantastical battle of wills between Will and Hannibal, but I wanted there to be more of a contrast between that and reality, which is what I liked about season one. That contrast gets removed in S2E4, and that's pretty much the last we ever see of it. So for me, the show just wasn't as interesting, despite the fact that it was still successful.

I've walked back on the Kill Bill films and Cloud Atlas, and in both cases it was because of an online movie reviewer. I didn't walk them back very far, but I'm significantly less annoyed with them than I was initially.

Count me in as one of those people, except that Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of my favorite movies. I have a lot of friends who  like Anderson, so I'd grudgingly watched all of his prior films, usually without managing to even crack a smile. I get what's supposed to be funny, but I end up hating the characters, and it ends up being a drag to get through. I only watched Fantastic Mr. Fox because is was stop-motion animation, and I went in with very low expectations. Instead, I found the whole thing delightful. Nothing's really different about it; the humor is all the same, the narrative style, and it's got the same A-list Hollywood cast, but for the first time in a Wes Anderson film, they actually seem like real people, even though, you know, they're animals.

I don't think it's often used that way, though, and the site lists a lot of text reviews that don't apply any sort of numerical rating system and/or are ambiguous.

Like, one of the reviewers employs a traffic signal gimmick: red, don't see it, green, definitely see it, yellow, caution. He gave Transcendence a mixed green and yellow score, but was also pretty hard on the movie in his text review. RT interpreted this as "rotten."

I've found quite a few mistakes on Rotten Tomatoes: reviews that were said to be "fresh" that were actually pretty unambiguously negative, and vice-versa; so I usually end up reading a few of the reviews to see if they actually line up with what RT said of them, which, of course, completely defeats the point of having the aggregate score. In fact, reading some of the Transcendence reviews shows that a lot more of the reviewers were on the fence about the movie than that 18% score implies.

Jane Eyre - 7 / 10

This is not a bad movie, but I fall in the camp that thinks Fukunaga/Buffini didn't do enough to make this adaptation worthwhile. It is a very pretty film. The landscape looks suitably cold and bleak. They even managed to make Mia Wasikowska into a convincing Jane. The beginning is strong; a cold open with Jane dragging herself across the moors in the pouring rain before she is saved just in time by kindly strangers. But the time Jane spends at Thornfield Hall is really kinda dull. It's supposed to be an intense, suspenseful, Gothic romance, and I found it to be lacking in tension, little worth calling suspense, and a half-hearted romance. It picks up again once we hit the third act, but it's such a shame that what should be the best part is so damned boring.

10 / 10

After the King's Speech discussion above, I decided to check out some other Oscar-nominated films from various categories for that year, which led me to Biutiful. I have a lot of love for this one and was genuinely surprised that it's Rotten Tomatoes score was only in the mid-60s. I was also very glad to see Javier Bardem in this movie, because I hate No Country for Old Men but really wanted to see him in something I could like. This movie feels tailor-made for me, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

5.5 / 10

I thought about giving this one at least a 6, but that would imply that I might watch this movie again sometime, and that is highly unlikely. I thought Natalie Portman's character was really dull, and even though her life was supposed to be spiraling out of control, she never got any more interesting. I kept waiting for her to get more interesting, but it just never happened; and there were all these questions in my head that the film just wasn't interested in answering.

Because I have a lot of friends who are ballet dancers, the controversies over dance doubles and the portrayal of the ballet world proved a lot more interesting. I know that Portman worked her butt off training for this film, but the fact that she's not actually a dancer meant that the camera is always very tightly framed. It was always arm work or leg work, but rarely both, in a way that felt incredibly artificial and claustrophobic but failed to lend any menace to this supposed thriller.