Simon Pegg Has A Lot To Say These Days

[Gorn Captain]

I certainly don't feel movies should be shallow. People dying is something we should acknowledge, even in a blockbuster movie.
Just recently, I saw a movie (was it Die hard 4?) where a fighter pilot ejects over a city. He parachutes to safety, his plane crashes on top of houses. It seems as you are expected to go "good, he got out safely!", but the movie never stops to reflect on the fact that people were probably killed down there.
I felt they could have handled it differently. Let the fighter crash in the desert or in the ocean.

It all comes down to: how realistic should a film fantasy be?
How far do you take the violence and mayhem?

Makes me think of Dexter. You "root" for someone who is a killer himself. And at times, he has mistakenly killed innocent people.
What are we supposed to do?
Go "ooops, sorry bout that!"?
"Well, he killed that guy who was innocent, but the rest were scum, so it's ok then?"

I feel we live in very confusing times...

[spacecaps]

I thought the thing he said about the new Trek movies being like an Indie band that you like and sudden'y they go mainstream was a perfect analogy for the new Star Trek films. For year Star Trek movies were tailored to a very specific audience. They were stiff and boring, steeped in nerd culture, and gave a wink and a nod to things only the most die-hard of fans would get. Now they're mainstream. Just like when the Indie band that only you know about gets popular, you don't start to hate them because they suddenly suck, you hate them cause everyone knows them. For a fringe Trek fan it's no big deal but for someone that's watched every single incarnation of Star Trek, they've sold out.

[ctc]

>There's enough horror, death, and destruction on the news and in real life robbing our children of their innocence.

But not everything needs to be kid friendly. I'm 42, it's okay if I watch something violent. I can also handle the collateral consequences of violence. Hell; I'm old enough that I EXPECT them, knowing that mass damage causes mass casualties. That's what bugs me about the issue; not that kids need to be exposed to such things (maybe.... see my next point....) but that ignoring them applies arbitrary limits to stories. That it bothers me that EVERYTHING gets watered down so much for the coveted PG rating; and in doing so it makes a lot of stories irredemably shallow.

>Even characters like Batman are routinely slammed into brick walls so hard they leave body imprints, yet they simply get up and continue fighting.

Which leads to the idea of consequence. For kid stuff, should there be some kind of ramification of the violence? Wouldn't it be a valuable lesson for the kids if the saw folks getting hurt. Or killed? Wouldn't that reinforce the notion that violence is bad? (I'm always reminded of Roy Fokker when this argument comes up.) But that goes with my earlier point; sometimes you NEED to scare or disturb the audience. We've sanitized the whole process, taken the danger out of it so that any actual downside to violence is removed.

>MOS could have been helped simply by some voice over of a news reporter saying that most of Metropolis was a ghost town due to the battle or something like that.
>Let the fighter crash in the desert or in the ocean.

Like that. Not that taking the easy out is INHERENTLY wrong, but we've come to the point where EVERY story does this. THAT'S the problem. And folks get so climatized to it that if you DO show the downside the audience loses their minds. You've ruined their fun. And THAT goes with the idea that our entertainment never REALLY challenges us, at all.... which is bad considering how much time people spend engaged with their entertainment. We're never encouraged to look beyond what's right in front of our faces. We're never challenged to see things a little differently. We're never asked to consider another philosophy.

>Kids simply did not walk into schools and kill people 30 years ago.

Yeah they did:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Ann_Spencer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

From the second article:

>The mid to late 1970s is considered the second most violent period in U.S. school history.

Weren't those "the good ol' days?"

This one caught my eye:

>There are very seldom reports of mass or multiple school shootings during the first three decades of the 20th Century, with the three most violent attacks on schools involving either arson or explosions.

This one too:

>This boy lost his life through the too common habit among boys of carrying deadly weapons. We do not know that this habit can be broken up. We do not know that school teachers have the right, or would exercise it if they had, of searching the pockets of their pupils, but it seems almost a necessity that some such rule be enforced.

....from an 1874 newspaper article.

>Makes me think of Dexter. You "root" for someone who is a killer himself. And at times, he has mistakenly killed innocent people.
>What are we supposed to do?

See.... it's okay to disagree with the characters in a story. Even the protagonist. Sometimes that's the point of the story. But we've grown so used to taking everything at face value that the concept seems somehow unnatural.

Don C.

[Werewolf]

There's enough horror, death, and destruction on the news and in real life robbing our children of their innocence. Comics and superheroes don't need to do it also.

I think one of the problems is the frat boy mentality that has taken over nerd culture. You have 20 to 30 something people stuck in a perpetual state of exaggerated late adolescence. They have lost the innocence and wonder of childhood but have not gained the wisdom and maturity of adulthood. So we end up with hyper violent and sexualized super hero comics and video games catering to the same group of people over and over. Self entitled, angry adult fan boys devoid of empathy that give death threats over movie casting.

[B-Lister]

I loved both movies too but Pegg is still absolutely correct in what he said. I thought the same things watching MOS, about the buildings coming down and the lack of mention that 10's of thousands of people just died

Because they DIDN'T.

Unless the narrative explicitly stated there was a huge loss of life, there was no huge loss of life.

[ctc]

>You have 20 to 30 something people stuck in a perpetual state of exaggerated late adolescence. They have lost the innocence and wonder of childhood but have not gained the wisdom and maturity of adulthood.

Y'know.... I think you're hitting on the deeper problem.... although I'd extend that age bracket into the 40's. It's that sense of entitlement; and it comes from never having had to question anything. You get so used to being completely pandered to that as soon as ANYTHING goes awry folks lose their minds. People can't accept that maybe sometimes things aren't going to play out how you expect, or want them to. And I suspect a lot of that comes from what I've been rallying against: entertainment that doesn't challenge. We're not used to the game changing, we're not used to genuinely unexpected outcomes, so we get all huffy when they come. (And yeah; make threats against actors, writers, artists....)

>So we end up with hyper violent and sexualized super hero comics and video games catering to the same group of people over and over.

I think this is wherw we disagree a bit. I don't think the problem is the hyper violence and sexualization so much as it's weaseling around them. The violence thing is a good example; there's a desire to slap as much mayhem as possible into the story, while minimalizing any consequence. All the titilation, none of the guilt. To me, THAT'S the problem. There SHOULD be some sort of consequence to negative actions. Not only does it make for a more fulfiling story, it instils the moral that fights are bad. Without the consequence, there's no moral.

>Unless the narrative explicitly stated there was a huge loss of life, there was no huge loss of life.

And that's absolutely true. A comic character exists only within the comic, a movie character on the screen. (Which is why I get a giggle out of Batman wetting himelf.) But that's why, back in the day folks would outgrow things like superhero comics. As you get older you learn how things work, and it gets tougher to accept things like half a city getting wrecked and nobody getting hurt, or ten guys with machine guns not being able to hit a guy in a Bat suit ten feet in front of them, or any kind of economy being possible in a world where every second scientist routinely bends the laws of physics and giant mutants routinely smash the financial district. If you could overlook that and enjoy the stories then more power to you. But if not, you'd move on to something else.

Don C.

[B-Lister]

The problem is that it wasn't addressed, therefore leading people to speculate and consider that speculation true.

We don't know that thousands died, or that the city was abandoned. All we know is what we saw, which was a colossal amount of property damage.

[Klosterheim]

Watchmen had real hero moments.

Night Owl helped save people from a burning building.

Even gave 'em a nice cup of coffee once they were safe.