Accountability in Entertainment • Page 377

GASP. NO.

 

Yeah, Dawn of the Dead (OG) is maybe my favorite horror movie of all-time and it's honestly unreal that he made a remake that comes close to doing it justice. One of the best remakes ever.

 

I mean, he can still be a good person to his cast and staff and be a weirdo Libertarian/bad director. On the flipside, Whedon was a social justice lib and turned out he was a terrible person.

 

Sure, my point is that I would rather someone have weird politics and be a generally good person than have performative politics and be fucking horrible. (I also don't think he's a bad director, but that's another discussion.)

 

A persons' politics is inevitably going to influence the art they make. Snyder's films are bad partly because of his politics.

 

Thought this said “librarian” and sadly the sentence would still likely make sense lol

 

I don’t think he’s a libertarian, though, lol. I think he just has incoherent politics, like a lot of Americans.

 

His politics involves a lot of slow motion?

 

Lol, y’all on one. I’m gonna watch Dawn remake now.

 

No but like, I saw books at the store written by Scott Snyder and thought the director was doing comics

 

Not sure what his politics are but he seems to be down to earth and level-headed, at least compared to others in the industry.

Dawn of the Dead, Watchmen, and Man of Steel still slap. Hope he has success but I don’t know if I’ll watch any of his upcoming films.

 

Dawn of the Dead is fine. Let’s just say I think he profoundly misunderstood both Watchmen and Superman.

 

I don't have an opinion on Superman and this probably isn't the thread to discuss Watchmen, but I think he chose to create the least political version of a very political comic, which may already signal failure to some, but considering how heavy-handed the TV series was, I personally prefer the very human story he told as opposed to an adaptation that puts politics ahead of the story

 

Maybe if there wasn’t basically a storyboard to work from that is so much better in pretty much every way than the movie I could see watchmen the film in a different light. But as it stands it sucks for me

 

I read Watchmen way before I saw the film and what struck me was it felt like it was trying to mimic the comic way too much panel by panel, with the exception of the plot by Ozymandias being changed. But I actually thought that change worked better.

 

In what ways did you find HBO Watchmen heavyhanded?

 

I simply think there are better resolutions to the Cold War than killing a ton of people in populous cities. I haven’t seen the movie since it was in theatres but my main takeaway then was that they didn’t have to do that.

 

Well I think part of the point of the comic and the film is that Ozymandias' plan was always short-sighted and doomed to failure.

 

Not gonna quote because again, not the place, but the film looking like a comic book is feature to me, not a bug, and I am okay with the changes made w/r/t the ending because the ending of the comics feels borderline unfilmmable, especially at that time.

There's a line about the streets being filled with liberal tears in like the first 15 minutes of the first episode

 

More on topic to “accountability,” I do sincerely wish that people who don’t like Zack Snyder would stop pretending he’s distinctly conservative and reactionary. It always reeks of the online tendency to link one’s tastes in entertainment to their morality. I don’t think he has good politics, but I don’t think much of the country does, and especially not fucking Hollywood, lol.

He called out the “comics gate” Geeks & Gamers bigots to their faces. He fought to keep his Justice League inclusive. He has a nonbinary actor playing a nonbinary character in Rebel Moon and hired a vocally left-leaning trans woman to write the tie-in comic. Instead of being silent (he’s not exactly active on Twitter), he endorsed Biden (who, yes, is garbage) over Trump. He’s at minimum as American-“liberal” as people like Kevin Feige, which ain’t a great bar, lol, but those people never get the “conservative” talk Snyder does.

The biggest thing people point to is his weird interest in the Fountainhead, but like… there are conservatives who love Rage Against the Machine and leftists who love the Punisher. There’s also the racial coding of 300, but people like Chris Claremont, Alan Moore, and Grant Morrison have also gotten tropey in shitty ways. Lord of the Rings certainly has very bad racial coding.

I’m a proponent of calling out the problems in various works and what they say, intentionally or unintentionally. And obviously of deplatforming actual shitheads. But, I hate the weird ass moralizing of taste that online-ness cultivates.

 

Thank you, this is what I was trying to say better than I ever could have worded it. I don't think he deserves a cookie for doing the bare minimum and I do think his work is as worthy of criticism as anyone else's. I just tend to see it criticized more for bad faith reasons. And I do feel it is good to acknowledge when someone is actively lending a positive presence to the industry considering how much we only see horrible behavior in threads like these.

 

This is all fair.