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Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

economist.com

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Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#61

Post by Jtsummers »

LukeShu wrote: post #55
Jtsummers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure there are no spoilers in that first paragraph. In fact, I'm pretty sure most of what's referenced was available in pre-release materials (trailers, press events, and such). I just saw the movie and just read this article, it's less spoilery (in my opinion, not spoilery at all) than listening to coworkers in the lead up to it who were making conjectures based on their knowledge of other Star Wars media…

Pre-release materials are the worst, and often contain awful spoilers. I intentionally avoided them for Star Wars. During the previews when I saw Star Wars, one of the people I went with did his best to ignore the Captain America trailer, because he didn't want it spoiled at all. You watch enough ads/pre-release materials to decide you want to see it, then once you decide to see it, you ignore everything you can.

IMO, outside of thrillers or movies that pretty much rely on a major twist, "spoilers" is nonsense. I'm not going to go around telling the plot of a movie to people (that's a dick move), but if a movie cannot stand on its own even if you've been told the last 5 minutes verbatim (or seen them) before seeing the rest, then the movie is probably not worth watching. And there are very few trailers that are that bad.

Again, I'll except trailers for thrillers and the like, those story structures necessarily depend on twists or slow reveals for their ride to be fun or interesting, and a spoiler can absolutely ruin them. But action movies?

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#62

Post by knughit »

lfowles wrote: post #47
olewhalehunter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not sure that Inside Out was meant to be an accurate depiction of our emotions any more than Finding Nemo is meant as an accurate portrayal of marine ecosystems, or Ratatouille of French cuisine. And yet the first thing to come to many children's minds when shown a clown fish or French cuisine is Nemo and Ratatouille. > I don't think that children watching the movie will really grow up believing they have all th…

> And yet the first thing to come to many children's minds when shown a clown fish or French cuisine is Nemo and Ratatouille. Is that a bad thing?

The Nemo movie created a holocaust of clownfish pets.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#63

Post by olewhalehunter »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #56
olewhalehunter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not sure that Inside Out was meant to be an accurate depiction of our emotions any more than Finding Nemo is meant as an accurate portrayal of marine ecosystems, or Ratatouille of French cuisine. And yet the first thing to come to many children's minds when shown a clown fish or French cuisine is Nemo and Ratatouille. > I don't think that children watching the movie will really grow up believing they have all th…

> I've met people who think the movie helped them "understand themselves better" whether or not that is actually true. What makes you better qualified than them to understand what's happening in their heads?

I'm not, but neither is Disney, what makes Paul Ekman "the best lie detector in the world" if he can't also provide a universal theory of truth?

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#64

Post by lfowles »

knughit wrote: post #62
lfowles wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet the first thing to come to many children's minds when shown a clown fish or French cuisine is Nemo and Ratatouille. Is that a bad thing?

The Nemo movie created a holocaust of clownfish pets.

101 Dalmations also had a effect on the dalmation breed, but does that mean we should stop featuring animals in movies? Should movies have a cultural influence limit before we stop showing them to children? Should we add a lecture before/after the movie on responsible pet ownership?

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#65

Post by olewhalehunter »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #52
olewhalehunter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emotions are so much more complex than our terrible labels for them, and much of your emotional sense of self comes from the language your parents branded you with for the most cultural convenience: '"Anger" is bad! It's your fault in not handling "it", not ours or the systems', but "Anger" in-of-itself doesn't exist outside of language, just the nebulous array of feelings and reactions we've been to coniditoned to l…

If the impression you got was "anger is bad and abstract thought is risky," then I'm not sure what movie you watched, but it definitely wasn't Inside Out. You're mistaken about "anger" being purely a cultural/linguistic construction, and about the authenticity of Inside Out's psychological model in general: the film was inspired by (and admittedly somewhat simplifies) solid psychological research, particularly the wo…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman#Criticisms

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#66

Post by astrange »

weisser wrote: post #16
javery wrote: post #2

This is why I bet they buy Nintendo at some point.

I hope they do. Nintendo has been pretty awful at hardware for a while now but I still love the characters. Rare being bought by Microsoft was very unfortunate, however.

Rare deciding to go for the "casual" market was apparently an internal decision, like Konami's.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/12/rares-management-to-bl...

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#67

Post by PhasmaFelis »

olewhalehunter wrote: post #63
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've met people who think the movie helped them "understand themselves better" whether or not that is actually true. What makes you better qualified than them to understand what's happening in their heads?

I'm not, but neither is Disney, what makes Paul Ekman "the best lie detector in the world" if he can't also provide a universal theory of truth?

What? You said that people think the movie helped them understand themselves better, but that at least some of them are wrong. I'd like to know on what basis you make that judgment. I'm not clear where Paul Ekman enters into that question.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#68

Post by dlp211 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #21
brazzledazzle wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of people are probably going to want to yell at me but I think it needed to be remade. And I say this as a fan. I don't think a non-fan would pour over Star Wars vehicle cross sections. What they did was remake it in the best way possible given their constraints (old diehard fans) and I think it was done smartly and tastefully. Done this way you get new fans without losing a lot of them to appeasing old…

Except for that it wasn't supposed to be a remake, rather this was just a case of everyone involved phoning it in. I think Andrew O'Hehir said it best, "it's the Citibank of movies, literally too big to fail." Right now everyone has been brainwashed into loving it because of Disney's billion-dollar marketing spend. But much like Bush's popularity after 9/11, sooner or later reality is going to catch up. As a kid part…

[STAR WARS: TFA SPOILERS AHEAD] I don't understand how you got to this conclusion. There were more interesting characters and missing backstory in this single movie than in the OT. Characters like Phasma, Maz, the old man that give Poe the map, Poe, Snoke, and the rest of the Knights of Ren. And while there were many parallels between the new movie and the OT, it also introduced and developed a ton of extremely strong new characters, namely Finn, Kylo, Poe, and Rey. My biggest gripes with the new film was Death Star 3.0 and the helo pan at the end, neither of which were really intricate to the story. Also the acting was head and shoulders above any of the previous films and the most impressive thing was how real everything felt, from the Stormtroopers humanization to the land battling and dog fighting.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#69

Post by olewhalehunter »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #67
olewhalehunter wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not, but neither is Disney, what makes Paul Ekman "the best lie detector in the world" if he can't also provide a universal theory of truth?

What? You said that people think the movie helped them understand themselves better, but that at least some of them are wrong. I'd like to know on what basis you make that judgment. I'm not clear where Paul Ekman enters into that question.

My phrasing was "Whether or not that is actually true", but one shouldn't ascribe any psychological authority to anyone, especially those involved in mass media, other than a vicious ability to con people into consuming their tripe.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#70

Post by paulddraper »

beedogs wrote: post #34
tunesmith wrote: post #7

FYI, the first part of the article spoils some minor things about the new star wars film, for those who haven't seen it. I bailed out of reading it after that.

If the name of a single character now counts as a spoiler, I don't think I want to live on this planet anymore.

Could you spoil it for us with the name of the planet you do want to live on?
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