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Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Movie Hype: Black and White Re-Releases, Happy Happy Joy Joy, Bill & Ted Face the Music, Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula Bizarre Talk Show Scene

 


There's a great article from Gizmodo in April going over the strange phenomenon of Black and White Re-Releases. It coincided with the re-release of Parasite in Black and White.

Why Do Movie Fans Love Black and White Re-Releases? goesover the three big movies that started out as modern colored films and for some very strange reasons cam back without color.

What the article tell us is the directors behind Logan Noir, Fury Road: Black & Chrome and Parasite: Didn't Think Of A Cool New Name is that the director's wanted their films to be seen as classics. And in their strange sort of logic thought that the films being black and white brings them to that level.

None of the films were intended to be in black and white by their directors.

 
 
Oddly, social media also plays a factor with fans celebrating the movie with stills from the film showing how good scenes are even without color. 
 
People online praise these posts and directors and studios notice.

Why not release a film again and just take the color out and make more money? We've posted on all these black and white versions as special releases in LA and people came out to see them in that format.

Weird.

So, the reason we have re-releases are:
-Directors want to see their films as classics
-Some people on social media want to see the film in B&W
-People want to look cool and go see the film to be pretentious
or are tricked by media to see it 
-Studios make more money
 
 
Bill & Ted Face the Music & Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula are easily skippable movies. If bored
Bill & Ted is an okay watch, but you can wait till it hits a streaming service and you don't have to pay for the the rental.

 

Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula already has a problem with the name alone. None of the original cast are in it and it doesn't even feel like it's from the same director. Looking into it, he wasn't on writing duty on the first one. Sadly, he is on writing duty for the sequel.

The film is fun for viewing to be made of with friends. That's what we did. We probably couldn't have finished it without them and ourselves constantly making fun of it.

There's this utterly bizarre info dump beginning with a talk show host discussing what happened in the first movie with an unnamed guest that had us cracking jokes for minutes. It's just so jarringly out of place and shows how little the director know what American talk shows are like that you can't stop making fun of it.

Things wrong with the talk show scene:
-flowers on desk 
-big library books behind host
-talking about in depth-news on comedy talk show
-cutting to Aox News( Fox News) footage on talk show, is show on that network?
-Female comedy host on late night talk show
-set looks crummy
-awful English speaker actors
-no explanation of who guest or host is
-what city is the backdrop
-no connection in film why we're watching the talk show

So that and more are prime reasons to bash this movie apart. It's hard to fathom how the director thought this was okay to release after making the first. A CGI mess of car chases, characters you hope die and scenes where I contemplated why no one cleaned up their camps. It's the zombie apocalypse, but you have time to clean.

Oh and seat-belt safety.



Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story
 
This doc takes us back to the creation of Ren & Stimpy which couldn't exist without it's creator John Kricfalusi and that's both good and bad. The doc shows how much John could be a huge jerk, but at the same time he led the way on the cartoon renaissance of the 90's. Then you learn about the uncomfortable relationships he had with underage girls and he becomes an even worse character in a doc mainly about him. The film goes through it all, the creation of the cartoon to John's downfall.

I wouldn't say the directors did an amazing job at keeping the audience entertained. A lot of talking heads, a lot of the same footage or art re-used. There's more clever techniques out there to tell a story and they aren't used here.

If an animation fan, it's also a good look at all the creative people who worked on the show. I wish they shared a timeline of influence or where everyone went when the show ended. All those who worked on it kept creating our childhoods and we easily wouldn't have SpongeBob and others cartoons without it.