Recently released films

[jack]

Stupidest title and tagline

The Unborn. "It wants to be born"

Content warning so stupid its actually physically painful:

The runner up was "Contains one use of strong language and moderate sex references", which was originally going to win the "stupidest content warning" category, on account of making me laugh out loud. That was a British content warning. Then I read an American content warning.

"Rated R for frenetic strong bloody violence throughout, crude and graphic sexual content, nudity and pervasive language.

OK, so being specific in warnings could be a helpful concept, but it just sounds, you know, really stupid. I actually assumed the second was a pardoy, and that IMDB had become completely open content, and went off to find a citation (MPAA).

Apparently those are ACTUAL categories. "Frenetic strong bloody violence throughout, crude and graphic sexual content, nudity and pervasive language" excluding bloody violence, sounds like my love live. The point being, to me, pervasive language sounds like a good thing. Have these people ever, you know, read a book? Or seen a play? Or listened to the radio? Those are nothing BUT language. I can understand that people under the age of 18 might conceivably want to avoid a film where the language is not carefully confined to small self-contained segmants, but I don't see any point in legally requiring them to!

Premise so stupid it's actually physically painful:

Crank: High Voltage.

"The first ‘Crank’ movie, saw Jason Statham poisoned then forced to keep his adrenalin up to stay alive, This time, Chev is in a spot of bother with a Chinese gangster, who has removed his heart and has replaced with a mechanical one that needs to be jolted with an electric charge to stay pumping."

Crank: High Voltage also received honourable mention in the "stupidest title" category. Come to think of it, I think that was the film the "content warning so stupid it's physically painful" came from too. Not that that means it has to be a bad film.

Comments

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

Crude and graphic? So if it was just crude, or graphic but artistic, that would make it okay?

and er frenetic violence? "frenetic" sounds more like it ought to go along with "crude" and "graphic." Then "pervasive" could go with "violence," and "language" could just stay as "language," which would mean exactly the same thing.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

So if it was just crude, or graphic but artistic, that would make it okay?

:) Quite. I think in actual fact, no, it wouldn't affect the rating, but they're trying to give more precise information to people who might care (and obviously, some people would). It just sounds really ridiculous -- the worst possible compromise between a standard check-box list and a descriptive english sentence :)

and er frenetic violence?

:) Though I think "frenetic" is likely a very good description of this film: judging from the poster (and premise) it is ever so frenetic :)

[quism.livejournal.com]

I was always fond of "mild peril." So, the characters are in peril, "imminent danger of harm," as the dictionary says, but only a little bit?

[simont]

My biggest problem with that one is a tendency to misread it as "mild perl".

Though it's the "dire and extended perl" you really need to watch out for, admittedly.

[quism.livejournal.com]

Pirates of the Caribbean would have been an entirely different film had it been "The Curse of the Black Perl".

I'm sure you could add Nic Cage, pretend it was an encrypted map to some treasure and, lots of explosions and sweating later, have a hit on your hands only slightly more likely than National Treasure. (Hollywood movie producers probably scan LJ every day for just this kind of idea. I want credit, damn you!)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. Presumably either in peril of mild harm, or secondary characters in peril of death :)

[simont]

Strong language warning: I liked this one, which I saw recently in the EPG downloaded by MythTV.

Bounce (2000)
An advertising executive (Ben Affleck) falls in love with a young widow (Gwyneth Paltrow), but fails to tell her he played a part in her husband's death. Contains some strong language.

The bit I like is that just when you've read the first sentence and are thinking "bet she was bloody furious when she found out", the next sentence drops neatly into your train of thought and you think "yes, I expect there was some strong language at that point".

Which makes me wonder: is there a risk that a content warning might become a spoiler in some films?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:)

Which makes me wonder: is there a risk that a content warning might become a spoiler in some films?

Or an advertisement. I think a lot of people see warnings for sex like that. Supposing there was supposed to be any tension in the first place, learning that Mr. Crank High Shock fucks Mrs. Crank High Shock in the racetrack obviously removes it. Conversely, people who mainly want to see that, want to know it's going to be in the film beforehand.

[simont]

Or an advertisement.

Ah yes, like the trick of using the safety warnings as the main means of convincing the buyer that the product is a good one.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, of course. Very much so. Of course, there are classic examples "The film SO HORRIFYING...", "WARNING: Insanity sauce can cause..." or even "WARNING: do not smoke, or you will get high! (Which is illegal.)"

:)

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

I'd even go as far to say that, minus the 'bloody' and keeping the violence light, that line sounds like what I want out of my love life... 'Pervasive language' sounds especially dirty.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I realised when I wrote it that it was slightly ambiguous whether I meant "without any violence" or "with only violence that isn't bloody", but decided best to leave it like that :)

I really liked the pervasive language description: we know "language" means objectionable language, so "pervasive language" sounds really dirty, but also just means that all things are better with giggling and preferably pedantic discussion :)

[naath.livejournal.com]

Warnings - yes, very stupid. The thing that really annoys me though is that all the things that people (IME*) want are pretty much not those warnings at all. Last Monday's Law And Order UK had an example of a good sort of warning (to point out that not all mainstream media sucks) - before every segment they clearly announced that "this show contains depictions of sexual assault", something I do generally like to be prepared for in advance (and something that some people will actively avoid).

I'm not sure what warnings should say on films, I think it depends who they are aimed at (the warnings that is). Warnings for "Violence" seem to be too generic to make much sense (except in a THINK OF THE CHILDRUN way).

*the experience is of meta discussions about fanfiction and appropriate warnings to put on it.

[simont]

The thing that really annoys me though is that all the things that people (IME*) want are pretty much not those warnings at all. [...] *the experience is of meta discussions about fanfiction and appropriate warnings to put on it.

I know your specific example makes it clear this isn't the sort of thing you mean, but I can't help parsing this as saying that what people really want is warnings like "contains dire and extended plot holes", "contains painfully derivative and clichéd plot", "contains gratuitous sex and violence in place of character development"...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

"contains dire and extended plot holes"

ROFL! That's definitely what I want. Except I'd rather the stories just curled up and died in the first place :)

I'm reminded of a rant post I had pending on what did and did not constitute a plot hole. I was inspired by someone describing an out-of-period car as a plot hole -- it was in fact quite fundamental, but it wasn't a plot hole! However, on considering the canonical example of what was a plot hole, it turned into a twenty minute excoriation of the film double jeopardy, which I felt was justified, but a bit repetitive.

"contains gratuitous sex and violence in place of character development"...

I'm sure you'll be delighted to know (if you don't already) that there is a standard warning phrase for that one: "PWP" or "Plot? What plot?" (About sex, rather than violence.) It's very popular.

Of course, everyone I know tends to have much more plot in something they think of as that, than normal people have anywhere. (Like how my "one-liner" posts are about four paragraphs :)

[simont]

Mmm, "plot hole" does seem to be a concept used in strange and variable ways.

I suppose my opening bid for a definition would be something which makes the progression of the plot as given either impossible or implausible – the watcher is inclined to think that surely what would actually have happened would have been something other than what was shown.

So given that definition, the big question is where you draw the line between something unbelievable in which you're supposed to suspend disbelief, and something unbelievable which is a plot hole. To some extent this is a matter of context: if character A's actions require them to know something that only character B knew and was determined never to tell anybody, that would constitute a plot hole in a mainstream novel, but in (say) the B5verse it might instead be accepted as part of the dramatic revelation that character A turned out to be an unregistered telepath.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

That sounds about right.

I'm not sure if my conception was too strict. I remember being very firm that it should be a hole in the plot, ie. sequence of choice, rather than the premises, but maybe the premises should count too. Eg. if you postulate cheap teleportation, but have no explanation why R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z don't happen to the economy.

Perhaps the distinction I was searching for was (to borrow complex analysis terminology) between removable plot holes and essential plot holes. A removable plot hole is something like a McGuffin: the explanation *given* for Q doesn't make sense, but there any number of explanations which would have done perfectly fine, and it occurs early enough we can accept it as a premise and not have the ending ruined. Conversely, an essential plot hole is one where the essential elements of the plot conflict each other and pretty much can't be removed.

something unbelievable in which you're supposed to suspend disbelief, and something unbelievable which is a plot hole

Yeah. I guess some of the rows about this come because different people are willing to accept different cues to believe something.

[simont]

but have no explanation why R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z don't happen to the economy

That's an interesting field in itself. One thing that occasionally strikes me about certain SF books is that part of the premises they require you to temporarily believe are in the nature of consequences rather than axioms. So a great deal of SF and fantasy postulates counterfactual (or sometimes maybe-factual, in cases where the true answer isn't yet known) things about the nature of the physical world – hyperspace exists, the Force exists, some physical phenomenon exists on which one can build force fields, magic works – and then explores the consequences which can be deduced from those axioms in the ordinary way.

But some SF injects its counterfactuals or maybefactuals in the middle of the deductive process, rather than by injecting premises at the start of it. For instance, I recently re-read "A Deepness In The Sky", which has among its required maybefactuals some rather specific ideas of what is and is not feasible when it comes to maintaining civilisations over long distances and/or long times. One cannot just dismiss this as "author's opinion which I don't have to share", because it's critical to the plot – one has to temporarily believe Vinge's ideas of what sorts of society can and cannot hold together, because otherwise the main characters' experiences and motivations don't even make sense. And yet it's not a premise in at all the same sense that "the laws of physics permit force fields" would have been a premise. I think the way to look at it is that between the reality of what we know about human nature and the conclusions Vinge draws is a very complicated and subjective reasoning process which we so far haven't enough experience or skill to be confident of the answer to, and Vinge is asking us to assume that the answer will turn out to be a certain thing. Much as Ted Chiang might ask us to accept for the sake of a short story that the axioms of arithmetic turn out to be inconsistent, without asking us to accept any actual change in the axioms to cause this to be the case.

I think you put it nicely with the phrase "cues to believe". The difference between Vinge's unsupported conclusions about long-term interstellar sociology and your example above of teleportation mysteriously not revolutionising the economy is that Vinge lays out his maybefactuals with a clear air of "this is what I'm asking you to accept for the sake of the story", whereas in your example the author gives the impression not of having set it up deliberately that way but of having failed to think it through properly. In much the same way, come to think of it, as you can accept unproved assertions in an argument much more easily if they're stated up front (so they can be checked) than if they're introduced half way through or in a way that makes it look as if they were sneaked in dishonestly.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's very well put.

Indeed, I've often described something that bugs me almost exactly like that: sometimes I have the feeling that, eg. a Christian sect has at some point adopted an axiom that blah-de-blah is implied by the bible, rather than just assuming it right out, and though I know all the reasons why, it jumps out at me as annoying that it looks like they introduced this extra layer of indirection to make it seem superficially more plausible (because, after all, the bible is a complex document and implies all sorts of things, it's conceivable it implies whatever abstruse thing they imagined).

Contrariwise, I'm not sure where to draw the line between "assume new premise" and "assume new conclusion from existing premises". It seems to depend how clearly the conclusion is or isn't obvious to us, which of course is ever so subjective. Imagining that there's a new law of physics, or an obscure already-implied loophole in the old ones, seem about equal in suspension-of-disbelief, even though they're different physically. The difference with the sociology example is that we have some intuition, and hence can say "blah de blah does NOT sound like a plausible consequence, but I'm sufficiently unsure to accept it for the moment."

(Of course, it falls down completely when the conclusion is sufficiently obvious and also sufficiently entwined you can't imagine the consequences at all, eg. 1=2)

I think you put it nicely with the phrase "cues to believe".

Thanks. I think that's very much what makes it palatable or not palatable: you can accept it, but hate it if it's slipped in under the rug somewhere and makes you say "is this really obvious??"

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

I discuss similar ideas about how a fictional work can encourage the suspension of disbelief (with respect to Stephen Baxter's novel Time) in this post. I think there are two aspects to this: first, the presentation of evidence for the counterfactual within the fictional world, and second, a narrative payoff for suspending disbelief: a mystery that is explained by the counterfactual, or a plot development that it enables, or simply something cool.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, I wish "Author can not write for toffee" were put on many fanfics...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Sarcastic people claim it's called "fanfiction.net" :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

are pretty much not those warnings at all.

Yeah. The thing is, it seems like such a good idea. I mean, obviously some people don't like bad language, or excessive squick, etc, so having an objective board to warn about them totally makes sense. But it turns out not to really work in real life. I guess partly that the warnings are too vague, and the differences too subjective, and partly that it's generally reasonably obvious what sorts of things are going to be in a film anyway. (Someone looking at the poster for Stupid Crank: Lots of Electricity can pretty much reel off that warning perfectly, just by guessing :))

the experience is of meta discussions about fanfiction and appropriate warnings to put on it.

Yeah, there's a big trade-off, and a lot of people who haven't considered that anyone might have different priorities to them. "Warning: Twist ending"... :)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The trailer for Crank 2 made it look fully aware of the stupidity of the notion and having fun with it, which is something for which I can have a certain amount of respect; it's a direction which has worked before. (I'm sorry, I find Jason Statham frantically rubbing himself against an old lady's cardigan to generate static electricity funny, largely because of his facial expression at the time.)

While I find the parenting philosophy behind break-down-the-sex-and-violence-in-atomic-detail film review sites like http://www.kids-in-mind.com/ more than a little disturbing, it's also the case that the general film warnings for violence in, say, the Montreal Gazette's reviews, will tend to calibrate by the amount of violence in something rather than the intensity of it, which can certainly fail badly for disturbing papersky. OTOH, they did have the best content warning ever, for Sideways, which was "some language, mild drug content, 1961 CHEVAL BLANC DRUNK FROM A STYROFOAM CUP !!!" Because some things you just can't have your children thinking are acceptable.