@nepu7supastar7: Uh...do you have any evidence to support that? For any given game/movie/book/whatever, there will be critics actually giving reasoned explanations for why they thought it was good or bad. Sometimes both sides have merits, sometimes someone misunderstood the material. And yes, SOMETIMES people just plain decide to hate on something before ever experiencing it. But do you actually have any evidence that such a thing is common enough to wave away criticism entirely?

Because that's sort of what I'm taking from this. That film criticism is utterly worthless just because someone MIGHT not take film criticism seriously and just decide that they're going to hate a movie regardless of how good it is. The flip-side of this is that SOME people might decide beforehand to LOVE a movie regardless of how good or bad it is. This is basically saying that discussion about film (and by extension, any form of art) is worthless and that no one should bay any attention to what anyone else says. Like a movie that is widely hated? Well don't try to understand their position, they're just ignorant closed-minded people who are just bashing the movie for no good reason. Do you hate a movie that is widely loved? No use trying to understand their position, everyone else is just so stupid and uncultured that they can't appreciate real quality.

You do realize that a hell of a lot of people actually LIKE hearing other peoples' take on art, right? Like, that's precisely why people go watch a movie together and then talk about it afterwards. And that's just people going to the movies after dinner. Do you think the people MAKING these movies got to where they did by taking the stance that everyone else's opinion is worthless?

I don't know, I always sort of got the feeling that a shitload of marketing is aimed towards appealing to peoples' interests in violence and sex. You don't have to show nudity or a gruesome murder in order to accomplish either.

Anyway, I don't think there's an "obvious" answer here since neither violence nor sex is inherently bad. Which is "worse" would "obviously" depend on how the violence or sex is actually handled and what ideas it communicates to young viewers. If we want to start talking about this stuff as plausibly having artistic or societal merit, then it's on a case-by-case basis.

I'm pretty sure that teens are going to f*** anyway since they're teens.

Having said that, I think this is sort of a weird debate in the first place, since it's not as if the standard R-rated movie (or M-rated video game) is illegal for kids to watch or play (at least in the USA). I'm assuming we're not talking about hardcore porno here, or movies so gory that they'd get slapped with the dreaded NC-17 rating. The standard position is, "parents can let their kids see it if they want, and sellers are free to deny it to children without a parent's consent."

I'm not saying there isn't a weird discrepancy, but I ultimately think it's sort of a moot point. If society says that kids aren't supposed to see a boob, then as a parent you can just buy/rent movies with boobs if you disagree.

I think one of mine might be "the police chief who lets the killer go free because he ignores all evidence because he doesn't want to be proven wrong." Or like, variations of that.

I'm not saying that that kind of thing never happens, but it's enough of a movie cliche that it can kind of get annoying. Like, that happened in Fargo Season 1 (not a movie, but I think it still counts). It was handled well, despite being a cliche. It's established that the police chief was unexpectedly put into a position that he didn't want and that he's incapable of handling, and that he's such a simple-minded person that he CAN'T accept the true version of events because doing so would shatter his view of people and the world. I could buy that.

Then they freaking do the same thing in Season 3, only this time the chief can't accept reality because he's an authoritarian asshole who just plain likes to think that he's right all of the time.

Again, not that that's necessarily even implausible. But I can't help but feel like a lot of times the only reason that trope gets used is because the writers can't come up with a way to fill the time slot without having the cops get stone-walled by the bosses who are supposed to be valuing their work.

What, do you mean if I watch full episodes "now", as in current episodes?

Or are you asking if I still watch old episodes in their entirety instead of just skipping to certain parts?

If it's the former, then no. I haven't watched any new episodes of The Simpsons in like, 20 years.

If it's the latter, then hell yes. When The Simpsons was in its prime, it was amazing. And almost always holds up incredibly well even today. When I watch it old episodes I don't skip through parts of them, because it's still REALLY solid TV.

Isn't this a pretty big point too? I know that Dawn of the Dead was a horror movie and horror movies are generally pretty cheap to make. But like, same principle. I'd have to look up the production numbers, but I recall reading that the Original Ghostbusters wasn't even that expensive for the time. While the Ghostbusters reboot was like, silly expensive.

Is that remotely true? Because if so, I would think that budgeting could be a big problem for why some of these "only okay" reboots/remakes flop. If the original property wasn't some huge mega-budget film, then why revive it decades later as a huge mega-budget blockbuster while relying on nostalgia to recoup the investment? I can't help wonder if the reason for a lot of these movies' "failure" is because everyone was too optimistic and poured too much money into it when they should have tempered their expectations.

Hell, wasn't Mad Max: Fury Road barely "a success" too? And that movie actually ended up being awesome as f***. And yeah, I know that Fury Road wasn't initially supposed to cost so much but did largely due to huge problems during the production. But isn't that kind of the point? It went WAY overbudget because of reasons that no one was expecting. And probably would have been a bigger success if that didn't happen.

I mean, I know that inflation is a thing, but the original Ghostbusters had a production budget of $30 million back in 1984. Meanwhile you're talking about the production budget of the Dawn of the Dead remake actually being $2 million LESS 20 years later. I know...different genres. But still, did the Ghostbusters reboot really NEED to be that expensive? They couldn't have found a way to do it for cheaper while focusing more attention on the writing?

@mrbojangles25: The idea of a "do-over" might seem appealing in principle, but it kind of disturbs me if it were actually true.

I mean, if I were the reincarnation of someone who died, then who am I the reincarnation of? From THAT person's perspective, it's appealing that my body and mind get used as another chance to start over. But honestly...f*** that guy, whoever he is (or whoever she is, if I'm the reincarnation of a woman). He/she died, I didn't. If I lived a previous life, I don't get the benefit of any knowledge that will help me to do better this time. As far as I know, I started off this life as a blank slate, a new person. And there have to be ACTUALLY new persons born (as in, people who aren't reincarnations of other people) simply due to population increase. If my experience as a reincarnation in indistinguishable from that of a new person who had NEVER been reincarnated before, then there's functionably no difference between the two. Even if I was reincarnated, the reincarnation apparently doesn't matter since I'm not getting anything positive from it.

More disturbing is the alternate possibility: that I'm getting something NEGATIVE from it. That, like, some baby gets born somewhere in the world. This baby (as far as he/she knows) is a completely new person. Would it be fair if that person just happened to be the reincarnation of, say, Hitler? And that he/she goes through life inexplicably being evil (or being completely victimized by evil) due to some past shit that he/she had nothing to do with being assigned to them before the capacity to even walk or speak?

It'd be one thing if MEMORIES were carried over to the next life. That reincarnated people KNEW they were reincarnations. But otherwise, that's just some innocent person being beaten up by the cosmos with no reason and no explanation. If I'm hypothetically a piece of shit because I was a piece of shit in a past life, then isn't it beyond cruel to just make me suffer for it NOW without even letting me know why I'm such a piece of shit? If the point is punishment, what the hell good does it do to punish me for something that I can't remember and that I never even did during my current lifetime? And if the point is to give me an opportunity to do better this time, how the hell am I supposed to do better when I don't even get the benefit of learning what I did wrong the last time?

@ezekiel43: I don't think that superhero movies are a passing fad, but I do think that eventually they're going to stop having the total dominance that they have right now. Especially considering that a big number of the most successful superhero movies are specifically coming from one movie studio that has a reputation of putting out QUALITY films. It's relatively easy for people to watch the 2 or 3 movies that Marvel/Disney put out in a year, specifically because of the perceived level of quality and the amount of time that people have already invested in that cinematic universe. But I don't see Marvel/Disney putting out this level of content forever. A few creative flops, maybe a change in management that results in a string of bad ideas, maybe a new "fad" becoming huge at the same time that Marvel just happens to put out a string of duds (it happens, all movie studios release some bad movies eventually). All it would potentially take is for Marvel to scale back to like, ONE movie a year, and then I could see audiences moving onto a different "fad".

To be fair, why should they feel obligated to call out the asshole vegans on their behavior when there are plenty of non-vegans willing to step in and do it? It's not as if veganism is some official organization or something? If you're a vegan and some other vegan is an asshole, he doesn't represent you any more than an asshole video gamer represents you.

Think of it in those terms. What if instead of vegans we were talking about something like video games. Video games (and the people who play them) have certainly gotten a bad rap at certain times, but I don't think it's the duty of every gamer to personally step up and call out every gamer who happens to be an asshole. I mean, if you just plain WANT to stand up and speak out for gamers as a whole, then fine. That's your business, more power to you. But a lot of gamers just buy a few games every year, do a little casual playing after work. For them it's not about the ideology, they just sort of like playing the occasional video game. Why the heck should they feel obligated to go out of their way to call out other gamers?

I'd wager that it's the same thing with a lot of vegans. They're not fighting for the respectability of the vegan diet in popular culture. They just want to eat what they want to eat. How are they somehow more obligated than anyone else to call out the asshole vegans?

Basically any subset of culture is going to have a small but vocal and militant group of assholes, so it's no surprise that some vegans are like that as well.

On the whole though, I doubt that most vegans are anything like that. For starters, I rarely find out that someone I know is a vegan in the first place. And when I do, it's usually not until after I've known them for a while. After all, that's not the type of thing that I would imagine would just usually come up at all. I'm not a vegan, and most of my casual conversations with acquaintances don't involve me talking about what I eat. So why would vegans be any different?

In addition to that, on the few occasions when someone has told me that they are vegans, they were never assholes about it. It was more along the lines of them just saying something like, "I can't eat that, I'm a vegan" and then they never bring it up again. It's FAR more often that I hear "normal" people make snide derogatory comments about vegans even though it's not really any of their business and doesn't affect them all. Which, again, kind of makes sense. If I make a jerk-ish comment about vegans, a lot of people will give me a pass since as meat-eaters we're the majority. And it's easier for the majority to be jerks to the minority without being called out on being jerks. By contrast, vegans are a minority. If they start making snide smart-ass judgemental comments about people who eat meat, then they're DEFINITELY going to get called out as being jerks. I'd wager that most vegans don't want that. They just want to be able to eat what they want without people being jerks to them. So they don't have any incentive to scold people for eating meat, that just singles them out as targets to be picked on.