ACTION · 8:07pm Aug 22nd, 2018
This stuff I love 
Not just gushing appreciation for action movies as fun entertainment, but someone able to talk about why & how they can work.
(warning: somewhat more shocking violence than the other videos)
Analysis of content & themes are a dime a dozen, but it's so rare to find any analysis of craft & form. Especially on a genre often viewed as «schlock»
People joke about Michael Bay movies being nothing but fights and explosions, but John Woo basically does exactly that as well. The climax of Hard Boiled is a 40 minute sequence of gunfights, yet it never feels dull or repetitive... because of how the director controls clarity and rhythm.
I want to keep linking more of these, but here's one that I found particularly interesting. I'd never before considered how Robocop uses action scenes themselves to show the main character's arc of reclaiming humanity.
This is why I find this channel's perspective compelling. He believes action can be artistic when it's used to serve the story, never the other way around.
Hrmm... this matches up with what I wrote on the use of songs within a musical episode.
MLP Gen4 has wavering song quality, but they're always used to advance the plot or reveal more about the characters. Gen1 used songs to sum up what just happened, and it always comes across as preachy and redundant (regardless of the music's quality itself). And they seem obligatory, since they included a song in every single 10-minute segment.
(sure, Gen4 sums up early episodes with a friendship letter to Celestia, but it's short and placed at the end. It doesn't interrupt the story. it doesn't waste a song, which could be better used for a big story moment)
The same thinking approach of "throw in a song so the children don't get bored" is the same used in mediocre action movies, "throw in a car chase or fight scene so the audience don't get bored" and has nothing to do with the art of effective storytelling. 
This is a dumb tangent I was tempted to include in the song blogpost back then, but it makes more sense here.
[Idomeneo] explores these issues within the framework of the opera seria genre, a stylized format favored by aristocratic courts, in which idealized noble characters function with a clear delineation between action (expressed in recitative) and reflection (expressed in arias, ensembles, and choruses). While 18th-century audiences accepted, and even celebrated, the artificial nature of this form of theater, subsequent generations sought a greater sense of realism in opera. Along with many other pieces from this period, Idomeneo essentially disappeared from the world's stages until the mid-20th century. Modern audiences, familiar with works that reject realism and embrace certain artistic mannerisms, have once again returned this masterpiece to a place in the repertory.
-- The Metropolitan Opera, Playbill
The elitist snobbery is gross, but I also fundamentally disagree with its analysis. It's not "realistic" to break out in song in the first place!! 
Wait... actually people do break out in song sometimes. Like "Happy Birthday To You" or "Auld Lang Syne". Or someone feels happy and sings some pop song. Or they FeelsBadMan and sings along to NIN's "Hurt". They usually don't improvise their own lyrics, but it's still singing.
This could be debatable, but I think this real life behavior has much more in common with the earlier type of opera, where characters reflect on what just happened and express their emotions, than the later form where songs advanced the story. And I suspect the aristocrats quite enjoyed the preachy, propaganda nature of such storytelling.
People don't use catchy songs as rhetoric for social change. I mean outside of the context of theater/art. You know what I mean. 
So it's not that the later opera style was in demand by commoners because of "increased realism". It was simply better storytelling. The Magic Flute remained popular for centuries because it used music AS story. Idemoneo disappeared from stages and was only remembered for its music score alone.
Can you imagine this argument applied to action movies? They'd reject the "realism" of a precisely choreographed Bruce Lee film, and embrace the "anti-realism" "artistic mannerisms" of the modern action flick full of over-edited shaky-cam and actors flailing about in the dark. 
To be fair, the part about "idealized noble characters" is certainly less realistic, that is true. But that's not form, it's content! and content which had fallen out of style at the time (note how this was the time period of the American and French revolutions). I'm not sure that's something to be proud of reviving as a sign of modern sophistication, but that's the upper class attitude for you.
Geez I hate opera. My dad made me watch it. I'd rather watch Hard Boiled.
What did your dad like about Opera?
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He only listens to classical music, and literally nothing else. and he even admitted to me he thinks Idomeneo's story is kinda dumb, he just wants to hear the orchestra play Mozart.
I mean he genuinely loves it. The rest of the audience, I'm not entirely sure about. Rich people who want to look cultured...
I've never seen opera. I'd give it a shot, but I don't think I'd really like it that much outside the novelty of it.
For me the best action scenes are those that 1) you're emotionally invested in, 2) have high stakes, and 3) related to that, put the hero in a situation from which you can't easily see how they get out. Make the odds heavily against them. And I mean actually against them. Don't just make them outnumbered. Thirty thugs vs Batman isn't exciting if he's in the batmobile. Thirty thugs against Batman on his own, after he's lost his utility belt IS exciting, in my opinion.
One of my favorite Marvel action scenes is the elevator fight in Captain America the Winter Soldier. Nick Fury has just been killed, and the last thing he tells Cap is not to trust anyone. Which is what Cap has been arguing against with Fury, and Black Widow, who don't trust anyone. He's unbalanced and doesn't know what to do, and things are serious. Then he gets on an elevator and becomes surrounded by like ten other guys, half of them the highly trained special ops guys he leads himself. And you think "Oh man how the hell is he gonna get out of this?" Up to this point we've only seen Cap take on at most two guys at once. Ten on one seems impossible. The result is an exhilarating fight scene, in my opinion.
Have you seen the Raid movies, by the way?
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opera is the more elite version of broadway. which itself is the more expensive version of going to a movie. (which is the expensive version of going on youtube?)
Lion King on Broadway was pretty fun though.
I saw the first Raid movie. It's great, though too scary and intense for me at times.
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I've not seen Lion King on Broadway, even taped, but I have seen Les Miserables. It was really good.
The second raid tried to be even more intense, but it wasn't nearly as natural as the first and came off forced. Intense for the sake of being intense, which I don't enjoy. It's not terrible, but the stakes aren't as high as the first movie either. Still has some good fight scenes.