Hate to say it, but Tears of the Kingdom (i.e. the name) still hasn't really grown on me. Back when the Breath of the Wild title was announced I was in awe almost instantly. It just felt really good to say.
Breath of the Wild never rolled off my tongue all that well, and it still sounds a bit awkward to me for some reason. Ya know like how some people have a reaction to the word "moist," I have a similar thing with "breath." I dunno.
However, for as weird as it feels for me to say "Breath of the Wild," I gotta agree "Tears of the Kingdom" isn't doing any better for me. It's weirdly cumbersome, for some reason? Hell, I typoed it three times
just now.
I did! It was gorgeous to look at, the performances were fantastic (I was really feeling Pádraic's pain and utter confusion, and I know what it's like to find solace in friendship with animals) and the slow descent into the darkly absurd was
not what I was expecting. Absolute surprise. Weird as hell, palpable, and it had its logic and it stuck to it all the way to the end and I respect the hell outta that.
And since the theater was a good 45 miles away I listened to Anúna the whole way home, which sorta kept it all going.
Look, I'm not trying to attack you here, I'm just saying that it was out of line for Simu Liu to drag Scorcese into this discussion. One could make an argument about Tarantino but as
@Party Sklar has correctly pointed out, Tarantino himself has also championed non-US films and helped release a few through his now defunct label.
Bringing up Scorcese unprompted to me just comes off as uninformed at best and malicious at worst. Imagine using your fame and wealth and spending a large chunk of your life to restore literally hundreds of films that otherwise would have been lost and then being called a gatekeeper. Boggles the mind.
Pretty sure he was bringing up Scorcese because he was the first big director to vocalize the "Marvel movies aren't cinema" stance. Which I understand! I totally get that position, but that one statement of his a few years ago prompted like a month of toxic discussion on social media about "real" film fans vs "mainstream" pop culture followers, and that I think is the gatekeepy part. Simu could've worded it better, I agree, as I think he was more going after the toxic discussion that people try to prop up using Scorcese's (and now Tarantino's, probably) quotes, rather than the directors themselves or their work.
Either way, still sorry. I thought his sassiness with the gif was cute.