"look at the succesful white folks and their problems solved by more money" is what Mad Men was about.

I really don't think that's what Mad Men was about.

That's like saying Sopranos was about "all the rich gangsters and how they use violence to solve all their problems." Just an extremely shallow read.

Though I'll admit, I haven't seen Mad Men in its entirety.

it goes nowhere. don;t worry about it. Mad Men was CANDY. a horrible man in a horrible marriage, with a horrible wife, and a shit job that only exists to lie to the public to make them buy the shit they don't want or need. Fucking horrible, aimless, pointless show. poor whoreson steals identity after his CO is blown up, ruins the lives of his fake identity's family in the process, lies his way to a job selling shit to idiots, destroys a marriage, fucks random women in front of his duaghter cuz he just dont give a fuck, ignores his son for 7 seasons, marries a french girl, ruins her life, goes to a zen retreat and makes the single most saccharine and successful (because americans are stupid AF ad want corporate trolls to feed them their happiness and comraderie) ad campaign of all time. wow . horrible horrible.

sopranos never forgot that every single mob guy was a FUCKING HORRIBLE MONSTER PSEUDO-HUMAN PREDATOR. Mad Men never gave a fuck either way, even though it's protagonist was just as much a shithole empty sell of a human.

Is that summary really accurate? Because now I don't want to watch it through to the end.

And you're right. Sopranos never forgot that it was dealing with absolute fucking subhuman monsters, but it allowed the audience to forget from time to time, making it all the more horrifying when things snapped back into focus.

Not a show I'll ever likely watch again.

great summary exept for the "fucking horrible, aimless pointless show."

fucking horrible, aimless, pointless life maybe? sure. but the show? no fucking way.

the whole point of it was precisely that after all his millions and his sturggles and success he got exactly nowhere

when he finally has a breakdown and is able to embrace another human being in a moment of compassion... turns around and sells it to coca-cola. ha! ha ha ha ha!

how did more money "solve all his problems"? by your own summary above--it clearly didn't

you looked down the scope, aimed, had the target in your sights, then flipped the gun 180 degrees and blew your own head off.

how did you read the show as praise instead of condemnation?

if you missed it altogether, i'd like to refer you to the show's opening credits-- which is the silhouette of a man falling, falling, falling, falling into some endless abyss while he passes by a number of life's luxuries and marks of "success"

THE FALLING IS THE POINT

i did not read it as that. the US audience did. Just like the idiots that have Great Gatsby parties who completely misread the novel as a glorification of wanton excess.

watch the whole intro to Mad Men. the fall bullshit means NOTHING. he "lands" on a fancy couch, chillin, relaxed. come on.

well man the audience isn't a single block and there's always gonna be idiots who are going to misread everything from the old testament to tomorrow's news, but i think neither you nor us are such idiots--- so why do we have to make the idiot's point of view the center of our conversation?

I disagree on Sopranos. "Human, all to human", a couple of great story lines, Paulie's Ma in the nursing home, and the one with Bobby Bacalla's dad, who goes out on a blaze of glory. The best TV show ever, IMO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu39qrsuBRk

we don;t, but the idiot's point of view is what shapes what gets made by hollywood, and HOW it is made. you know this.

no way. sopranos had way too many filler episodes to be considered all time greatest. each season, which had very few eps to begin with, had at least 3-4 episodes that were just fucking BORING. I think as a whole it was great, but it was also highly flawed.

no way, no. that's a paranoid/conspiracy version. like "the illuminati control everything." i don't buy that vision at all.

the reality is artists have their dreams and tastes, the MANY PUBLICS have their tastes, producers want their money, etc., you shake that in a cocktail shaker and it gets done. it's ultimately a chaotic/random process. the perfect is the enemy of the good.

commercial pressures have always been present in art, and great art still gets made. you mentioned gatsby-- fitzgerald too had to eat. so you have to balance what you reeeeeeeally want to write (e.g., finnegan's wake, which nobody understands) to what the mass public wants to buy (e.g. romance paperbacks).

too many artists are invoved in hollywood for it to be mere brainwash. LA may be a sick town but it's also *stuffed* with talent.

part of the reason good writing migrated to cable TV was because it was cheap to produce and so there is much less risk and you can have "boutique" shows made for smaller audiences, not for mass consumption.

the opposite occurs in film where you need dumb trilogies of everything because it costs so much to make you have to *try* to guarantee massive revenues.

but funny thing-- good writing begets success, and blam, small things become massive (you were just talking about nirvana elsewhere, for example).

educated adults have flocked to sopranos and mad men partly in a way because there are no more godfathers or deer hunters at the movies. ok, we still had no country for old men but those things are rare now. so fargo is on tv too.

"hollywood" is specifically the old money studios that dominate 90% of films distributed in USA and with the deepest pockets to fund the big blockbusters.

I think TV in USA is finally catching up to TV in Europe. Better writing stories for the sake of story and not for commercial tie ins. It is for the best. the old film system required everyone to enjoy films at a theater and all the costs and hassles that come with it.

That mentality is largely changed in USA now (since people watch more shit at home on fancy ass home theaters or just on their computers), but in China, India, Latin America, etc. the filmgoing experience is still very much in play, so Hollywood studio films are created to suit them first, and american tastes second. That is how it seems to me.

i think us tv has surpassed europe for a while now. though you realize many productions are international these days. maybe it's more like us tv has absorbed european tv and shot it with steroids and added some great stuff. smart AND fun.

and yes hollywood films are after a global audience now. i forget what movie recently had chinese "inserts" so that i could be successful in china. but yeah it's all about the exports.

who said that america doesn't manufacture things anymore? movies are massive industrial pursuits. MASSIVE.

anyway i wrote a longer version of this later but the browser cacked out. i'll follow up tomorrow...

See, eve I get that the falling is the point, and I didn't watch the whole series. People love that show, and plenty probably love it for stupid reasons, but I do not think that the point of the actual show was to glamorize the... err... glamor.

Only if you think of us tv solely in terms of long form dramas.

watched Reprise the other night. Trier, I gotta get more of his movies. It was really good. Just added Louder Than Bombs and Oslo, August 31st to the ntflx

Mad Men is about America. a loser liar con-artist can make himself rich and powerful over and over again by the power of his bullshit

o man! i was looking for this all over the TV thread

yeah! will reply there

just watched THE INTERNSHIP

which is stupid good. by which i mean: stupid. but good because of it. not great or anything. it's a stupid comedy w/ vince vaughn and owen wilson about being a couple of good salesmen in dead-end jobs who get an internship at google ha ha ha. and it's good with beer and chili-butter popcorn in a hot summer day when you can't think straight or do work worth a shit.

next, some superhero marvel move ha ha haaaa.

is today tuesday or wednesday? i'm lost

wait. it's tuesday. yeah.

I think part of this is true regarding US TV versus European TV. At the very least, European TV was willing to produce some pretty heady stuff in the 70's and 80's. German TV financed Rainer Werner Fassbinder over the course of two decades and series like "World On A Wire", "Berlin Alexanderplitz" and the newly re-restored "Eight Hours Are Not A Day"- besides being proclaimed as masterpieces now- were adventurous attempts for TV series/movies. Likewise, French filmmakers such as Jacques Rivette ("Out 1"), Marcel Ophuls (a host of WW2 documentaries) and Maurice Pialat ("A House in the Woods") all ventured into the TV realm. I know there's alot more I've forgotten.

American TV, during that same time, were content with freakin' "Hunter" or "Cagney and Lacey". Perhaps the most "adventurous" we got was financing Marvin Chomsky's "Holocaust" series or something like "Roots".....ambitious, historically moving ideas wrapped behind a fairly safe and recognizable facade. I suppose "Twin Peaks" in the early 90's was the greatest leap for American production and then followed by HBO's trailblazing one-two punch of "The Wire" and "The Sopranos". Thirty years later.....

i'll reply on the TV thread!

Just watched Advantageous, scifi dystopia. Pretty nicely done in a lot of ways, seems very plausible. Didn't have a lot of backstory for explanation of a few items, which was a bit off-putting, but if you take it as a POV/snapshot of a situation, it doesn't need the deep 'splaining, and can be possibly enjoyed as is. I'd call it a very smart movie....

The Panic in Needle Park

I guess this is mostly of interest for being Pacino's movie debut (putting aside earlier bit-parts). Beyond that it's very much a product of its time and place: equal parts nouvelle vague and Hubert Selby - with a Joan Didion script for extra kudos.



Second up ...



Barfly

Similar theme (a semi autobiographical script by Bukowski) this one loses out due to a far too mannered performance by Mickey Rourke - who I've never been a fan of (The Wrestler aside). Faye Dunaway is great though.

Amy, I love you. <3

She was kind of gross (her character, that is, not Amy herself) in this one, didn't you think?
But yeah, I love her too. Have you ever seen Doubt? Oh my god, she's in a habit throughout the entire film but I still need a cold shower after watching.

I initially gave this movie a fair amount of shit for both its grim violence and its highly stylized aesthetic, which I thought lacked purpose. But I have to admit, the movie has stuck with me. I've thought about it a lot since seeing it. So I think it must had a bit more to it than I assumed.

Also, Michael Shannon really killed it in this movie. I haven't read a single review that's been able to adequately capture the unassuming way in which his presence takes hold of the entire film, and becomes the focal point, but that's exactly what he does. He's the only real hero in the story (either story), and his performance was just gripping. Loved it.

Yeah she was not "the good guy". This movie shocked me. I was so scared and it stuck with me.

Haven't seen Doubt yet but plan to see everything she is in haha.

Oh man. Doubt is tremendous. That's a real actor's movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Viola Davis (who was a relative nobody at the time, but still won an Oscar for her incredible 13 minutes of screen time) just act the hell out of that movie. Hot damn.

had a little movie fest this weekend. bunch of good stuff

POM POKO




awesome! sad. hilarious! sad. awesome!

isao takahata directed and miyazaki cowrote

HENRY AND JUNE



really great and hot thought a bit slow maybe? maria de medeiros was fantastic. too funny to see remo williams as henry miller. i mean fred ward ha ha. he did look the part though and good accent. also, whitnail has a supporting role, playing hugo (anais's husband). uma as june miller was pretty good. but maria de medeiros was just fantastic here.

BLACK DYNAMITE



o man o man o man. 5/5. a++++ will buy again

i might be forgetting something. i've been so busy lately that i hadn't been able to watch a movie in a long time. revenge, at last!

The Graduate

I'm too young to have seen it when it came out but can only imagine the excitement audiences must've felt when 1st seeing it. It's clearly of its time but never feels stuck in it, which I suppose is one of the criteria necessary for a film to qualify as truly great. And this is a truly great film.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

it really is. i think also boomers loved it for the wrong reasons (i only think, not "assert"). in that the end is very telling when you look at it in retrospective it's not "positive". so it's not like finding liberation, but rather, yo get what you want, and now...? ah ha ha ha. in a way it's like the boomers-- their idealist hippies turned into yuppies with empty lives. only here it doesn't get to the 80s-- just to the moment after the empty win

oh, maybe im a cynic. but i love the movie precisely because it shows there's no escape. at least not this way

it shows that even the supposed freedom is a trap. he will be with a woman he doesnt truly love, who doesnt truly love him, and there is no guarantee of happiness ahead.

I love this movie. Ultra-violence like only the late 80's could do.

YES! Predator 2 rules.

if you have access to dropbox, you can download the Predator 2 here from me. https://www.dropbox.com/s/k2cdpppw5c...RARBG.mp4?dl=0

1.7 GB

A lot of people I speak to about the movie don't really register that moment at the end, so I'm glad that it's pop culture common knowledge to you guys.

I think The Graduate is misinterpreted a great deal, and that people miss the significance of that moment because of how pretty and stylized and superbly well crafted the movie is as a whole -- but the films exists around that final look, in which, yes, these two characters realize that instead of escaping the "phony" world around them, they've actually taken their first steps toward being part of it. Loveless marriage and all.

I've always felt that there was some spiritual overlap between The Graduate and Catcher in the Rye; which I won't get into here, again, for everyone's sake. But if you take the thing as a whole, pointedly not-happy ending and all, then it's still just a really fantastic film.

That one would have to be in my all-time favorites list, irrespective of genre or era.

Haha, I agree. Although I'd say the film's attitude to Benjamin's 'freedom' is ultimately ambivalent; we don't believe in the life he goes for, but nor do we believe in the one he wants to escape from.

100%. In lots of ways I'd say Benjamin is just Holden at a slightly later stage in life, with things moving from anger and frustration to something closer to outright despair.