Mean Girls. Feels like a philosophically deep film, or one you could argue as such. Quite funny.

well i ended up watching the rest of "the neon demon" and turns out i had stopped at the worst moment of it all. the rest... was unpleasant, sure, but there wasn't much to it after that pause. not much of a story either, in the end, kinda "meh" actually. it was visually great though, that's one glossy motherfucking movie. glossier than "drive", even. spectacular. but storywise... maybe a bit silly in the end.

This one never gets old, does it? Cool Hand Luke is timeless

My second favorite Newman film, with Slap Shot being the first

Actually... I don't think I've seen any others XD

I watched Uncle Frank on Amazon at a friend’s recommendation. Not bad, but a little light on plot. Very sad at times, and effective, but it could have used a bit more time to breathe and flesh itself out. Still, pretty good stuff.

Cars go vroom vroom

Love these two flicks �� ��

I watched Her finally.
I didn’t love it. I love everyone in the cast and I love Spike Jonze, but the movie — while fine I guess — just kinda weirded me out and made me sad for 2 hours and 5 minutes. Not in a cathartic way but in a “this is some sad bastard bullshit” kind of way.

I dunno. It was probably a good film but I didn’t enjoy watching it.

sure, the car was nice, but there are much more memorable visions in that movie...

i have no words


it's probably because the main character was a huge dweeb, and hard to like, as i recall. "sad bastard bullshit" indeed.

basically the movie is one big joke stretched out to feature length, right?

--

anyway i saw "the song remains the same" which was in a criterion channel program of live music films (same program featuring "gimme shelter" i saw last week).



it was fucking brilliant. and funny too when it wants to. i had seen clips before but never the complete thing. at 2h17m runtime i thought i'd be bored quickly but nope, watched the whole thing, all the way to the end of the exit music (hah), and it was superentertaining. well done, 1970s! which reminds me... the present sucks at many things.

also thanks to ethan hawke (!?) who curated a program in the criterion channel where i caught charlie chaplin's "limelight." great fucking film! and virtually unknown too. also same 2h17m runtime lol, but again, highly watchable (except for a few ballet scenes, i don't take ballet well).



here is the criterion channel intro by ethan hawke and his interviewer. it's paywalled, but there's a 14d free trial if you dare (and you should dare...) https://www.criterionchannel.com/lim...e-on-limelight

I watched Red Rocket. It was loud and trashy and depressing. No doubt a good film but hard to enjoy. Also some problematic stuff. Nobody to root for. Florida Project was better I think.

And I rewatched Arrival and it’s still amazing.

Avengers: Endgame


I was looking forward to watching this and it was finally on TV last week.
Oh my it was horrible, I had no fucking clue who half of the characters were, I must have missed a volume or two in the Marvel universe or what ever they call it.
It's boring and long winding.
The only nice part was the Hulk basically

It’s pure fan service but it’s a blast. Probably only works if you know who the characters are though.

i believe you, thanks for the warning
i was rolling my eyes already at the something something war where everything turns to pixels so at this point i think i'd only watch it if they paid me.

don't get me wrong, i enjoyed a few of the earlies--ironman, the first thor, the joss whedon one... the taika waititi one had some funny jokes. but at this point i feel the whole thing is about some nerd bullshit and making money with toys. and i'm talking about the wrong kind of nerd, not the nerds that run the world.

on that note: i tried watching some voice actors play dungeons and dragons on tv and it was ooooooofffffff blaghhhhhhhh. but the same voice actors have a nice funny anime series on amazon. oh, wrong thread now, sorry...

Mmmmmm… I dunno man, I think Infinity War/Endgame is worth seeing, at the very least from a cultural perspective because it’s like the biggest goddam thing ever. There’s a lot to like about both movies, and Infinity War actually takes some risks (of course it doesn’t commit to a single one but still, bold to end a film that way).
I’m not the biggest fan of the MCU, but I like those movies.
Oh, and Waititi’s Thor: Love & Thunder is coming out soon, based on one of my favorite comic book runs. I’ll be there for that.


Those Twitch streamers? People playing video games who got a show, basically? That’s weird to me because I’m too fucking old for that shit. I used to play mad video games with my friends. We were good as hell and had hilarious banter. Nobody considered it a talent.
I even sound too old, listen to my dumb ass. (But apparently I’m not as old as some because I can still appreciate dumb fun crowdpleasing Marvel movies like most of the planet ;) )

right, and that's precisely the disaster of it all. if it was just another kid movie i wouldn't give a shit either way. like, i never ranted against spy kids. but never watched it either. it was for kids and that was okay, let the kids play.

i mentioned the 70s above. what was the biggest goddamn thing in the film culture, in the 70s? taxi driver, godfather, apocalypse now... last tango in paris! dirty harry, chinatown, cuckoo's nest, french connection, clockwork orange, network... salò, banned! tinto brass doing caligula. emmanuelle, the empire of the senses, all the president's men. kramer vs kramer. annie hall. truffaut and rohmer's heyday, buñuel's final films. bergman's cries and whispers, and scenes from a marriage, and woody allen imitating bergman. grownup films with grownup subjects were the biggest thing in the culture. even the schlocky disaster movies might feature an ex-whore or something. jaws was a monster movie, but it was a believable monster and the heroes were human. and sure, there was star wars, but star wars was for the kids who made the parents buy the toys.

yes. i have a problem with the culture. i have a problem with the planet, hahaha.



that's me now, guilty as charged. i hate the marvel universe, not because it exists, but because *it's the biggest fucking thing* why????????

eta: i blame my generation for never getting over motherfucking starwars. we started this perpetual childhood shit lol.

I guess if I had seen the prequel, Avengers: Infinity War, I would have liked the Endgame better. But I didn't. Not sure if it was on TV before, perhaps I skipped it thinking it was the one I had seen already ....


I do like some of the other Marvels though, especially Guardians Of The Galaxy because they don't take themselves so seriously.
The Avengers though, it's all too melodramatical

ah, shit, i got busy raging against the machine and didnt answer this part earlier: not twitch, it's an actual tv show i liked... but too long to explain right now, i'll post in the tv thread when i get a chance (tomorrow's coffee break or something).

Is it The Legend of Vox Machina?

http://sonicyouth.com/gossip/showthr...40798&page=175

anyway the other day i watched this fairly recent french flick, "de gaulle" (2020).




it's nice well done etc but... reads a bit propagandistic.

don't get me wrong, hats off to de gaulle for his role in ww2 and the resistance, etc... but the movie portrayed him like a man without flaws, which he wasn't. but ok, it's a "heroic" subject, and pétain is the villain here (well, he was, the poor senile traitor). the real struggle runs even deeper as the film focuses on de gaulle's difficult decision to seize the historical moment, bridging the personal and the political-- this is what i think it does best.

because of this it's not just a war/political story, but also the story of his wife and children, especially his down syndrome kid (i didn't know about her).

while not a masterpiece, and corny if you're cynical, the movie was cathartic, and it made for a nice evening.

also, seeing the nazi invasion and the refugees reminded me of ukraine, and of zelensky refusing to lie down and surrender to a greater mechanized power, so that was timely for fucking sure.

ok.

I’m confused, so it’s Burn Notice or Mrs. Maisel? Lmao
EDIT: Never mind, it’s totally the Legend of Vox Machina; finally saw your TV post about it.
Figured that’s what it had to be

Gonna be a dickhead and say that I think the Avengers films are probably better overall than the first Star Wars trilogy. Even the first Avengers movie, which is kind of a big B-movie, is pretty fun, and the second is unfairly maligned.
The third and fourth are just a bloody good fuckin’ ride, man, with plenty of emotional heft to boot. And I like Captain America and Thor vastly more than I like Luke Skywalker.

Sorry, my generation is showing.

no need to apologize lol, i don't give a shit and hate them all equally. again, for their cultural dominance in the grownup sphere, not for any other reason thst would ultimately be irrelevant.

but yeah it was genxers who started clinging to cartoons in adult age, playing with dolls ("action figures," lol, though personally i never did), eating baby cereal for breakfast, etc etc.

i remember in the 90s there was a popular record of various indie bands playing cartoon music... all i remember from it is the ramones did a decent rendition of tv spiderman. but can you think of bands for boomers doing, um, howdy doody or whatever the fuck? like, seriously?

back to film: some genxer luminaries like wes anderson or michel gondry or joss whedon are very clever boys playing with their toys. do i like their shit? yeah, guilty as charged. we started arrested development (literally)... or boomers did, except they got stuck in adolescence after they got their hormones. we got stuck in some preteen shit. i bet you whedon owns toys.

your generation (i think it's your generation?) went even deeper into the infantilism and gave us clapping music and pajama boy:



so yeah. we're all fucked to various degrees. but this is not a competition. me, im just looking for a way out of the babysphere. like, ragingly.

i guess my real complaint is that i wanted to grow up to be a degenerate, and instead the culture gave us... baby caca. and sure, there's plenty of porno out there, but porno is not art. i want my last tango in paris. i want a new empire of the senses.

anyway imma go back and rewatch de gaulle to see how a proper geezer deals with being in deep shit. rasputin was testing nukes today after all so who knows what's coming.

nah, im not gonna rewatch it...

maybe i'll find something on criterion to suck my thumb to.

ah yes!



great fucking movie. i have not seen it in a while. classic. 10/10.

Yeah, I’m a millennial. Or a millennial “cusper,” I guess. Born in the mid-‘80s, so too late to be Gen X.

I understand what you’re saying, actually, even though I can’t entirely relate to it.
Comic-book culture took an upward turn in both quality and popularity in the mid- to late ‘80s, too. A lot of the movies we’re seeing originated with ‘80s stories, or benefitted from big ‘80s works (Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Gaiman’s amazing Sandman, etc.) so we probably ultimately have the gen-xers who bought and read those boomer-written comics to thank for the deluge of comic book and childish bullshit cinema.

My generation did take things further though. We got super dumb with it. We were raised thinking Batman ‘89 was a great work of art because it was one of the first adult-ish movies we saw. But at best it’s an OK way to spend 1.5 hours if you have nothing else to watch.

Anyway, I’m picking up what you’re putting down, my friend. Interesting perspective, too. I’ve heard my dad (who likes to fancy himself a Gen-Xer in spirit though he is 100% a fucking boomer, make no mistake), and my elder cousins (true Gen-Xers, I guess) lament the same things you’ve outlined here. And none of them get the MCU really. Hah.

Sorry bud, but the last time I tried to watch anything other than Empire, I was bored shitless. Return of the Jedi has had a particularly unfortunate aging process. The better Star Trek movies (The Wrath of Khan, at least) hold up better.

The original trilogy is still better than the prequels, and at least one of the sequels. And I like Star Wars, I do. I love the Mandalorian. I love The Last Jedi. I love Empire. I respect the vision of the original trilogy, but it just doesn’t quite hold up for me.

I’m sure the same will be true of the big Avengers movies at some point, but as of now, I’ll take Avengers/Age of Ultron/Civil War (which is basically Avengers 2.5 only it’s like the best one)/Infinity War/Endgame over anything in the Star Wars world, probably.

Pepe me all you want, but I’m not trolling

.

BATMAN

And?

but how will i idealize my childhood if i don't turn my first star wars into an actual religion? the force!

poor alec guinness hated his dialogue in this crap. he was a grownup. we were children. many of us did not upgrade os. oh i'll reply to the other now...

yeah, why would you. everyone has their concerns. im not looking for a shoulder--i'm just protesting so i can keep breathing. viva la rebelión.

but i do appreciate an ear, and your perspectives, and that they're different from mine. agreement is for pussies, hahah.


yeah, it's the genexers that did it to you like the boomers did it to us.

boomers (and older) filled our minds with sex and secret agent exploits and deep sea diving and the cold war, we filled yours with toys and superpowers. goddamn.

anyway here 3 reasons why i can't relate to comic book culture of the 80s:

first one is when i was a kid i was reading grownup books.

second is my location had no access to those comics. but even if i could have found them, i was too far gone by then.

third is my location was conflicted and highly politicized so we couldn't stay children forever. imagine belfast during the troubles lol (it wasnt belfast but you get the idea). you had to snap out of lalaland quick.

so when i tried reading watchmen as a grownup all i could see was an imitation of borges with a much inferior premise--a world of superheroes, blech. and again i started reading borges when i was like... 12? so as i said, too far gone already. i didnt care for a postmodern critique of golden age comics because i already thought golden age comics were stupid and their morality hugely flawed. and watchmen was better than those, but still... groan.

sandman is a different story though. sandman deals in mythology. i still like greek mythology, and the greek epics, so this fits, right into that. it's the basis of western literature after all. and sandman is complex, is nuanced, is subtle.... sandman is literature, with pictures. watchmen is maybe... teen/young adult? a much poorer mythology than sandman. sandman has depth! in sandman the gaze gets lost in the horizon because sandman had the intelligence to plant his roots in a sophisticated mythological world. so you don't know where he ends and old myth begins. and that world is infinite, and old. that was his genius.


right. you didn't have raquel welch on tv



i saw her when i was like 5 and wow i wanted to be a grownup fast hahahhahaaa

and then there were the bond girls....!

wait... didnt your batman feature kim basinger? fuckit, i'd wear a cape for her hahahaaa. kim basinger in the 80s, oh lord...


alright cousin! yeah i will never "get" the mcu as any sort of serious business. for explosions, sure. and scarlett was much better in "match point" and "vicky cristina barcelona."

anyway if you wanna see a boomer pretending to be a genexer... californication was the show for that. total boomer character, lol, written in the wrong age bracket, namedropping nirvana as if.

100% agree, Sandman is the real deal. Watchmen is second-tier. The world will be a better place once more people realize this.

Sandman IS fucking *literature*

but agreement is for pussies! hahaha.

well, lol, anyway, your opinion quoted above is right and good in my view hahah.

and... you ever read borges? not yet?

I watched 2.5 hours. still have 45 mins to go.

So far? OK. I hated the stupid storylines that were written in the 2000's about Bruce's dad being corrupt, and his long-lost brother, and all this other extra shit that the writers added because people are taught not to believe that a human being can be a good person without being a fucking liar and a crook actually.

I think Hollywood directors and producers are all so FUCKED by their shit parents that they cannot just write a great story for the Batman, instead having to explore all these ridiculous side-streets, none of which matter for shit to the Batman mythos.

In this respect, the Batman film with Michael Keaton is closer to true Batman comics than any of the recent spate of crap.

Sandman and Watchmen are both pinnacles of comic storytelling, the blending of image and text to create a new method to tell stories.

Sandman started a sjust a horror comic, and became something bigger as Neil Gaiman matured in his writing style.

The Watchmen is not a critique of golden era superheros. Everyone gets this wrong. It is a crititique of the comic book companies themselves and how they portray these "heroes." And it rules all.

and Borges would have liked it. Borges was blind though, so he would have missed like 75% of the story as it is told visually.


If you had read Watchmen when it came out, as I did, it would have blown your mind away.

Batman was always intended to fight the crime that is too small, too low-level for the superpowered heroes to deal with. he fought the street crime, like daredevil. I like how they showed this a bit in the Batman movie.

Pattinson plays Bruce with NO charisma, which is fucked. Wayne should be portrayed like Elon Musk, a richboy's son who does what he wants and marries stupid performers with little talent.

i didn't know this, but from a third world perspective superheroes were always just a cultural arm of the american empire, and widely mocked for it, especially by the left. so the specifics below that level of ideological clash are pretty minor.

the companies portraying the heroes... reminds me of when bugs bunny fights the animator... i used to love that one.


hahahahha! yeah, no pictures..

and yeah, borges liked imaginary worlds and mythologies and thought experiments and so forth. but i'm not sure this would have been his bag. i'll have to ask him when i see him in hell... pretty sure he's there lol.

clearly watchmen was a bit of an homage to him. but the subject matter doesn't cut it for me.

for an admirer of borges who i think surpassed him, check out roberto bolaño's "la literatura nazi en américa." holy fuck, what a book.


but i would have had to care about superheroes in the first place and i didn't. i would have had to grow up under different circumstances altogether.

my eye openers happened elsewhere... like the time when i was 11 or 12 and a cop hit me with his nightstick when i told him about some petty crime in progress. pain aside, it became suddenly obvious that he was in on it haaahaaahaaa. that's all the experience i needed to unlock a large number of life's puzzles. although i had stopped believing in the jesus that same year too, or maybe the previous one, so i was on a roll becoming disillusioned with moral authority i guess lol.

for many years i resented that dirty cop but in retrospect i'd like to thank him for the lesson. almost zen.

but if i had grown up liking superheroes... yeah im sure i would have enjoyed the teardown of the mythology and the dissection of its ideological underpinnings.

i mean it's a good effort in that particular cultural context, and a ballsy move to slap the expectant audience with such formal experimentation, but the subject matter unfortunately just leaves me cold. at that time... i was more interested in cortázar, who fucked with the page more than anyone i had seen up to that point. those days i also was obsessed with herman hesse lol.

I think I told you some time ago (Jesus, probably like 2 years now) that I swiped a Borges short story collection from my stepdad. Sadly I haven’t read it yet. I suck.
But this is my year for reading, so maybe I’ll finally get to it.

Well, Watchmen did kinda blow my mind when I first read it, to be honest.

Also wow, I always assumed I was one of the older people on this board, but if you were reading Watchmen when it came out and Symbols is old enough to have a chip on his shoulder about millennials ;) then perhaps I was off.

Anyway, I do agree that Watchmen is often misunderstood, but it’s been a few years since the last full read-through (around the time that Doomsday Clock crap was happening I think), so it’s not super fresh in my mind.

Sandman, on the other hand … I actually don’t think I read the whole thing until SYMBOLS told me that any fan of Gaiman’s novels absolutely can’t not read Sandman. I took that to heart and read every volume of the thing including the early ones I’d previously read, and my GOD what a fucking masterpiece.
Just an absolute literary achievement.
Yes, it did broaden and grow over time. You stopped seeing quite the same shocking gore and Justice League members stopped popping up, and it became more of an almost anthropological exploration of the meaning of myth (Gaiman’s all-time favorite subject). So yeah, it grew more nuanced and refined as the story progressed, but in my opinion the series as a whole just absolutely shits bombs on pretty much anything else in comics.
Watchmen is definitive in one way, Sandman is definitive in another. But I don’t think there’s really any comparison when it comes to the quality of the writing. Alan Moore is brilliant, but the prose in Sandman is unmatched.

Sandman and Saga. Those are the best things to come from the graphic novel medium in my opinion. And Saga’s not done, so there’s a chance it will take the top spot for me.

ETA:
OH! ROB!! … Have you ever read Alan Moore’s “Miracleman”? (Which coincidentally Neil Gaiman attempted to take over once Moore was done, but Gaiman never had a chance to finish his story.)
Anyway, Moore’s Miracleman is fucking INSANE. I think it preceded his other big works, and I think it got his “recreate/reimagine comic tropes/characters and consider the real-world implications of their existence” juices flowing.

If you haven’t read it, read it. It’s probably my favorite thing he’s done. It’s absolutely bonkers and twisted as hell and there’s an up-close-and-personal scene of a woman giving birth to a super-baby which is unnecessarily graphic and it’s got some Dr. Manhattan-style post-human philosophizing. And it’s meta as all hell. The thing is simply not of this world.

I think Pattinson is probably the best Batman we’ve had, but Christian Bale is BY FAR the best Bruce Wayne if you get what I’m saying.
Bale fumbled the bag a bit in his performance under the cowl, as Batman, but when he was Bruce Wayne he was PERFECT. A three-dimensional character that really rang true for me.

Also the Nolan Batman movies still win for me. THE BATMAN was good, but it could have used some editing, and the Riddler was disappointing and literally NOBODY needs to see yet another Joker, so fuck right off with that shit, WB. Just get off it. Fuck’s sake.

A Joker moratorium should have been declared in 2008. You all know how I feel on the matter I’m sure.

nooooo! that is not what i meant at all. that is a huge misunderstanding and mischaracterization, and just no. i reject that. it's a funny wink but the joke has no truth.

i don't have a problem with "millenials." who are legion. read in this way this is an almost meaningless term. too abstract to mean much. it's only useful in broad and loose terms. it takes specificity to have a problem with something, much less with someone.

so i have a problem with the infantilizing aspects of the culture of postindustrial capitalist societies. i have a problem with the cultural supremacy of the superhero movie in the adult world, which i find fucking lame and in bad taste. not the movies themselves, but their place. and i also have a problem with becoming an eloi (maybe). maybe i have morlock longings, hahahaha.


ah! well... then wtf are we doing talking about superheroes hahaha.

speaking of elois, borges liked h.g. wells (um, not personally, lol, i don't think they met in meatspace). but he features him in this "personal library" he wrote, which is a collection of 100 short reviews of authors he enjoyed the most. since he was an erudite reader it's well worth a look.

anyway i ended up finishing volker schlöndorff's "the tin drum" last night. at 2h43 minutes the director's cut was too long for one midweek evening. so the viewing got split into 2 parts, but not because i wanted. i would have gladly watched it all in one sitting but schedules are schedules.

i hadn't seen it in ages, and i had never seen this cut, which is fucking great. it all makes more sense and is more memorable now than ever.



i can't write anything longwinded about it right now but it's an amazing fucking film.

see more here: https://www.criterion.com/search#stq=the+tin+drum

The misfortune of seeing the new Space Jam.