"it was ok i suppose" : a non reaction to "polarazing" things

[craner]

see i would be on your side but i saw The Lady from Shanghai on the big screen some years back and in that moment thats when i got it

Exactly, although I'm impressed that Orson's comedy Irish accent didn't ruin the whole thing for you

 

[luka]

i have enjoyed black and white films. the last one i saw i liked was called Harvey. it was about a giant rabbit

 

[craner]

The world of cinema is divided between France and Italy, or, to put it another way, Sundance and Hollywood.

 

[forclosure]

Arkadin is weird man,there's so much off beat stuff in terms of visual depth, angles and even how it's told that i'm surprised people haven taken from

also you say Arkadin is less depressing when i swear one of the reveals is that he's involved in a sex trafficking ring?

 

[forclosure]

beginning to wonder why i started this thing...

 

[forclosure]

any thoughts you wanna share @sufi? i feel this got derailed immediately the second i typed Mullholland Drive

 

[WashYourHands]

To sow division? (teasing)

Miami Vice - crap, bilge, fuck off with your joke jackets, if this was real life they’d have been knee deep in flake, booze, illegal funding streams, beds of money, before a rapid decline with heroin down the Keys

Orson Welles - big fella, biiiiig fella, didn’t anyone dare mention this to OW intervention style? “Mr Welles, the hotel believes a 5th breakfast may be excessive”. Films? No idea

Elizabeth Taylor - a lovely wee ride, age was cruel, the perfect brunette (until C Munro showed up). Seen her in Cleopatra? Goddess right there fap fap fap

Celtic FC - all you London cunts look out when we join the PL with, chokes on food a bit, certain Huns across town. Far more potency than Watford. Exclusionary, power mad, elitist, included the Welsh but not the only European Cup winner north of Manchester

Forest FC - only acceptable English equivalent, B Clough, Shilton, Robertson, Gemmill, all the way through to essentially gifting Roy Keane everything he’d need as a PL winner. Watching them? Rubbish. You have to tramp all the way from fucking Mapperley, 2buses, a trek for a regional city. When I was younger there was far more risk to personal safety, which was nice

Witness - I don’t know how many times my pre-Boomer Mum’s watched this film, hundreds, possibly more. Add Gladiator, The Quiet Man, Doris Day in By the Light of the Silvery Moon/On Moonlight Bay. Every visit, at least one of these will be the price so it’s the least we can do

Ian Paisley - I think of him splitting a sheet of acid with Third, travelling through spacetime, only to come round the following morning having gone through anal jihad and left-communist wetware installations. Miss you, Pails

Bacon - minging, look at industrial pig farming, how is this possible? But in a wholemeal toast as a sarnie, with a dollop of ketchup? If it’s crisp and I’m not imposing because you’re doing the prep, go on then

Lamb - the King, a whole leg slow roasted, heavy spicing, just add some greens, failing that Barnsley style chops fat rendered and roasted, cumin/coriander/paprika/lime juice/s&p

What was the question again? Clock off at 7pm

 

[catalog]

Arkadin is weird man,there's so much off beat stuff in terms of visual depth, angles and even how it's told that i'm surprised people haven taken from

also you say Arkadin is less depressing when i swear one of the reveals is that he's involved in a sex trafficking ring?

CK seems to me to get very stolid and so dark towards the end, whereas Arkadin the pace doesn't let up and you can go along with it more. The characters are all a little more off kilter if that makes sense?

Have you seen falstaff? That's easily the best one I think.

 

[version]

I think the consensus on a lot of things isn't real and certainly isn't a genuine reflection of the thing itself, particularly nowadays. Everything's exaggerated for effect, drenched in irony. You can't just reappraise 'Miami Vice'. You have to come out with either some belligerent contrarian take on why it's actually a masterpiece or overintellectualise it.

When you actually watch the stuff then you realise all the discussion around it is one of those games Gus likes to highlight. It's people posturing on Twitter and Letterboxd or whatever publication they write for.

 

[version]

It all seems a bit arbitrary, to latch onto the other thread. I think this is one of the pitfalls of the whole rhizome thing with D&G and the way the internet works. Everything can become more or less interchangeable noise and you just stop caring, one thing's as good or as bad as the next and you can arbitrarily choose whether or not to make it interesting by just framing it a certain way.

 

[version]

This is from the top rated review of 'Predator 2' on Letterboxd,

"If the first Predator movie concerned itself with the Reagan White House's illegal drug-money-funded death-squad-enabling wars of terror and regime overthrow in Central America, Predator 2 is the domestic blowback that results from the CIA flooding the cities of the United States with guns and crack in order to disable revolt and enact widespread genocide economics, justifying a massive for-profit mass incarceration protocol immediately upon the horizon. While Predator 2's depiction of gang life might be broadly surreal, the idea that Black and Latino organizations are fighting each other and the underpaid stressed-out footsoldier cops and the DEA in order to buy into a system devised purposefully for their own annihilation is very much a reality."

It's fun and makes sense to a degree, but it's also a stretch and I very much doubt this is what the filmmakers had in mind when they made the film. It feels more like someone trying to come up with an interesting angle for their Letterboxd audience, talk about their politics etc whilst doing it an offbeat, contrarian sort of way by doing it with a maligned action sequel, i.e. you can take literally anything you want and just decide to do this sort of reading of it.

Everything seems a bit pointless and numbing when that approach becomes the dominant one.

 

[luka]

when i get grumpy with Gus i sometimes tell him he could spin his bullshit around anything, it doesnt mean anything, it could be a deoderant advert. and like, we were talking about it with pitchfork too, just the sense that the reviews write themselves, they dont relate to the thing being reviewed, all the connections have disappeared and its a game that only refers to itself not the record

 

[version]

Someone was talking about this re: January 6th too. That the actual event doesn't matter. They don't need it to be worse than 9/11 in order to decide that it is and there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy to go along with it.

 

[forclosure]

I think the consensus on a lot of things isn't real and certainly isn't a genuine reflection of the thing itself, particularly nowadays. Everything's exaggerated for effect, drenched in irony. You can't just reappraise 'Miami Vice'. You have to come out with either some belligerent contrarian take on why it's actually a masterpiece or overintellectualise it.

When you actually watch the stuff then you realise all the discussion around it is one of those games Gus likes to highlight. It's people posturing on Twitter and Letterboxd or whatever publication they write for.

i mean lets be honest letterboxd might aswell just be an extension of twitter part of the same branch imo

 

[forclosure]

This is from the top rated review of 'Predator 2' on Letterboxd,



It's fun and makes sense to a degree, but it's also a stretch and I very much doubt this is what the filmmakers had in mind when they made the film. It feels more like someone trying to come up with an interesting angle for their Letterboxd audience, talk about their politics etc whilst doing it an offbeat, contrarian sort of way by doing it with a maligned action sequel, i.e. you can take literally anything you want and just decide to do this sort of reading of it.

Everything seems a bit pointless and numbing when that approach becomes the dominant one.

i'd agree but tell that to the believers in vulgar auterism, they'd probably call you an idiot for still thinking in this way that the directors opinion on their own movies still matter

 

[version]

There's surely no way a film can live up to being discussed as polarising anyway. I remember people going on about 'The Tree of Life' in those terms and just thinking it was a bit crap, but whatever.

 

[version]

i'd agree but tell that to the believers in vulgar auterism, they'd probably call you an idiot for still thinking in this way that the directors opinion on their own movies still matter

I don't mind it when it's done well, but it's so commonplace now that it's dull and unimaginative. We're at the point where it's reduced to halfarsed, one-sentence comments about how 'Venom' is really a love story.

 

[craner]

There's surely no way a film can live up to being discussed as polarising anyway. I remember people going on about 'The Tree of Life' in those terms and just thinking it was a bit crap, but whatever

Have you ever seen The Gestapo’s Last Orgy?

 

[version]

Have you ever seen The Gestapo’s Last Orgy?

Let's see what Letterboxd has to say about this one...

Top review is from one "Egon Strangler",

'When I was in high school, one night my dad snuck into my VHS collection and watched this, thinking it was an adult film. The next morning he pulled me aside, white as a ghost, and said "Son, I want you to destroy that Gestapo movie and never watch it again."

I've always thought it was weird my dad hated this movie so much he pretty much admitted he wanted to jerk off to some Nazi porn.'

 

[forclosure]

@version the textbook definition of letterboxd review for me is this one review i saw of Tsai Ming Liang's The River(a movie i like btw) that was just two quotes 1 was from some old French academic textbook about cinema and images, the other was from the podcast cumtown about its nothing to do with being a leftist or anything political it's about being gay with your dad.

when you watch the movie and realise what the 2nd quote has to do with the movie its infuriating