"it was ok i suppose" : a non reaction to "polarazing" things
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woops
is not like other people
für Craner dreht sich alles um Vergnügen. ich persönlich meide es. es macht dich schwach.
craner
Beast of Burden
sus
Moderator
To be fair to Rich, I have watched Mulholland Drive going on a dozen times now, and I think it is very indeterminate what is real and what is fantasy, and whose fantasy exactly is playing out. Also, it can still be a single person's fantasy of a two-person magical world. Also, I thought Rich's explanation was beautiful.
sufi
lala
I watched that film in LA with @HannahB iirc after driving up mulholland drive or poss before driving down it. @HB is a proper film person
it sure did derail quick. i'm not really a films buff, so i've kind of opted out of that contest - these online platforms create a competitive environment and that drives everything to extremities, ideologically, as well as in taste and levels of snark and glurge
i personally have not connected my irl persona very closely with my online one -i mean i still see them as separate things - but increasingly online impinges on real life as we track and broadcast and project ourselves more and more intensely, so the public persona is just getting bigger and bigger proportions of airtime, while the ambivalent fleshy homunculous crawls head bowed into it's matrix pod, if you see what i mean?
IdleRich
IdleRich
I think if you've read that as any kind of a description of some kind of "way to live" I've written it much worse than I thought.... and I thought I'd written it fairly badly.
Let me rephrase, avoiding metaphor or any other kind of complex wordplay including puns, sarcasm etc
When I was 16 years old I realised that when we were asked our opinion on something we were supposed to have strong reactions... if we liked a thing we had to say that it was our favourite thing ever, but, if we didn't we had to say stuff about how it was the worst thing of all time anywhere in the world ever and, ideally, we should then elaborate on the specific type of testicular cancer we wanted its creators to suffer from and how drawn out their deaths should be.
All well and good it's just... quite a lot of things didn't fit those categories. Of course, for a film critic the best fun is to write about a terrible film, especially a terrible film that people thought was gonna be good. In that circumstance you can fire up all your best weapons, dig out some killer insults you've been saving up for next time your worst enemy says something on dissensus - but that don't matter, noone reads dissensus so you can use it slag off Mr Tea AND Savages (I mention Savages because, I was just flicking through the channels and that film was on, have you ever seen that film? It's a real bad one. Like really bad. I was just about to lay into the savage glee that yer average critic deploys against even slightly bad films, but with a film like this it's fully deserved. Savages is so bad, I had completely forgotten it existed, yet at the same time, sometimes it pops unbidden into my head and wrecks my day, it's the worst... anyway). But after a terrible film, the next most fun is a great film. Mediocre film? Hard to get too excited about, hard to write well about, mediocre in so many ways they transpose their mediocrity to other genres around them including criticism.
The point is, mediocre and the just ok, get written out of history. We all know most things are mediocre, but we rarely read a review of such and we don't use the description as much as we should. Well, maybe we do now, as we've matured into (in most of our cases) mediocrity. But... I got interrupted in my reading, but if that was roughly what this thread was about then I wholeheartedly agree. Though as a point, it really is quite a middling one, six out of ten probably....
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IdleRich
IdleRich
Yes, that's what I mean when I said "if we accept it's real". I think at that point of the film, certainly the first time i saw it at least, it felt real. Maybe if I were smarter I would have spotted at the time that it was too perfect and too safe and so on... but I was just sucked into it. Now, I think there is no plausible reading of the film I've seen that allows you to believe it's anything other than a fantasy... but I don't think that undermines anything of what I said about how I first experienced and understood it - albeit wrongly in the end.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Thanks mate, I feel that you are sticking up for me and I don't want to throw it back in your face and I am glad you think it's beautiful BUT I do have to make it clear, that although as you're watching it it feels that way, at the same time I'm not saying that it's what is going on, it's not the reality of the film. I totally agree that that whole relationship is a fantasy. In fact, by Lynch standards, the non-reality of that whole thing is one of the most clearcut and inarguable bits... in fact, now I come to think of it properly, it's actually too clear cut, perhaps it's a red herring, it's exactly what he wants you to think... no, that's mental, sorry ignore me. But in the moment, at that time, it feels real... in fact it is real for them in that instant.
forclosure
Well-known member
"generating more heat than light" as they call it
forclosure
Well-known member
forclosure
Well-known member
Walter Hill said something similiar about this with boxing films, how they always end up never being about the sport it's always about some larger bullshit metaphor
There are "red flag" films too. Fight Club, American Psycho, The Dark Knight. That sort of thing.
forclosure
Well-known member
forclosure
Well-known member
there's a film podcast i check out from time to time where one of the hosts likes to bring up the existance of a "feral books guy" but really he knows he's just imagined this person up and he's just talking about himself lol
forclosure
Well-known member
its funny that The Times of all places wrote that cause there's a certain "type of guy" that i'd associate with reading that paper well not really a guy just a aggravating rich older man whose terrified of everything and feels like our "traditional institutions" are under threat
forclosure
Well-known member
MASSIVLY even people who you think would know better get caught up in it
I don't know if its just the way the site works just bringing out the worst tendencies in people but it does have this knack of doing it to people that and thinking whatever talking point of the day their having deep discussions over is more important than that it really is
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
The Film Bro canon
forclosure
Well-known member
@version makes you think about the weird way in which such an importance is put on "small talk" the whole thing that you engage with certain things not cause you like them just so if you happen to run into a person at work and they ask you about it you can say "yeah i did..was alright" so you're not left out or what have you
the much vaunted and mythical "water cooler conversation" that i've heard people talk about which really twitter is just a really aggressive version of that
tbh i don't think people have had small talk around the water cooler in a looong long time, definitly not now
the much vaunted and mythical "water cooler conversation" that i've heard people talk about which really twitter is just a really aggressive version of that
tbh i don't think people have had small talk around the water cooler in a looong long time, definitly not now