Sulphur on 13/2/2024 at 17:25
Well, you certainly made up for not posting about them for the past 14 years.
henke on 13/2/2024 at 17:46
1. you only watched one movie in 2011?
2. please tell me more about SEXMISSION.
Neb on 13/2/2024 at 20:37
I watched Citizen Kane and then must've been done for the rest of the year. Not even a movie for Christmas.
Sexmission was a goofy Polish sci-fi about the last men alive being captured by women for their seed. It was probably really dumb, but I remember not hating it at the time.
Some definite notables on there:
Once Upon a Time in the West - I saw a video of a media professor saying it was better than The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (which I had seen and loved). I thought he was just being contrarian, but after watching it, completely agreed. It's been almost nine years, so I'll give it another go this year to see if it still holds up. The way Leone tells stories with glances and other visual elements is pure genius, even if the plot and characters themselves aren't particularly sophisticated. I enjoyed spending a solid portion of the movie not knowing whether or not there was meant to be a 'good guy' or a real protagonist.
[video=youtube;g5Fh31Q_AkQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Fh31Q_AkQ[/video]
Life is Sweet - I have ploughed through many Mike Leigh films in the past, but this one has stuck with me. I felt the characters etched into my memory for months after, and I returned to this fantastic scene plenty of times.
[video=youtube;KGAWliosbao]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGAWliosbao[/video]
Barry Lyndon - This was another 'how good could it be?' watch. I had already seen it before in 2007, remembered enjoying it, but wasn't certain that I believed someone who said it was the best Kubrick. I changed my mind after watching it again in 2021. It's an excellent portrayal of an Irish lowborn who has the pure ambition to succeed in entering the English aristocracy and gain a landed title, but has character flaws which prevent him from securing his ambitions. Also, OMG SHE'S YOUR COUSIN, GET OVER IT!
[video=youtube;WKApoK3KYFU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKApoK3KYFU[/video]
Some other mentions:
Most horrible: Ivansxtc - The only movie I want to scrub from memory. It was an adaptation of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The last scene has him dying of lung cancer and haemorrhaging in hospital. Part of me thinks that a movie only has to be memorable to be worthwhile. :erg:
Trying to be outlandish: The House that Jack Built - A Lars von Trier about a serial killer. Ever since he got kicked out of Cannes for being cringe he has to innovate even harder than before for outrage. I also saw Breaking the Waves not that long ago and found it much more impressive.
The last one I watched: The China Syndrome - a fairly decent thriller about a camera crew who witness an incident at a nuclear power plant while filming a segment, and the resulting cover-up. Released 7 years before the Chernobyl accident.
Sulphur on 23/2/2024 at 03:27
Breaking the Waves was a pretty interesting movie, never mind LvT. I haven't watched many of his other films, because his tendency to go for the throat in terms of emotional reaction's a bit much. Still plan to get around to Antichrist someday, but when your movie opens with a baby falling out a window while the parents are having sex, you know it's a statement of intent.
Anyhoo, I've been watching For All Mankind, though I cannot for the life of me understand why I continue to. The premise is neat: an alternate history where the Russians landed on the moon first, and the Cold War went through a different perambulation because of that. It's helmed by Ron Moore; you know, some guy who did writing for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and then had the temerity to reboot Battlestar Galactica as a science fiction 9/11 parable.
Except, like BSG, For All Mankind starts off strong, then ensures it frustrates you entirely by focusing on the things it's not good at, which is the drama. This is a much bigger problem in FAM because BSG had a bunch of likeable characters who got developed in ways that made sense at least half of the time, and the conflicts between them mostly worked (until the show shoved sense out of an airlock and decided the ineffableness of religion was its true focus). If you're going to write drama, your characters must be able to carry it.
FAM has one-dimensional people put into contrived situations 98% of the time, with lines and reactions that probably read good on paper but come off as baby's first teleplay in action. Part of that is the direction, but I can't fault the performances: the actors do what they can with the material, but what they're asked to do is so poorly constructed at times that it beggars belief. Every bit of character drama here feels so manufactured that beyond the obvious reasons (come up with a plot concept, then write the characters around it), I wondered if these writers just new to the whole deal of writing. And the answer is no, some of them even worked with Ron back in his Star Trek days. But maybe that's part of the problem: Star Trek works because its episodic nature demands strong archetypes built to withstand episodic writing. FAM is serialised in nature, which means you can jettison the archetypes and let the characters develop over time. My theory is they overestimated their ability to pull off what The Sopranos or Mad Men did, which was to start with an interesting base and then layer in depth and complexity with their protagonists as time went on. Four seasons in, FAM still feels like it's moving around the cardboard cutouts you'd find in some run of the mill 90s network TV show, and it's never going to feel less than contrived in the situations it forces upon them.
Which is a shame, because the things it's actually okay to kind of good at are (some of) the politics and the space exploration parts. If they'd focused more on these, written up stronger character bases, then... I guess you'd have Star Trek or BSG?
Which is no bad thing: stick to what you're good at.
Cipheron on 26/2/2024 at 03:35
Quote Posted by Neb
I have logged every movie I've watched since 2010. There might be a few missing if I never finished them.
Ah, Tekkonkinkreet was a mixed bag, but a very unique film. You probably want to watch the Satoshi Kon anime films (the guy died young after directing 4 masterpiece films).
Tokyo Godfathers, Millenium Acrtress, Paprika and Perfect Blue.
Some other old films I watched relatively recently that I really enjoyed:
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) great racing / road movie with some cool shots
American Graffiti (1973) George Lucas' teen / coming of age movie. Definitely one of the great teen movies and better than most of the 1980s stuff.
Son of the White Mare (1981, Hungarian, animated). this is some of the trippiest shit you'll ever see. It's based on Hungarian folklore.
Edit: just noticed Neb got around to
Yojimbo (1961, Akira Kurosawa). This one is notably because Sergio Leone literally stole the entire plot almost exactly shot by shot to make
A Fistful of Dollars. There's stuff that "rips off" popular films then there's was Sergio Leone did to Yojimbo, which is taking things to another level you wouldn't believe exists in ripping something off.
District 9. I wasn't sure what to expect going into this, but it's a really unique take on science fiction action which deals with real world issues. I had thought this had something to do with Peter Jackson, it turns out that it was because he helped fund the film on the strength of the short film treatment the creator had released.
Network 1976. Very enjoyable black comedy / social satire.
I also noticed Neb watched
Top Secret! which is by the Zuckers-Abrams-Zucker (ZAZ) team. They also directed the (first)
Airplane movie in 1980 (but they didn't make Airplane 2), and their proto-film with some great moments was the sketch-comedy film
Kentucky Fried Movie from 1977. Later, they directed the Leslie Nielson-starring
Police Squad (TV) + Naked Gun series. I've watched Police Squad a couple of times and am about to get into the Naked Gun trilogy next.
EvaUnit02 on 28/2/2024 at 13:02
Dune Part 2 (2024) - 5/5
A triumph in both filmmaking and writing. Finally some good food from Hollywood.
The writing was utterly fantastic.
Chani remaining the moral compass to the bitter end, fighting against the cult of personality, false prophet puppetry. Jessica and other Bene Gesserits manipulating the shit of everybody. Execution of even minor characters like the one played by Lea Seydoux was so good, a stone cold femme fatale wrapping even that highly intelligent and cunning younger Harkonnen nephew around her little finger.
The rest of modern Hollywood should take notes on how to write properly from this film.
I hope we get to see future adaptations of later stories where the Atreides bloodline get redeemed. (I know that the sandworm god emperor guy maintains his sanity, but begrudgingly tolerates the cult worship of himself to maintain order and peace in the galaxy.)
Anarchic Fox on 5/3/2024 at 17:59
Quote Posted by demagogue
Sure he wasn't one of the handful of titans, but he wasn't a slouch either. I just watched a nice (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py8k1tn8yw4) video walking through his contributions to physics. There were two big things that he jumped the gun on, just without connecting the last piece, Dirac's prediction of positrons and the theoretical discovery of the mechanism for the creation of black holes. Anyway, I think it's fair for a movie like this to thumb the scale a bit just out of literary license since it's ultimately a story for the public, sort of like they also did with Steven Hawking because the public adores him so much.
You're such a fool, Demagogue. An accomplished plasma physicist expresses her opinion on a physicist's value, and you respond with a Youtube video.
Go watch some videos about China instead.
demagogue on 5/3/2024 at 20:06
Well we're chatting on a forum for video games to begin with. But if you're bringing it up, what's special about that video is that it's actually walking through his published papers. That's as close as one can hope to get to the source in a package accessible enough for people posting on a video game forum.
It's not like I was counter-arguing you; it was giving context to the gallery about why the movie might want to thumb that scale.
Edit: Actually, I guess I need to make this explicit. Obviously the video isn't for you because you're going to be light years ahead of it; it's for the readers (with no background in this at all) following the argument to get the gist in an accessible package. I can understand you getting miffed if you thought I was trying to trump your expertise with a video like that, but I didn't post it with any intention of telling you something you don't already know x1000 more than I do. But I can see that it looks like I did. So apologies for not being more thoughtful about that.
But anyway, I wasn't even disagreeing with you, sheesh. I wouldn't say he approached Max Born with Max Born himself being a minor constellation. I wasn't claiming to be any expert, but even with what I think I know I'm not disagreeing with that. I think my point was it's not like he was a community college physics teacher/slouch. He was competent for what he was doing and there was a professional respect; which is what I'm thinking the thumbing of the scale was conveying for the target audience in the context of an admittedly pretty hagiographic portrayal. (Edit: One problem with the movie's portrayal I'll grant is that it distorts what his talents were that made him so effective as the head of the Manhattan project; they weren't from the influence of his work or reputation as a physicist.)
You don't have to call me a fool or get hostile over trying to put it into context and think through what the movie may be trying to do in the context of your valid point.
Edit: Well, back up, the main point is that the movie was having Oppenheimer portrayed, and reacted to by others, in a way that people in that field at that time wouldn't have recognized or even found a little laughable, so there's an inauthenticity to it. That's a good point. I think the movie was trying to do something else with that portrayal for its target audience that was outside the frame of the profession, which was what I was trying to get at and why I didn't even think I was contradicting you, that also crossed that line in a way that makes your complaint justified. I used to post walls of text with all these kinds of caveats, but then no one reads them at all...
If you want to think about it this way, the point I'm wanting to make is now clearer & more solid than it was from that post, so in that way, your push back is doing good work in making me do that.
Cipheron on 5/3/2024 at 22:20
Quote Posted by Anarchic Fox
You're such a fool, Demagogue. An accomplished plasma physicist expresses her opinion on a physicist's value, and you respond with a Youtube video.
... A youtube video in which they're interviewing a physics professor.
And I really hope you were just kidding there, because the entire statement is just a bunch of obvious logical falllacies glued back to back:
Ad Hominem attack, to start with
Then instead of addressing what the person said bringing up some previous unspecified "accomplished plasma physicist" and claiming that's who the speaker is contradicting: that's the
Strawman Appeal to Authority Shifting the goalpostsNon-Sequitor (e.g. "how dare you insult the Queen" when the Queen was never mentioned)
Red Herring why is plasma physics even mentioned here? It's not actually relevant to the argument at all, since a plasma physicist isn't any more or less able to have an opinion on a theoretical physicist than anyone else.
Also the phrasing was suspiciously vague yet oddly specific. There are a number of fallacies related to that. Misleading Specificity, Half-Truths, Missing Context etc. Without more specifics how can we be certain Oppenheimer didn't run over her dog, or she's a hardcore McCarthyist? That's the problem with vague evidence.
Then the part about being skeptical purely because it's a youtube video:
Appeal to ridiculeArgument from incredulityYou can try for the trifecta by now claiming the physicist professor in the video isn't physics professor enough for you ("but I said *accomplished* physicist") which would be:
No True ScotsmanOr, maybe you could have claimed that if we accept what's in youtube videos, before you know it, everyone would be having an opinion, which is the
Slippery Slope ArgumentThe efficiency with which this statement delivers fallacies is actually impressive.
Sulphur on 6/3/2024 at 05:40
...
Sounds like all y'all need to chill out a bit. Have a video to watch.
[video=youtube_share;eW8XoovSlsM]https://youtu.be/eW8XoovSlsM?feature=shared[/video]