Tocky on 26/6/2025 at 03:53

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Marrow Bone on hulu is the most heartbreaking ghost story I have ever watched. I can easily see it happening too. That is all I can say without risking a giveaway.

The latest Poltergeist remake follows the original plot but with less spectacular special effects because CGI just can't compare. You really can't remake it anyway. It was of it's time and set so many tropes we forget they were a first. This one can't recapture the surprises or the complacency or ultimate fear of the original. It can only make you nostalgic for the original.

And Harvester, the villain is known on the first visit to their place. What could house a hyperbaric chamber? Good series. Like all good ones you wind up caring for the characters. I even did so after the Syrian would not give specifics on which side he was on. Even the asshole was likeable. My favorite scene was when he beat the shit out of that guy who threatened his son.

demagogue on 26/7/2025 at 01:15

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I'm a Mulholland Drive junkie, but recently I've been really thinking about how to really unlock the movie for myself and others. Of course there's the notorious (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiCfHW3N3vo) explainer video by Twin Perfect on YouTube.

Although he's annoying, I think he actually gets the main points basically right. So it's one way to start the unlocking. But I think he actually takes too superficial a view, and of course just having the "answer" handed to the viewer doesn't really allow them to explore the symbolism space themselves.

So like with a good Thief fan mission, maybe, I wouldn't actually recommend watching it right off, but I think it's better to first give some hints or approaches that, if a viewer follows them up, it starts to unlock the movie scene by scene until the whole thing starts to open up. (Then after trying to crack it yourself, you can go back and check with the video.)

There are two really big hints or approaches for Mulholland Drive I think are good to think about going in. One is the color symbolism (which by the way is consistent throughout all Lynch movies since Blue Velvet and is a good way to open up all of them), and the other is understanding the final diner scene.

I'll just drop some hints about those two things, and I think it'll help unlock the movie if you really pay attention to them.

Starting with the 2nd, which revolves around the key secret to the whole thing, in that final diner scene, the key thing to notice is that the man she's talking to, showing the publicity photo, actually has two jobs. Of course when you watch it the first time, you're supposed to think he's an assassin and they're arranging an assassination of "this is the girl". In a way symbolically they are. But if you watch carefully, you'll notice he actually has a 2nd job. Now think about the meaning of that scene if he's acting not as an assassin but in his role in that 2nd job. This is the hint that will really blow open the central secret of the movie better than anything else. I think it's better to give you the hint and let you explore it than to just give it away. It hits so much harder when you get it yourself, and the meaning of all the other parts start opening up.

The other thing is the color symbolism. I'll just make a list. Lynch is religiously scrupulous to color symbolism. Pretty literally any time you see that color, he's referring to its symbolism. I'm not even kidding. There's some interpretation to be done, but to cut to the chase, here's the way I think about them. Watch each scene with these in mind, and I promise the meaning of the scenes will open up in really fascinating ways that reveal a lot about what's really going on.

Color symbolism list (my interpretation):
Blue: The central secret
Red: The Sex / The violation
Yellow / gold / jewelry: Greed (Twin Perfect said "the spirit of classic Hollywood" but, eh... Yellow is greed is all his other movies.)
Green: Youth / inexperience
Pink: The dream
Black: He or she knows, they're in the dark of life
White: He or she doesn't know yet, they're still in the light of life
Black & white striped: They know, but they've reached balance in life between the dark and light


So for example, one of the most stunning visuals in this entire movie is actually the color of a van that I don't think is on the screen for even 1/3 of a second, maybe 8 frames. But boy do those frames hit hard once you know what you're really looking at!!

All of that said, I still haven't said what the central secret is. It's something you really could drop as a single term. And the magic of the show is that it repeats it in practically every scene, over and over, without every directly saying its name. It's present but hidden everywhere. But it's still better to let it hit you, and it really does explode the meaning of every scene wide open once you see it.

Well, the other central secret is about who these women / this woman really is, but I think if you think about the above, opening up that secret should come along for the ride.

Sorry if all of this is a bit overbearing. Like I said I'm a Mulholland Drive junkie, and it's fascinating or exciting for me to see people figure out how to peel this movie apart. But don't feel any pressure or take me as any kind of special expert or demanding or anything. Also half the movie is also all the emotional vibes that go beyond reason or "solving the mystery" which any viewer can pick up by themselves, and that's valid too.

But I do think thinking through solving the mystery with some of these hints in hand does actually help open up the movie in a special way, so I recommend it to anyone interested in the movie anyway. Well that's my 2 cents on it anyway. Cheers.

Starker on 6/8/2025 at 23:11

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The idea was basically the plot of The Bell Curve where it was used as an argument for eliminating welfare policies. It has been a longstanding idea in certain right-wing subcultures where it has been used as a prediction or even justification for inevitable totalitarianism in the US where the tech-savvy elite will eventually rule over the ignorant masses.

I've made it a point to watch everything Mike Judge does. It's not even that I think his stuff is particularly good at satire or laugh out funny, but I feel that it manages to capture something about US culture incredibly well, whether it's the understated humour of King of the Hill or the corporate culture of Office Space. Idiocracy feels like a reaction to the Bush era, but of course anti-intellectualism has been an undercurrent in the US for quite a while now. In a lot of ways, it feels like a companion piece to Team America by the South Park guys which has its own brand of mockery of unquestioning knee-jerk patriotism.

heywood on 7/8/2025 at 13:50

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Mike Judge is awesome at mocking American culture.

It would be better to discuss The Bell Curve in a different thread, but yeah I can see the influence. Had I known that Idiocracy was framed in eugenics, I might have skipped it as irrelevant because the social and political movement away from rationalism that we're living in now has nothing to do with genetics.

Thirith on 11/8/2025 at 08:32

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Last night we watched Knit's Island, a French documentary which kinda has the three documentarians 'embed' on a DayZ server and interact with the people playing on it as the filmmakers they are, asking them about themselves and the ways in which they behave in the game and express themselves. It's all quite loose and experiential: there are no structured interviews, just conversations between the filmmakers and the players as they play DayZ. You've got the postapocalyptic griefer-cannibals, the close-knit friendly communities, the couple that's been traversing Chernarus for seven, eight years, the strange but friendly Finnish guy who's running the Church of Dagoth in the game.

You can imagine the kind of themes the film touches on: real life vs. game, escapism, do people play these games to be someone else or to be themselves more fully - but the machinima-style format and the selection of people the filmmakers end up interacting with makes this fascinating (at least for me - I can imagine others finding it dreadfully dull and the filmmakers annoying). Since the whole thing was made during the pandemic, which is alluded to but rarely spoken about in detail, you also get the impression that the world of DayZ was where many of these people went when they couldn't go outside and meet up with others to the same extent. The film is sometimes goofy, sometimes strange (there's a definite uncanny valley effect between the ways in which DayZ looks quite realistic and the many ways in which it's a clunky video game), and towards the end oddly poignant. It also made me think about the hundreds of hours of multiplayer games played especially with TTLG folks, and the ways in which those are at least as much about hanging out with friends as they are about playing a game and trying to beat it. They way I think of several of the people here as their characters in GTA or Arma or Human Fall Flat or Peak or Walkabout Mini Golf - and it doesn't make them any less real to me.

[video=youtube_share;EyvZ3iuMWKM]https://youtu.be/EyvZ3iuMWKM?si=eI870o0edcR3H4ZR[/video]