Its a rental service? I thought you went to the theaters.
Yeah, it's a kiosk where you rent movies. I ain't paying $10+ to see some state propaganda. I get my state propaganda the ol' fashioned way: by getting it hammered into me at school.
My household spends almost two hundred bucks for Verizon triple play and its mostly garbage. We only have Showtime and The Movie Channel as our premium channels for movies, and their some of the worst forms of state propaganda. Occasionally their service has a glitch that allows you to access all of the other channel premiums and watch how many movies you want. So I take advantage of that when the opportunity comes.
Got a crush on Owen Wilson atm so Drillbit Taylor, Shangai Noon and Midnight in Paris (all hilarious!) Anyone see either This Is The End or Anchorman 2? The first has THE BEST CAST EVAR!
I saw Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. I found it to be racist and pointless. The filmmaker tries to address "race struggle", but reproduces stereotypes that are not really helpful for whatever he's trying to prove.
ELYSIUM, brilliant. They didnt quite 'organise the space workers' though.
One of the best big budget Hollywood action movies I've seen in recent years but only because the others of that genre are usually so pathetic.
Why can't the police robots be made by other robots? The new Total Recall had its hero work in cop robot factory as well BTW.
I get that the bourgeoisie want to physically separate themselves from the (lumpen-)proletariat, they already do that now but they're capitalists for fucksake so there's no reason access to their magical medbeds wouldn't be restricted by money rather than citizenship.
I guess I liked it but I'm disappointed because it could have been a much better film. Even if only by calling the hero Max Hoelz instead of Max Da Costa.
ELYSIUM, brilliant. They didnt quite 'organise the space workers' though.
One of the best big budget Hollywood action movies I've seen in recent years but only because the others of that genre are usually so pathetic.
Why can't the police robots be made by other robots? The new Total Recall had its hero work in cop robot factory as well BTW.
I get that the bourgeoisie want to physically separate themselves from the (lumpen-)proletariat, they already do that now but they're capitalists for fucksake so there's no reason access to their magical medbeds wouldn't be restricted by money rather than citizenship.
I guess I liked it but I'm disappointed because it could have been a much better film. Even if only by calling the hero Max Hoelz instead of Max Da Costa.
Also the jerky handheld camera work is soooo annoying.
I rarely go to the pictures, but went to see this a couple of months back.
It's hard to explain this film, just because it combines so many different elements. It's basically a monochrome, psychedelic, mystic, historical drama set in the English Civil War. Both the writing, and the direction is really gritty, visceral and surreal, but I felt the visual aesthetics completely overpowered the writing, so the plot was lost on a few occasions. Saying that, the visuals actually made me come back to it, and want to understand it a bit more. I very rarely watch a film so soon after I've seen it the first time. It's really stripped-down - five characters in a field - but bombastic. I'd say it was like a mix between F.J. Ossang's work and Un Chien Andalou. Bit of Brecht in there too. Really uncomfortable to watch, but immersive.
Great cast too. In particular, Michael Smiley (Tyres in Spaced), and Reece Shearsmith (League of Gentleman), are amazing.
Apparently it was released on DVD, cinema and on television at the same time. I'd be interested to know how that worked out.
I rarely go to the pictures, but went to see this a couple of months back.
It's hard to explain this film, just because it combines so many different elements. It's basically a monochrome, psychedelic, mystic, historical drama set in the English Civil War. Both the writing, and the direction is really gritty, visceral and surreal, but I felt the visual aesthetics completely overpowered the writing, so the plot was lost on a few occasions. Saying that, the visuals actually made me come back to it, and want to understand it a bit more. I very rarely watch a film so soon after I've seen it the first time. It's really stripped-down - five characters in a field - but bombastic. I'd say it was like a mix between F.J. Ossang's work and Un Chien Andalou. Bit of Brecht in there too. Really uncomfortable to watch, but immersive.
Great cast too. In particular, Michael Smiley (Tyres in Spaced), and Reece Shearsmith (League of Gentleman), are amazing.
Apparently it was released on DVD, cinema and on television at the same time. I'd be interested to know how that worked out.
Had little discernible plot and gave me a headache. But visually stunning and liked the bawdy dialogue.
Had little discernible plot and gave me a headache. But visually stunning and liked the bawdy dialogue.
Yeah, I think that's fair. Thinking about it, I'm kind of leaning towards the idea that there actually isn't supposed to be much of a plot, in the sense of a narrative I mean. The visuals and odd sense of time (quick-cuts, slow-motion, dead coming back to life, scenes coming back to the start) make it quite nauseating. There is also a lot of anti-illusionism going on (character glance at the camera, the song interlude). It's all a bit post-dramatic.
I found this interesting:
And you use that period as the basis for what is basically a trip movie. What made you want to combine the two things?
BW: Just reading about it. We read about the magic men going about blowing ground-up mushroom dust into people's faces and people having experiences. That was really interesting. And we read about mushroom circles and how they were considered to be portals to fairy worlds and how if you went through one it was very difficult to escape. How time moves at different speeds either side of the mushroom circle and that you need four men and a rope to pull you out...
Oh, that's where that bit came from!
BW: It just jumps off the page. You're going “Fuck! That's brilliant!” But also on a very basic level we wanted to make a midnight movie. Those kind of movies that haven't been made for donkeys years, like Eraserhead, where you end up going, “This is wilfully strange”. It's a trip movie, basically. In the same way that people flogged 2001 as one. It's a sensory experience as much as it is a story. That was important.
This is absolutely the worst film I have ever seen. I wanted to switch off after 5 minutes but watched it all the way through with a sort of fascinated horror as time after time it missed the point by about fifty million fucking miles. Mr Kubric displayed a determination to go for a sensationalist approach which rendered the story as a barely noticeable side issue. The humour of the book was totally AWOL as was Alex's endearing qualities that amazingly make you love him in spite of all of his diabolical attitudes and actions.
I know that it's hard for films to tell a story in the same way as a book but besides getting EVERYTHING wrong, it missed the whole third section out completely. A third of the book which of course includes the conclusion!
There was a 1984 tv series in the fifties called Big Brother is Watching You which ended with Winston and Julia up against a wall shouting 'down with Big Brother' as they were shot. Well, every frame of this hideous pile of shit missed the point like this but times a trillion.
Aaaaagghhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Coincidentally, I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey by Kubrick. It was alright. A lot of the scenes tend drag a bit overlong.
I saw Hidden Agenda by Ken Loach, which was extremely dialogue driven. It seems to be the only way the director knows how to express his politics, by creating characters who share his outlook.
I also saw: Skyfall, Zero Dark Thirty, Ted and Argo. I was unsurprisingly unimpressed by these latter four titles.
Coincidentally, Soapy, I just watched it yesterday from that same torrent. Great movie. I also recently watched The Act of Killing, a documentary about some former death squad members in Indonesia who were active during Suharto's coup. Very surreal film, one of the best documentaries I've ever seen.
Soapy and Tyrion - thanks for the links, really like to see both of them, but they don't seem to be working for me. I can't seem to access any of the torrent sites as a matter of fact. Something to do with my settings?
This week, I aav been mostly watching...
Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others - German film, situated in 1984, Berlin. About a Stasi agent getting more and more involved in the lives of a writer and actress whom he is spying on. Good film, I enjoyed it.
Capricorn One - Sci Fi from 1978, about a Mars landing hoax. I really enjoyed it, though I found the ending a bit disappointing.
Tout va Bien - Godard film from 1972. About a fictional strike in a sausage factory in 1968 France. Employs Brechtian techniques that I've never encountered in film before. For example, there's one monologue directed at the camera from a CGT shop steward - in character - though reading directly off the script. I enjoyed it a lot, would watch it again.
Ghost In The Shell 1995, and Innocence, 2004. Like most Manga films, I can't really explain what's going on. Would watch them again to take it all in. Loved the first one, though wasn't to fussed with the second one. I didn't really like the use of 3D computerized animation in the sequel, but I've been told by my brother my computer is shit, and I should see it on a proper screen. So there.
It says, "error - site blocked". Does the same for most other sites. I've managed to start downloading The Act of Killing though from another site. Should be ready to watch in a couple of weeks, haha.
The Act of Killing[/url], a documentary about some former death squad members in Indonesia who were active during Suharto's coup. Very surreal film, one of the best documentaries I've ever seen.
I certainly adds credibility to Marx view of the lumpen proletariat :(
Pretty shocking film, but I can't make my mind up what I think about the way its been done.
I watched a short very funny satirical/political critique by way of subtitles of 'Marxism-Leninism-Maoism' set against a Chinese Martial Arts type background film called 'Can Dialectics Break Bricks' and an interesting Bertoldt Brecht black and white anti-war theatrical film showing at the 'Art Moving Left' Exhibition at Liverpool Tate - not the most enlightening exhibition from my political point of view but these two old films were good. Others might have come across these before?
Spikeymike - Can Dialectics Break Bricks is here in full on youtube. A Situationist film, bizarre and funny, yeah. I seem to recall it mentioning anarcho-syndicalism a few times, though it could be just be my brain playing tricks again. Was a while baack when I saw it. Don't suppose you remember the name of the Brecht work?
Supposedly one of the best films ever made. I couldn't make it through the whole thing. The flat angles, which are apparently a "trademark" of the director just make it awful, the characters/performances are all interchangeable and almost every time there was a conversation between two people they spoke directly to the camera which ended up making the film look silly. I know it was the 50's and it's a classic and all that, but I seriously don't get what people see in this.
Just finished watching Her, about a man (played by Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his artificially intelligent operating system in a a slightly futuristic setting. Despite what that description would suggest, it's not at all campy and really very emotional, with excellent performances by both Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the AI. Spike Jonze is one of my favorite directors and apparently he's a great writer as well.
I recently watched the Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight trilogy, which I'd never seen any of before but the third film came out last year and has gotten rave reviews (as has the whole trilogy, they have 100%, 95%, and 98% respectively on Rotten Tomatoes). The praise is definitely well earned. Each of the movies takes place in more or less a single day and mostly consist of two people, played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, talking and walking around, but they're all really romantic and Hawke and Delpy are flawless. I think I liked Before Sunset the best--it definitely has my favorite ending of the three--but they're all fantastic films.
I also saw Dr. Strangelove for the first time the other day, which was hilarious.
I usually take the names of films from this list: http://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000_all1000films.htm and wait for it to show on Turners Movies Classics and record them with my DVR.
Berberian Sound Studio, 2012. Wicked film, loved it. Set in the 70s, an mild-mannered English foley artist ventures to Italy to work on what he believes to be an equestrian film, but turns out to be a horror flick. It gets surreal, and macabre; the line between his reality and the film becomes non-existent. Co-produced by Warp, the soundtrack in this film is quite incredible, fitting of the subject matter. This, with the cinematography, makes it a real dense film, full of texture. Saying that, I found it fun to watch, not at all difficult. Great stuff.
EDIT: Also watched If..., 1968, which though I ploughed through it, thought it was actually quite dull. I actually hated every single character.
I found The Act of Killing really good, but I'd like to know more about how they made it. Sometimes felt very... I don't know, violently voyeuristic. I'd like to know though if that that village they burnt down actually was a working, real-life village, or just a set. From what I could make out, it was a real village. Absolutely fucking mental. "Gangsters/free men", the mythology of capitalism in a nutshell. Fuck, I feel so bad for those kids who had no idea what was going on, and the people having to live through that again. When the guy talks of burying his "Communist" step-dad to the murderers - absolutely heartbreaking.
On the Waterfront, about a bureaucratic union taken over by the bureaucratic mob
I was in the process of putting some stuff together on anti-communist movies, but got sidetracked by other things, but was going to include On The Waterfront. (I'm still working on it, but it is going slowly at the moment.)
The whole film seems to be an elaborate justification for grassing up supposed communists to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The director (Elia Kazan), the writer, and the actor who played Johnny Friendly (the main villain) all testified before HUAC and all of them named names.
The whole film is littered with references to "stool pigeons" and "rats", and there is a belaboured metaphor with Brando looking after the dead guy's pigeons, and then becoming a "stool pigeon" (geddit?). Just to make sure they don't look like total dicks they make the film about mobsters rather than communists.
Ironically about a decade earlier the movie studios paid a mob run union to prevent workers from striking and to scab, as well as bussing in mobsters from Chicago to attack striking studio workers who belonged to a rival union. They also paid cops as well, to help break the strike, who took wages from both the studios and the police department (which also issued gun licences to the mobsters who showed up). (Kazan was working in Hollywood at that time, so I find it hard to believe he wouldn't know this.)
(Mostly) anti-communist movies that I have watched since a few months ago:
Blockade (1938) – not anti-com but film makers forced to remove all political context for this film about the Spanish Civil War. (Who is fighting who, and why? Nobody seems to know.)
Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) – anti-Nazi rather than anti-com (but watched to see how they deal with the other Bad Guys).
Ninotchka (1939) – An anticom romcom.
The Iron Curtain (1948) – Mostly dull anti-com flick filmed in Canadia.
I Married a Communist / The Woman on Pier 13 (1949) – The name was changed to trick people into seeing it.
The Red Menace (1949) – A stupid but unintentionally funny B-movie.
The Flying Saucer (1950) – Shit, but cool UFO effect at the beginning.
I was a Communist for the FBI (1951) – Makes a hero out of a real-life wife beater, who, not content with beating up his own wife, even beat up his brother's wife.
The Whip Hand (1951) – Originally anti-Nazi, but the Nazis turned into communists on the orders of anti-com studio boss Howard Hughs.
Big Jim McLain (1952) – John Wayne sexes up the job of a glorified delivery boy for HUAC who delivers subpoenas (which he repeatedly calls “subpeenees”) to suspected communists, who he invariably punches, involved in some convoluted plot to create industrial strife in Hawaii by releasing plague infected rats (or something).
Invasion USA (1952) – 90% stock footage of actual people dying in WW2 (and possibly Korea), cobbled together with a clumsy plot which kills off all the characters, and has a stupidly disappointing ending where it turns out none of it actually happened. At all. Fuck you, movie audience!
My Son John (1952) – He’s gay! An intellectual! And a communist! Also, his parents are both Forrest Gump.
On the Waterfront (1954) – What I said above.
I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958) – Mildly amusing sci-fi B-flick, where aliens come to Earth and impersonate the men of a small town to impregnate Earth woman but turn out to be firing blanks. The bit near the end where the doctor rounds up all the virile, cigar smoking men from the maternity ward to form a posse to kill the aliens is priceless.
It was doing my head in so I had to have a rest over Christmas. (I’m not even half way through, yet, damnit!)
Awesome list omen, i've seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers before, which is hilarious (I think that is anti-communist scifi), i'm totally going to hit up some of those films.
[Sorry if this is too long, but consider it practice for a series of essays I'm writing.]
Yeah, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is kind of a key film, bridging the gap between sci-fi and anti-communism. It wasn't the first anti-com sci-fi, though its really the only one that's stood the test of time (three remakes and a slew of copycats). In fact sci-fi didn't exist as a genre* in cinema until the '50s and overlapped neatly with the Second Red Scare, and would provide a way of dressing up anti-communism so as to make it more palatable (most overtly anti-communist movies flopped, hence why they changed the name of I Married a Communist and re-released it as The Woman on Pier 13).
[*I know there were earlier sci-fi films, but there were very few and they usually belonged to another genre like horror (Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), or stood alone (Metropolis, Things to Come).]
Body Snatchers has been seen as both anti-communist and anti-anti-communist, thus making it more popular than regular anti-com movies. In the anti-anti-communist telling, the pod people are interpreted as conformist McCarthyites persecuting the innocent and forcing them to conform. The film's producer, Walter Wanger, had initially opposed the anti-communist witch hunts, but later became instrumental in implementing the Hollywood blacklists. And although based on a novel by Jack Finney (who had conservative leanings), the writer of the screenplay, Daniel Mainwaring, was affected by the blacklisting, and Wanger had to vouch for him to write the screenplay (the studio was worried that he might be a communist). Mainwaring also acted as a front for blacklisted writers, so that they could still work despite the blacklist.
As for Ninotchka, its kind of an oddball in terms of anti-com movies. It predates the Second Red Scare by about a decade, and doesn't have any obvious motivation for its explicit anti-communism. For example, Bela Lugosi, who plays Ninotchka's superior back in Russia, was actually a communist, and the FBI kept a file on him, and several attempts were made to deport him from the US. The films re-release was blocked during the war, specifically because it was anti-communist, and Hollywood would in fact make a number of explicitly pro-communist films during the war, at least partly instigated by the US government, such as Mission to Moscow, which was shameless apologism for the Stalinist purges, and these films would ironically lead (along with the strikes in Hollywood) to people claiming that Hollywood was infested with communists, the blacklists, etc. But Ninotchka was re-relased after the war, on the wave of anti-communist hysteria, made into a stage play, and remade into a musical (Silk Stockings) in 1957. It was also really the only successful, overtly anti-communist movie.
Errr, that was the fifth one on my list of watched movies that you just replied too! ;)
Anyway, the three "I Married a..." movies from the 40s and 50s kind of neatly illustrate the trajectory of propaganda during the period, from anti-Nazi to anti-communist to subtly anti-communist sci-fi allegories: I Married a Nazi (1940), I Married a Communist (1949), I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958).
So, for my essay I quickly mocked up this movie poster a couple of months ago for what I thought would be the equivalent today (not sure that I'll use it though):
Errr, that was the fifth one on my list of watched movies that you just replied too! ;)
Anyway, the three "I Married a..." movies from the 40s and 50s kind of neatly illustrate the trajectory of propaganda during the period, from anti-Nazi to anti-communist to subtly anti-communist sci-fi allegories: I Married a Nazi (1940), I Married a Communist (1949), I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958).
So, for my essay I quickly mocked up this movie poster a couple of months ago for what I thought would be the equivalent today (not sure that I'll use it though):
There is a real movie about "I married an islamic fundamentalist" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102555/
The whole film is littered with references to "stool pigeons" and "rats", and there is a belaboured metaphor with Brando looking after the dead guy's pigeons, and then becoming a "stool pigeon" (geddit?). Just to make sure they don't look like total dicks they make the film about mobsters rather than communists
Wait, so "stool pigeons" and "rats" are references to? Don't quite get it?
Now to switch up this thread a bit, who are libcommies favorite actors/actresses?
Mine is Jack Nicholson. The dude gave lots of strong performances of interesting characters. My faves:
Easy Rider
The Last Detail
Five Easy Pieces
Chinatown
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Passenger
The Shining
A Few Good Men
As Good as it Gets (although its a bit silly)
About Schmidt
Thus far, Hollywood's greatest actor since the 1960s.
I'm a big fan of Ryan Gosling, he and Michelle Williams are incredible in Blue Valentine. Half Nelson, Lars and the Real Girl, and Drive also have top-notch Gosling performances.
I've been working my way through all the Stanley Kubrick movies I haven't seen in the past (everything other than The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and A Clockwork Orange) and watched Paths of Glory yesterday. Pretty decent political message to it; a French general during WWI, tempted with the promise of a promotion, orders a suicidal attempt to take a German position and then has several soldiers charged with cowardice (to be punished by execution) when the attack fails. The generals are depicted as selfish, petty asshole who care far more about their careers than about the lives of the rank and file, and there's lots of scenes showing the splendor that they live in contrasted with the miserable trench life. Apparently the French government tried very hard to prevent the movie from being released in France. Very solid film.
I understand that omen is using the term communist in the way he/she explained in the thread ‘everyone thinks communists are nazis’:
‘When I use the term "communist" above, I mean it in a very general and stupid way, which is the way it was used back then (and still is today), combining everything from Soviet Russia, the CPUSA, socialism (in general), trade unionism, the civil rights movement, social democracy, Roosevelt's New Deal, and the Democrat party and liberals in general. (And it would include us too!)’
(omen #10)
However I think ‘Ninotchka’ (Lubitsch, 1939) is misrepresented as he/she fails to understand the film’s inner workings or its mass appeal (omen #662). David Thomson gets much closer:
‘Ninotchka is a splendid example of sex in politics. The time is an unspecified moment in the late thirties. Ninotchka is a humorless commissar sent from Moscow to Paris to check up on three delinquent officials.
“How are things in Moscow?” the trio ask. “Very good,” she says. “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.”
If you think that joke tasteless, you probably won’t like ‘Ninotchka’ – and you shouldn’t go near ‘To Be Or Not To Be’. After all, real people were appallingly tortured and slowly executed in the mass trials. Yet the jump to Soviet logic – fewer but better – is piercing political satire. And the film is setting Ninotchka up for her humorlessness to be ‘executed’. She asks Melvyn Douglas, “Must you flirt?”
“I don’t have to, but I find it natural.” (This is the essence of Lubitsch: Let God stand up for nature.)
“Suppress it,” she replies, and there the line has the politics of suppression and the sex of repression bouncing together. Don’t forget that Billy Wilder did the script for Lubitsch…
…The commercial key to it all was ‘Garbo laughs’, and so she did. Of course, no one doubts that she is going to melt, but the lovely thing about the film is a way chat and smiles do the trick. She doesn’t have to be convinced by some ponderous arguments over political destiny. Flirtation does it – the most egalitarian weapon…’
(Have You Seen…? David Thomson, 2008, page 601)
My take is that (aside from mass murder) when Lenin and the Bolsheviks put ‘sexual liberation’ on the back burner they were presenting the Hollywood dream machine with an open goal.
This repressive legacy it still active and visible in Russia today.
Auld-bod, I think we are talking at cross purposes here. You noted above that I'm using "communism" in a very broad sense, which I unfortunately didn't clarify in this thread. And I take it your post of #661 was questioning my calling Ninotchka anti-communist?
By "anti-communist" I mean that it is part of a tradition of lumping together certain ideas or actions, calling them "communist" and associating them with the Soviet Union in some way, so as to discredit all those ideas and their supporters (e.g. the civil rights movement, unions, socialism of any kind, welfare, public healthcare, the New Deal, academia, atheism, homosexuality, etc), as well as generally propagandising against the Soviet Union. Ninotchka is a part of this tradition.
The film doesn't attempt to distinguish communism and the Soviet Union, nor does it just explicitly attack the Soviet Union. It also, to take one example, ridicules Ninotchka for attempting to organize the powder room attendants at a swanky hotel into a union.
I also get how the film works, although you left out the bit about how the film shows that communism means deprivation, sharing, and no privacy, versus the abundance of capitalism (the remake was retitled Silk Stockings). (No doubt true in the USSR, but, as I said above, the film doesn't distinguish between communism and the USSR.)
As for the film's popularity, this has little to do with its anti-communism, and more to do with it being a well written and directed, heavily publicized A-movie (i.e. large budget and widely released), staring a major Hollywood star (Garbo, in an uncharacteristic role), and a sex comedy that pushed the limits of the Production Code (the industry's censorship code).
Has anybody seen Inside Llewyn Davis? I gather that it's based on the life of Dave Van Ronk, who was apparently an anarchist for a period and a longtime member of the IWW. I dislike folk music and am fairly ambivalent about the Coen brothers, so I'm less than excited about the prospect of sitting through it, but I am curious if they left any of the political aspects from his life in the story.
Put me into a state of deep thought. Anarchism has a serious flaw in that it's near impossible to create accessible fiction around it. You really need the protagonist to be everywhere doing all the most exciting things one after the other. Which only works if s/he is the chosen one, Harry Potter style. Having thousands of people doing their bit is just to avant garde a way of telling a story.
I guess that's why V-for Vendetta is all we get. :(
Now to switch up this thread a bit, who are libcommies favorite actors/actresses?
Mine is Jack Nicholson. The dude gave lots of strong performances of interesting characters. My faves:
Easy Rider
The Last Detail
Five Easy Pieces
Chinatown
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Passenger
The Shining
A Few Good Men
As Good as it Gets (although its a bit silly)
About Schmidt
Thus far, Hollywood's greatest actor since the 1960s.
Hmmm, agree on some, but about Schmidt is fucking awful.
By no means my favourite actor but amazingly, Tom Cruise is incredible in Magnolia. That said, literally every single performance in that film is remarkable.
Someone mentioned A Clockwork Orange. Words just fail me with that film! It has to be the worst interpretation of a book ever made. It misses the point so spectacularly that I sat cringing all the way through it. Eugh!
Put me into a state of deep thought. Anarchism has a serious flaw in that it's near impossible to create accessible fiction around it. You really need the protagonist to be everywhere doing all the most exciting things one after the other. Which only works if s/he is the chosen one, Harry Potter style. Having thousands of people doing their bit is just to avant garde a way of telling a story.
I guess that's why V-for Vendetta is all we get. :(
Im just not sure how The Hunger Games was trying to get an anarchist message across. I know the author describers herself as a left-liberal. I would LOVE to see a film from a libertarian communist describing how a revolution would go down. How exactly does Anarchism have a serious flaw in its ability to make a fictional story about how it would work? This has just not happened on a mass scale like the movie The Hunger Games. I think it would be awesome if it did though, and I think it would be a hell of a movie.
Hey Cooked, I didn't really take enough time to digest your post before replying. I get where you coming from, but I still don't think its impossible to make a movie about a social revolution that is popular. Plenty of popular movies focus around one character playing a part in a bigger social movement. It just so happens that all of these movies have shit politics, mostly liberal.
Katalin Varga, 2009. After watching Beberian Sound Studio, and being utterly absorbed and impressed with it, I decided to check out Peter Strickland's first film; a low-budget, revenge film set in rural Romania. Acting was perhaps a little wooden, but I really liked it nonetheless.
A common theme I noticed in both films are the ways in which Strickland portrays women; very much the victims of misogyny - and in Katalin Varga's case, rape - but not at all meek. The female characters' strong resistance is the catalyst in Beberian, and the driving force in Katalin.
Good stuff.
I also watched Altered States, 1980. So fucking awful it was almost good.
i campagni (or 'The Organizer' as it is known in the USA), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_compagni.
It wasn't that bad at all for a film that isn't widely recognized. Sure the politics may not be good. But a film about workers going on strike, we don't see that too often.
It definitely deserves a remake. Which I'll do in post-revolutionary society.
i campagni (or 'The Organizer' as it is known in the USA), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_compagni.
It wasn't that bad at all for a film that isn't widely recognized. Sure the politics may not be good. But a film about workers going on strike, we don't see that too often.
It definitely deserves a remake. Which I'll do in post-revolutionary society.
I fucking love that movie. The guy's an organizing powerhouse, but he's even more neurotic than me. I always yell at the screen when the fat guy gets hit by the train, and when they lose the factory occupation.
Have you seen Salt of the Earth? It's an even better old movie about a strike. It was banned and every single person involved in the making of it was blacklisted from Hollywood. It's about a zinc miners' strike, and the miners are played by actual miners who actually went on strike earlier the same year. It's epic.
Last movie I watched was Scarface, which I guess some people say is an anti-capitalist film. I dunno.
A few weeks ago I watched ‘The Round Up/Szegenylegenyek’ (Miklos Jancso, 1965). This slowly paced film is based on historical events following the collapse of the 1848 Hungarian revolution. The Austrian authorities methodically destroy the imprisoned guerrilla’s solidarity. The camera follows the action in harsh black and white, beautifully framed images. At the end I had a sudden feeling of déjà vu. Worth watching if you believe in knowing your enemy.
EDIT: '...Jancso claimed to be making films about freedom and power and their eternal conflict, but he did not seem to be much hindered or opposed by censorship. And there are great passages in The Roundup in which one feels the mathematics of liberty being steadily squeezed by geometry...
...Meanwhile Jancso's work is nearly as out of fashion as that of Eisenstein, and not much short of being that spectacular.'
Have you seen Salt of the Earth? It's an even better old movie about a strike. It was banned and every single person involved in the making of it was blacklisted from Hollywood.
Just to elaborate on this: Salt of the Earth was independently produced by blacklistees in defiance of the Hollywood blacklists (i.e. they were already blacklisted rather than blacklisted as a result of the film). The film itself wasn't banned, but was effectively boycotted, with the American Legion, Howard Hughes (who a few years earlier had shutdown RKO Pictures for six months to purge it of alleged communists), and the Hollywood press calling for the boycott, and projectionists refusing to screen it*, although the film was beset with outside interference from the beginning. Film workers were intimidated, shot at, attempts were made to burn down sets, and film laboratories refused to process the film.
* The projectionists had been organized by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, a scab union which had been run by mobsters who were paid by studio bosses to keep workers from striking. IATSE had been instrumental in crushing a rival federation of unions, the Conference of Studio Unions, in the mid-forties, which resulted in the CSU being locked out with IATSE providing scab labour as well as muscle to attack pickets in the form of mobsters bussed in from Chicago (as I mentioned earlier in this thread). IATSE, a top down union, unlike the CSU, ordered its projectionists not to show Salt of the Earth. (Although it is doubtful that many cinema owners would have screened the film, anyway.)
Just finished Land and Freedom. Very reminiscent of Homage to Catalonia; a British communist belonging to the CPGB (so not totally an Orwell stand-in) heads to Spain to fight the Nationalist forces and ends up with a POUM militia, briefly ditches them for the International Brigades before rejoining his POUM buddies after witnessing Stalinist repression in Barcelona during the May Days, and eventually leaves totally disillusioned with the Communist parties. Oddly, some of the POUMistas are shown wearing red and black scarves and they sing A Las Barricadas at one point--maybe they turned anarchist over the course of their time at the front? Whatever the case, I really enjoyed the film.
The fighting units in Spain were sometimes politically mixed. I know of at least one Glasgow anarchist who joined the CP specifically to get him out to Spain. He was with the I.B. and the Stalinists made lists of the politically ‘unreliable’ in their ranks. When the I.B.s were withdrawn following the Hitler Stalin Pact, he stayed on, and was in Barcelona hours before it fell.
Even on Franco’s side, Paul Preston give instances of conscripted republicans dying in battle. An example of recruitment:
‘In Navarre, Civil Guard posts received orders to oblige men suspected of left-wing sympathies to appear at the recruiting offices. Summoned to the barracks, they were given the stark choice ‘the Legion or the ditch’.’
(The Spanish Holocaust, 2012, page 448)
In this instance the men were shot anyway, as it was suspected that many of them planned to desert and go over to the anarchists.
I saw it a couple years back, but was only partly paying attention and didn't know anything about the Revolution. I think I'll rewatch it.
Edit: Just finished Libertarias. I also liked it much more than Land and Freedom, a better movie in general and also one that better captured the revolutionary fervor in the early days of the revolution. Really horrific ending. Durruti seemed like a bit of a prick.
Libertas is excellent and Riders of the Dawn(Los Jinetes del Alba) are similar but far better than Land and Freedom which uses Anarchist paraphernalia but ignores their role and elevates the POUM instead.
I'm on my phone right now, so I can't check. If you can find sperate subtitles to download (Google for film title/TV show + srt) then you can download video from YouTube using a browser plugin and watch in an external player with subtitles. But you might have to try several subtitle srt files to find one that plays in synch. (SRT is just the extension of the subtitle file, which is just a special text file with time codes. There are tons of sites with free subtitles.)
Tyrion
I obtained the DVD from Play.com
As far as I know I could not find it to watch or download online.
If I recall I got the DVD sent to me from America.
Just watched Steve McQueen’s Shame (2011). Carey Mulligan was excellent though the film was just so-so – more style than content. My real problem was I find slick professional types, who are so materially pampered that they’re solely obsessed with their willy, a recipe for indifference. Worth watching for Carey Mulligan’s moving performance as she does not appear to be watching herself in a mirror.
The film really pales beside Mike Leigh’s ‘Naked’ (1993), which dealt with someone who had real problems.
Kill List, 2011. It starts as a kitchen sink drama, then turns into a gangster thriller, then morphs into a horror, along the lines of The Wicker Man or Witchfinder General. Perhaps a bit of a subversive undertone to it as well. Liked it a lot, found it fun and tough in equal measure. I'm becoming a Ben Wheatley fan.
Also currently going through a documentary series called First Australians. From Wiki: "The series chronicles the history of contemporary Australia, from the perspective of its first people, or Aborigines. [...] It relies heavily on archival documents and interpretations from historians and members of both the Indigenous and European community and leaders" It's quite dense, and consists of seven one-hour episodes.
Watched most of the 'new' Robocop on the sly. The highlight is easily Samuel L Jackson's impression of a certain well known US news anchor - I think that's what they call them?
Apart from that it's very similar to the original but predictably predictable and not as good. Like all these remakes it has none of the atmosphere of the original. There were some interesting/exciting bits but not enough for me to give a shit what happened at the end so I turned it off.
Best thing I saw recently was the Stallone, De Niro boxing thing. Quite funny.
It's a bit like Kes, but instead of a boy rearing and training a kestrel, it's about a boy who theives copper wire. Might not want to watch it if you're looking for something to cheer you up. It's a bit grim. It were alright though.
Having a bit of a subtitle session at the moment. In the last couple of weeks I've seen Jean de Florette, Volver, All About My Mother, Talk To Her and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. All were great, especially the first two. Tonight it's Amelie - if you haven't seen it you owe yourself an apology.
HBO's True Detective. Dark, intense and atmospheric, this series is extremely well directed and planned for a TV series. And McConaughey's character is like all anti-civ, post-modern and nihilistic. How in the world does someone like that end up becoming a police detective? I have no idea.
[SPOILER]Below is a six minute single take tracking shot from the fourth episode.
[youtube]s_HuFuKiq8U[/youtube]
If you're in the mood for subtitled movies, Québec has produced some good ones, e.g. -
Mon Oncle Antoine
Jesus of Montreal, The Decline of the American Empire, The Barbarian Invasions. (All Denys Arcand.)
Les Ordres - set in the 1970 October Crisis, when Trudeau sent the troops into Montréal and 100s of people were arrested without charge.
C.R.A.Z.Y. (directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who's just done Dallas Buyers Club.)
I Killed My Mother.
Laurence Anyways.
Thanks Fleaurnoire. Apart from the fact that these films are cultularily interesting, concentrating on the subtitles helps prevent my middle age habit of falling asleep in front of the TV!
And McConaughey's character is like all anti-civ, post-modern and nihilistic. How in the world does someone like that end up becoming a police detective? I have no idea.
http://www.arkhamdigest.com/2014/01/true-detectives-nic-pizzolatto-on.html
it's funny that none of these nihilists like ligotti have practised what they preached and summoned the courage to commit suicide unlike say the dadaists/surrealists, such a dickhead philsophy.
Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2 (I also downloaded Vol 3, not knowing there are only two, so christ knows what I've got on my computer now). I liked it, pretty fun. But even though I normally liked Tarantino's music scores, I thought this was just too much. It was constant, like a music video. Other than that, cool.
I also watched The Believer, 2001.
**Warning, warning - spoiler alert**
Ryan Gosling plays a Jewish Neo-Nazi named Daniel, loosely based around a true story. It's an interesting film, brave perhaps in the way in which it treats the protagonist; Even though there are scenes of macho Nazism - like body building, strutting around town in a Swastika t-shirt intimidating people - the film centres around the dialogue, as Daniel, though prone to violent outbursts, is quite articulate in his views which are mainly based on his understanding of Judaism's theology, that he challenged at a young age. Also brave perhaps in that there are no obvious counter-arguments in the film responding to his diatribes.
Though Daniel does climb up the Fascist ranks, there is a constant sense he is doing it to test himself and his Jewish heritage, albeit in an extreme, misguided way. We learn that he keeps a piece of Jewish cloth (sorry, I have no idea what it is) under his Fascist garb, and can get quite defensive when he hears even anti-Jew misinformation. I've read that the director - who is Jewish - sees this as a modern reworking of the myth of Abraham and Isaac. I don't know anything about Judaism, so couldn't tell. There are quite a few touching moments, especially the scene in which he and his father talk of the incomprehensibly of Jewish Law, while having a Shabbat dinner.
I liked it, found it interesting at least, in concept. Gosling does a great job. The only flaws for me being the repeating black and white flashback scenes. We don't see much of the transition from Jewish school-kid to raging Anti-Semite, but I guess that isn't exactly the point of the film.
Worth a watch, I'd like to hear other's views on the film.
HBO's True Detective. Dark, intense and atmospheric, this series is extremely well directed and planned for a TV series. And McConaughey's character is like all anti-civ, post-modern and nihilistic. How in the world does someone like that end up becoming a police detective? I have no idea.
[SPOILER]Below is a six minute single take tracking shot from the fourth episode.
[youtube]s_HuFuKiq8U[/youtube]
I fuckin' love that show. Sometimes Rust is quoting Schopenhauer verbatim, which makes for shitty philosophy, but definitely good drama.
I don't think neither Pizzolatto nor his characters are nihilists. Pizzolatto said in an interview that his morals are almost the complete opposite of his characters and Rust isn't espousing nihilism, but pessimism and anti-natalism. There's, so far as I know, nothing in the latter that forces someone to become a nihilist (although the two are certainly famous with the Youtube school of philosophy).
Saw a few good films at the bristol radical film festival last weekend. I really enjoyed On the Art of War, very recommended, anyone here seen it?
It's about the 15 month strike at INNSE in Milan, which the owner was trying to shut down and sell to property developers. Talks to the 4 men who climbed a gantry and stayed there for over a week. They talk about their politics and the class struggle and so on. It's very well made with very intriguing interviews.
Finally watched The Deer Hunter, which, for anyone that doesn't know, follows the disintegration and psychological ruin of an originally close-knit Pennsylvanian industrial community after several of its residents experiences in the Vietnam war, which is variously traumatic, fatal and dismembering. I think there is real aesthetic value in the film, insofar as it speaks to friendship, war, trauma, tragedy, death and related issues, but there is certainly something ideologically (in the pejorative sense of the early Marx and the Frankfurt School) problematic in the films portrayal of the North Vietnamese: as, without exception, murderous, evil and sadistic. In fact, the central metaphor and hinge upon which the films narrative turns - of captive U.S. soldiers being subjected to recursive games of Russian Roulette in Vietnam - doubtlessly never happened in reality, and contrives a very distorted picture of the Vietcong. Nevertheless, I think that the latter need not undo, at least in terms of personal value, the former, and thoroughly enjoyed the film.
The Wolf of Wall Street - went quite quickly for a three hour film, yet I just didn't get the "irony" that the film supposedly contains. Maybe I missed something. Also, there's a rape scene in the film that is brushed over within seconds. In fact, it's portrayed in such a way that anyone slightly naive wouldn't think twice about it.
The Monument Men - fucking abysmal. A factually wayward, terrible time-sequencing (it seemed they were living in a world where Europe was so small you could quite easily travel around it on a bicycle), a script built from a series one-liners, shoddy acting, subtly xenophobic, and a very confused concept - is it a light-hearted escapade, or a serious commentary on war? No, it's shit.
!Woman Art Revolution - a good documentary about feminist art movements, and how female artists have been treated in America since the late 50s. All participants very honest about what worked and what did not, and while I didn't particularly like much of what was created, it was interesting to see the different techniques used. It's hard to be critical though when much of what was created was in reaction to not being recognised, or heard at all.
Saw the Grand Budapest Hotel. To sound a bit wanky, it shows a bit of maturity from Wes Anderson. And visually quite striking, which is what you'd expect from Anderson.
Other than that, working our way through the Wire for a second time. There's so much you miss the first time around andi it's only reinforced my belief that it is, indeed, the best show that's ever been on TV.
Omen - The Selfish Giant. You ever read the book? It's a children's book by the socialist William Morris. Very sweet. (As an aside, literally almost all the fabric in my socialist in-laws' house - curtains, bedding, furniture covering - are William Morris prints. That's a lot of birds and flowers...)
Sabot - Season 2 of House of Cards is good? My partner and I watched Season 1 but it just really didn't suck us in enough to stick around for season 2. Quite disappointing for Spacey. You ever see the original version? I hear it's pretty good.
I've not read the book, though I believe it is a short story in a collection written by Oscar Wilde, not William Morris. I read a synopsis of it after watching the film. The two stories only seem tenuously related, though I seem to recall that the opening credits say "inspired by...". Not sure sweet would be the term to use for the film.
ETA: Also watching the wire (but for the first time). About half way through the second series, though I haven't watched an episode for a couple of weeks now.
I've not read the book, though I believe it is a short story in a collection written by Oscar Wilde, not William Morris.
Yup, you're entirely right.
I have to say I'm amazed you can watch the Wire for the first time and go that long without watching an episode! That's good though, you only get the first time once, better to savor it. ;-)
I loved it. But there again I love all of Hayao Miyazaki's films. It's the (highly fictionalized) story of the man who designed the Mitsubishi Zero, dreams of flying and creating gorgeous planes, with the undercurrent that these beautiful dreams will be used as weapons of war.
I have to say I'm amazed you can watch the Wire for the first time and go that long without watching an episode! That's good though, you only get the first time once, better to savor it. ;-)
I took about 3 years to watch all 5 seasons (starting after it'd all been broadcast). Watching an episode wasn't something to be taken lightly, like you might stick on Corrie or whatever. Arranging an appropriate time to watch the next one felt like a great burden :D
I found Company of Strangers really good and you can watch it here: https://www.nfb.ca/film/company_of_strangers/
It follows 8 women whose bus breaks down in the middle of some remote place, leaving them stranded, getting to know each other and having to fend for themselves for a bit.
My retelling of this might not be accurate, but the way I remember it introduced to me was that the director wanted to challenge the stereotypical image of old people as frail, or just as sources of memories of events rather than people in their own right with personal experiences. She experimented with a straight documentary format with talking heads and so on, but found it wasn't quite right. She decided on a fictionalised scenario with loosely directed scenes but the dialog is largely improvised so they are largely being themselves, so you get these really candid moments (which can be really heartbreaking, hard to hold back the tears!). Interestingly the director experimented in casting with a mixed gender group but found that everyone settled into gender stereotypes, with the men being very vocal and the women becoming passive, and so finally ended up with these 8 non-professional women.
Anyway, recommended, you feel like you got to know these women a little bit and are sad to say bye at the end.
House of Cards season one got sillier as it went on. Season two started quite well but got even more ridiculous. The idiot ball gets passed around fairly frequently. I enjoyed it but it was just a bit of fun.
Justified season 5, not as good, I think the Raylan character i running out of steam a bit, although there have been some great moments as usual.
Prisoners: quite a good film with Hugh Jackman about a father going crazy when his daughter disappears.
The Wire - I always binged on that. Pretty much as soon as I had an episode I watched it.
Juno : enjoyable fimm that didn't really end up quite where I expected. Unlike house of cards
Is this a film and TV thread now? Or do house of cards and the wire not count?
Shhhhh! Keep quiet or the [s]Admins[/s] libcops will shut down the thread and temp ban us all for being off-topic!
Just watched the first season (and now started the second) of Continuum. Anticapitalist terrorists (you heard me!) from a future run by Mega Bill Gates escape their execution by travelling back in time to present day Canadia, where they renew their terror campaign in the present (with their own version of 9/11). A future cop accidentally gets sent back in time with them and is helped by the teenage version of future Mega Bill Gates to track them down.
Has some neat special effects. Also one episode has anarchists, who are literally only interested in bringing about chaos. And the terrorists anticapitalist philosophy is shown to ultimately come from the confused ramblings of a moody teenager (Mega Bill Gates's step brother). Spoilers! The terrorists are a sort of amalgam of Occupy Wall street, Anonymous and Al Qaeda.
The future seems to be a ancaps wet dream, with corporations running the government and cops (which isn't entirely portrayed as a bad thing).
House of Cards season one got sillier as it went on. Season two started quite well but got even more ridiculous. The idiot ball gets passed around fairly frequently. I enjoyed it but it was just a bit of fun.
Pretty much this.
CS, I'm only watching it because I've almost ran out shows to watch on netflix. Although, I am looking forward to season 3. I haven't watched the UK version yet but might give it a go.
Re: Continuum. The second series is definitely better than the first (in terms of being generally more interesting). Just finished it, and about to watch the first episode of the third series, and I'll have caught up with the show in real-time.
My general impression now is that it does show the ancap future in a negative light (only really hinted at in the first series), however, it still depicts it as the least worst alternative (between capitalism and whatever it is that the anti-capitalists want), and much of the plot revolves around Mega Bill Gates fixing the future that he fucked up in the first place. It's kind of: the system is broken, and it's up to people who run that system to fix it, and any alternative is far worse. Also, for every bad thing the capitalists do, the anti-capitalists do something far worse (e.g. the capitalists literally enslave workers, but the anti-capitalists mass murder the slaves rather than freeing them. Spoilers!)
To put it another way: it's like Orwell says in his essay on Charles Dickens (which I recently uploaded to the library), Dickens's view is that the particular horrors of 19th century capitalism are due to the moral failings of individual capitalists and can be fixed by capitalists behaving more decently to their employees. Which is why Dickens' novels are littered with misers and wealthy benefactors, or in the case of A Christmas Carol, the miser redeems himself and becomes a benefactor.
It's worth reading Orwell's essay (I attached ebook versions at the above link, as it is quite a long essay), as it accounts for much of the liberal critique of capitalism in fiction, and particularly as depicted on screen.
Primer, 2004. A time-travel sci-fi. The mumbling, the accents, and the scientific jargon meant I spent the first ten minutes pausing and rewinding so I could get what was being said. Then I decided to just go with the flow, and hope it would all make sense in the end, which it didn't. Still, the concept was interesting; a sci-fi that actually goes all out to explain the science, and the processes of science. Raised some interesting points about intellectual property and trying to protect accidental findings from others - even if the creators themselves don't know what they are - out of fear of losing money or prestige. That's what I got out of it anyway.
Primer, 2004. A time-travel sci-fi. The mumbling, the accents, and the scientific jargon meant I spent the first ten minutes pausing and rewinding so I could get what was being said. Then I decided to just go with the flow, and hope it would all make sense in the end, which it didn't. Still, the concept was interesting; a sci-fi that actually goes all out to explain the science, and the processes of science. Raised some interesting points about intellectual property and trying to protect accidental findings from others - even if the creators themselves don't know what they are - out of fear of losing money or prestige. That's what I got out of it anyway.
I was intrigued enough to watch this on-line, I fear it's about a subject I'll have great difficulty in understanding, the film made little sense to me. But because the film was so cheap, boring and dull I can't be arsed. Hardly inspiring stuff was it. It might have worked better as a television series.
I watched it once before, but I don't think I got much out of it at the time as I was drunk. All I really remember about it is that there was this bloke who had to lie around in a box a lot. I keep meaning to watch it again, as I quite like time travel stories, and I'd heard good things about Primer.
Also, top tip: if you have to keep rewinding because of the mumbling/accents, try subtitles. (If you downloaded the film, you can most likely download subtitles as well.)
Just finished Sons of Anarchy season 6. An actual surprise alongside the endlessly ridiculous series of shootings that have long replaced a plot. I think that this show is how Kurt Sutter works out his psychological issues. It's hard to like a show based around the existence of a club that is a collection of people who at best behave like bullies.
On the bright side I had no idea how much hugging was required in organised crime.
Okay, so Lost in Translation was no exercise in Marx's theory of alienation, but it seems to me that it did capture (or at least noticed) the extant of alienation (i.e. alienation generalized throughout the whole world). That something was wrong, but it wasn't anything particular to this or that part of the world. Many people who watched this film thought it was just about two characters experiencing 'culture shock', being that they are visiting a foreign land. I think it was more than that.
Am I over reading it? Am I projecting what I wanted the film to be about? Or is that assessment fairly accurate?
Primer, 2004. A time-travel sci-fi. The mumbling, the accents, and the scientific jargon meant I spent the first ten minutes pausing and rewinding so I could get what was being said. Then I decided to just go with the flow, and hope it would all make sense in the end, which it didn't. Still, the concept was interesting; a sci-fi that actually goes all out to explain the science, and the processes of science. Raised some interesting points about intellectual property and trying to protect accidental findings from others - even if the creators themselves don't know what they are - out of fear of losing money or prestige. That's what I got out of it anyway.
This was a good movie. The science researcher who explains the fungus to them is a Professor of Biology in real life and teaches at my university in Florida. My girlfriend had Genetics and Biology of Aging with him. He's a pretty cool guy. I'm like what, 2 degrees from an indie-movie supporting actor? I'm practically famous!
Oh, also, does anyone haave any votes for the best Haymarket Documentary? Something short/not too dry but also accurate? Or a live action film based on the events? Thanks!
That's cool! I did enjoy the film, even though I didn't get it, the concept made me watch it right through. And the acting was great - my only quibble being it was perhaps too good, if you know what I mean, too realistic... Maybe it wasn't projected enough perhaps. Am I right in thinking it only cost 7 grand to make, and it was originally just a uni project? Amazing stuff considering. Pass on my regards ;)
I watched Elysium last night. Pretty good, reminded me of Total Recall in a way, which is never a bad thing. Some ridiculous parts, but fun to watch.
Not what I expected it had a surprising "Gummo" feel to it. Although the characters, the place and the situations are beliveable in isolation. (Being from peripheral Sweden myself I can vouch for it ;) When pushed together into the space of a film it occasionally veered a bit to close to caricature for me to be comfortable.
Ok, so Grand Budapest Hotel was awesome, don't get me wrong, but really I feel like all of Wes Anderson's movies have this strange subtext highlighting the "beauty of order". Vaneigm calls this the "death wish".
I remember in Bottle Rocket when the character played by Luke Wilson is trying to get his life together and there is a very happy montage of him working three jobs a day while Owen Wilson tries to continue his life of crime and ends up in prison.
Fast forward to Grand Budapest where Jeff Goldblum is the hero attorney who represents the estate of the dead countess and since his fee is stipulated in the will refuses to aid Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe.
Not to mention that Zero happily works 19 hours a day without complaint and in his old age bemoans the fact that the "once great" hotel he used to work for no longer forces human beings to spend 19 hours a day trying to satisfy every desire of the extremely rich.
Anyway, it was still a great movie and pretty much every movie has so much subtle ideology behind it that I disagree with/is sexist/is racist/you name it, it's just I don't think I've ever seen anyone point this out before.
Queimada! , a film with a great Marxist analysis of a fictional slave revolt, but the director has trouble fitting such a huge plot into 90 minutes so it does get a little awkward/clunky at times
here's a scene where Marlon Brando attempts to instigate a bourgeois revolution;
Sir William Walker: Gentlemen, let me ask you a question. Now, my metaphor may seem a trifle impertinent, but I think it's very much to the point. Which do you prefer - or should I say, which do you find more convenient - a wife, or one of these mulatto girls? No, no, please don't misunderstand: I am talking strictly in terms of economics. What is the cost of the product? What is the product yield? The product, in this case, being love - uh, purely physical love, since sentiments obviously play no part in economics.
[general laughter]
Sir William Walker: Quite. Now, a wife must be provided with a home, with food, with dresses, with medical attention, etc, etc. You're obliged to keep her a whole lifetime even when she's grown old and perhaps a trifle unproductive. And then, of course, if you have the bad luck to survive her, you have to pay for the funeral!
[general laughter]
Sir William Walker: It's true, isn't it? Gentlemen, I know it's amusing, but those are the facts, aren't they? Now with a prostitute, on the other hand, it's quite a different matter, isn't it? You see, there's no need to lodge her or feed her, certainly no need to dress her or to bury her, thank God. She's yours only when you need her, you pay her only for that service, and you pay her by the hour! Which, gentlemen, is more important - and more convenient: a slave or a paid worker?
Okay, so Lost in Translation was no exercise in Marx's theory of alienation, but it seems to me that it did capture (or at least noticed) the extant of alienation (i.e. alienation generalized throughout the whole world). That something was wrong, but it wasn't anything particular to this or that part of the world. Many people who watched this film thought it was just about two characters experiencing 'culture shock', being that they are visiting a foreign land. I think it was more than that.
Am I over reading it? Am I projecting what I wanted the film to be about? Or is that assessment fairly accurate?
Yeah, I would say the foreign setting is only a convenient way to underline or "project" in a visible way what the characters feel: lack of purpose or fulfillment, impossibility of understanding the world or communicating with other people, etc.
And while it describes alienation, it seemed more in line with "generic" existential themes than with any attempt at social critique.
Primer, 2004. A time-travel sci-fi. The mumbling, the accents, and the scientific jargon meant I spent the first ten minutes pausing and rewinding so I could get what was being said. Then I decided to just go with the flow, and hope it would all make sense in the end, which it didn't. Still, the concept was interesting; a sci-fi that actually goes all out to explain the science, and the processes of science. Raised some interesting points about intellectual property and trying to protect accidental findings from others - even if the creators themselves don't know what they are - out of fear of losing money or prestige. That's what I got out of it anyway.
I was intrigued enough to watch this on-line, I fear it's about a subject I'll have great difficulty in understanding, the film made little sense to me. But because the film was so cheap, boring and dull I can't be arsed. Hardly inspiring stuff was it. It might have worked better as a television series.
I share the sentiment about that film. I look toward the movie Looper for a movie that did time travel right. Maybe I am just not smart enough, but I hard real hard time following Primer. It seemed rather self-indulgent in that way.
Black Harvest , you can torrent this slowly. It is a documentary about an entrepreneur trying to adapt a primitive PNG society to the wage system, probably the best documentary I have ever seen
I've just re-watched Jose Luis Cuerda's, 'Butterfly's Tongue' (1999) and reckoned it to be even better on second viewing. Try and see it - Spain on the brink of the civil war - heart wrenching stuff.
Alambrista!
GOOD MOVIE ABOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
CRITERION COLLEKTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I also watched Medium Cool
Watched Gravity the other night. Gorgeous imagery, though I feel that the story Cuaron was trying to tell through it went a little past my head. Not that that's a fault of the movie, of course.
Oh, yeah and one of the scenes genuinely made me feel anxious/claustrophobic, so I guess Cuaron really did manage to capture some of what it would be like to be in that situation.
The Great Silence, a 1968 Italian western film about the fight of a mute gunslinger against a group of merciless bounty hunters who are terrorising a village.
I'm not a huge fan of the genre, but some peculiarities like the snow-filled setting (atypical for a western), the mute protagonist and the bleak atmosphere keep it interesting.
It has some more or less subtle political themes too: the law protects and legitimises the greed and the cruelty of the bounty hunters; the bandits, punished and killed as lawbreakers, turn out to be only poor people trying to feed their families in times of famine; the sheriff's attempt at pursuing justice through legal means is a failure.
Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Klaus Kinski.
Shows more ambition than you'd expect from a B-movie.
I saw it in the cinema in 3D. Now, I hate 3D films and I would have much rather seen this not in 3D, but I do have to say I felt the claustrophobia and the shit flying out of the screen definitely made my eyes water.
The Rover
Not bad, but ultimately there's a lot of build-up and no real story. If you like to see sweaty people die and are not too interested in why, then I'd recommend it.
The Wicker Man. Again! Pretty mega whatever way you look at it but particularly joyous to watch the repressed, po-faced nosey parker of a cop get his comeuppance.
You wouldn't say that if you'd been to the Outer Hebrides...
ACT 1 Scene 1 An island in the world of shadows where the dead live
Anubis the jackal-headed boatman brings the souls of the dead to the world of shadows. He feeds off their passions and their dreams. At his command, some of the dead relive their memories. The millionaire Mr Dollarama finds his wife Inanna in bed with her guru Swami Zumzum. Vermeer the painter sees Pearl in his mind - 'A face like music, partly now, partly remembered' - and falls in love with her.
Last week I went and saw the film recording of The Second Mrs Kong, Birtwistle's opera with the Russell Hoban libretto, in the music research archive of the Victoria and Albert Museum since it isn't available commercially. It's basically a mirror-image of the Orpheus legend in which Kong (the gorilla of King Kong movie fame) in the 'World of Shadows' hears the voice of Pearl (the model for Vermeer's painting 'Girl with a Pearl Earring') in 'the Place of Memory'. They fall in love from afar and resolve to find each other. After a long search they meet, but because they exist in different worlds, they can't be united. The implication of the libretto is that this enactment of the Orpheus legend by Pearl and Kong occurs endlessly again and again in the world of shadows. The identity of Kong is intriguing. To Pearl he is the 'lost and lonely child of all the world', but he is also, variously, a 50-foot-high gorilla, a little puppet with a giant head and hand, and an Idea:
Inanna: 'In the film it was a puppet that they killed. . . The real Kong is an idea that will never die'.
Mr Dollarama: 'But if he's a live idea, why is he here among the dead?'
Anubis: 'Back in 1933 it wasn't easy to tell the difference between a live idea and a dead ape'.
I hired out the full orchestral score from Universal Editions in Vienna for £30 and it arrived the day before I went to see the recording. Birtwistle's orchestral music is created from 'sound objects' derived more from the idiom of abstract electronic music than from the clear melodic shapes and metrical rhythms of 'Classical' music that are so reminiscent of the lifeless lazy clichés of the popular music business. These sound objects are chunks of orchestral 'texture' whose constituents range from short rapid motifs played over and over, to sustained, slowly changing pitches, and with the addition of an obbligato accordion part, dense textures marked by pervasive use of cimbalon, divided strings, percussion and brass, particularly tubas, continue to sweep across the pages of the score. The pitch-language is generally dissonant since many of the textures Birtwistle creates arise from clusters of semitones, but the degree of dissonance constantly changes, depending particularly on timbre and registration; the resulting nuances are a key feature of the style.
It was the most striking and haunting thing I'd come across in ages.
A Canadian movie called 'The Divide' made 'Battle in Seattle' look like a choir boys picnic, but huh, I still liked BiS.
I'd thought they'd pretty much depleted the apocalyptic genre until I saw this little known and underrated gem which approached the event of nuclear extinction from an internalized psychological/identity perspective rather than from the cliched law and order westernized 'we shall persevere by way of government military intervention'. The acting is excellent, the atmosphere created is one of unrelenting desperation and depravity. The movie leaves one more aware of how individual qualities and values are the core of ever having expectations that a random community can maintain social relationships which mutually respect a collective purpose, and of how power is often corrupted by those who have physical strength and weaponry to force their ways.
Passage To Marseille (1944). After losing his faith in collaborationist France, a courageous boy moves Bogart to struggle for liberation again (probably reminds Bogart of his son he left in France).
Watched a pretty excellent film about anarchists today, The East. Private intelligence agent Jane goes undercover to infiltrate a dangerous eco-terrorist anarchist group. Digging her way through a strange world of dumpster diving and riding the railway, Jane eventually manages to enter the burned out building where the bearded anarchists are squatting. In a really powerful scene, the anarchists all don straitjackets while eating dinner. Without use of their arms, they have to take turns holding a spoon in their mouth to feed the person next to them! What cooperative anarchists! They also bathe in a river and I don't think the house has plumbing.
Jane slowly falls for Manson-esque group leader Benji and is especially impacted by a really successful "jam" (what the anarchists call their operations) in which the eco-terrorist anarchists infiltrate a company party for a big evil pharmaceutical company and spike everyone's champagne with a supposedly harmless drug the company sells. Turns out the supposedly harmless drug destroys brains and the eco-terrorist anarchists rejoice as a barely coherent big evil pharmaceutical executive mumbles through a TV speech.
In the meanwhile, there's a big twist when it's revealed that the house they're squatting in.. is actually Benji's! He was a rich kid and set his house on fire before pretending to be squatting there with the other eco-terrorist anarchists because money corrupts. Another of the group members also really dislikes her dad and he's a big business executive. Poor anarchists are a troubled bunch.
I had to go to work and didn't actually see the rest of the movie, but definitely an A+ so far. Apparently the writers spent two months dumpster diving (freeganism? Never heard the term until this movie) so it's definitely an accurate look at anarchist eco-terrorism.
So is anyone going to see Snowpiercer? Based on the early reactions to the film, it can basically be described as a 'surrealist', class-struggle themed sci-fi film.
Anon should take some lessons from the powerful message the eco-terrorist anarchists include with their YouTube uploads.
Eco-terrorist Anarchists
We are the East. And we are your wake-up call. And we are not hiding from you. We are you. We are the morning you got off the treadmill and ran under the open sky. We’re the first time you kissed someone and they kissed you back. We are the night you couldn’t sleep. The night you stared at the ceiling, thinking, ‘Is this it?’ ‘Is this the best life has to offer?’ No. There is a freedom in you that knows no fear.
We are the East. And we are your wake-up call. And we are not hiding from you. We are you. We are the morning you got off the treadmill and ran under the open sky. We’re the first time you kissed someone and they kissed you back. We are the night you couldn’t sleep. The night you stared at the ceiling, thinking, ‘Is this it?’ ‘Is this the best life has to offer?’ No. There is a freedom in you that knows no fear.
We are the hangnail that just won't clip. We are the off milk in the fridge. We're the time you ordered the extra-spicy chicken burger and you thought, "yup, this isn't bad".
We are the East. And we are your wake-up call. And we are not hiding from you. We are you. We are the morning you got off the treadmill and ran under the open sky. We’re the first time you kissed someone and they kissed you back. We are the night you couldn’t sleep. The night you stared at the ceiling, thinking, ‘Is this it?’ ‘Is this the best life has to offer?’ No. There is a freedom in you that knows no fear.
We are the hangnail that just won't clip. We are the off milk in the fridge. We're the time you ordered the extra-spicy chicken burger and you thought, "yup, this isn't bad".
We are the eco-terrorist anarchists.
And we are you.
Chilli you are killing me.
I thought that movie was cute. A liberal's wet dream of pulling the "anarchists" to their side. I use quotation marks because, according to that movie, the things that make you an anarchist are eating out of a dumpster, living in a burned out house and (occasionally) talking about "the system" as vaguely as possible.
Intent on watching Salt of the Earth and Kameradschaft (of which I first learned here), just as soon as I can get someone in my family to goddamn sit down and watch it with me---I don't do movies alone.
In the interim, I've seen Maleficent, which, as with Frozen, far exceeded my (non-existent) expectations for the standard Disney fare. As far as such material goes, I'm liking this trend toward validating a wider range of women's experiences and relationships that don't revolve around or necessitate the validation of men, as well as complicating the truly pernicious trope of True Love® and acknowledging its alternative, non-romantic formulations. Though it's a good thing Jolie nails the lead role so well, because with most of the other characters being underwritten (Stefan, with his flashes of vengeful paranoia) or just plain misconceived (the gratingly unfunny and incompetent pixie aunts), she basically has to carry the film all by herself. James Newton Howard's score also evokes a bunch of nostalgia in me and reminded to revisit my Wagner recordings.
Chef was merely passable, showing early signs of promise before devolving into a conflict-free and formulaic fairy-tale. The set-up the initial drama is poorly contrived and ends up being resolved too easily and too early in the film for me to continue caring past a certain point. That it portrayed a relatively uncomplicated and idealized paean to entrepreneurship without more closely examining food service within the context of a labor complex (as opposed to simply an issue of sifled individual creativity, which is undermined when Favreau trades in his food truck for another overpriced and likely more exploitative establishment). Perhaps most egregious was the shameless advertising for Twitter; it felt like I was watching a commercial. Social media's insipidness is ubiquitous enough as it is, must I put up with it invading cinema? And of course, as a vegan, some of the (frankly pornographic) shots of meat were quite disturbing, but I was prepared for that going in.
So is anyone going to see Snowpiercer? Based on the early reactions to the film, it can basically be described as a 'surrealist', class-struggle themed sci-fi film.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/
I saw it a few weeks ago, its great, true to the description. The train could be a metaphor for civilizations unchallenged historical acceptance of hierarchical strata and privilege as its operational edict.
Hey Vicent, Free Project TV seems to have a decent amount of films. Alternatively, just google the name of your film along with "putlocker" and that will often bring up a site that'll stream it for you.
I watched a little bit of the east the other day. I turned it off when I saw a grown women eat an apple from the garbage. Found that to be repulsive.
From the very little that I saw I was reminded of this: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ElJFYwRtrH4
Also saw herzog's remake of Nosferatu. It was really good.
That IS disgusting, however, once when I suffered internal bleeding, I was not permitted to eat for three days, after which an apple from the garbage would have been a delicacy, or a crust of stale bread smeared with margarine. Talking about Herzog, his ' Bad Lieutenant' is good because of Cage's ability to express the dark and complex emotions of a shackled moralist battling evil. Of course there will never be another Klaus Kinski and Fitzcarraldo, but the medium of film is after all the projection of the resident social structure and the relationships which form and rebound off the subsequent entanglements of desires and necessities . Or else there are his documentaries about reality, a genre he excels in, such as 'Encounters at the end of the world', or 'Cave of forgotten dreams'.
I watched a little bit of the east the other day. I turned it off when I saw a grown women eat an apple from the garbage. Found that to be repulsive.
From the very little that I saw I was reminded of this: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ElJFYwRtrH4
Also saw herzog's remake of Nosferatu. It was really good.
Oh yeah, I found the Earthfirst youtube footage making me want to reach for a can of woop-ass, like umm, I could not imagine having these self-righteous bourgeois emos within a radius of 50 metres of me unless I had a bottle of whisky and a loudspeaker blasting out some sex pistols!
I got to see 'Revolutionary Road' , it was made in 2008 yet somehow got forgotten or smothered by blockbusters, yet it is a cerebral buster for sure, and Di Caprio and Winslet and the crazy guy are awesome actors. The title actually refers to the address where the Wheeler family lives, and the crazy son of their friend drops the hidden innuendo intended by the writer when he blurts out "Oh its the revolutionaries who live in Wheeler Rd or the Wheelers who live in Revolutionary Rd". The 'revolution' is in fact the subtle personal identity wars which exist within relationships, and how society only requires a commitment by its members to change the cycle of conformity and the associated neurosises created by personal dreams which have been hijacked by economic necessities. It is a critique of conformity to a rational material security at the expense of a spontaneous fulfillment of desires. Its incredible, and there wasn't a car chase or a gun fight!
Being in a lot of planes, and in a lot of hotels recently. Here's the pick of what I've seen in them.
Jersey Boys - Utter, utter shite. No adaptation from the musical whatsoever, so why bother? It even had a pause at the end to make space for an audience clap. Sooo shit. Saw it in a cinema in Arizona. People laughed at - what I thought to be - quite a homophobic joke.
Noah - Didn't even get half an hour in. Shite.
The Grand Budapest Hotel - Pretty good. Ralph Feines was funny. Lovely aesthetics.
Jagten/The Hunt - Primary school teacher wrongly accused of being a paedophile is terrorised in his village. Good, suspenseful, but the plot was kind of weak in parts I felt. Still, recommend it.
Twin Peaks - Did the whole series in about a month. Loved it.
Eraserhead - Ummm...
Videodrome - Errrrr...
Wild At Heart - Really enjoyed it, loved the music composition also, contrasting Chris Isaaks with Powermad. Nice.
Lars and the Real Girl - About a delusional man played by Ran Gosling who takes his blow-up doll home to live with his brother and sister in-law, thinking she's a real human. Really liked it, funny and quite touching.
21 Jump Street - worst film I've seen in a long time. I hated it, and everyone in it, especially Jonah Hill.
Only God Forgives - liked it a lot, so beautifully filmed, obviously the focus being on the sound and image, with a minimal plot. I don't mind that at all. Visually stunning.
Yes, I enjoyed ‘Wild At Heart’. What a great actor Isabella Rossellini is – compare her performance in another Lynch film, ‘Blue Velvet’ – hard to believe it is the same person.
If you like a streak of surrealism in your entertainment catch the old TV series ‘Northern Exposure’. A mellow treat (with the occasional clinker).
Wild At Heart - Really enjoyed it, loved the music composition also
The best bit of the score's the title music, Richard Strauss' setting of the poem Im Abendrot (At Dusk) by Joseph von Eichendorff for soprano and orchestra, part of the Four Last Songs he wrote during his Indian summer period in his mid-eighties, with his wife's soprano voice in mind.
Snowpiercer - saw it twice now. Hands down, one of the best films I've ever seen. One of the rare films that explicitly takes on the existence of class divisions. And the set pieces were extremely well crafted, all the way from the tail to the front of the train.
Maybe it was too violent, but I guess it was inevitable in that situation. What I liked though was how a kind of ideological struggle ran alongside the physical struggle as well, as the justifications the ruling class propagate is unraveled, especially at the end. I think a lot of people will think of it as pessimistic, especially because of the ending*, which I don't want to give away. It certainly didn't all go down according to plan. But its not purely pessimistic at all.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - very good follow-up to the first. But completely overshadowed by Snowpiercer.
Fargo (tv series) - not True Detective good, but pretty decent.
Breaking Bad - its about a chemistry teacher who becomes the ultimate bad-ass. The plotting is wild, but it makes a story that's not believable. And some of the characters don't seem consistent enough.
*[SPOILER HINT - think 'common ruin of the contending classes' SPOILER HINT]
I'm a bit slow off the block, I'm sure there are previous comments about 'Capitalism : A Love Story'
"For chrissakes simiangene, its 5 yrs old, and you've only just watched it!?
This should be mandatory viewing for grade 4 classes, cut to the chase with education, give the kids the raw facts, take away the blinkers.
I'm a bit slow off the block, I'm sure there are previous comments about 'Capitalism : A Love Story'
"For chrissakes simiangene, its 5 yrs old, and you've only just watched it!?
This should be mandatory viewing for grade 4 classes, cut to the chase with education, give the kids the raw facts, take away the blinkers.
I haven't seen it yet. But I did see Inequality for All which was quite boring and unsurprising.
I'm a bit slow off the block, I'm sure there are previous comments about 'Capitalism : A Love Story'
"For chrissakes simiangene, its 5 yrs old, and you've only just watched it!?
This should be mandatory viewing for grade 4 classes, cut to the chase with education, give the kids the raw facts, take away the blinkers.
I haven't seen it yet. But I did see Inequality for All which was quite boring and unsurprising.
Its pretty basic stuff, but to the majority 95%, who get entangled within and by their necessity to survive and relinquish their powers to the overlord, it may be an eye opener and a catalyst to rebel against exploitation. He basically and whimsically endeavors to remind them of their potentialities.
Snowpiercer - saw it twice now. Hands down, one of the best films I've ever seen. One of the rare films that explicitly takes on the existence of class divisions. And the set pieces were extremely well crafted, all the way from the tail to the front of the train.
Maybe it was too violent, but I guess it was inevitable in that situation. What I liked though was how a kind of ideological struggle ran alongside the physical struggle as well, as the justifications the ruling class propagate is unraveled, especially at the end. I think a lot of people will think of it as pessimistic, especially because of the ending*, which I don't want to give away. It certainly didn't all go down according to plan. But its not purely pessimistic at all.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - very good follow-up to the first. But completely overshadowed by Snowpiercer.
Fargo (tv series) - not True Detective good, but pretty decent.
Breaking Bad - its about a chemistry teacher who becomes the ultimate bad-ass. The plotting is wild, but it makes a story that's not believable. And some of the characters don't seem consistent enough.
*[SPOILER HINT - think 'common ruin of the contending classes' SPOILER HINT]
Yeah Snowpiercer is truly and accurately an allegorical masterpiece of the present global condition. Therefore its not really Sci-fi futuristic which is the genre which critics try to slot it into, as a denial of their own inability to comprehend abstract symbolic representations of their own heinous complicity within 'the train machine'. Movies like this will never win awards, which is good in an inverted way.
OK, changing subject, I watched 'Triangle', and if you thought 'Inception' was a mind twister, this movie will surely have you boggled and left gasping at the screen as the credits roll by!
Fargo (tv series) - not True Detective good, but pretty decent.
Yeah, True Detective is better than Fargo? I've had True Detective recommended to me once or twice, but I thought Fargo was just incredible - like top 5 incredible. True Detective is that good?
I'm watching two series currently:
The Killing - which is awesome
The Walking Dead - which is basically shit and getting worse, but entertaining. It does show the limits of the zombie genre though and makes me wonder if it can be suited to a long-running show format and I'm not sure it can.
Fargo (tv series) - not True Detective good, but pretty decent.
Yeah, True Detective is better than Fargo? I've had True Detective recommended to me once or twice, but I thought Fargo was just incredible - like top 5 incredible. True Detective is that good?
I think so. I had watched True Detective first. After it ended, I needed a replacement series, which Fargo wasn't able to match. Maybe if I had watched Fargo first, I probably would have had different expectations.
The Tree of Life (2011), directed by Terrence Malick. I felt it had a few interesting passages, despite a having a script written by an self-absorbed 14 year old Christian poetry student, a camera person who was so drunk they were just stumbling around and focussing on random bits of nothing, an editor who didn't actually edit, and sickeningly cheesy visual analogy. And I hope whoever sold the rights so Malick could use large swathes of 2001: Space Oddyssey got a good price.*
Auld-bod
Standfield #797
Yes, I enjoyed ‘Wild At Heart’. What a great actor Isabella Rossellini is – compare her performance in another Lynch film, ‘Blue Velvet’ – hard to believe it is the same person.
If you like a streak of surrealism in your entertainment catch the old TV series ‘Northern Exposure’. A mellow treat (with the occasional clinker).
Just watched Blue Velvet, thanks for that. Yeah she's great! I'm really getting into my late discovery of David Lynch stuff.
I've seen there's over a 100 episodes of Northern Exposure, normally I'd pass, but since I'm currently residing in the middle of nowhere I might just get it finished in a couple of weeks, haha.
Just downloaded Snowpiercer too. Sounds good.
*Edit. Just found out that the special effects artist was Douglas Trumball - who also worked on 2001... It all becomes clear...
Searched for and checked out the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer. I'm proud to say I managed to guess that the green dude was Drax... The stuff you learn from reading that pile of magazines your brother left in your mothers loo when he moved out and you only read for the purpose of escaping the, generally not to unpleasant, family mayhem going on when all is visiting for summer/christmas.
My (cultural) geek cred is immensely improved by that pile.
Knowhere, the giant severed head of a Celestial converted into a mining facility for the extraction of spinal fluid, is clearly a metaphor the alienation of intellectual labor in modern capitalist society.
I took the little 'un to see Box Trolls on Saturday and as if by design sat beside the noisiest kids who wrestled over (amongst other things) a box of maltesers. Good film though.
Doubt - Very good film with Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Excellent acting from those three and a film that is about doubt and leaves us with doubt and ambiguity. Really enjoyable. The setting does seem a bit like every single tale of growing up in Irish new york neighbourhoods for a minute but it has a lot more to it.
Literally just got back from seeing Pride - with a Q&A from some of the people who are played in the film. It's really good, really enjoyable, and well worth a watch. Not perfect and if I have time in the next couples of days, I'll post more. But, for now, definitely worth seeing.
Has anyone seen Hollywood's "No Gods No Masters" - holy shit. As a piece of anti-anarchist propaganda it fails because unless you know some of the history you wouldn't have a clue what the film's trying to portray. Noteworthy scenes include the anarchist (luigi galleani) kidnapping a child? and an anarchist giving a terrible speech against the IWW whilst all the workers in the crowd yell that they don't need unions. Broadly sets up the policeman as the noble figure, defending justice in a world of clueless capitalists and anarchist terrorists.
recently seen films I do recommend:
~Even the Rain (También la lluvia)
~Rebellion in Patagonia (Patagonia rebelde)
If you don't know anything about Nick Cave or even if you don't like his music(?!!!) it's still well worth seeing. If you are into his music or books or whatever you HAVE to see it!
Allegorical what? A vampire movie without exposed and bloody carotid arteries,,,,,very un-clichéd , but is not Jim Jarmusch not un-eclectic? The main thing to remember is the future water wars, when the south dries up, yeah, keep that in mind.
A most wanted man : a little frustrating at times and Daniel Bruehl was completely wasted in a tiny role. On the whole enjoyable as a film though, pretty well acted by the central people, although Issa was a bit rubbish.
Before I Go to Sleep: Not too bad, decent performance from Firth and Kidman was quite good as was Mark Strong. The story was a bit silly and the direction of the actors wasn't great, but they might be due to the story weaknesses. You'd be better off watching Memento though.
The film 'Marvellous' - biopic of Neil Baldwin that was on BBC2 the other night (still watchable on I-player for a few more days). An uplifting film about a very nice man who, in the early 1980s, was also 'a very good friend of mine' :)
"Only Lovers Left Alive" , As Adam says, zombies are a real drag, and I liked the references to Christopher Marlowe's writing for Shakespeare (the Philistine). But as Adam says, he got it out, using Shakespeare as a conduit for the creative passion and wisdom of ancient vampire artisans. I liked the "too good to be famous" comment, a concise critique of modern aesthetics.
This is an intellectual allegory which has nothing to do with bats, evilness or garlic aversions but about desire and the social boundaries which stigmatize or glorify different manifestations of instinctual tendencies..As Adam says, the zombies are afraid of their own imagination and are slaves to their cravings, whereas they as vampires seek only one desire, not a cluttered chaotic consumerist identity with produces bad wiring schematics and polluted blood, and this idleness therefore frees them to refine and perfect their sustainability and neutrality, to obliterate the work ethic in their daily existence, to pursue artistic and scientific creations.,
Mommy - the latest film by Québec wunderkind Xavier Dolan. Absolutely brilliant. A single mother raising her troubled teenage son, after he's been released into her care from juvenile detention. It's beautiful and breath-taking and heartbreaking and very difficult to watch at times. The acting is just outstanding from the three main characters (mother, son and neighbour, who is suffering from her own trauma.) I know not many Québec films get a general release outside the French speaking world but this one's picking up so many accolades I expect it will and I really, really can't recommend it highly enough. Also, there's the added bonus that if you pay attention you can learn to swear like a Montréaler.
Anyway, trailer here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9LVLCYvqSI
The film 'Marvellous' - biopic of Neil Baldwin that was on BBC2 the other night (still watchable on I-player for a few more days). An uplifting film about a very nice man who, in the early 1980s, was also 'a very good friend of mine'
The last film I saw in the cinema was Guardians of the Galaxy. It was pretty dull, obvious and repetitive and highly predictable, I couldn't take interest in any of the characters none of which had any depth, even the bad guys were just not-scary. Shame since sci-fi has so much possibilities. Actually fell asleep for the closing parts, not something I usually do and last did at the cinema to Despicable Me (don't ask) years ago. Other films I recently watched:
happy people: a year in the taiga - documentary directed by Werner Herzog about a village in Siberia. Alright for what it was, if you like stuff about solitude + mix of survivalism etc., did romanticise their life a lot though ('the simple life') maybe anarcho-prims would like that. Overall good.
Sixth Sense - I'm late to the party, alright, guessed the ending so wasn't the best. Alright overall, if too long.
Antz - re-watched. Some weird revolutionary stuff in it, they even get the line 'the workers must control production' into it, a kid film. Mediocre overall.
Sienna - good if you life F1 especially, but worth watching anyway. tear-jerking at the end.
Badlands - 1970s film Terence Malick, and Martin Sheens first film. Quite good, good dialogue. About serial killers who are lovers in the south dakota badlands. Definitely worth watching.
True Romance - really good film, takes a lot from Badlands actually (music/openig credits etc.). I really liked the intro, one of the best I've seen. Weird few people have heard of it considering written by Tarentino (thank god he doesn't direct it thought). Good black comedy, worth it without being too serious.
"Elles". The rather pedestrian story of a sexually frustrated middle-class Parisienne journalist prying into the lives of two student prostitutes in order to compile a 12,000 word article for a Paris magazine. With Juliette Binoche.
I didn’t have great expectations of the four part TV series, ‘Inspector De Luca’, based on the books of Carlo Lucarelli. Between 1938 and 1948 we follow the chief inspector as he solves crimes in the City of Bologna.
The main flaw for me is his myopic liberal belief that the law encapsulates ‘truth and justice’. Once one accepts that there could be such strange individuals, there is much of interest as the plots and acting are very good with excellent period detail.
The section where De Luca is on the run from the partisans (he is on their death list) reminded me of Stuart Hood’s excellent book ‘Carlino’ (Carcanet Press, 1985), which is based on his memories of fighting with the Italian partisans in WW2.
So well worth a watch, though the main character is a political ignoramus (a very useful idiot, the antithesis of ‘the good soldier’).
Anyone seen Jimmys Hall? I was slow off the blocks for this one, although I tend to enjoy Ken Loach films, he pulls on the old heart strings sometimes.
Anyway - ideas and name dropping abunga... union members defying their leaders, Wobblies, TOM MANN! It was as though the film was triangulating into my little world; I was worried if it got any closer to home there would be a sequence on middle aged blokes sitting on settees drinking beer, alright for some, a bit specialised for most. Are you listening Loach?
About a real Russian sub K-129 during the cold war which focuses on the captain
in particular and an unexpected and slightly shady mission. Good as current movies go but that's not saying much. Harris is particularly good as is to be expected. Duchovny not too shabby either.
A film by Hal Hartley, The Girl From Monday, USA, 2005.
A happy surprise. In the first fifteen minutes it contains more ideas than most films in an hour and a half. It’s a futuristic film, a sci-fi satire, where a being from space (the girl) arrives to look for a friend and finds a world where most men and women are encouraged to trade their bodies on the stock market. It is a much better film that it sounds. It is described as ‘funny’. Not so, it’s too close to reality.
Nostalgia for the light. It does a good job of talking about Pinochet's concentration camps without being too political. It sort of begins touching on Pinochet haphazardly, as if only to mention that some people in his concentration camp in the Atacama Desert just happened to become amatuer astronomers as a way to feel escape. It seemed a good benign way of sending out the message of loss of democracy in Chile.
When Kim started mentioning US sanctions (after Dave turned the interview serious) it was clear that Dave couldn't win and even was in trouble. So here the film recognizes the bankruptcy of US rhetoric. Only then does Dave resort to emotionally manipulative questions. But if Kim is such a fan of Dave's show, he should have perfectly understood how US talk shows (eg Oprah) try to get to the emotionally vulnerable side of celebrities. Also, in light of Kim's breakdown, how to see the handled response by Eminem in the beginning of the movie? And what does this say about US celebrities who cynically do know how to play the emotional game along.
When Kim, denying in the same breath listening to Kate Perry, replies: 'I don't need my father. I'm strong", it seems to imply an equivalence between needing his father and listening to Kate Perry (both being signs of weakness). The strength lies, like in a candid moment with Dave previously, in admitting that his father was a cruel figure whose affirmation he shouldn't seek. His words in the breakdown during the interview thus strangely seem to correspond to his privately admitted belief. The movie makes a further twist when Dave in the end rides the tank with a Kate Perry song playing; it helps him focus in carrying out military action (the ultimate show of strength).
I didn’t have great expectations of the four part TV series, ‘Inspector De Luca’, based on the books of Carlo Lucarelli. Between 1938 and 1948 we follow the chief inspector as he solves crimes in the City of Bologna.
The main flaw for me is his myopic liberal belief that the law encapsulates ‘truth and justice’. ).
Read Almost Blue by him, I remember it having a ridiculous plot that clearly had not been thought out at all, but some ok moments.
Frozen - Not especially good, I couldn't quite put my finger on it but it just lacked in magic I supose. The songs seemed a bit unnatural and forcd and the plot and characters were a bit dull. All in all a bit of a let-down.
I have been listening to Serial (like all good liberals) and enjoying that.
The film 'Marvellous' - biopic of Neil Baldwin that was on BBC2 the other night (still watchable on I-player for a few more days). An uplifting film about a very nice man who, in the early 1980s, was also 'a very good friend of mine'
:) 'I'm a registered clown'. Lovely film.
It was repeated about a week ago. Should be on the BBC I-player still if you're quick.
But if Kim is such a fan of Dave's show, he should have perfectly understood how US talk shows (eg Oprah) try to get to the emotionally vulnerable side of celebrities. Also, in light of Kim's breakdown, how to see the handled response by Eminem in the beginning of the movie? And what does this say about US celebrities who cynically do know how to play the emotional game along.
David Foster Wallace explores this in the short story "My Appearance" about a minor tv star preparing for and appearing on the David Letterman show.
Saw "Nightcrawler". Fantastic!!! Jake Gyllenhall (spell check?) goes from petty criminal to CEO of "video production news" after he witnesses a film crew filming the wreckage of an accident on the highway. He learns that people go to crime scenes and accidents to get footage of death and destruction in order to sell the footage to news channels. Gyllenahll, a psychopath, was born for this job. The film is ripe with criticism of "news" channels as well as maybe kinda saying that our society as a whole is psychopathic in a way.
Dope movie, ignoring the ridiculous images that go along with the groan inducing metaphors in the voiceover this is a great tale of neo-liberal intrigue. It's like the documentary version of The Wolf of Wall Street except even more like creepy and shit because I had no idea just how powerful and highly respected these Enron people were before the collapse. Also some serious political intrigue with their role in the California energy crisis and the Bush administration's use of this as a tool to put Schwarzenagger in the governor's seat.
Pretty shocking that the lowest level employees of Enron (the on the ground energy technicians) had their stock accounts frozen when the scandal hit so that they couldn't sell of their shares. Many of them lost their pensions while simultaneously the top executives at the company sold their stocks while the stock price was still worth a little bit. Ken Lay then complained that it had been "hard on him and his family" because he only got to sell his stock for $26 million instead of the hundreds of millions that it had been worth before the scandal hit.
I watched this because Betty Lou Gerson is in it, who later voiced Cruella De Vil in Disney's 101 Dalmatians. Here she plays a fanatical communist. The movie shows how the CPUSA deals with people who try to leave: by sending any employer the person's party card membership (which results in them getting fired, even though they quit the party), or if they are illegal immigrant by alerting the police (I doubt this is historically accurate). There is also murder of someone for questioning the speaker at a lecture. Example of less extreme nastiness; setting up protests where everyone will get arrested, using women to attract recruits.
Hannelore Axman (who is an actual German) plays the communist with a conscious, whose father in Europe first hand experienced repression inside the party. She is the only other reason to bother watching this.
Operation Eichmann (1961) starring Werner Klemperer. Writer: Lester Cole
A good half of the movie shows his role in the organization of the final solution. Then his activities in exile. Especially his conflict with other Nazi exiles (who even plan an assassination of him, and try to make it look like it was revenge by Jews - again I'm ignorant if this is historically accurate).
The Israeli leader of the operation to capture Eichmann, in the movie is himself a concentration camp survivor (who with his own eyes sees Eichmann first testing a gas chamber).
Saw Whiplash. Definitely a great film, terrifying ending.
Fletcher's philosophies on competition are also disturbing, and obviously I would have liked to have seen the movie attack him for being such a piece of shit, but the ending suggests that Fletcher's philosophies may have virtue to them, which in my opinion is absurd.
Let's be cops - someone aoart from Jason Sudeikis' gang is trying to compete with the Vince Vaughan shitty couple-friendly comedies. Not too bad in the end, but in no way special.
The baddy is the new bad guy from Broadchurch
Saw 50 shades of Grey. Fucking boring as shit. There's some pseudo philosophical bullshit in there but it's not even worth talking about. Honestly think the book was secretly written by a cabal of sociologists who knew that this would give them topics to discuss at their academic conferences.
I watched Baraka a while back. It was awesome in the true sense of the word, but I thought it was also illustrative of a point I had been trying to make in an ongoing debate with one of my relatives. They maintain that art and culture can prescind from political questions, and that talk of systems and ideologies tends to contaminate and make for "lower" art. But in the context of Baraka, politics is inescapable, and to think otherwise seems to me a pretext to reduce the imagery of environmental depredation, labor exploitation, urban anomie and mass poverty to an undifferentiated aesthetic. The movie's premise was the interconnectedness of human life and the immanence of spirituality in the natural world, but nearly everything I saw suggested the contrary. The Indonesian woman's only point of contact with the outside world is mediated through the cigarettes she produces for a Japanese businessman who couldn't be further removed from her circumstances---to name just one example. And the montages of people enthralled to the archaism of religious mystification and obscurantism seems less profound and more like a means of collective denialism and escapism from the material challenges facing humanity as a whole---a sort of particularism, if you will, that divides everybody in their own self-constructed, self-enclosed worlds.
It's not so much a problem with the handfuls of mediative monks, but scenes of Mecca or the Ganges were disturbing testaments to the numbing of popular consciousness; and modern industrialized consumer societies aren't without their own updated forms of fetishism and ritual---the time-lapse sequence of urban traffic perfectly illustrated the superstructure that regiments, programs and automates what in real-time seems like chaos from the ground-level. So yeah, in conclusion, the notion of "World-Spirit" (something which Gustav Landauer mediated on---I think he would've loved this movie) seems subverted in the course of the movie's run-time, Fricke and co.'s intentions aside; even such a new-agey metaphysics by itself can be a bit dehumanizing at the same time (didn't Bookchin talk about this?), so it comes across as an insoluble projection of subjective feelings onto the material world. But it was profoundly beautiful all the same; some of those visuals will definitely stick with me.
Was I the only person not really troubled by American Sniper? The Chris Kyle character was definitely racist and jingoistic, but I don't think that means the movie necessarily was. To me it was more of a character study than political.
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), I'd had forgotten almost everything about this film. Which is strange as it is about time and memory. I'm not alone as I've heard it described as the ghost inside modern French cinema. The screen play by Marguerite Duras is outstanding.
superjail
question:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Ferrari_California_Paris_August_2010.jpg
what does a car that looks like this suggest to you about its owners, their attitude towards the speed limit and/or law enforcement in general, and their relationship to the police force?
jesus christ i didnt mean it like that, no violence or anything bad i just meant that this place is gonna get really bad if things keeps up like this. much love to everyone, stay safe… I'm really sorry. I'm leaving now for good, sorry for all the trouble. best of luck with the forum
Watched Come and See the other night, an extremely good and completely horrific Soviet film that follows a boy in Nazi occupied Belarus during World War 2. Also saw Ida, which is about a Polish nun in the 60s who discovers that her parents were Jews killed in the Holocaust, and Omar, a very tense Palestinian film from the same director as Paradise Now about a Palestinian guy coerced into informing for Shin Bet.
Watched Come and See the other night, an extremely good and completely horrific Soviet film that follows a boy in Nazi occupied Belarus during World War 2.
Phenomenal movie. So many memorable scenes: the bodies behind the house, the razing of the village, his confrontation with Hitler's image. I was struck by how visibly the kid aged over the course of a few days. And not a single moment of bullshit Great Patriotic War triumphalism; not even the partisans muster any heroism, but are just as desperate and burdened as the rest. The whole thing feels like a fever dream, actually, like Aguirre turned full-out survival horror.
Makes Enemy at the Gates look like Babes in Toyland.
The part with the pile of corpses got to me especially. Nightmarish stuff and a welcome remedy to all the Hollywood treatments of World War 2 that focus on inspiring heroism in tough times and all that.
A Most Violent Year, a brilliant movie with an amazing lead performance from Oscar Isaacs. A really compelling portrayal of the ruthless capitalist entrepreneur type.
There is very little worth watching on UK Freeview telly these days but I did rather enjoy the dark humour in the film 'God Bless America' by Bob Goldthwait staring Joel Murray and T.L.Barr. which played to my personal irritation at so many of the day to day habits of people in the modern capitalist world but wasn't of course actually against capitalism. Well I need a bit of escapism as much as the next person!
Cake : a bit weird, one of those films that doesn't realy tell you that much about any of the characters or anything else and doesn't give you much of a plot or much of a resolution to what there is. Not too bad but it did end up feeling a bit pointless.
Watched Snow Piercer and The Maze Runner last week. While Snow Piercer is a bit of a sledgehammer of a metaphor I really enjoyed the movie; well made, decent action and not a lot of dead moments. Also like the Maze Runner for what it is; yet another YA dystopian movie in which teenagers are sacrificed for [insert reason]. Not as good as the Hunger Games, but fun enough to watch.
Ass backwards - sort of film that's barely worth watching if it comes on TV.
When was the last time you had fun? - quite fun, comedy with a bit of drama about couples and relationships etc.
BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, not that fucking abomination of a version with Keira Knightly. Absolutely sublime - marvellously hammed up acting by Alison Steadman as Mrs Bennet and Colin Firth, who I'm generally not too keen on smashes it as the horribly pompous but endearingly tongue tied Mr Darcy.
Take the inverted snobbery peg off your nose and wallow in this corking escape mechanism of a film.
Just watched The Wind That Shakes the Barley for the first time. Pretty heavy-handed politically, but still a good movie. Liam Cunningham plays a great socialist-realism caricature to route for.
Just watched The Wind That Shakes the Barley for the first time. Pretty heavy-handed politically, but still a good movie. Liam Cunningham plays a great socialist-realism caricature to route for.
I was disappointed. It felt like Land and Freedom in a different country.
A few days ago I watched John Frankenheimer’s ‘Seconds’ (1966).
A friend had said he’d been haunted by it for years. I’d had a similar experience with his film ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1962), so was glad to have the opportunity to watch it on DVD. On the big screen it would be even more disturbing, as the soundtrack and cinematography are very disorientating.
Based on a novel, the film’s idea is that a person can pay to ‘reinvent’ themselves in a different guise and live life over again. Rock Hudson acts with conviction, as the ‘second chance’ man, disorientated in his new persona, who on one occasion visits his ‘recently bereaved’ wife and discovers his alienated past. Very interesting movie though not a million laughs.
The Forgotten (2004). Silly plot, but terrifying if regarded as allegory on the Stalin school of falsification. It makes me realise the need to have a party (or in its absence, Libcom) to preserve the history of the workers movement.
Another movie about memory loss, The Unknown (2011), at one point openly makes some historical commentary (ie that Germans – the movie takes place in Berlin – forget their own history of Nazism and "Communism").
Probably there are so many movies about memory loss because it's just a lazy plot device for writers, and mostly these movies are just about some search for identity ("being").
Watched Matewan today, a movie about a 1920 strike by coal miners in West Virginia that took on an element of gun fighting when Baldwin-Felts agents were brought in by the company. Good stuff, this scene especially was inspiring.
Watched Matewan today, a movie about a 1920 strike by coal miners in West Virginia that took on an element of gun fighting when Baldwin-Felts agents were brought in by the company. Good stuff, this scene especially was inspiring.
[youtube]qwEMIvDEFy4[/youtube]
I hope you're aware it happened and is pretty accurate to the facts (for a movie).
Trainwreck. Romantic comedy written by Amy Schumer. Was hilarious in its first half, then went through the required motions of the genre and I therefore lost a bit of interest towards the end (and I say this as someone who likes romcoms).
Straight Outta Compton.
Amazing film, brilliantly acted, beautifully shot and of course the music is still as fantastic as it ever was.
*Obviously I'm aware of the things which weren't in the film, ie the VAW and the erasure of the women who were part of the scene. I guess it comes under the heading of Things I Like Which Are Problematic.
Have just watched ‘The Homesman’, a western with Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank. Similar to Clint Eastwood’s ‘The Unforgiven’, the main interest lies in the complex emotions of the main characters.
It has a darkness I find in the likes of Thomas Hardy. A great piece of storytelling which you should watch without knowing too much of the tale.
Seems to take a lot of cues from Omar, or maybe they weren't aware of each groups projects while in development. Either way, I like this trend of letting historical settings and situations that stem from imperialist conflict shape characters and story archs.
The Man in the White Suit
excellent. old fashioned capital v. labor theme that you'd almost never see in a major american movie now, or really anytime post-war. i wonder if the Alec Guiness character would today be thought of as having Asperger's.
saw the star wars movie, it was pretty good, definitely a step up from episodes 1 2 and 3, but that's not saying much. A good film all in all but not on par with episodes 4 and 5 I think mainly because the music wasn't as good and the world building was a bit wonky. Who were "the resistance" weren't they supposed to be the government? Who were the First Order? Why were they pissed?
It was a lot simpler in the original trilogy which worked much better, right from the opening shot you understood exactly what was going on, this one didn't really explain it. Also still waiting on the explanation as to why the clone troopers who are trained from birth to fight are so terrible at aiming.
Also saw the martian. Spent most of is time celebtrating PROFESSIONAL SCIENCE and mythologizing a liberal middle class wet dream of what they imagine the technocratic elite to be (or what the technocrats think they do). Aside from the nauseating ideological message of the movie it was interesting enough to entertain me throughout.
In 1947, Dalton Trumbo a Hollywood screenwriter was jailed and blacklisted for his political beliefs. A good watch, which rather soft pedals the politics. Very well made in all other respects.
(Later, on the bus going home, I thought that Bryan Cranston should have called Saul.)
Trainwreck - I'm not taken with AMy Schumer, this had a pretty boring story, told with no subtlety and only about three funny jokes.
Man Up - wasn't too bad and until the awful speeches as the end managed to bequite amusing.
Sisters - I was hoping to like this but it was just really short on jokes and like a lot of recent comedies doesn't really have actual characters or jokes so it's a bit hard to get into.
Bridesmaids - Like TRainwreck and Sisters watched with my partner who turned it off halfway through,unlike the other two I didn't go back and finish it.
In a fit of nostalgia I went to see 4 old 1975 episodes of 'Day of Hope' as part of a Jim Allen retrospective at the cinema, a film made with his left-wing colleague Ken Loach who provided a short intro seeking to link it in with his current Left Unity/Corbynista campaigning. That unfortunate misplaced appeal aside the dramatised story of working class struggles and political illusions and the 'betrayals' of the Labour Party and trade unions from the First World War to the eventual defeat of the General Strike in 1926 was still a biting critique by to-days drama documentary standards - perhaps one reason why the BBC never repeated a showing of it since it's first appearance on UK TV screens.
Terence Malick's Knight of Cups. Largely disdained in the US with a couple of notable exceptions, I thought the film was more successful than Tree of Life and To the Wonder, his two most previous films.
Oh yeah also, not quite the last film I watched but the last blow me away good film I watched was Carol, great film and totally transended the subject matter which I thought kind of made a good point about the importance or otherwise of sexuality. Care Blanchett is a great actress even if she does lack range.
This guy is not an anarchist he is a radical/leftist, who confirms my belief that anarchism is part of the left. If I didn’t think that, it would be to deny Horton shares part of my belief system. If he is part of working class history, why should I deny that I am on the left?
Before anyone puts up the ideological shutters give this a watch.
Grave of the fireflies, the Studio Ghibli film. Historically very educational, it taught me a lot I didn't know and has.sparked my curiosity to learn more about Japan and the second world war. As a film I felt it was just too sad for me, it also lacked any suspense in the way the story arc was laid out. But I think the filmmakers were trying to do something and they did it well.
Cloud Atlas, which is 3 hours long but which I enjoyed, especially the Timothy Cavendish bits, which were the best parts of the film. Also a Tim Burton film called Coraline, enjoyed that too.
Green Room - untypical, i surely recommend
The Grimsby Brothers - probably the best "borat" film in terms of the balance of good/bad jokes
They Live - what a surprise! i wish there were movies like this these days...
13 Hours - yeah, i know... and i liked it a lot:)
Captain America 3 - better than thor movies, not as good as avengers, but i still enjoyed it
Deadpool - good fun
Revenant - everybody hates it but me:)
The Hateful Eight - what the hell was this about? and why i liked it?:)
Ethos wrote: Agent of the
Ethos
My household spends almost two hundred bucks for Verizon triple play and its mostly garbage. We only have Showtime and The Movie Channel as our premium channels for movies, and their some of the worst forms of state propaganda. Occasionally their service has a glitch that allows you to access all of the other channel premiums and watch how many movies you want. So I take advantage of that when the opportunity comes.
Got a crush on Owen Wilson
Got a crush on Owen Wilson atm so Drillbit Taylor, Shangai Noon and Midnight in Paris (all hilarious!) Anyone see either This Is The End or Anchorman 2? The first has THE BEST CAST EVAR!
i watch Chennai express.
i watch Chennai express.
I saw Spike Lee's Do The
I saw Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. I found it to be racist and pointless. The filmmaker tries to address "race struggle", but reproduces stereotypes that are not really helpful for whatever he's trying to prove.
The Wave. Thought it was
The Wave. Thought it was cack. Only managed to get about half way through it.
ELYSIUM, brilliant. They
ELYSIUM, brilliant. They didnt quite 'organise the space workers' though.
Choccy wrote: ELYSIUM,
Choccy
Alex Jones is apoplectic about it. Jones at his most blatently racist and right wing likening it to 'Birth of a Nation'
[youtube]gckNFdxBBzo[/youtube]
Mr. Jolly wrote: Choccy
Mr. Jolly
I could only make it into two minutes.
fair enough.
fair enough.
Choccy wrote: ELYSIUM,
Choccy
One of the best big budget Hollywood action movies I've seen in recent years but only because the others of that genre are usually so pathetic.
Why can't the police robots be made by other robots? The new Total Recall had its hero work in cop robot factory as well BTW.
I get that the bourgeoisie want to physically separate themselves from the (lumpen-)proletariat, they already do that now but they're capitalists for fucksake so there's no reason access to their magical medbeds wouldn't be restricted by money rather than citizenship.
I guess I liked it but I'm disappointed because it could have been a much better film. Even if only by calling the hero Max Hoelz instead of Max Da Costa.
The Kings of Summer. Good
The Kings of Summer. Good film, well made, and funny too.
bastarx wrote: Choccy
bastarx
Also the jerky handheld camera work is soooo annoying.
A Field In
A Field In England.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRRvzjkzu2U
I rarely go to the pictures, but went to see this a couple of months back.
It's hard to explain this film, just because it combines so many different elements. It's basically a monochrome, psychedelic, mystic, historical drama set in the English Civil War. Both the writing, and the direction is really gritty, visceral and surreal, but I felt the visual aesthetics completely overpowered the writing, so the plot was lost on a few occasions. Saying that, the visuals actually made me come back to it, and want to understand it a bit more. I very rarely watch a film so soon after I've seen it the first time. It's really stripped-down - five characters in a field - but bombastic. I'd say it was like a mix between F.J. Ossang's work and Un Chien Andalou. Bit of Brecht in there too. Really uncomfortable to watch, but immersive.
Great cast too. In particular, Michael Smiley (Tyres in Spaced), and Reece Shearsmith (League of Gentleman), are amazing.
Apparently it was released on DVD, cinema and on television at the same time. I'd be interested to know how that worked out.
Standfield wrote: A Field In
Standfield
Had little discernible plot and gave me a headache. But visually stunning and liked the bawdy dialogue.
Mr. Jolly wrote: Had little
Mr. Jolly
Yeah, I think that's fair. Thinking about it, I'm kind of leaning towards the idea that there actually isn't supposed to be much of a plot, in the sense of a narrative I mean. The visuals and odd sense of time (quick-cuts, slow-motion, dead coming back to life, scenes coming back to the start) make it quite nauseating. There is also a lot of anti-illusionism going on (character glance at the camera, the song interlude). It's all a bit post-dramatic.
I found this interesting:
http://thequietus.com/articles/12754-a-field-in-england-ben-wheatley-interview
http://vimeo.com/50467975 tru
http://vimeo.com/50467975
trumps hangover everytime.
A Clockwork Orange This is
A Clockwork Orange
This is absolutely the worst film I have ever seen. I wanted to switch off after 5 minutes but watched it all the way through with a sort of fascinated horror as time after time it missed the point by about fifty million fucking miles. Mr Kubric displayed a determination to go for a sensationalist approach which rendered the story as a barely noticeable side issue. The humour of the book was totally AWOL as was Alex's endearing qualities that amazingly make you love him in spite of all of his diabolical attitudes and actions.
I know that it's hard for films to tell a story in the same way as a book but besides getting EVERYTHING wrong, it missed the whole third section out completely. A third of the book which of course includes the conclusion!
There was a 1984 tv series in the fifties called Big Brother is Watching You which ended with Winston and Julia up against a wall shouting 'down with Big Brother' as they were shot. Well, every frame of this hideous pile of shit missed the point like this but times a trillion.
Aaaaagghhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Apart from the all that it wasn't too bad!
Coincidentally, I saw 2001: A
Coincidentally, I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey by Kubrick. It was alright. A lot of the scenes tend drag a bit overlong.
I saw Hidden Agenda by Ken Loach, which was extremely dialogue driven. It seems to be the only way the director knows how to express his politics, by creating characters who share his outlook.
I also saw: Skyfall, Zero Dark Thirty, Ted and Argo. I was unsurprisingly unimpressed by these latter four titles.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03c56rw/Kevin_Bridges_The_Story_Continues/
Cheered me right up!
Watched The Wolf of Wall
Watched The Wolf of Wall Street. Must see movie! Pretty stark look at the behind the scenes world of finance capital.
Torrent it here, http://kickass.to/the-wolf-of-wall-street-2013-dvdscr-xvid-bida-t8524359.html
Coincidentally, Soapy, I just
Coincidentally, Soapy, I just watched it yesterday from that same torrent. Great movie. I also recently watched The Act of Killing, a documentary about some former death squad members in Indonesia who were active during Suharto's coup. Very surreal film, one of the best documentaries I've ever seen.
Soapy and Tyrion - thanks for
Soapy and Tyrion - thanks for the links, really like to see both of them, but they don't seem to be working for me. I can't seem to access any of the torrent sites as a matter of fact. Something to do with my settings?
This week, I aav been mostly watching...
Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others - German film, situated in 1984, Berlin. About a Stasi agent getting more and more involved in the lives of a writer and actress whom he is spying on. Good film, I enjoyed it.
Capricorn One - Sci Fi from 1978, about a Mars landing hoax. I really enjoyed it, though I found the ending a bit disappointing.
Tout va Bien - Godard film from 1972. About a fictional strike in a sausage factory in 1968 France. Employs Brechtian techniques that I've never encountered in film before. For example, there's one monologue directed at the camera from a CGT shop steward - in character - though reading directly off the script. I enjoyed it a lot, would watch it again.
Ghost In The Shell 1995, and Innocence, 2004. Like most Manga films, I can't really explain what's going on. Would watch them again to take it all in. Loved the first one, though wasn't to fussed with the second one. I didn't really like the use of 3D computerized animation in the sequel, but I've been told by my brother my computer is shit, and I should see it on a proper screen. So there.
Downloaded Tout va Bien,
Downloaded Tout va Bien, excited to see it.
As for the link, what exactly is going wrong?
It says, "error - site
It says, "error - site blocked". Does the same for most other sites. I've managed to start downloading The Act of Killing though from another site. Should be ready to watch in a couple of weeks, haha.
Tyrion wrote: The Act of
Tyrion
I certainly adds credibility to Marx view of the lumpen proletariat :(
Pretty shocking film, but I can't make my mind up what I think about the way its been done.
Hmmm...maybe that website is
Hmmm...maybe that website is blocked in the UK?
Yeah I think that maybe the
Yeah I think that maybe the case. All those sites worked when I was in Australia for a bit. Not to worry, I'll just do a bit of browsing. Cheers
I watched a short very funny
I watched a short very funny satirical/political critique by way of subtitles of 'Marxism-Leninism-Maoism' set against a Chinese Martial Arts type background film called 'Can Dialectics Break Bricks' and an interesting Bertoldt Brecht black and white anti-war theatrical film showing at the 'Art Moving Left' Exhibition at Liverpool Tate - not the most enlightening exhibition from my political point of view but these two old films were good. Others might have come across these before?
(2012) The Act of Killing
(2012) The Act of Killing [Joshua Oppenheimer]
Try internet search - hash: 4DEBF831AD338F7EFDD3D84C6D85A07C8AE1A584
To avoid getting blocked try https://immunicity.org/getstarted which would probably allow you to see websites you're restricted from.
Also to protect you from snoopers try www.peerblock.com
Spikeymike - Can Dialectics
Spikeymike - Can Dialectics Break Bricks is here in full on youtube. A Situationist film, bizarre and funny, yeah. I seem to recall it mentioning anarcho-syndicalism a few times, though it could be just be my brain playing tricks again. Was a while baack when I saw it. Don't suppose you remember the name of the Brecht work?
AES - cheers for that info!
Tōkyō Monogatari/Tokyo Story
Tōkyō Monogatari/Tokyo Story
Supposedly one of the best films ever made. I couldn't make it through the whole thing. The flat angles, which are apparently a "trademark" of the director just make it awful, the characters/performances are all interchangeable and almost every time there was a conversation between two people they spoke directly to the camera which ended up making the film look silly. I know it was the 50's and it's a classic and all that, but I seriously don't get what people see in this.
Just finished watching Her,
Just finished watching Her, about a man (played by Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his artificially intelligent operating system in a a slightly futuristic setting. Despite what that description would suggest, it's not at all campy and really very emotional, with excellent performances by both Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the AI. Spike Jonze is one of my favorite directors and apparently he's a great writer as well.
I recently watched the Before
I recently watched the Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight trilogy, which I'd never seen any of before but the third film came out last year and has gotten rave reviews (as has the whole trilogy, they have 100%, 95%, and 98% respectively on Rotten Tomatoes). The praise is definitely well earned. Each of the movies takes place in more or less a single day and mostly consist of two people, played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, talking and walking around, but they're all really romantic and Hawke and Delpy are flawless. I think I liked Before Sunset the best--it definitely has my favorite ending of the three--but they're all fantastic films.
I also saw Dr. Strangelove for the first time the other day, which was hilarious.
Since my last post, I've
Since my last post, I've watched:
Old Movies
Casablanca
On the Waterfront, about a bureaucratic union taken over by the bureaucratic mob
Hitchcock's Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, and The Birds (Psycho and Rear Window was the most entertaining of them all)
Lumet's 12 Angry Men, and Network
Out of the Past
French New wave: Breathless, The 400 Blows, and Cleo from 5 to 7, and Pickpocket
The Conversation
Scorsese's Mean Streets (not worth seeing)
The Graduate
I Am Cuba
New Movies
Silver Linings Playbook
The Machinist
L.A. Confidential
American Beauty
I've seen a lot more than this, but if ain't on this list, than its so bad that I completely forgot them.
Well, actually I can remember Gravity, but it was bad. Well, maybe not that bad, but one of the worst experiences I've had going to the theaters.
I usually take the names of
I usually take the names of films from this list: http://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000_all1000films.htm and wait for it to show on Turners Movies Classics and record them with my DVR.
Berberian Sound Studio, 2012.
Berberian Sound Studio, 2012. Wicked film, loved it. Set in the 70s, an mild-mannered English foley artist ventures to Italy to work on what he believes to be an equestrian film, but turns out to be a horror flick. It gets surreal, and macabre; the line between his reality and the film becomes non-existent. Co-produced by Warp, the soundtrack in this film is quite incredible, fitting of the subject matter. This, with the cinematography, makes it a real dense film, full of texture. Saying that, I found it fun to watch, not at all difficult. Great stuff.
EDIT: Also watched If..., 1968, which though I ploughed through it, thought it was actually quite dull. I actually hated every single character.
I found The Act of Killing really good, but I'd like to know more about how they made it. Sometimes felt very... I don't know, violently voyeuristic. I'd like to know though if that that village they burnt down actually was a working, real-life village, or just a set. From what I could make out, it was a real village. Absolutely fucking mental. "Gangsters/free men", the mythology of capitalism in a nutshell. Fuck, I feel so bad for those kids who had no idea what was going on, and the people having to live through that again. When the guy talks of burying his "Communist" step-dad to the murderers - absolutely heartbreaking.
Agent of the Fifth
Agent of the Fifth International
I was in the process of putting some stuff together on anti-communist movies, but got sidetracked by other things, but was going to include On The Waterfront. (I'm still working on it, but it is going slowly at the moment.)
The whole film seems to be an elaborate justification for grassing up supposed communists to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The director (Elia Kazan), the writer, and the actor who played Johnny Friendly (the main villain) all testified before HUAC and all of them named names.
The whole film is littered with references to "stool pigeons" and "rats", and there is a belaboured metaphor with Brando looking after the dead guy's pigeons, and then becoming a "stool pigeon" (geddit?). Just to make sure they don't look like total dicks they make the film about mobsters rather than communists.
Ironically about a decade earlier the movie studios paid a mob run union to prevent workers from striking and to scab, as well as bussing in mobsters from Chicago to attack striking studio workers who belonged to a rival union. They also paid cops as well, to help break the strike, who took wages from both the studios and the police department (which also issued gun licences to the mobsters who showed up). (Kazan was working in Hollywood at that time, so I find it hard to believe he wouldn't know this.)
(Mostly) anti-communist
(Mostly) anti-communist movies that I have watched since a few months ago:
Blockade (1938) – not anti-com but film makers forced to remove all political context for this film about the Spanish Civil War. (Who is fighting who, and why? Nobody seems to know.)
Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) – anti-Nazi rather than anti-com (but watched to see how they deal with the other Bad Guys).
Ninotchka (1939) – An anticom romcom.
The Iron Curtain (1948) – Mostly dull anti-com flick filmed in Canadia.
I Married a Communist / The Woman on Pier 13 (1949) – The name was changed to trick people into seeing it.
The Red Menace (1949) – A stupid but unintentionally funny B-movie.
The Flying Saucer (1950) – Shit, but cool UFO effect at the beginning.
I was a Communist for the FBI (1951) – Makes a hero out of a real-life wife beater, who, not content with beating up his own wife, even beat up his brother's wife.
The Whip Hand (1951) – Originally anti-Nazi, but the Nazis turned into communists on the orders of anti-com studio boss Howard Hughs.
Big Jim McLain (1952) – John Wayne sexes up the job of a glorified delivery boy for HUAC who delivers subpoenas (which he repeatedly calls “subpeenees”) to suspected communists, who he invariably punches, involved in some convoluted plot to create industrial strife in Hawaii by releasing plague infected rats (or something).
Invasion USA (1952) – 90% stock footage of actual people dying in WW2 (and possibly Korea), cobbled together with a clumsy plot which kills off all the characters, and has a stupidly disappointing ending where it turns out none of it actually happened. At all. Fuck you, movie audience!
My Son John (1952) – He’s gay! An intellectual! And a communist! Also, his parents are both Forrest Gump.
On the Waterfront (1954) – What I said above.
I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958) – Mildly amusing sci-fi B-flick, where aliens come to Earth and impersonate the men of a small town to impregnate Earth woman but turn out to be firing blanks. The bit near the end where the doctor rounds up all the virile, cigar smoking men from the maternity ward to form a posse to kill the aliens is priceless.
It was doing my head in so I had to have a rest over Christmas. (I’m not even half way through, yet, damnit!)
Awesome list omen, i've seen
Awesome list omen, i've seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers before, which is hilarious (I think that is anti-communist scifi), i'm totally going to hit up some of those films.
Ninotchka - ‘The last mass
Ninotchka - ‘The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.’
Now omen, what’s anti-communist about that? :(
[Sorry if this is too long,
[Sorry if this is too long, but consider it practice for a series of essays I'm writing.]
Yeah, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is kind of a key film, bridging the gap between sci-fi and anti-communism. It wasn't the first anti-com sci-fi, though its really the only one that's stood the test of time (three remakes and a slew of copycats). In fact sci-fi didn't exist as a genre* in cinema until the '50s and overlapped neatly with the Second Red Scare, and would provide a way of dressing up anti-communism so as to make it more palatable (most overtly anti-communist movies flopped, hence why they changed the name of I Married a Communist and re-released it as The Woman on Pier 13).
[*I know there were earlier sci-fi films, but there were very few and they usually belonged to another genre like horror (Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), or stood alone (Metropolis, Things to Come).]
Body Snatchers has been seen as both anti-communist and anti-anti-communist, thus making it more popular than regular anti-com movies. In the anti-anti-communist telling, the pod people are interpreted as conformist McCarthyites persecuting the innocent and forcing them to conform. The film's producer, Walter Wanger, had initially opposed the anti-communist witch hunts, but later became instrumental in implementing the Hollywood blacklists. And although based on a novel by Jack Finney (who had conservative leanings), the writer of the screenplay, Daniel Mainwaring, was affected by the blacklisting, and Wanger had to vouch for him to write the screenplay (the studio was worried that he might be a communist). Mainwaring also acted as a front for blacklisted writers, so that they could still work despite the blacklist.
As for Ninotchka, its kind of an oddball in terms of anti-com movies. It predates the Second Red Scare by about a decade, and doesn't have any obvious motivation for its explicit anti-communism. For example, Bela Lugosi, who plays Ninotchka's superior back in Russia, was actually a communist, and the FBI kept a file on him, and several attempts were made to deport him from the US. The films re-release was blocked during the war, specifically because it was anti-communist, and Hollywood would in fact make a number of explicitly pro-communist films during the war, at least partly instigated by the US government, such as Mission to Moscow, which was shameless apologism for the Stalinist purges, and these films would ironically lead (along with the strikes in Hollywood) to people claiming that Hollywood was infested with communists, the blacklists, etc. But Ninotchka was re-relased after the war, on the wave of anti-communist hysteria, made into a stage play, and remade into a musical (Silk Stockings) in 1957. It was also really the only successful, overtly anti-communist movie.
omen wrote: (Mostly)
omen
You could try I married a communist! (Not related to the Phillip Roth book which is pretty good in itself)
Errr, that was the fifth one
Errr, that was the fifth one on my list of watched movies that you just replied too! ;)
Anyway, the three "I Married a..." movies from the 40s and 50s kind of neatly illustrate the trajectory of propaganda during the period, from anti-Nazi to anti-communist to subtly anti-communist sci-fi allegories: I Married a Nazi (1940), I Married a Communist (1949), I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958).
So, for my essay I quickly mocked up this movie poster a couple of months ago for what I thought would be the equivalent today (not sure that I'll use it though):
omen wrote: Errr, that was
omen
There is a real movie about "I married an islamic fundamentalist" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102555/
Why must people always steal
Why must people always steal my ideas decades before I have them? I might sue.
And Homeland did it as well.
And Homeland did it as well.
omen wrote: The whole film is
omen
Wait, so "stool pigeons" and "rats" are references to? Don't quite get it?
Now to switch up this thread
Now to switch up this thread a bit, who are libcommies favorite actors/actresses?
Mine is Jack Nicholson. The dude gave lots of strong performances of interesting characters. My faves:
Easy Rider
The Last Detail
Five Easy Pieces
Chinatown
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Passenger
The Shining
A Few Good Men
As Good as it Gets (although its a bit silly)
About Schmidt
Thus far, Hollywood's greatest actor since the 1960s.
Agent of the Fifth
Agent of the Fifth International
Old timey slang for someone who informs to the police.
I'm a big fan of Ryan
I'm a big fan of Ryan Gosling, he and Michelle Williams are incredible in Blue Valentine. Half Nelson, Lars and the Real Girl, and Drive also have top-notch Gosling performances.
(2012) The Happy Lands
(2012) The Happy Lands [Robert Rae] [PG-12] [subs: en fr]
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jgv34
[youtube]vCCgjNmdfe0[/youtube]
===
(2012) Dear Mandela [Dara Kell, Christopher Nizza]
[youtube]o5LJNj_HCro[/youtube]
omen wrote: Errr, that was
omen
This is the film thread, I shouldn't have to know how to read! :)
I've been working my way
I've been working my way through all the Stanley Kubrick movies I haven't seen in the past (everything other than The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and A Clockwork Orange) and watched Paths of Glory yesterday. Pretty decent political message to it; a French general during WWI, tempted with the promise of a promotion, orders a suicidal attempt to take a German position and then has several soldiers charged with cowardice (to be punished by execution) when the attack fails. The generals are depicted as selfish, petty asshole who care far more about their careers than about the lives of the rank and file, and there's lots of scenes showing the splendor that they live in contrasted with the miserable trench life. Apparently the French government tried very hard to prevent the movie from being released in France. Very solid film.
Tyrion #674 I agree about
Tyrion #674
I agree about 'Paths of Glory', Kubrick never topped it. The final sequence with the woman singing is still haunting me.
Excellent trio by Japanese
Excellent trio by Japanese director Yoji Yamada.
Twilight Samurai (2002)
The Hidden Blade (2004)
Love and Honor (2006)
I understand that omen is
I understand that omen is using the term communist in the way he/she explained in the thread ‘everyone thinks communists are nazis’:
‘When I use the term "communist" above, I mean it in a very general and stupid way, which is the way it was used back then (and still is today), combining everything from Soviet Russia, the CPUSA, socialism (in general), trade unionism, the civil rights movement, social democracy, Roosevelt's New Deal, and the Democrat party and liberals in general. (And it would include us too!)’
(omen #10)
However I think ‘Ninotchka’ (Lubitsch, 1939) is misrepresented as he/she fails to understand the film’s inner workings or its mass appeal (omen #662). David Thomson gets much closer:
‘Ninotchka is a splendid example of sex in politics. The time is an unspecified moment in the late thirties. Ninotchka is a humorless commissar sent from Moscow to Paris to check up on three delinquent officials.
“How are things in Moscow?” the trio ask. “Very good,” she says. “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.”
If you think that joke tasteless, you probably won’t like ‘Ninotchka’ – and you shouldn’t go near ‘To Be Or Not To Be’. After all, real people were appallingly tortured and slowly executed in the mass trials. Yet the jump to Soviet logic – fewer but better – is piercing political satire. And the film is setting Ninotchka up for her humorlessness to be ‘executed’. She asks Melvyn Douglas, “Must you flirt?”
“I don’t have to, but I find it natural.” (This is the essence of Lubitsch: Let God stand up for nature.)
“Suppress it,” she replies, and there the line has the politics of suppression and the sex of repression bouncing together. Don’t forget that Billy Wilder did the script for Lubitsch…
…The commercial key to it all was ‘Garbo laughs’, and so she did. Of course, no one doubts that she is going to melt, but the lovely thing about the film is a way chat and smiles do the trick. She doesn’t have to be convinced by some ponderous arguments over political destiny. Flirtation does it – the most egalitarian weapon…’
(Have You Seen…? David Thomson, 2008, page 601)
My take is that (aside from mass murder) when Lenin and the Bolsheviks put ‘sexual liberation’ on the back burner they were presenting the Hollywood dream machine with an open goal.
This repressive legacy it still active and visible in Russia today.
Rust and Bone (De rouille et
Rust and Bone (De rouille et d'os), 2012.
French/Belgian romantic drama, with a smidgen of class analysis chucked in. Very good. Great plot, superb performances.
12 Years a Slave.
Hit and miss for me.
Berberian Sound Studio, 2012.
Mentioning it again, because it's so fucking good. Psychological thriller set in a 1970s Italian horror film studio.
Auld-bod, I think we are
Auld-bod, I think we are talking at cross purposes here. You noted above that I'm using "communism" in a very broad sense, which I unfortunately didn't clarify in this thread. And I take it your post of #661 was questioning my calling Ninotchka anti-communist?
By "anti-communist" I mean that it is part of a tradition of lumping together certain ideas or actions, calling them "communist" and associating them with the Soviet Union in some way, so as to discredit all those ideas and their supporters (e.g. the civil rights movement, unions, socialism of any kind, welfare, public healthcare, the New Deal, academia, atheism, homosexuality, etc), as well as generally propagandising against the Soviet Union. Ninotchka is a part of this tradition.
The film doesn't attempt to distinguish communism and the Soviet Union, nor does it just explicitly attack the Soviet Union. It also, to take one example, ridicules Ninotchka for attempting to organize the powder room attendants at a swanky hotel into a union.
I also get how the film works, although you left out the bit about how the film shows that communism means deprivation, sharing, and no privacy, versus the abundance of capitalism (the remake was retitled Silk Stockings). (No doubt true in the USSR, but, as I said above, the film doesn't distinguish between communism and the USSR.)
As for the film's popularity, this has little to do with its anti-communism, and more to do with it being a well written and directed, heavily publicized A-movie (i.e. large budget and widely released), staring a major Hollywood star (Garbo, in an uncharacteristic role), and a sex comedy that pushed the limits of the Production Code (the industry's censorship code).
omen #679 Point taken.
omen #679
Point taken. ;)
(1975) Libera, amore mio... ~
(1975) Libera, amore mio... ~ Libera, my love [Mauro Bolognini]
[youtube]8AxDYGR4V7E[/youtube]
Has anybody seen Inside
Has anybody seen Inside Llewyn Davis? I gather that it's based on the life of Dave Van Ronk, who was apparently an anarchist for a period and a longtime member of the IWW. I dislike folk music and am fairly ambivalent about the Coen brothers, so I'm less than excited about the prospect of sitting through it, but I am curious if they left any of the political aspects from his life in the story.
The Hunger Games: Catching
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire :kropotkin:
Put me into a state of deep thought. Anarchism has a serious flaw in that it's near impossible to create accessible fiction around it. You really need the protagonist to be everywhere doing all the most exciting things one after the other. Which only works if s/he is the chosen one, Harry Potter style. Having thousands of people doing their bit is just to avant garde a way of telling a story.
I guess that's why V-for Vendetta is all we get. :(
Agent of the Fifth
Agent of the Fifth International
Hmmm, agree on some, but about Schmidt is fucking awful.
By no means my favourite actor but amazingly, Tom Cruise is incredible in Magnolia. That said, literally every single performance in that film is remarkable.
Someone mentioned A Clockwork Orange. Words just fail me with that film! It has to be the worst interpretation of a book ever made. It misses the point so spectacularly that I sat cringing all the way through it. Eugh!
Cooked wrote: The Hunger
Cooked
Im just not sure how The Hunger Games was trying to get an anarchist message across. I know the author describers herself as a left-liberal. I would LOVE to see a film from a libertarian communist describing how a revolution would go down. How exactly does Anarchism have a serious flaw in its ability to make a fictional story about how it would work? This has just not happened on a mass scale like the movie The Hunger Games. I think it would be awesome if it did though, and I think it would be a hell of a movie.
Micky Rourke in Barfly. Now
Micky Rourke in Barfly. Now that is a tidy bit of acting!
Hey Cooked, I didn't really
Hey Cooked, I didn't really take enough time to digest your post before replying. I get where you coming from, but I still don't think its impossible to make a movie about a social revolution that is popular. Plenty of popular movies focus around one character playing a part in a bigger social movement. It just so happens that all of these movies have shit politics, mostly liberal.
Katalin Varga, 2009. After
Katalin Varga, 2009. After watching Beberian Sound Studio, and being utterly absorbed and impressed with it, I decided to check out Peter Strickland's first film; a low-budget, revenge film set in rural Romania. Acting was perhaps a little wooden, but I really liked it nonetheless.
A common theme I noticed in both films are the ways in which Strickland portrays women; very much the victims of misogyny - and in Katalin Varga's case, rape - but not at all meek. The female characters' strong resistance is the catalyst in Beberian, and the driving force in Katalin.
Good stuff.
I also watched Altered States, 1980. So fucking awful it was almost good.
Almost.
i campagni (or 'The
i campagni (or 'The Organizer' as it is known in the USA), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_compagni.
It wasn't that bad at all for a film that isn't widely recognized. Sure the politics may not be good. But a film about workers going on strike, we don't see that too often.
It definitely deserves a remake. Which I'll do in post-revolutionary society.
Agent of the Fifth
Agent of the Fifth International
I fucking love that movie. The guy's an organizing powerhouse, but he's even more neurotic than me. I always yell at the screen when the fat guy gets hit by the train, and when they lose the factory occupation.
Have you seen Salt of the Earth? It's an even better old movie about a strike. It was banned and every single person involved in the making of it was blacklisted from Hollywood. It's about a zinc miners' strike, and the miners are played by actual miners who actually went on strike earlier the same year. It's epic.
Last movie I watched was Scarface, which I guess some people say is an anti-capitalist film. I dunno.
A few weeks ago I watched
A few weeks ago I watched ‘The Round Up/Szegenylegenyek’ (Miklos Jancso, 1965). This slowly paced film is based on historical events following the collapse of the 1848 Hungarian revolution. The Austrian authorities methodically destroy the imprisoned guerrilla’s solidarity. The camera follows the action in harsh black and white, beautifully framed images. At the end I had a sudden feeling of déjà vu. Worth watching if you believe in knowing your enemy.
EDIT:
'...Jancso claimed to be making films about freedom and power and their eternal conflict, but he did not seem to be much hindered or opposed by censorship. And there are great passages in The Roundup in which one feels the mathematics of liberty being steadily squeezed by geometry...
...Meanwhile Jancso's work is nearly as out of fashion as that of Eisenstein, and not much short of being that spectacular.'
(David Thomson, 'Have You Seen...?', page 740)
Fnordie wrote: Have you seen
Fnordie
Just to elaborate on this: Salt of the Earth was independently produced by blacklistees in defiance of the Hollywood blacklists (i.e. they were already blacklisted rather than blacklisted as a result of the film). The film itself wasn't banned, but was effectively boycotted, with the American Legion, Howard Hughes (who a few years earlier had shutdown RKO Pictures for six months to purge it of alleged communists), and the Hollywood press calling for the boycott, and projectionists refusing to screen it*, although the film was beset with outside interference from the beginning. Film workers were intimidated, shot at, attempts were made to burn down sets, and film laboratories refused to process the film.
* The projectionists had been organized by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, a scab union which had been run by mobsters who were paid by studio bosses to keep workers from striking. IATSE had been instrumental in crushing a rival federation of unions, the Conference of Studio Unions, in the mid-forties, which resulted in the CSU being locked out with IATSE providing scab labour as well as muscle to attack pickets in the form of mobsters bussed in from Chicago (as I mentioned earlier in this thread). IATSE, a top down union, unlike the CSU, ordered its projectionists not to show Salt of the Earth. (Although it is doubtful that many cinema owners would have screened the film, anyway.)
Very cool, omen!
Very cool, omen!
removed link
removed link
Just finished Land and
Just finished Land and Freedom. Very reminiscent of Homage to Catalonia; a British communist belonging to the CPGB (so not totally an Orwell stand-in) heads to Spain to fight the Nationalist forces and ends up with a POUM militia, briefly ditches them for the International Brigades before rejoining his POUM buddies after witnessing Stalinist repression in Barcelona during the May Days, and eventually leaves totally disillusioned with the Communist parties. Oddly, some of the POUMistas are shown wearing red and black scarves and they sing A Las Barricadas at one point--maybe they turned anarchist over the course of their time at the front? Whatever the case, I really enjoyed the film.
Tyrion #695 The fighting
Tyrion #695
The fighting units in Spain were sometimes politically mixed. I know of at least one Glasgow anarchist who joined the CP specifically to get him out to Spain. He was with the I.B. and the Stalinists made lists of the politically ‘unreliable’ in their ranks. When the I.B.s were withdrawn following the Hitler Stalin Pact, he stayed on, and was in Barcelona hours before it fell.
Even on Franco’s side, Paul Preston give instances of conscripted republicans dying in battle. An example of recruitment:
‘In Navarre, Civil Guard posts received orders to oblige men suspected of left-wing sympathies to appear at the recruiting offices. Summoned to the barracks, they were given the stark choice ‘the Legion or the ditch’.’
(The Spanish Holocaust, 2012, page 448)
In this instance the men were shot anyway, as it was suspected that many of them planned to desert and go over to the anarchists.
Riders of the Dawn Devils
Riders of the Dawn
Devils Backbone
Both concerning Spanish Revolution
The Extraordinary Adventures
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec.
Not concerning anything beyond mummies and dinosaurs and being French.
Tyrion wrote: Land and
Tyrion
Have you seen Libertarias? I liked it better
I saw it a couple years back,
I saw it a couple years back, but was only partly paying attention and didn't know anything about the Revolution. I think I'll rewatch it.
Edit: Just finished Libertarias. I also liked it much more than Land and Freedom, a better movie in general and also one that better captured the revolutionary fervor in the early days of the revolution. Really horrific ending. Durruti seemed like a bit of a prick.
Libertas is excellent and
Libertas is excellent and Riders of the Dawn(Los Jinetes del Alba) are similar but far better than Land and Freedom which uses Anarchist paraphernalia but ignores their role and elevates the POUM instead.
freemind, do you know if
freemind, do you know if Riders of the Dawn is available anywhere online with English subtitles? I found the whole series on YouTube, but no subs.
I'm on my phone right now, so
I'm on my phone right now, so I can't check. If you can find sperate subtitles to download (Google for film title/TV show + srt) then you can download video from YouTube using a browser plugin and watch in an external player with subtitles. But you might have to try several subtitle srt files to find one that plays in synch. (SRT is just the extension of the subtitle file, which is just a special text file with time codes. There are tons of sites with free subtitles.)
Tyrion I obtained the DVD
Tyrion
I obtained the DVD from Play.com
As far as I know I could not find it to watch or download online.
If I recall I got the DVD sent to me from America.
Just watched Steve McQueen’s
Just watched Steve McQueen’s Shame (2011). Carey Mulligan was excellent though the film was just so-so – more style than content. My real problem was I find slick professional types, who are so materially pampered that they’re solely obsessed with their willy, a recipe for indifference. Worth watching for Carey Mulligan’s moving performance as she does not appear to be watching herself in a mirror.
The film really pales beside Mike Leigh’s ‘Naked’ (1993), which dealt with someone who had real problems.
Kill List, 2011. It starts as
Kill List, 2011. It starts as a kitchen sink drama, then turns into a gangster thriller, then morphs into a horror, along the lines of The Wicker Man or Witchfinder General. Perhaps a bit of a subversive undertone to it as well. Liked it a lot, found it fun and tough in equal measure. I'm becoming a Ben Wheatley fan.
Also currently going through a documentary series called First Australians. From Wiki: "The series chronicles the history of contemporary Australia, from the perspective of its first people, or Aborigines. [...] It relies heavily on archival documents and interpretations from historians and members of both the Indigenous and European community and leaders" It's quite dense, and consists of seven one-hour episodes.
I recommend it, fascinating and brutal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcslF8yQ1Tg
Watched most of the 'new'
Watched most of the 'new' Robocop on the sly. The highlight is easily Samuel L Jackson's impression of a certain well known US news anchor - I think that's what they call them?
Apart from that it's very similar to the original but predictably predictable and not as good. Like all these remakes it has none of the atmosphere of the original. There were some interesting/exciting bits but not enough for me to give a shit what happened at the end so I turned it off.
Best thing I saw recently was the Stallone, De Niro boxing thing. Quite funny.
The Selfish Giant (2013) It's
The Selfish Giant (2013)
It's a bit like Kes, but instead of a boy rearing and training a kestrel, it's about a boy who theives copper wire. Might not want to watch it if you're looking for something to cheer you up. It's a bit grim. It were alright though.
Just finished season 2 of
Just finished season 2 of House of Cards. Much better from season 1.
Having a bit of a subtitle
Having a bit of a subtitle session at the moment. In the last couple of weeks I've seen Jean de Florette, Volver, All About My Mother, Talk To Her and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. All were great, especially the first two. Tonight it's Amelie - if you haven't seen it you owe yourself an apology.
Jean de Florette - brilliant.
Jean de Florette - brilliant. 8-)
HBO's True Detective. Dark,
HBO's True Detective. Dark, intense and atmospheric, this series is extremely well directed and planned for a TV series. And McConaughey's character is like all anti-civ, post-modern and nihilistic. How in the world does someone like that end up becoming a police detective? I have no idea.
[SPOILER]Below is a six minute single take tracking shot from the fourth episode.
[youtube]s_HuFuKiq8U[/youtube]
Webby: If you're in the mood
Webby:
If you're in the mood for subtitled movies, Québec has produced some good ones, e.g. -
Mon Oncle Antoine
Jesus of Montreal, The Decline of the American Empire, The Barbarian Invasions. (All Denys Arcand.)
Les Ordres - set in the 1970 October Crisis, when Trudeau sent the troops into Montréal and 100s of people were arrested without charge.
C.R.A.Z.Y. (directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who's just done Dallas Buyers Club.)
I Killed My Mother.
Laurence Anyways.
And True Detective is very, very good.
Thanks Fleaurnoire. Apart
Thanks Fleaurnoire. Apart from the fact that these films are cultularily interesting, concentrating on the subtitles helps prevent my middle age habit of falling asleep in front of the TV!
Quote: And McConaughey's
http://www.arkhamdigest.com/2014/01/true-detectives-nic-pizzolatto-on.html
it's funny that none of these nihilists like ligotti have practised what they preached and summoned the courage to commit suicide unlike say the dadaists/surrealists, such a dickhead philsophy.
Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2 (I also
Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2 (I also downloaded Vol 3, not knowing there are only two, so christ knows what I've got on my computer now). I liked it, pretty fun. But even though I normally liked Tarantino's music scores, I thought this was just too much. It was constant, like a music video. Other than that, cool.
I also watched The Believer, 2001.
**Warning, warning - spoiler alert**
Ryan Gosling plays a Jewish Neo-Nazi named Daniel, loosely based around a true story. It's an interesting film, brave perhaps in the way in which it treats the protagonist; Even though there are scenes of macho Nazism - like body building, strutting around town in a Swastika t-shirt intimidating people - the film centres around the dialogue, as Daniel, though prone to violent outbursts, is quite articulate in his views which are mainly based on his understanding of Judaism's theology, that he challenged at a young age. Also brave perhaps in that there are no obvious counter-arguments in the film responding to his diatribes.
Though Daniel does climb up the Fascist ranks, there is a constant sense he is doing it to test himself and his Jewish heritage, albeit in an extreme, misguided way. We learn that he keeps a piece of Jewish cloth (sorry, I have no idea what it is) under his Fascist garb, and can get quite defensive when he hears even anti-Jew misinformation. I've read that the director - who is Jewish - sees this as a modern reworking of the myth of Abraham and Isaac. I don't know anything about Judaism, so couldn't tell. There are quite a few touching moments, especially the scene in which he and his father talk of the incomprehensibly of Jewish Law, while having a Shabbat dinner.
I liked it, found it interesting at least, in concept. Gosling does a great job. The only flaws for me being the repeating black and white flashback scenes. We don't see much of the transition from Jewish school-kid to raging Anti-Semite, but I guess that isn't exactly the point of the film.
Worth a watch, I'd like to hear other's views on the film.
Agent of the Fifth
Agent of the Fifth International
I fuckin' love that show. Sometimes Rust is quoting Schopenhauer verbatim, which makes for shitty philosophy, but definitely good drama.
Wojtek, I don't think
Wojtek,
I don't think neither Pizzolatto nor his characters are nihilists. Pizzolatto said in an interview that his morals are almost the complete opposite of his characters and Rust isn't espousing nihilism, but pessimism and anti-natalism. There's, so far as I know, nothing in the latter that forces someone to become a nihilist (although the two are certainly famous with the Youtube school of philosophy).
Saw a few good films at the
Saw a few good films at the bristol radical film festival last weekend. I really enjoyed On the Art of War, very recommended, anyone here seen it?
It's about the 15 month strike at INNSE in Milan, which the owner was trying to shut down and sell to property developers. Talks to the 4 men who climbed a gantry and stayed there for over a week. They talk about their politics and the class struggle and so on. It's very well made with very intriguing interviews.
i was talking about ligotti.
i was talking about ligotti.
wojtek wrote: i was talking
wojtek
Oh, haha, my bad. I thought McConaughey's character and Pizollato were included when you said, "these nihilists".
Finally watched The Deer
Finally watched The Deer Hunter, which, for anyone that doesn't know, follows the disintegration and psychological ruin of an originally close-knit Pennsylvanian industrial community after several of its residents experiences in the Vietnam war, which is variously traumatic, fatal and dismembering. I think there is real aesthetic value in the film, insofar as it speaks to friendship, war, trauma, tragedy, death and related issues, but there is certainly something ideologically (in the pejorative sense of the early Marx and the Frankfurt School) problematic in the films portrayal of the North Vietnamese: as, without exception, murderous, evil and sadistic. In fact, the central metaphor and hinge upon which the films narrative turns - of captive U.S. soldiers being subjected to recursive games of Russian Roulette in Vietnam - doubtlessly never happened in reality, and contrives a very distorted picture of the Vietcong. Nevertheless, I think that the latter need not undo, at least in terms of personal value, the former, and thoroughly enjoyed the film.
The Wolf of Wall Street -
The Wolf of Wall Street - went quite quickly for a three hour film, yet I just didn't get the "irony" that the film supposedly contains. Maybe I missed something. Also, there's a rape scene in the film that is brushed over within seconds. In fact, it's portrayed in such a way that anyone slightly naive wouldn't think twice about it.
The Monument Men - fucking abysmal. A factually wayward, terrible time-sequencing (it seemed they were living in a world where Europe was so small you could quite easily travel around it on a bicycle), a script built from a series one-liners, shoddy acting, subtly xenophobic, and a very confused concept - is it a light-hearted escapade, or a serious commentary on war? No, it's shit.
!Woman Art Revolution - a good documentary about feminist art movements, and how female artists have been treated in America since the late 50s. All participants very honest about what worked and what did not, and while I didn't particularly like much of what was created, it was interesting to see the different techniques used. It's hard to be critical though when much of what was created was in reaction to not being recognised, or heard at all.
Saw the Grand Budapest Hotel.
Saw the Grand Budapest Hotel. To sound a bit wanky, it shows a bit of maturity from Wes Anderson. And visually quite striking, which is what you'd expect from Anderson.
Other than that, working our way through the Wire for a second time. There's so much you miss the first time around andi it's only reinforced my belief that it is, indeed, the best show that's ever been on TV.
Omen - The Selfish Giant. You ever read the book? It's a children's book by the socialist William Morris. Very sweet. (As an aside, literally almost all the fabric in my socialist in-laws' house - curtains, bedding, furniture covering - are William Morris prints. That's a lot of birds and flowers...)
Sabot - Season 2 of House of Cards is good? My partner and I watched Season 1 but it just really didn't suck us in enough to stick around for season 2. Quite disappointing for Spacey. You ever see the original version? I hear it's pretty good.
I've not read the book,
I've not read the book, though I believe it is a short story in a collection written by Oscar Wilde, not William Morris. I read a synopsis of it after watching the film. The two stories only seem tenuously related, though I seem to recall that the opening credits say "inspired by...". Not sure sweet would be the term to use for the film.
ETA: Also watching the wire (but for the first time). About half way through the second series, though I haven't watched an episode for a couple of weeks now.
Loved ‘The Wire’ though I
Loved ‘The Wire’ though I needed to use English subtitles. The 2nd series was the bee’s knees.
Quote: I've not read the
Yup, you're entirely right.
I have to say I'm amazed you can watch the Wire for the first time and go that long without watching an episode! That's good though, you only get the first time once, better to savor it. ;-)
The Wind Rises. I loved it.
The Wind Rises.
I loved it. But there again I love all of Hayao Miyazaki's films. It's the (highly fictionalized) story of the man who designed the Mitsubishi Zero, dreams of flying and creating gorgeous planes, with the undercurrent that these beautiful dreams will be used as weapons of war.
Hmmm, now I wanna watch The
Hmmm, now I wanna watch The Wire. Are all 60 episodes still on HBO On Demand?
Chilli Sauce wrote: I have to
Chilli Sauce
I took about 3 years to watch all 5 seasons (starting after it'd all been broadcast). Watching an episode wasn't something to be taken lightly, like you might stick on Corrie or whatever. Arranging an appropriate time to watch the next one felt like a great burden :D
Great though- my favourite TV show definitely.
Agent of the Fifth
Agent of the Fifth International
http://www.free-tv-video-online.me/internet/the_wire/
I found Company of Strangers
I found Company of Strangers really good and you can watch it here: https://www.nfb.ca/film/company_of_strangers/
It follows 8 women whose bus breaks down in the middle of some remote place, leaving them stranded, getting to know each other and having to fend for themselves for a bit.
My retelling of this might not be accurate, but the way I remember it introduced to me was that the director wanted to challenge the stereotypical image of old people as frail, or just as sources of memories of events rather than people in their own right with personal experiences. She experimented with a straight documentary format with talking heads and so on, but found it wasn't quite right. She decided on a fictionalised scenario with loosely directed scenes but the dialog is largely improvised so they are largely being themselves, so you get these really candid moments (which can be really heartbreaking, hard to hold back the tears!). Interestingly the director experimented in casting with a mixed gender group but found that everyone settled into gender stereotypes, with the men being very vocal and the women becoming passive, and so finally ended up with these 8 non-professional women.
Anyway, recommended, you feel like you got to know these women a little bit and are sad to say bye at the end.
Little off topic, but just
Little off topic, but just sooo cool.
Size comparison of science fiction spaceships.
http://dirkloechel.deviantart.com/art/Size-Comparison-Science-Fiction-spaceships-398790051
House of Cards season one got
House of Cards season one got sillier as it went on. Season two started quite well but got even more ridiculous. The idiot ball gets passed around fairly frequently. I enjoyed it but it was just a bit of fun.
Justified season 5, not as good, I think the Raylan character i running out of steam a bit, although there have been some great moments as usual.
Prisoners: quite a good film with Hugh Jackman about a father going crazy when his daughter disappears.
The Wire - I always binged on that. Pretty much as soon as I had an episode I watched it.
Juno : enjoyable fimm that didn't really end up quite where I expected. Unlike house of cards
Is this a film and TV thread now? Or do house of cards and the wire not count?
Shhhhh! Keep quiet or the
Shhhhh! Keep quiet or the [s]Admins[/s] libcops will shut down the thread and temp ban us all for being off-topic!
Just watched the first season (and now started the second) of Continuum. Anticapitalist terrorists (you heard me!) from a future run by Mega Bill Gates escape their execution by travelling back in time to present day Canadia, where they renew their terror campaign in the present (with their own version of 9/11). A future cop accidentally gets sent back in time with them and is helped by the teenage version of future Mega Bill Gates to track them down.
Has some neat special effects. Also one episode has anarchists, who are literally only interested in bringing about chaos. And the terrorists anticapitalist philosophy is shown to ultimately come from the confused ramblings of a moody teenager (Mega Bill Gates's step brother). Spoilers! The terrorists are a sort of amalgam of Occupy Wall street, Anonymous and Al Qaeda.
The future seems to be a ancaps wet dream, with corporations running the government and cops (which isn't entirely portrayed as a bad thing).
jef costello wrote: House of
jef costello
Pretty much this.
CS, I'm only watching it because I've almost ran out shows to watch on netflix. Although, I am looking forward to season 3. I haven't watched the UK version yet but might give it a go.
Re: Continuum. The second
Re: Continuum. The second series is definitely better than the first (in terms of being generally more interesting). Just finished it, and about to watch the first episode of the third series, and I'll have caught up with the show in real-time.
My general impression now is that it does show the ancap future in a negative light (only really hinted at in the first series), however, it still depicts it as the least worst alternative (between capitalism and whatever it is that the anti-capitalists want), and much of the plot revolves around Mega Bill Gates fixing the future that he fucked up in the first place. It's kind of: the system is broken, and it's up to people who run that system to fix it, and any alternative is far worse. Also, for every bad thing the capitalists do, the anti-capitalists do something far worse (e.g. the capitalists literally enslave workers, but the anti-capitalists mass murder the slaves rather than freeing them. Spoilers!)
To put it another way: it's like Orwell says in his essay on Charles Dickens (which I recently uploaded to the library), Dickens's view is that the particular horrors of 19th century capitalism are due to the moral failings of individual capitalists and can be fixed by capitalists behaving more decently to their employees. Which is why Dickens' novels are littered with misers and wealthy benefactors, or in the case of A Christmas Carol, the miser redeems himself and becomes a benefactor.
It's worth reading Orwell's essay (I attached ebook versions at the above link, as it is quite a long essay), as it accounts for much of the liberal critique of capitalism in fiction, and particularly as depicted on screen.
Watched Scarface for the nth
Watched Scarface for the nth time, brilliant. Depressed at the end.
Shutter Island. It really
Shutter Island. It really fucking upset me. That'll teach me about not reading the blurb on the DVD box.
Primer, 2004. A time-travel
Primer, 2004. A time-travel sci-fi. The mumbling, the accents, and the scientific jargon meant I spent the first ten minutes pausing and rewinding so I could get what was being said. Then I decided to just go with the flow, and hope it would all make sense in the end, which it didn't. Still, the concept was interesting; a sci-fi that actually goes all out to explain the science, and the processes of science. Raised some interesting points about intellectual property and trying to protect accidental findings from others - even if the creators themselves don't know what they are - out of fear of losing money or prestige. That's what I got out of it anyway.
Standfield wrote: Primer,
Standfield
I was intrigued enough to watch this on-line, I fear it's about a subject I'll have great difficulty in understanding, the film made little sense to me. But because the film was so cheap, boring and dull I can't be arsed. Hardly inspiring stuff was it. It might have worked better as a television series.
I watched it once before, but
I watched it once before, but I don't think I got much out of it at the time as I was drunk. All I really remember about it is that there was this bloke who had to lie around in a box a lot. I keep meaning to watch it again, as I quite like time travel stories, and I'd heard good things about Primer.
Also, top tip: if you have to keep rewinding because of the mumbling/accents, try subtitles. (If you downloaded the film, you can most likely download subtitles as well.)
I watched The Ballad of Joe
I watched The Ballad of Joe Hill, which you can slowly torrent. A real masterpiece
Just finished Sons of Anarchy
Just finished Sons of Anarchy season 6. An actual surprise alongside the endlessly ridiculous series of shootings that have long replaced a plot. I think that this show is how Kurt Sutter works out his psychological issues. It's hard to like a show based around the existence of a club that is a collection of people who at best behave like bullies.
On the bright side I had no idea how much hugging was required in organised crime.
"I AM THE LAST FILM THAT I
"I AM THE LAST FILM THAT I WATCHED!"
-The Soapiationist International, 2014
Okay, so Lost in Translation
Okay, so Lost in Translation was no exercise in Marx's theory of alienation, but it seems to me that it did capture (or at least noticed) the extant of alienation (i.e. alienation generalized throughout the whole world). That something was wrong, but it wasn't anything particular to this or that part of the world. Many people who watched this film thought it was just about two characters experiencing 'culture shock', being that they are visiting a foreign land. I think it was more than that.
Am I over reading it? Am I projecting what I wanted the film to be about? Or is that assessment fairly accurate?
Crossing Over (2009)
Crossing Over (2009) Harrison Ford, Ashley Judd, Ray Liotta etc
Crossing Over is a multi-character canvas about immigrants of different nationalities struggling to achieve legal status in Los Angeles.
Very good. A bit Hollywood at times but apart from that some touching moments and well worth watching.
@Standfield Quote: Primer,
@Standfield
This was a good movie. The science researcher who explains the fungus to them is a Professor of Biology in real life and teaches at my university in Florida. My girlfriend had Genetics and Biology of Aging with him. He's a pretty cool guy. I'm like what, 2 degrees from an indie-movie supporting actor? I'm practically famous!
Oh, also, does anyone haave
Oh, also, does anyone haave any votes for the best Haymarket Documentary? Something short/not too dry but also accurate? Or a live action film based on the events? Thanks!
@Pennoid That's cool! I did
@Pennoid
That's cool! I did enjoy the film, even though I didn't get it, the concept made me watch it right through. And the acting was great - my only quibble being it was perhaps too good, if you know what I mean, too realistic... Maybe it wasn't projected enough perhaps. Am I right in thinking it only cost 7 grand to make, and it was originally just a uni project? Amazing stuff considering. Pass on my regards ;)
I watched Elysium last night. Pretty good, reminded me of Total Recall in a way, which is never a bad thing. Some ridiculous parts, but fun to watch.
Rebel Without a Cause - it
Rebel Without a Cause - it was a bit too silly for me.
M*A*S*H - too messy.
Ashes and Diamonds - better than the above two.
Eat Sleep Die Not what I
Eat Sleep Die
Not what I expected it had a surprising "Gummo" feel to it. Although the characters, the place and the situations are beliveable in isolation. (Being from peripheral Sweden myself I can vouch for it ;) When pushed together into the space of a film it occasionally veered a bit to close to caricature for me to be comfortable.
Ok, so Grand Budapest Hotel
Ok, so Grand Budapest Hotel was awesome, don't get me wrong, but really I feel like all of Wes Anderson's movies have this strange subtext highlighting the "beauty of order". Vaneigm calls this the "death wish".
I remember in Bottle Rocket when the character played by Luke Wilson is trying to get his life together and there is a very happy montage of him working three jobs a day while Owen Wilson tries to continue his life of crime and ends up in prison.
Fast forward to Grand Budapest where Jeff Goldblum is the hero attorney who represents the estate of the dead countess and since his fee is stipulated in the will refuses to aid Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe.
Not to mention that Zero happily works 19 hours a day without complaint and in his old age bemoans the fact that the "once great" hotel he used to work for no longer forces human beings to spend 19 hours a day trying to satisfy every desire of the extremely rich.
Anyway, it was still a great movie and pretty much every movie has so much subtle ideology behind it that I disagree with/is sexist/is racist/you name it, it's just I don't think I've ever seen anyone point this out before.
Queimada! , a film with a
Queimada! , a film with a great Marxist analysis of a fictional slave revolt, but the director has trouble fitting such a huge plot into 90 minutes so it does get a little awkward/clunky at times
here's a scene where Marlon Brando attempts to instigate a bourgeois revolution;
Sir William Walker: Gentlemen, let me ask you a question. Now, my metaphor may seem a trifle impertinent, but I think it's very much to the point. Which do you prefer - or should I say, which do you find more convenient - a wife, or one of these mulatto girls? No, no, please don't misunderstand: I am talking strictly in terms of economics. What is the cost of the product? What is the product yield? The product, in this case, being love - uh, purely physical love, since sentiments obviously play no part in economics.
[general laughter]
Sir William Walker: Quite. Now, a wife must be provided with a home, with food, with dresses, with medical attention, etc, etc. You're obliged to keep her a whole lifetime even when she's grown old and perhaps a trifle unproductive. And then, of course, if you have the bad luck to survive her, you have to pay for the funeral!
[general laughter]
Sir William Walker: It's true, isn't it? Gentlemen, I know it's amusing, but those are the facts, aren't they? Now with a prostitute, on the other hand, it's quite a different matter, isn't it? You see, there's no need to lodge her or feed her, certainly no need to dress her or to bury her, thank God. She's yours only when you need her, you pay her only for that service, and you pay her by the hour! Which, gentlemen, is more important - and more convenient: a slave or a paid worker?
Noah - it was better than the
Noah - it was better than the original story.
Agent of the Fifth
Agent of the Fifth International
Yeah, I would say the foreign setting is only a convenient way to underline or "project" in a visible way what the characters feel: lack of purpose or fulfillment, impossibility of understanding the world or communicating with other people, etc.
And while it describes alienation, it seemed more in line with "generic" existential themes than with any attempt at social critique.
proletarian.
proletarian.
I share the sentiment about that film. I look toward the movie Looper for a movie that did time travel right. Maybe I am just not smart enough, but I hard real hard time following Primer. It seemed rather self-indulgent in that way.
Black Harvest , you can
Black Harvest , you can torrent this slowly. It is a documentary about an entrepreneur trying to adapt a primitive PNG society to the wage system, probably the best documentary I have ever seen
You guys raved about it so
You guys raved about it so much that I sat down and watched Primer last night.
I don't appreciate movies that make me do math.
As is my custom every Easter
As is my custom every Easter I have just watched Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth.
Absolutely sublime.
http://nagasawafamily.org/jac
http://nagasawafamily.org/jacques-ellul-anarchy-&-christianity.pdf
I can never decide whether I find Robert Powell funnier in Ken Russell's Mahler or on the Jaspar Carrott show.
I've just re-watched Jose
I've just re-watched Jose Luis Cuerda's, 'Butterfly's Tongue' (1999) and reckoned it to be even better on second viewing. Try and see it - Spain on the brink of the civil war - heart wrenching stuff.
Alambrista! GOOD MOVIE ABOUT
Alambrista!
GOOD MOVIE ABOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
CRITERION COLLEKTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I also watched Medium Cool
Watched Gravity the other
Watched Gravity the other night. Gorgeous imagery, though I feel that the story Cuaron was trying to tell through it went a little past my head. Not that that's a fault of the movie, of course.
Oh, yeah and one of the scenes genuinely made me feel anxious/claustrophobic, so I guess Cuaron really did manage to capture some of what it would be like to be in that situation.
Volver for about the fifth
Volver for about the fifth time. Absolutely fucking marvellous.
The Great Silence, a 1968
The Great Silence, a 1968 Italian western film about the fight of a mute gunslinger against a group of merciless bounty hunters who are terrorising a village.
I'm not a huge fan of the genre, but some peculiarities like the snow-filled setting (atypical for a western), the mute protagonist and the bleak atmosphere keep it interesting.
It has some more or less subtle political themes too: the law protects and legitimises the greed and the cruelty of the bounty hunters; the bandits, punished and killed as lawbreakers, turn out to be only poor people trying to feed their families in times of famine; the sheriff's attempt at pursuing justice through legal means is a failure.
Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Klaus Kinski.
Shows more ambition than you'd expect from a B-movie.
I saw it in the cinema in 3D.
I saw it in the cinema in 3D. Now, I hate 3D films and I would have much rather seen this not in 3D, but I do have to say I felt the claustrophobia and the shit flying out of the screen definitely made my eyes water.
Even the Rain, great film!
Even the Rain, great film!
The Rover Not bad, but
The Rover
Not bad, but ultimately there's a lot of build-up and no real story. If you like to see sweaty people die and are not too interested in why, then I'd recommend it.
good shit, Costa-Gavras-ish
good shit, Costa-Gavras-ish without actually being Costa-Gavras
Dogville. It's pretty dark.
Dogville. It's pretty dark. Anyone seen it?
Chilli Sauce wrote: Dogville.
Chilli Sauce
well, it is directed by Lars von Trier!
yeah, saw it a few years ago funnily enough at some anarchisty squat cinema in Camden. I enjoyed it.
Recently I have also seen:
Blue Ruin: an excellent, dark revenge thriller
and the two newest X-Men movies, which were actually pretty good (I thought most of the first lot were shit) and highly enjoyable
The Wicker Man. Again! Pretty
The Wicker Man. Again! Pretty mega whatever way you look at it but particularly joyous to watch the repressed, po-faced nosey parker of a cop get his comeuppance.
You wouldn't say that if
You wouldn't say that if you'd been to the Outer Hebrides...
ACT 1 Scene 1 An island in the world of shadows where the dead live
Anubis the jackal-headed boatman brings the souls of the dead to the world of shadows. He feeds off their passions and their dreams. At his command, some of the dead relive their memories. The millionaire Mr Dollarama finds his wife Inanna in bed with her guru Swami Zumzum. Vermeer the painter sees Pearl in his mind - 'A face like music, partly now, partly remembered' - and falls in love with her.
Last week I went and saw the film recording of The Second Mrs Kong, Birtwistle's opera with the Russell Hoban libretto, in the music research archive of the Victoria and Albert Museum since it isn't available commercially. It's basically a mirror-image of the Orpheus legend in which Kong (the gorilla of King Kong movie fame) in the 'World of Shadows' hears the voice of Pearl (the model for Vermeer's painting 'Girl with a Pearl Earring') in 'the Place of Memory'. They fall in love from afar and resolve to find each other. After a long search they meet, but because they exist in different worlds, they can't be united. The implication of the libretto is that this enactment of the Orpheus legend by Pearl and Kong occurs endlessly again and again in the world of shadows. The identity of Kong is intriguing. To Pearl he is the 'lost and lonely child of all the world', but he is also, variously, a 50-foot-high gorilla, a little puppet with a giant head and hand, and an Idea:
Inanna: 'In the film it was a puppet that they killed. . . The real Kong is an idea that will never die'.
Mr Dollarama: 'But if he's a live idea, why is he here among the dead?'
Anubis: 'Back in 1933 it wasn't easy to tell the difference between a live idea and a dead ape'.
I hired out the full orchestral score from Universal Editions in Vienna for £30 and it arrived the day before I went to see the recording. Birtwistle's orchestral music is created from 'sound objects' derived more from the idiom of abstract electronic music than from the clear melodic shapes and metrical rhythms of 'Classical' music that are so reminiscent of the lifeless lazy clichés of the popular music business. These sound objects are chunks of orchestral 'texture' whose constituents range from short rapid motifs played over and over, to sustained, slowly changing pitches, and with the addition of an obbligato accordion part, dense textures marked by pervasive use of cimbalon, divided strings, percussion and brass, particularly tubas, continue to sweep across the pages of the score. The pitch-language is generally dissonant since many of the textures Birtwistle creates arise from clusters of semitones, but the degree of dissonance constantly changes, depending particularly on timbre and registration; the resulting nuances are a key feature of the style.
It was the most striking and haunting thing I'd come across in ages.
A Canadian movie called 'The
A Canadian movie called 'The Divide' made 'Battle in Seattle' look like a choir boys picnic, but huh, I still liked BiS.
I'd thought they'd pretty much depleted the apocalyptic genre until I saw this little known and underrated gem which approached the event of nuclear extinction from an internalized psychological/identity perspective rather than from the cliched law and order westernized 'we shall persevere by way of government military intervention'. The acting is excellent, the atmosphere created is one of unrelenting desperation and depravity. The movie leaves one more aware of how individual qualities and values are the core of ever having expectations that a random community can maintain social relationships which mutually respect a collective purpose, and of how power is often corrupted by those who have physical strength and weaponry to force their ways.
Yeah, Blue Ruin was a great
Yeah, Blue Ruin was a great movie, Good twist at the end, sad it got that way, but hillbillies will be hillbillies!
Coen brothers' Barton
Coen brothers' Barton Fink
Christopher Nolan's Following
On the threshold: Class
On the threshold: Class Struggle in Delhi (A Film)
Passage To Marseille (1944).
Passage To Marseille (1944). After losing his faith in collaborationist France, a courageous boy moves Bogart to struggle for liberation again (probably reminds Bogart of his son he left in France).
Watched a pretty excellent
Watched a pretty excellent film about anarchists today, The East. Private intelligence agent Jane goes undercover to infiltrate a dangerous eco-terrorist anarchist group. Digging her way through a strange world of dumpster diving and riding the railway, Jane eventually manages to enter the burned out building where the bearded anarchists are squatting. In a really powerful scene, the anarchists all don straitjackets while eating dinner. Without use of their arms, they have to take turns holding a spoon in their mouth to feed the person next to them! What cooperative anarchists! They also bathe in a river and I don't think the house has plumbing.
Jane slowly falls for Manson-esque group leader Benji and is especially impacted by a really successful "jam" (what the anarchists call their operations) in which the eco-terrorist anarchists infiltrate a company party for a big evil pharmaceutical company and spike everyone's champagne with a supposedly harmless drug the company sells. Turns out the supposedly harmless drug destroys brains and the eco-terrorist anarchists rejoice as a barely coherent big evil pharmaceutical executive mumbles through a TV speech.
In the meanwhile, there's a big twist when it's revealed that the house they're squatting in.. is actually Benji's! He was a rich kid and set his house on fire before pretending to be squatting there with the other eco-terrorist anarchists because money corrupts. Another of the group members also really dislikes her dad and he's a big business executive. Poor anarchists are a troubled bunch.
I had to go to work and didn't actually see the rest of the movie, but definitely an A+ so far. Apparently the writers spent two months dumpster diving (freeganism? Never heard the term until this movie) so it's definitely an accurate look at anarchist eco-terrorism.
[youtube]gHpT9B7e7-Q[/youtube]
Two Faces of January : Not
Two Faces of January : Not bad, a little silly at times towards the end but mostly enjoyable and well acted.
So is anyone going to see
So is anyone going to see Snowpiercer? Based on the early reactions to the film, it can basically be described as a 'surrealist', class-struggle themed sci-fi film.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/
Tyrion, I just want you to
Tyrion,
I just want you to know that I downloaded The East just off the back of your post alone.
I still doubt it can come anywhere near the radical anarcho-truth dealt out in SLC Punk, but I'm willing to give it a shot.
Anon should take some lessons
Anon should take some lessons from the powerful message the eco-terrorist anarchists include with their YouTube uploads.
Eco-terrorist Anarchists
Radical stuff!
Quote: We’re the first time
And what happened all the previous times?!
Eco-terrorist Anarchists
Eco-terrorist Anarchists
We are the hangnail that just won't clip. We are the off milk in the fridge. We're the time you ordered the extra-spicy chicken burger and you thought, "yup, this isn't bad".
We are the eco-terrorist anarchists.
And we are you.
Chilli Sauce
Chilli Sauce
Chilli you are killing me.
I thought that movie was cute. A liberal's wet dream of pulling the "anarchists" to their side. I use quotation marks because, according to that movie, the things that make you an anarchist are eating out of a dumpster, living in a burned out house and (occasionally) talking about "the system" as vaguely as possible.
Intent on watching Salt of
Intent on watching Salt of the Earth and Kameradschaft (of which I first learned here), just as soon as I can get someone in my family to goddamn sit down and watch it with me---I don't do movies alone.
In the interim, I've seen Maleficent, which, as with Frozen, far exceeded my (non-existent) expectations for the standard Disney fare. As far as such material goes, I'm liking this trend toward validating a wider range of women's experiences and relationships that don't revolve around or necessitate the validation of men, as well as complicating the truly pernicious trope of True Love® and acknowledging its alternative, non-romantic formulations. Though it's a good thing Jolie nails the lead role so well, because with most of the other characters being underwritten (Stefan, with his flashes of vengeful paranoia) or just plain misconceived (the gratingly unfunny and incompetent pixie aunts), she basically has to carry the film all by herself. James Newton Howard's score also evokes a bunch of nostalgia in me and reminded to revisit my Wagner recordings.
Chef was merely passable, showing early signs of promise before devolving into a conflict-free and formulaic fairy-tale. The set-up the initial drama is poorly contrived and ends up being resolved too easily and too early in the film for me to continue caring past a certain point. That it portrayed a relatively uncomplicated and idealized paean to entrepreneurship without more closely examining food service within the context of a labor complex (as opposed to simply an issue of sifled individual creativity, which is undermined when Favreau trades in his food truck for another overpriced and likely more exploitative establishment). Perhaps most egregious was the shameless advertising for Twitter; it felt like I was watching a commercial. Social media's insipidness is ubiquitous enough as it is, must I put up with it invading cinema? And of course, as a vegan, some of the (frankly pornographic) shots of meat were quite disturbing, but I was prepared for that going in.
what is a good website to
what is a good website to stream films for free?
Agent of the Fifth
Agent of the Fifth International
I saw it a few weeks ago, its great, true to the description. The train could be a metaphor for civilizations unchallenged historical acceptance of hierarchical strata and privilege as its operational edict.
Hey Vicent, Free Project TV
Hey Vicent, Free Project TV seems to have a decent amount of films. Alternatively, just google the name of your film along with "putlocker" and that will often bring up a site that'll stream it for you.
Red Metal The Copper Country
Red Metal The Copper Country Strike of 1913
I watched a little bit of the
I watched a little bit of the east the other day. I turned it off when I saw a grown women eat an apple from the garbage. Found that to be repulsive.
From the very little that I saw I was reminded of this: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ElJFYwRtrH4
Also saw herzog's remake of Nosferatu. It was really good.
Werner Harding wrote: I
Werner Harding
That IS disgusting, however, once when I suffered internal bleeding, I was not permitted to eat for three days, after which an apple from the garbage would have been a delicacy, or a crust of stale bread smeared with margarine. Talking about Herzog, his ' Bad Lieutenant' is good because of Cage's ability to express the dark and complex emotions of a shackled moralist battling evil. Of course there will never be another Klaus Kinski and Fitzcarraldo, but the medium of film is after all the projection of the resident social structure and the relationships which form and rebound off the subsequent entanglements of desires and necessities . Or else there are his documentaries about reality, a genre he excels in, such as 'Encounters at the end of the world', or 'Cave of forgotten dreams'.
Werner Harding wrote: I
Werner Harding
Oh yeah, I found the Earthfirst youtube footage making me want to reach for a can of woop-ass, like umm, I could not imagine having these self-righteous bourgeois emos within a radius of 50 metres of me unless I had a bottle of whisky and a loudspeaker blasting out some sex pistols!
I got to see 'Revolutionary
I got to see 'Revolutionary Road' , it was made in 2008 yet somehow got forgotten or smothered by blockbusters, yet it is a cerebral buster for sure, and Di Caprio and Winslet and the crazy guy are awesome actors. The title actually refers to the address where the Wheeler family lives, and the crazy son of their friend drops the hidden innuendo intended by the writer when he blurts out "Oh its the revolutionaries who live in Wheeler Rd or the Wheelers who live in Revolutionary Rd". The 'revolution' is in fact the subtle personal identity wars which exist within relationships, and how society only requires a commitment by its members to change the cycle of conformity and the associated neurosises created by personal dreams which have been hijacked by economic necessities. It is a critique of conformity to a rational material security at the expense of a spontaneous fulfillment of desires. Its incredible, and there wasn't a car chase or a gun fight!
Being in a lot of planes, and
Being in a lot of planes, and in a lot of hotels recently. Here's the pick of what I've seen in them.
Jersey Boys - Utter, utter shite. No adaptation from the musical whatsoever, so why bother? It even had a pause at the end to make space for an audience clap. Sooo shit. Saw it in a cinema in Arizona. People laughed at - what I thought to be - quite a homophobic joke.
Noah - Didn't even get half an hour in. Shite.
The Grand Budapest Hotel - Pretty good. Ralph Feines was funny. Lovely aesthetics.
Jagten/The Hunt - Primary school teacher wrongly accused of being a paedophile is terrorised in his village. Good, suspenseful, but the plot was kind of weak in parts I felt. Still, recommend it.
Twin Peaks - Did the whole series in about a month. Loved it.
Eraserhead - Ummm...
Videodrome - Errrrr...
Wild At Heart - Really enjoyed it, loved the music composition also, contrasting Chris Isaaks with Powermad. Nice.
Lars and the Real Girl - About a delusional man played by Ran Gosling who takes his blow-up doll home to live with his brother and sister in-law, thinking she's a real human. Really liked it, funny and quite touching.
21 Jump Street - worst film I've seen in a long time. I hated it, and everyone in it, especially Jonah Hill.
Only God Forgives - liked it a lot, so beautifully filmed, obviously the focus being on the sound and image, with a minimal plot. I don't mind that at all. Visually stunning.
Standfield #797 Yes, I
Standfield #797
Yes, I enjoyed ‘Wild At Heart’. What a great actor Isabella Rossellini is – compare her performance in another Lynch film, ‘Blue Velvet’ – hard to believe it is the same person.
If you like a streak of surrealism in your entertainment catch the old TV series ‘Northern Exposure’. A mellow treat (with the occasional clinker).
Standfield wrote: Quote: Wild
Standfield wrote:
The best bit of the score's the title music, Richard Strauss' setting of the poem Im Abendrot (At Dusk) by Joseph von Eichendorff for soprano and orchestra, part of the Four Last Songs he wrote during his Indian summer period in his mid-eighties, with his wife's soprano voice in mind.
Compare e.g. Love me tender
Snowpiercer - saw it twice
Snowpiercer - saw it twice now. Hands down, one of the best films I've ever seen. One of the rare films that explicitly takes on the existence of class divisions. And the set pieces were extremely well crafted, all the way from the tail to the front of the train.
Maybe it was too violent, but I guess it was inevitable in that situation. What I liked though was how a kind of ideological struggle ran alongside the physical struggle as well, as the justifications the ruling class propagate is unraveled, especially at the end. I think a lot of people will think of it as pessimistic, especially because of the ending*, which I don't want to give away. It certainly didn't all go down according to plan. But its not purely pessimistic at all.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - very good follow-up to the first. But completely overshadowed by Snowpiercer.
Fargo (tv series) - not True Detective good, but pretty decent.
Breaking Bad - its about a chemistry teacher who becomes the ultimate bad-ass. The plotting is wild, but it makes a story that's not believable. And some of the characters don't seem consistent enough.
*[SPOILER HINT - think 'common ruin of the contending classes' SPOILER HINT]
I'm a bit slow off the block,
I'm a bit slow off the block, I'm sure there are previous comments about 'Capitalism : A Love Story'
"For chrissakes simiangene, its 5 yrs old, and you've only just watched it!?
This should be mandatory viewing for grade 4 classes, cut to the chase with education, give the kids the raw facts, take away the blinkers.
simiangene wrote: I'm a bit
simiangene
I haven't seen it yet. But I did see Inequality for All which was quite boring and unsurprising.
Agent of the Fifth
Agent of the Fifth International
Its pretty basic stuff, but to the majority 95%, who get entangled within and by their necessity to survive and relinquish their powers to the overlord, it may be an eye opener and a catalyst to rebel against exploitation. He basically and whimsically endeavors to remind them of their potentialities.
Agent of the Fifth
Agent of the Fifth International
Yeah Snowpiercer is truly and accurately an allegorical masterpiece of the present global condition. Therefore its not really Sci-fi futuristic which is the genre which critics try to slot it into, as a denial of their own inability to comprehend abstract symbolic representations of their own heinous complicity within 'the train machine'. Movies like this will never win awards, which is good in an inverted way.
OK, changing subject, I watched 'Triangle', and if you thought 'Inception' was a mind twister, this movie will surely have you boggled and left gasping at the screen as the credits roll by!
Quote: Fargo (tv series) -
Yeah, True Detective is better than Fargo? I've had True Detective recommended to me once or twice, but I thought Fargo was just incredible - like top 5 incredible. True Detective is that good?
I'm watching two series currently:
The Killing - which is awesome
The Walking Dead - which is basically shit and getting worse, but entertaining. It does show the limits of the zombie genre though and makes me wonder if it can be suited to a long-running show format and I'm not sure it can.
Chilli Sauce
Chilli Sauce
I think so. I had watched True Detective first. After it ended, I needed a replacement series, which Fargo wasn't able to match. Maybe if I had watched Fargo first, I probably would have had different expectations.
The Tree of Life (2011),
The Tree of Life (2011), directed by Terrence Malick. I felt it had a few interesting passages, despite a having a script written by an self-absorbed 14 year old Christian poetry student, a camera person who was so drunk they were just stumbling around and focussing on random bits of nothing, an editor who didn't actually edit, and sickeningly cheesy visual analogy. And I hope whoever sold the rights so Malick could use large swathes of 2001: Space Oddyssey got a good price.*
Auld-bod
Just watched Blue Velvet, thanks for that. Yeah she's great! I'm really getting into my late discovery of David Lynch stuff.
I've seen there's over a 100 episodes of Northern Exposure, normally I'd pass, but since I'm currently residing in the middle of nowhere I might just get it finished in a couple of weeks, haha.
Just downloaded Snowpiercer too. Sounds good.
*Edit. Just found out that the special effects artist was Douglas Trumball - who also worked on 2001... It all becomes clear...
Hasn't anyone else seen
Hasn't anyone else seen Guardians of the Galaxy yet? Because it's really awesome! <- my in depth analysis :)
Fleur wrote: Hasn't anyone
Fleur
I have! And it is quite good.
Xmen days of future past and then guardians of the galaxy, marvel is killing it!
Marvel didn't make Days of
Marvel didn't make Days of Future Past, Fox did.
o
o
Searched for and checked out
Searched for and checked out the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer. I'm proud to say I managed to guess that the green dude was Drax... The stuff you learn from reading that pile of magazines your brother left in your mothers loo when he moved out and you only read for the purpose of escaping the, generally not to unpleasant, family mayhem going on when all is visiting for summer/christmas.
My (cultural) geek cred is immensely improved by that pile.
[edited to add what film i'm talking about]
Knowhere, the giant severed
Knowhere, the giant severed head of a Celestial converted into a mining facility for the extraction of spinal fluid, is clearly a metaphor the alienation of intellectual labor in modern capitalist society.
I took the little 'un to see
I took the little 'un to see Box Trolls on Saturday and as if by design sat beside the noisiest kids who wrestled over (amongst other things) a box of maltesers. Good film though.
Doubt - Very good film with
Doubt - Very good film with Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Excellent acting from those three and a film that is about doubt and leaves us with doubt and ambiguity. Really enjoyable. The setting does seem a bit like every single tale of growing up in Irish new york neighbourhoods for a minute but it has a lot more to it.
Literally just got back from
Literally just got back from seeing Pride - with a Q&A from some of the people who are played in the film. It's really good, really enjoyable, and well worth a watch. Not perfect and if I have time in the next couples of days, I'll post more. But, for now, definitely worth seeing.
The Inbetweeners 2 - better
The Inbetweeners 2 - better than the first one. Still uneven and not as good as the series, but amusing enough.
All is Lost - a metaphor for
All is Lost - a metaphor for an ever increasingly globalized capitalism.
The East - just an awful movie.
American Hustle - highly overrated.
Captain Phillips - okay movie. nothing special here.
Next up at some times this weekend, 12 Years a Slave, Nebraska, and Fruitvale Station.
Has anyone seen Hollywood's
Has anyone seen Hollywood's "No Gods No Masters" - holy shit. As a piece of anti-anarchist propaganda it fails because unless you know some of the history you wouldn't have a clue what the film's trying to portray. Noteworthy scenes include the anarchist (luigi galleani) kidnapping a child? and an anarchist giving a terrible speech against the IWW whilst all the workers in the crowd yell that they don't need unions. Broadly sets up the policeman as the noble figure, defending justice in a world of clueless capitalists and anarchist terrorists.
recently seen films I do recommend:
~Even the Rain (También la lluvia)
~Rebellion in Patagonia (Patagonia rebelde)
20'000 Days on Earth If you
20'000 Days on Earth
If you don't know anything about Nick Cave or even if you don't like his music(?!!!) it's still well worth seeing. If you are into his music or books or whatever you HAVE to see it!
Agent of the Fifth
Agent of the Fifth International
why do you think so? it was ok, though. unfortunately, bit boring (it would be better if they made it even shorter)
latest X-Men - really good!
Edge of Tomorrow - great and surprisingly funny!
Godzilla - expected something bad, got something not really bad at all.
Transformers 4 - so many US flags that I seriously think it was ironic!:)
Pacific Rim - how low can I go:D
Allegorical what? A vampire
Allegorical what? A vampire movie without exposed and bloody carotid arteries,,,,,very un-clichéd , but is not Jim Jarmusch not un-eclectic? The main thing to remember is the future water wars, when the south dries up, yeah, keep that in mind.
A most wanted man : a little
A most wanted man : a little frustrating at times and Daniel Bruehl was completely wasted in a tiny role. On the whole enjoyable as a film though, pretty well acted by the central people, although Issa was a bit rubbish.
Before I Go to Sleep: Not too bad, decent performance from Firth and Kidman was quite good as was Mark Strong. The story was a bit silly and the direction of the actors wasn't great, but they might be due to the story weaknesses. You'd be better off watching Memento though.
The film 'Marvellous' -
The film 'Marvellous' - biopic of Neil Baldwin that was on BBC2 the other night (still watchable on I-player for a few more days). An uplifting film about a very nice man who, in the early 1980s, was also 'a very good friend of mine' :)
"Only Lovers Left Alive" , As
"Only Lovers Left Alive" , As Adam says, zombies are a real drag, and I liked the references to Christopher Marlowe's writing for Shakespeare (the Philistine). But as Adam says, he got it out, using Shakespeare as a conduit for the creative passion and wisdom of ancient vampire artisans. I liked the "too good to be famous" comment, a concise critique of modern aesthetics.
This is an intellectual allegory which has nothing to do with bats, evilness or garlic aversions but about desire and the social boundaries which stigmatize or glorify different manifestations of instinctual tendencies..As Adam says, the zombies are afraid of their own imagination and are slaves to their cravings, whereas they as vampires seek only one desire, not a cluttered chaotic consumerist identity with produces bad wiring schematics and polluted blood, and this idleness therefore frees them to refine and perfect their sustainability and neutrality, to obliterate the work ethic in their daily existence, to pursue artistic and scientific creations.,
Mommy - the latest film by
Mommy - the latest film by Québec wunderkind Xavier Dolan. Absolutely brilliant. A single mother raising her troubled teenage son, after he's been released into her care from juvenile detention. It's beautiful and breath-taking and heartbreaking and very difficult to watch at times. The acting is just outstanding from the three main characters (mother, son and neighbour, who is suffering from her own trauma.) I know not many Québec films get a general release outside the French speaking world but this one's picking up so many accolades I expect it will and I really, really can't recommend it highly enough. Also, there's the added bonus that if you pay attention you can learn to swear like a Montréaler.
Anyway, trailer here -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9LVLCYvqSI
Quote: The film 'Marvellous'
:) 'I'm a registered clown'. Lovely film.
The last film I saw in the
The last film I saw in the cinema was Guardians of the Galaxy. It was pretty dull, obvious and repetitive and highly predictable, I couldn't take interest in any of the characters none of which had any depth, even the bad guys were just not-scary. Shame since sci-fi has so much possibilities. Actually fell asleep for the closing parts, not something I usually do and last did at the cinema to Despicable Me (don't ask) years ago. Other films I recently watched:
happy people: a year in the taiga - documentary directed by Werner Herzog about a village in Siberia. Alright for what it was, if you like stuff about solitude + mix of survivalism etc., did romanticise their life a lot though ('the simple life') maybe anarcho-prims would like that. Overall good.
Sixth Sense - I'm late to the party, alright, guessed the ending so wasn't the best. Alright overall, if too long.
Antz - re-watched. Some weird revolutionary stuff in it, they even get the line 'the workers must control production' into it, a kid film. Mediocre overall.
Sienna - good if you life F1 especially, but worth watching anyway. tear-jerking at the end.
Badlands - 1970s film Terence Malick, and Martin Sheens first film. Quite good, good dialogue. About serial killers who are lovers in the south dakota badlands. Definitely worth watching.
True Romance - really good film, takes a lot from Badlands actually (music/openig credits etc.). I really liked the intro, one of the best I've seen. Weird few people have heard of it considering written by Tarentino (thank god he doesn't direct it thought). Good black comedy, worth it without being too serious.
"Elles". The rather
"Elles". The rather pedestrian story of a sexually frustrated middle-class Parisienne journalist prying into the lives of two student prostitutes in order to compile a 12,000 word article for a Paris magazine. With Juliette Binoche.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elles_(film)
I didn’t have great
I didn’t have great expectations of the four part TV series, ‘Inspector De Luca’, based on the books of Carlo Lucarelli. Between 1938 and 1948 we follow the chief inspector as he solves crimes in the City of Bologna.
The main flaw for me is his myopic liberal belief that the law encapsulates ‘truth and justice’. Once one accepts that there could be such strange individuals, there is much of interest as the plots and acting are very good with excellent period detail.
The section where De Luca is on the run from the partisans (he is on their death list) reminded me of Stuart Hood’s excellent book ‘Carlino’ (Carcanet Press, 1985), which is based on his memories of fighting with the Italian partisans in WW2.
So well worth a watch, though the main character is a political ignoramus (a very useful idiot, the antithesis of ‘the good soldier’).
Anyone seen Jimmys Hall? I
Anyone seen Jimmys Hall? I was slow off the blocks for this one, although I tend to enjoy Ken Loach films, he pulls on the old heart strings sometimes.
Anyway - ideas and name dropping abunga... union members defying their leaders, Wobblies, TOM MANN! It was as though the film was triangulating into my little world; I was worried if it got any closer to home there would be a sequence on middle aged blokes sitting on settees drinking beer, alright for some, a bit specialised for most. Are you listening Loach?
Phantom (2013) - David
Phantom (2013) - David Duchovny, Ed Harris
About a real Russian sub K-129 during the cold war which focuses on the captain
in particular and an unexpected and slightly shady mission. Good as current movies go but that's not saying much. Harris is particularly good as is to be expected. Duchovny not too shabby either.
A film by Hal Hartley, The
A film by Hal Hartley, The Girl From Monday, USA, 2005.
A happy surprise. In the first fifteen minutes it contains more ideas than most films in an hour and a half. It’s a futuristic film, a sci-fi satire, where a being from space (the girl) arrives to look for a friend and finds a world where most men and women are encouraged to trade their bodies on the stock market. It is a much better film that it sounds. It is described as ‘funny’. Not so, it’s too close to reality.
MT wrote: Agent of the Fifth
MT
Yes, I think the same too.
It's a very nice movie, but I don't see any metaphor.
Surely it perfectly fits my bad english (almost no dialogue) :)
Nostalgia for the light. It
Nostalgia for the light. It does a good job of talking about Pinochet's concentration camps without being too political. It sort of begins touching on Pinochet haphazardly, as if only to mention that some people in his concentration camp in the Atacama Desert just happened to become amatuer astronomers as a way to feel escape. It seemed a good benign way of sending out the message of loss of democracy in Chile.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jul/12/nostalgia-for-the-light-review
the Interview (no analysis by
the Interview (no analysis by Zizek yet?)
When Kim started mentioning US sanctions (after Dave turned the interview serious) it was clear that Dave couldn't win and even was in trouble. So here the film recognizes the bankruptcy of US rhetoric. Only then does Dave resort to emotionally manipulative questions. But if Kim is such a fan of Dave's show, he should have perfectly understood how US talk shows (eg Oprah) try to get to the emotionally vulnerable side of celebrities. Also, in light of Kim's breakdown, how to see the handled response by Eminem in the beginning of the movie? And what does this say about US celebrities who cynically do know how to play the emotional game along.
When Kim, denying in the same breath listening to Kate Perry, replies: 'I don't need my father. I'm strong", it seems to imply an equivalence between needing his father and listening to Kate Perry (both being signs of weakness). The strength lies, like in a candid moment with Dave previously, in admitting that his father was a cruel figure whose affirmation he shouldn't seek. His words in the breakdown during the interview thus strangely seem to correspond to his privately admitted belief. The movie makes a further twist when Dave in the end rides the tank with a Kate Perry song playing; it helps him focus in carrying out military action (the ultimate show of strength).
Auld-bod wrote: I didn’t have
Auld-bod
Read Almost Blue by him, I remember it having a ridiculous plot that clearly had not been thought out at all, but some ok moments.
Frozen - Not especially good, I couldn't quite put my finger on it but it just lacked in magic I supose. The songs seemed a bit unnatural and forcd and the plot and characters were a bit dull. All in all a bit of a let-down.
I have been listening to Serial (like all good liberals) and enjoying that.
Red Marriott
Red Marriott
It was repeated about a week ago. Should be on the BBC I-player still if you're quick.
Pride, is well worth watching
Pride, is well worth watching and would recommend it.
and then followed by (Still) The Enemy Within which is also worth watching.
Noa Rodman wrote: But if Kim
Noa Rodman
David Foster Wallace explores this in the short story "My Appearance" about a minor tv star preparing for and appearing on the David Letterman show.
Saw "Nightcrawler". Fantastic!!! Jake Gyllenhall (spell check?) goes from petty criminal to CEO of "video production news" after he witnesses a film crew filming the wreckage of an accident on the highway. He learns that people go to crime scenes and accidents to get footage of death and destruction in order to sell the footage to news channels. Gyllenahll, a psychopath, was born for this job. The film is ripe with criticism of "news" channels as well as maybe kinda saying that our society as a whole is psychopathic in a way.
"Enron: The Smartest Guys in
"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"
Dope movie, ignoring the ridiculous images that go along with the groan inducing metaphors in the voiceover this is a great tale of neo-liberal intrigue. It's like the documentary version of The Wolf of Wall Street except even more like creepy and shit because I had no idea just how powerful and highly respected these Enron people were before the collapse. Also some serious political intrigue with their role in the California energy crisis and the Bush administration's use of this as a tool to put Schwarzenagger in the governor's seat.
Pretty shocking that the lowest level employees of Enron (the on the ground energy technicians) had their stock accounts frozen when the scandal hit so that they couldn't sell of their shares. Many of them lost their pensions while simultaneously the top executives at the company sold their stocks while the stock price was still worth a little bit. Ken Lay then complained that it had been "hard on him and his family" because he only got to sell his stock for $26 million instead of the hundreds of millions that it had been worth before the scandal hit.
The Red Menace (1949) I
The Red Menace (1949)
I watched this because Betty Lou Gerson is in it, who later voiced Cruella De Vil in Disney's 101 Dalmatians. Here she plays a fanatical communist. The movie shows how the CPUSA deals with people who try to leave: by sending any employer the person's party card membership (which results in them getting fired, even though they quit the party), or if they are illegal immigrant by alerting the police (I doubt this is historically accurate). There is also murder of someone for questioning the speaker at a lecture. Example of less extreme nastiness; setting up protests where everyone will get arrested, using women to attract recruits.
Hannelore Axman (who is an actual German) plays the communist with a conscious, whose father in Europe first hand experienced repression inside the party. She is the only other reason to bother watching this.
Operation Eichmann (1961) starring Werner Klemperer. Writer: Lester Cole
A good half of the movie shows his role in the organization of the final solution. Then his activities in exile. Especially his conflict with other Nazi exiles (who even plan an assassination of him, and try to make it look like it was revenge by Jews - again I'm ignorant if this is historically accurate).
The Israeli leader of the operation to capture Eichmann, in the movie is himself a concentration camp survivor (who with his own eyes sees Eichmann first testing a gas chamber).
Saw Whiplash. Definitely a
Saw Whiplash. Definitely a great film, terrifying ending.
Fletcher's philosophies on competition are also disturbing, and obviously I would have liked to have seen the movie attack him for being such a piece of shit, but the ending suggests that Fletcher's philosophies may have virtue to them, which in my opinion is absurd.
What we do in the Shadows.
What we do in the Shadows. Totally brilliant from start to finish. Stars Jermaine from Flight of the Concordes. Watch it!
Let's be cops - someone aoart
Let's be cops - someone aoart from Jason Sudeikis' gang is trying to compete with the Vince Vaughan shitty couple-friendly comedies. Not too bad in the end, but in no way special.
The baddy is the new bad guy from Broadchurch
Recently saw Seven
Recently saw Seven Psychopaths, a Martin McDonagh film... same guy that did In Bruges, another film I really liked.
The Bones Brigade -
The Bones Brigade - skateboarding doc. Aw man, nostalgia OD! When I was skating as a kid, these guys were mythical heroes!
The Autobiography of Nicolae
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu
Saw 50 shades of Grey.
Saw 50 shades of Grey. Fucking boring as shit. There's some pseudo philosophical bullshit in there but it's not even worth talking about. Honestly think the book was secretly written by a cabal of sociologists who knew that this would give them topics to discuss at their academic conferences.
I watched Baraka a while
I watched Baraka a while back. It was awesome in the true sense of the word, but I thought it was also illustrative of a point I had been trying to make in an ongoing debate with one of my relatives. They maintain that art and culture can prescind from political questions, and that talk of systems and ideologies tends to contaminate and make for "lower" art. But in the context of Baraka, politics is inescapable, and to think otherwise seems to me a pretext to reduce the imagery of environmental depredation, labor exploitation, urban anomie and mass poverty to an undifferentiated aesthetic. The movie's premise was the interconnectedness of human life and the immanence of spirituality in the natural world, but nearly everything I saw suggested the contrary. The Indonesian woman's only point of contact with the outside world is mediated through the cigarettes she produces for a Japanese businessman who couldn't be further removed from her circumstances---to name just one example. And the montages of people enthralled to the archaism of religious mystification and obscurantism seems less profound and more like a means of collective denialism and escapism from the material challenges facing humanity as a whole---a sort of particularism, if you will, that divides everybody in their own self-constructed, self-enclosed worlds.
It's not so much a problem with the handfuls of mediative monks, but scenes of Mecca or the Ganges were disturbing testaments to the numbing of popular consciousness; and modern industrialized consumer societies aren't without their own updated forms of fetishism and ritual---the time-lapse sequence of urban traffic perfectly illustrated the superstructure that regiments, programs and automates what in real-time seems like chaos from the ground-level. So yeah, in conclusion, the notion of "World-Spirit" (something which Gustav Landauer mediated on---I think he would've loved this movie) seems subverted in the course of the movie's run-time, Fricke and co.'s intentions aside; even such a new-agey metaphysics by itself can be a bit dehumanizing at the same time (didn't Bookchin talk about this?), so it comes across as an insoluble projection of subjective feelings onto the material world. But it was profoundly beautiful all the same; some of those visuals will definitely stick with me.
Was I the only person not
Was I the only person not really troubled by American Sniper? The Chris Kyle character was definitely racist and jingoistic, but I don't think that means the movie necessarily was. To me it was more of a character study than political.
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959),
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), I'd had forgotten almost everything about this film. Which is strange as it is about time and memory. I'm not alone as I've heard it described as the ghost inside modern French cinema. The screen play by Marguerite Duras is outstanding.
This is a cool short video
This is a cool short video analysis of Snowpiercer:
[youtube]Bm9qKj1Q_OU[/youtube]
http://blogs.indiewire.com/sh
http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/up-next-for-raoul-peck-the-young-karl-marx-a-james-baldwin-documentary-20150209
^apparently Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck is making a film called The Young Karl Marx, about the shaky relationship between Marx and Engels.
Hope it some kind of buddy comedy.
the conformist - bertolucci
the conformist - bertolucci
Last film I watched was Enemy
Last film I watched was Enemy at the Gates, probably one of my all-time favourite war films!
Secrets of State (2008)
Secrets of State (2008) "Secret défense"
Diane is a student recruited by the French secret service, Pierre is a troubled young man who thinks terrorism will bring him salvation.
A Girl Walks Home Alone At
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night - marketed as the "first Iranian Feminist Vampire Western". Not really but an awesome film. Fun creepy and sweet.
superjail question: http://up
superjail
question:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Ferrari_California_Paris_August_2010.jpg
what does a car that looks like this suggest to you about its owners, their attitude towards the speed limit and/or law enforcement in general, and their relationship to the police force?
tarkovsky pedagogy of the
tarkovsky
pedagogy of the oppressed
strong kids safe kids
using direct words
tell everyone to evacuate please and thank you
jesus christ i didnt mean it
jesus christ i didnt mean it like that, no violence or anything bad i just meant that this place is gonna get really bad if things keeps up like this. much love to everyone, stay safe… I'm really sorry. I'm leaving now for good, sorry for all the trouble. best of luck with the forum
Wait...................
Wait................... Wut??????
confusionboats - legit
confusionboats - legit worried about you. Can anybody do anything to help?
Watched Come and See the
Watched Come and See the other night, an extremely good and completely horrific Soviet film that follows a boy in Nazi occupied Belarus during World War 2. Also saw Ida, which is about a Polish nun in the 60s who discovers that her parents were Jews killed in the Holocaust, and Omar, a very tense Palestinian film from the same director as Paradise Now about a Palestinian guy coerced into informing for Shin Bet.
Tyrion wrote: Watched Come
Tyrion
Phenomenal movie. So many memorable scenes: the bodies behind the house, the razing of the village, his confrontation with Hitler's image. I was struck by how visibly the kid aged over the course of a few days. And not a single moment of bullshit Great Patriotic War triumphalism; not even the partisans muster any heroism, but are just as desperate and burdened as the rest. The whole thing feels like a fever dream, actually, like Aguirre turned full-out survival horror.
Makes Enemy at the Gates look like Babes in Toyland.
The part with the pile of
The part with the pile of corpses got to me especially. Nightmarish stuff and a welcome remedy to all the Hollywood treatments of World War 2 that focus on inspiring heroism in tough times and all that.
Watched Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Watched Fantastic Mr. Fox. Had the best random scene in any movie I've ever watched.
A Most Violent Year, a
A Most Violent Year, a brilliant movie with an amazing lead performance from Oscar Isaacs. A really compelling portrayal of the ruthless capitalist entrepreneur type.
Leo, fantastic mr. fox is so
Leo, fantastic mr. fox is so excellent. one of my all time faves!
There is very little worth
There is very little worth watching on UK Freeview telly these days but I did rather enjoy the dark humour in the film 'God Bless America' by Bob Goldthwait staring Joel Murray and T.L.Barr. which played to my personal irritation at so many of the day to day habits of people in the modern capitalist world but wasn't of course actually against capitalism. Well I need a bit of escapism as much as the next person!
Cake : a bit weird, one of
Cake : a bit weird, one of those films that doesn't realy tell you that much about any of the characters or anything else and doesn't give you much of a plot or much of a resolution to what there is. Not too bad but it did end up feeling a bit pointless.
Saw Mad Foxes, an
Saw Mad Foxes, an Italian/Swiss revenge film from the 80s, in the cinema last nite. Holy shit was it amazing!
All you need to know: naked Nazi bikers doing high kicks in full frontal glory. For like 5 minutes.
Anybody else seen it?
(Although, there is an extremely violent rape scene, so just be aware of that one).
Leo wrote: Watched Fantastic
Leo
Is that the scene explaining that crazy ball game they play?
Watched Snow Piercer and The
Watched Snow Piercer and The Maze Runner last week. While Snow Piercer is a bit of a sledgehammer of a metaphor I really enjoyed the movie; well made, decent action and not a lot of dead moments. Also like the Maze Runner for what it is; yet another YA dystopian movie in which teenagers are sacrificed for [insert reason]. Not as good as the Hunger Games, but fun enough to watch.
Ass backwards - sort of film
Ass backwards - sort of film that's barely worth watching if it comes on TV.
When was the last time you had fun? - quite fun, comedy with a bit of drama about couples and relationships etc.
BBC adaptation of Pride and
BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, not that fucking abomination of a version with Keira Knightly. Absolutely sublime - marvellously hammed up acting by Alison Steadman as Mrs Bennet and Colin Firth, who I'm generally not too keen on smashes it as the horribly pompous but endearingly tongue tied Mr Darcy.
Take the inverted snobbery peg off your nose and wallow in this corking escape mechanism of a film.
Pride - masterpiece! Kung
Pride - masterpiece!
Kung Fury - if you try it, then really do so with subtitles turned on (on youtube)
Just watched The Wind That
Just watched The Wind That Shakes the Barley for the first time. Pretty heavy-handed politically, but still a good movie. Liam Cunningham plays a great socialist-realism caricature to route for.
Fnordie wrote: Just watched
Fnordie
I was disappointed. It felt like Land and Freedom in a different country.
A few days ago I watched John
A few days ago I watched John Frankenheimer’s ‘Seconds’ (1966).
A friend had said he’d been haunted by it for years. I’d had a similar experience with his film ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1962), so was glad to have the opportunity to watch it on DVD. On the big screen it would be even more disturbing, as the soundtrack and cinematography are very disorientating.
Based on a novel, the film’s idea is that a person can pay to ‘reinvent’ themselves in a different guise and live life over again. Rock Hudson acts with conviction, as the ‘second chance’ man, disorientated in his new persona, who on one occasion visits his ‘recently bereaved’ wife and discovers his alienated past. Very interesting movie though not a million laughs.
The remake of Manchurian was
The remake of Manchurian was also pretty good IIRC.
The Forgotten (2004). Silly
The Forgotten (2004). Silly plot, but terrifying if regarded as allegory on the Stalin school of falsification. It makes me realise the need to have a party (or in its absence, Libcom) to preserve the history of the workers movement.
Another movie about memory loss, The Unknown (2011), at one point openly makes some historical commentary (ie that Germans – the movie takes place in Berlin – forget their own history of Nazism and "Communism").
Probably there are so many movies about memory loss because it's just a lazy plot device for writers, and mostly these movies are just about some search for identity ("being").
But memory loss is a dreadful thing.
Noa Rodman wrote: Silly plot,
Noa Rodman
or ham-fisted anti-abortion propaganda...
Ant-Man. Really enjoyed it.
Ant-Man. Really enjoyed it. Funniest of all the Marvel movies (Michael Peña was especially hilarious) and packaged like a classic heist movie.
Watched Matewan today, a
Watched Matewan today, a movie about a 1920 strike by coal miners in West Virginia that took on an element of gun fighting when Baldwin-Felts agents were brought in by the company. Good stuff, this scene especially was inspiring.
[youtube]qwEMIvDEFy4[/youtube]
Tyrion wrote: Watched Matewan
Tyrion
I hope you're aware it happened and is pretty accurate to the facts (for a movie).
on ant man: agreed! Great
on ant man: agreed! Great film. WAAAYYY better than the shittiness known as Age of Ultron
I've quoted that Joe Kenehan
I've quoted that Joe Kenehan speech in house visits to coworkers way more often than I care to admit.
The Matrix.
The Matrix.
Trainwreck. Romantic comedy
Trainwreck. Romantic comedy written by Amy Schumer. Was hilarious in its first half, then went through the required motions of the genre and I therefore lost a bit of interest towards the end (and I say this as someone who likes romcoms).
Straight Outta
Straight Outta Compton.
Amazing film, brilliantly acted, beautifully shot and of course the music is still as fantastic as it ever was.
*Obviously I'm aware of the things which weren't in the film, ie the VAW and the erasure of the women who were part of the scene. I guess it comes under the heading of Things I Like Which Are Problematic.
Saw Batman & Robin. No
Saw Batman & Robin. No words.
Phoenix. Recommended
Phoenix. Recommended
Have just watched ‘The
Have just watched ‘The Homesman’, a western with Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank. Similar to Clint Eastwood’s ‘The Unforgiven’, the main interest lies in the complex emotions of the main characters.
It has a darkness I find in the likes of Thomas Hardy. A great piece of storytelling which you should watch without knowing too much of the tale.
Phoenix Seems to take a lot
Phoenix
Seems to take a lot of cues from Omar, or maybe they weren't aware of each groups projects while in development. Either way, I like this trend of letting historical settings and situations that stem from imperialist conflict shape characters and story archs.
Can't recommend Omar enough, too.
Veronica Mars - a little
Veronica Mars - a little gimmicky but a lot of fun.
The Man in the White
The Man in the White Suit
excellent. old fashioned capital v. labor theme that you'd almost never see in a major american movie now, or really anytime post-war. i wonder if the Alec Guiness character would today be thought of as having Asperger's.
saw the star wars movie, it
saw the star wars movie, it was pretty good, definitely a step up from episodes 1 2 and 3, but that's not saying much. A good film all in all but not on par with episodes 4 and 5 I think mainly because the music wasn't as good and the world building was a bit wonky. Who were "the resistance" weren't they supposed to be the government? Who were the First Order? Why were they pissed?
It was a lot simpler in the original trilogy which worked much better, right from the opening shot you understood exactly what was going on, this one didn't really explain it. Also still waiting on the explanation as to why the clone troopers who are trained from birth to fight are so terrible at aiming.
NO SPOILERS. SOME OF US
NO SPOILERS. SOME OF US AREN'T SEEING IT UNTIL BOXING DAY.
lol, don't worry there's no
lol, don't worry there's no spoilers there
Still not looking.....
Still not looking.....
Soapy #898 ‘Also still
Soapy #898
‘Also still waiting on the explanation as to why the clone troopers who are trained from birth to fight are so terrible at aiming.’
A reporter on Radio 4 the other night said he knew the answer. He’d tried on the trooper’s helmet and the vision was crap.
in a new hope they where
in a new hope they where trying to let them escape so they could find the rebel base
Also saw the martian. Spent
Also saw the martian. Spent most of is time celebtrating PROFESSIONAL SCIENCE and mythologizing a liberal middle class wet dream of what they imagine the technocratic elite to be (or what the technocrats think they do). Aside from the nauseating ideological message of the movie it was interesting enough to entertain me throughout.
radicalgraffiti wrote: in a
radicalgraffiti
Ya but they couldnt aim for shit when han solo and leia stood in front of that door for 30 minutes in return of the jedi
Trumbo (2015) In 1947, Dalton
Trumbo (2015)
In 1947, Dalton Trumbo a Hollywood screenwriter was jailed and blacklisted for his political beliefs. A good watch, which rather soft pedals the politics. Very well made in all other respects.
(Later, on the bus going home, I thought that Bryan Cranston should have called Saul.)
Trainwreck - I'm not taken
Trainwreck - I'm not taken with AMy Schumer, this had a pretty boring story, told with no subtlety and only about three funny jokes.
Man Up - wasn't too bad and until the awful speeches as the end managed to bequite amusing.
Sisters - I was hoping to like this but it was just really short on jokes and like a lot of recent comedies doesn't really have actual characters or jokes so it's a bit hard to get into.
Bridesmaids - Like TRainwreck and Sisters watched with my partner who turned it off halfway through,unlike the other two I didn't go back and finish it.
In a fit of nostalgia I went
In a fit of nostalgia I went to see 4 old 1975 episodes of 'Day of Hope' as part of a Jim Allen retrospective at the cinema, a film made with his left-wing colleague Ken Loach who provided a short intro seeking to link it in with his current Left Unity/Corbynista campaigning. That unfortunate misplaced appeal aside the dramatised story of working class struggles and political illusions and the 'betrayals' of the Labour Party and trade unions from the First World War to the eventual defeat of the General Strike in 1926 was still a biting critique by to-days drama documentary standards - perhaps one reason why the BBC never repeated a showing of it since it's first appearance on UK TV screens.
A classic documentary: The
A classic documentary: The High Lonesome Sound - Roscoe Holcomb (30 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I0ZxDXV4dc
Terence Malick's Knight of
Terence Malick's Knight of Cups. Largely disdained in the US with a couple of notable exceptions, I thought the film was more successful than Tree of Life and To the Wonder, his two most previous films.
re-watched O Brother Where
re-watched O Brother Where Art Thou. almost as good as the first time, but some of the characterization seemed clunky.
Hail Caesar. It was
Hail Caesar. It was entertaining but other than that I didn't really know what to make of it.
Anomalisa. I thought it could have been so much more. Beautifully made though.
Oh yeah also, not quite the
Oh yeah also, not quite the last film I watched but the last blow me away good film I watched was Carol, great film and totally transended the subject matter which I thought kind of made a good point about the importance or otherwise of sexuality. Care Blanchett is a great actress even if she does lack range.
This guy is not an anarchist
This guy is not an anarchist he is a radical/leftist, who confirms my belief that anarchism is part of the left. If I didn’t think that, it would be to deny Horton shares part of my belief system. If he is part of working class history, why should I deny that I am on the left?
Before anyone puts up the ideological shutters give this a watch.
PBS Myles Horton - A Radical Hillbilly (Bill Moyers Journal) 1981 Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HGJQ2ZE38k
I'm really enjoying this film
I'm really enjoying this film on Myles Horton, Auld-bold. Thank you.
I was sent the link to the
I was sent the link to the trailer for the film, Comrades, this morning. It looks like a good one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RqjsIVGRJE
The east (2013) An
The east (2013)
An ecoanarchist insurection cell called the east gets infiltrated by spies from a capitalist company.
Dont expect too much from a mainstream Hollywood movie, though the anarchists are portrayed better than what you would have expected from Hollywood
Grave of the fireflies, the
Grave of the fireflies, the Studio Ghibli film. Historically very educational, it taught me a lot I didn't know and has.sparked my curiosity to learn more about Japan and the second world war. As a film I felt it was just too sad for me, it also lacked any suspense in the way the story arc was laid out. But I think the filmmakers were trying to do something and they did it well.
A bad taste fest - Divine in
A bad taste fest - Divine in Polyester
http://youtu.be/dYwDXfBJ9ZY
Cloud Atlas, which is 3 hours
Cloud Atlas, which is 3 hours long but which I enjoyed, especially the Timothy Cavendish bits, which were the best parts of the film. Also a Tim Burton film called Coraline, enjoyed that too.
Green Room - untypical, i
Green Room - untypical, i surely recommend
The Grimsby Brothers - probably the best "borat" film in terms of the balance of good/bad jokes
They Live - what a surprise! i wish there were movies like this these days...
13 Hours - yeah, i know... and i liked it a lot:)
Captain America 3 - better than thor movies, not as good as avengers, but i still enjoyed it
Deadpool - good fun
Revenant - everybody hates it but me:)
The Hateful Eight - what the hell was this about? and why i liked it?:)