Raxivace's 2018 List of Movies or (Neo-General Chat: The Second Raid)

[maz89]

Yeah, I loved those paralleled crane shots and the contrast between the first and second time they're deployed for that staircase. I like how you use "self-imposed imprisonment" as a meaning for the bars framing her character in that way.

Should check out his late French films.

[Raxivace]

That was horrible.

Actually, its going to be the greatest movie of all time, fuck A Brighter Summer Day, Detective Pikachu is where its at.

For real though I think the movie looks fun.

[Raxivace]

I think your "Scorsese meets Ozu" comparison is pretty spot-on.

Now that I think about it, there's something of a bitter irony (But perhaps not an inappropriate irony) in using an American director and a Japanese director to describe ABSD lol.

Great review btw. Way better than my rambling.

I guess in that case, Yi Yi is more Ozu without the Scorsese (though Yang's formalism is different than Ozu's). Yeah, that final scene is as powerful as any I've ever seen in film, and even though on first watch it seems like it comes out of nowhere, upon rewatches it seems almost tragically inevitable, especially once you follow the development of the film's various motifs.

Absolutely. The play shooting scenes in particular really stood out to me in an "Oh fuck, the signs were here this whole time" kind of way on that second watch.

I read that Bordwell article after I wrote my review, and I'm not sure if I was happy or sad that he'd already written about the stuff I noted... I guess I should be happy that I had noticed what probably the greatest cinema academic mind of our time noticed, lol. Glad you also watched it twice. I've now seen it three times, once with the commentary. First was on a laserdisc-to-DVD transfer long before the Criterion version was released. I could appreciate its greatness back then but it really took the Criterion version for me to fully absorb it.

I heard about that laserdisc release in reading and listening to podcasts about ABSD, bootlegs made from it etc. I haven't looked at any clips from it for comparison's sake but I'm pretty happy with my blu-ray copy lol.

One thing I want to add...I think I read this thought somewhere else first, but does ABSD really not feel like a 1991 film to you? Like when I compare to something with a lot of superficially similar elements like Forrest Gump (Nostalgic look at the past, Elvis references etc.), that movie really does feel like a 90's film to me despite being only made three years later. ABSD doesn't really date in the same way. Of course we could attribute this to just a general difference in the style and interests between Zemeckis and Yang, but maybe its an interesting comparison to consider.

I really do hope you explore the Taiwanese New Wave more. The sad part is that Hou's two best films aren't even available on DVD, and the versions floating around out there are piss-poor quality (the DVD release of Puppetmaster, now long OOP, cropped its wide-screen format to 4:3). All of those after that are/were on DVD, but many also long OOP. Luckily, three of his masterpeices are available on blu-ray (Time to Live and the Time to Die, Dust in the Wind, and The Assassin), but only the last one is easy to find. I have the former two on a limited Taiwanese release that's now also hard to find. If you want I could upload them to a torrent or something.

That would be dope, as long as you could do so in a way that wouldn't get the cops on your trail. I do plan on finishing Yang's filmography at least too (Since its only like 9 films, and that's including the stage play and the anthology he contributed) but even then three of those movies I've been struggling to find. I'm pretty shocked and saddened that even in the age of piracy some things are genuinely difficult to find a copy of...

Still planning on making the trip through 70s Godard? That's a lot of crap to wade through! I'm at least interested to hear what you have to say about Numero Deux.

Hell yeah I'm still making that trip. As Barret says in FF7, there ain't no gettin' offa this train we're on...

Besides I've got yet another Godard movie seen that I just haven't finished a post about.

Maybe that image explains why Godard loved Marx/communism so much; to him it was like sex!

Haha, could be.

Godard's influence spread pretty quickly throughout cinema, so it's entirely possible Anno saw some films from directors influenced by Godard. Though TBH I can't think of any that did that "characters talking directly about themes on a dark sound stage" thing since Godard except for Anno. Would love to know where he got the inspiration from that. I will say though that the Japanese New Wave had plenty of Godard-isms themselves, sometimes even weirder. See Eros + Massacre for an example.

Yeah that's still a mystery I'm trying to solve. It could also be that Anno is just lying.

I'll try and see Eros + Massacre at some point.

This really does sound excellent. I've never been quite the Welles fan that you are (I think he made three masterpieces, and everything after that is good-to-brilliant, but not masterpieces), but he's never not interesting at the least.

Yeah its great. Will be curious to see what you think of it.

BY THE WAY ITS FUCKIN' BULLSHIT THAT JJ FUCKIN' ABRAMS GETS A SHOUTOUT IN THE CREDITS AND I DON'T. The $50 I donated in college hurt me a lot more than whatever thousands he donated hurt him since he's got that fuckin' Star Wars money. I tried to spread the word about the campaign to restore the film too, he does like a dopey video and that gets him a spot in the credits? And my threads across IMDb didn't? The fuck is that noise?

"But Raxivace, there was a special campaign tier you could have technically donated to if you wanted to be in the credit-"

Fuck off hypothetical commentator, I don't care about your fuckin' facts. You don't even exist. As a hypothetical being you're not even real.

[Eva Yojimbo]

Should check out his late French films.

Madame De... is probably his most well-known, but I prefer most of his others from that period: La Ronde has that Lubitsch-like touch with how light and elegant it is; Lola Montes is just drop-dead gorgeous (makes me wish he shot more in color); and Le Plaisir is one of the few anthology films that really works. TBH, Ophuls is a director I admire more than I love, but his camera work is astounding and you can see its influence on directors like Kubrick, and his approach to melodrama was probably only second to Sirk in its influence.

[Eva Yojimbo]

I heard about that laserdisc release in reading and listening to podcasts about ABSD, bootlegs made from it etc. I haven't looked at any clips from it for comparison's sake but I'm pretty happy with my blu-ray copy lol.

It's not as bad as the various bootleg Hou films out there I've seen, but it's certainly nowhere near Criterion quality!

One thing I want to add...I think I read this thought somewhere else first, but does ABSD really not feel like a 1991 film to you? Like when I compare to something with a lot of superficially similar elements like Forrest Gump (Nostalgic look at the past, Elvis references etc.), that movie really does feel like a 90's film to me despite being only made three years later. ABSD doesn't really date in the same way. Of course we could attribute this to just a general difference in the style and interests between Zemeckis and Yang, but maybe its an interesting comparison to consider.

I'd say it feels like a Taiwanese 90s film, but I can only say that being quite familiar with Taiwanese cinema from that period. But, yeah, it certainly feels nothing like 90s American cinema. Look/feel wise it is rather similar to Hou's late 80s/early 90s films.

BTW, if you get around to any Tsai films, just know he's nothing like Yang and Hou. He has a very idiosyncratic style where he mostly shoots every scene in a single, static take, and there's very little dialogue. Ebert once compared him to Ozu, Bresson, Antonioni, Tati, and Keaton... which is quite the mixture!

That would be dope, as long as you could do so in a way that wouldn't get the cops on your trail. I do plan on finishing Yang's filmography at least too (Since its only like 9 films, and that's including the stage play and the anthology he contributed) but even then three of those movies I've been struggling to find. I'm pretty shocked and saddened that even in the age of piracy some things are genuinely difficult to find a copy of...

I'll get to it ASAP. From what I've heard, the business aspect of Taiwanese cinema is pretty shady and mired in a lot of legal junk, which might explain why there's so few international DVD releases. It took Criterion forever to finally put out ABSD. I first heard about them attempting to get it nearly a decade ago!

Yeah that's still a mystery I'm trying to solve. It could also be that Anno is just lying.

I'll try and see Eros + Massacre at some point.

I doubt he's lying. As out-there as the Japanese New Wave could get it wouldn't surprise me if there were one or two films that did something similar.

BY THE WAY ITS FUCKIN' BULLSHIT THAT JJ FUCKIN' ABRAMS GETS A SHOUTOUT IN THE CREDITS AND I DON'T. The $50 I donated in college hurt me a lot more than whatever thousands he donated hurt him since he's got that fuckin' Star Wars money. I tried to spread the word about the campaign to restore the film too, he does like a dopey video and that gets him a spot in the credits? And my threads across IMDb didn't? The fuck is that noise?

"But Raxivace, there was a special campaign tier you could have technically donated to if you wanted to be in the credit-"

Fuck off hypothetical commentator, I don't care about your fuckin' facts. You don't even exist. As a hypothetical being you're not even real.

[Raxivace]

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I'm behind on replies again, I'll get to them later.

I did finish His & Her Circumstances today though. Anno's run on the show is excellent, and honestly almost as good as NGE. It's a really curious show in a lot of ways, atypical both for Anno and especially for Gainax in lacking any kind of sci-fi or action elements whatsoever (I guess there's Love & Pop too though). In terms of genre its a straight shoujo romance (With both comedy and dramatic elements), but filtered through Anno's style and fourth-wall breaking to great effect. Yukino and Arima were both great characters, and the exploration of their flaws and psychologies (While occasionally breaking off into the stories of other characters as something of a comparison) was absolutely fantastic.

The stuff after Anno leaves though is...admirable for the most part (I like the popsicle sticks episode!), though not entirely effective. The main romance is not quite abandoned, but never seems to get any kind of final say either. It's weird that we never actually get to the big play after several episodes (What was it? 6 or 7?) of buildup too.

Also, ending on friggin' Tonami of all characters is bizarre, though I can kind of understand the impulse to go for a sort of The Lion King/The Wire type of ending where he's set up as the "next" Yukino- a vain but troubled character who will grow as a result of a possible romantic relationship (Curiously, he has a fair bit in common with Arima too. He could pass as his double as well as Yukino's). I just don't think the execution is quite there for it to work.

[Eva Yojimbo]

^ I pretty much wholly agree with your take. The Anno run of H&H is about as good as NGE (at least the series; the film is another level, of course). You can see the similarities with Love & Pop, though I think most of it works better in H&H. I think you're easier on the non-Anno stuff than I was, though. I found most of that just a mess. Curiously, now that I think of it, Shiki Jitsu is almost like a weird mix of NGE, H&H, and L&P. It really does feel like a summation of Anno's pet themes and techniques/devices he developed in all those works.

[Raxivace]

It could be the strength of the Anno episodes still affecting me I guess with those last episodes. Popsicle sticks I'll stand by as good though.

[Raxivace]

Also part of it is that for comparison's sake there's the filler arcs of Nadia that Anno wasn't attached to, which are still kind of fresh in my mind from watching it earlier this year. The "Island" arc in that isn't too bad actually (Maybe a little better than the ending of H&H but eh, still weaker than anything Anno did) but oh boy the fuckin' "Africa" arc that comes right after is some crap that is genuinely awful despite the funny "Jean starts singing a love song for Nadia that accidentally turns into a diss track" bit at the end.

[Raxivace]

Jimbo, instead of playing Final Fantasy games go watch Nadia. That way you can finally learn what the Secret of Blue Water is.

[maz89]

A few thoughts on the films I've seen over the last two weeks.

For Whom The Bell Tolls - If I had to sum it up: bland and overly long war propaganda. One critic noted that Cooper and Bergman were playing themselves, and I kind of agree with that. The whole romance was so overly done I became quite sick of Bergman's exaggerated child-like adoration of Cooper. Katina Praxinou was the only worthy character but even her performance peaks with her dark monologue on the nature of man early on. I also dislike how the redemption of Katina's character's husband was totally undone just to make the point that America takes care of its allies.

Johnny Guitar - I can't recall if I've ever seen a movie starring Joan Crawford before this one but she turned in a great performance in this one: a woman who carves out her own place in the world, whilst refusing to give a fuck about how she stacks up against gender stereotypes or society's expectations of her (fuck yeah feminism!), after her disillusionment with love (um... not so feminist to be defined by a bad relationship, but we'll ignore that for now). I have a thing for strong, independent female characters, so I was always going to end up liking this film. It doesn't hurt that the extended dialogue sequences are well-written, well-acted, well-shot, etc. I like the touch that it's another woman - and not a man - who is envious and plots the demise of Crawford's character (although I would have liked it more if this villainous woman had more to her than a one-note jealousy driving her entire purpose). Solid film.

Charade - I love Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, but I'm not sure if I enjoyed this too much. It was entertaining, but also a bit ridiculous. It also annoys me that they couldn't let Grant be the bad guy or give the film a less-than-squeaky-clean happy ending.

The Gunfighter - Loved this! I can't recall if I've seen in Peck in anything other than To Kill A Mockingbird, but I'll make it a point to check out other films he's starred in. He brings a world-weariness to his character that makes his pining for a standard life so very believable. Although the plot was somewhat predictable, the way it played out in the end was not and it was heartbreaking to watch. I liked how there are two threats waiting for Peck's character as he exits the bar at the film's end, and the thing that undoes him is the very thing that he always feared - a young squirt trying to make a name for himself. Interesting that Peck's "revenge" was to let that murderous squirt lead a life similar to the one he had been living, in a punishment commensurate with his crime. Fitting.

The Philadelphia Story - A fun, fast-paced and very well-written rom-com. The trio (Steward, Grant, K. Hepburn) turn in superb performances, only I'm not convinced about what happens in the ending regarding that love triangle (more like, love square). Some of the scenes were downright hilarious - the part where Hepburn's younger sister introduces herself flamboyantly to the journalists by squealing in French, or when Hepburn switches the identities of her uncle and father to keep up the ruse in front of the journalists.

A Star Is Born (1937) - I'm doing a marathon of all of these "A Star is Born" films before I see the 2018 remake, and the first one was pretty good. I've seen films with similar themes before - Scorsese's underrated New York, New York comes to mind (and if you talk about disillusionment with the celebrity/fame/Hollywood machine in general, there's loads of films out there, including our favorite MD) - but I generally liked the execution here, including that tragic climax in which Fredric Marche's character commits suicide in what he probably saw as a selfless way to stop being an obstacle in Esther's path to greatness. Not sure why they decided to remake this three times because this version holds up even today, but I'll find out.

Mr Smith Goes To Washington - I thoroughly enjoyed Stewart's performance and the whole thing was all very realistic, entertaining and enjoyable until the film's ending when the corrupted Senator decides to reveal that Smith had been telling the truth about the businessman pulling the strings. I know, I know - they'd been building to this breakdown from the beginning, but still, if the film wanted to be realistic, it should have let Stewart lose. Why does the Golden Age of Hollywood have to have a happy ending? I loved Jean Arthur's performance, she reminded me a bit of another icy, cool performer named Barbara Stanwyck.

[Raxivace]

I haven't posted about it yet but I'm also doing the A Star is Born thing too. We have really similar thoughts about the first movie. :)

I think I liked Charade more than you but I can't quite remember what your spoiler is referring to. Philadelphia Story is dope.

About Mr. Smith- Capra's big thing is idealism and compassion triumphing over corruption. He's a romantic who wants to inspire people. It's not the most realistic of endings of course but Capra also isn't quite trying to be Rossellini or someone like that.

[maz89]

About Mr. Smith- Capra's big thing is idealism and compassion triumphing over corruption. He wants to inspire people. It's not the most realistic of endings of course but Capra also isn't quite trying to be Rossellini or someone like that.

You're right, of course. I shouldn't be complaining anyway, I always tear up at the end of It's A Wonderful Life.

At the end of Charade, Grant is revealed to be a CIA agent and Bartholomew is revealed to be Dyle (the man responsible for all the killing and searching for the fortune stolen by a team of five during the French resistance), while the film begins with Grant posing as Dyle's brother and Bartholomew posing as a CIA agent... at a police station. Well, at least, the title of the film is fitting. It's fun, but it's also silly.

[Raxivace]

I will say I think Wonderful Life is the better version of mixing the romanticism and the more critical side of Capra than Mr. Smith is. Stewart lives and the townspeople help save him, but it's also not like Potter was stopped, the stolen money isn't returned, and Bedford Falls hasn't necessarily gotten away unscathed.

Stewart has found his strength to continue on though and keep on fighting despite being shit on literally his entire life, which is pretty bittersweet but also beautiful.

[maz89]

I don't remember the specifics, but I do remember finding it bittersweet and touching. Surprising how IAWL was relatively poorly received at the time of its release.

[Raxivace]

Oh boy here we go. Buckle up everyone.

Also I'm telling you up front that there are Buster Scruggs spoilers ahead.

213. British Sounds (AKA See You at Mao, 1970, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Henri Roger) - Another propaganda film that is mercifully short at 51 minutes. Actually, this one isn't as bad as it could be. There's a tracking shot in the automobile factory segment that recalls the traffic jam shot in Weekend which is kind of funny. A later part of the movie has some kids trying to make a political parody of the Beatles song “Hello, Goodbye".

A less successful segment of the movie has another hot naked girl walking around a house doing nothing in particular while some voiceover reads from a feminist essay. There's even an extended shot of the naked girl's vagina at one point as the feminist voice over continues and it's like. Okay Godard. Just make a damn horny movie if you want to. I know you could argue that this segment fits into Godard's other interests about the dichotomy between image and sound, but I really get the impression that the voiceover not only doesn't accomplish this very well, but that it's more of an excuse for Godard to film another pretty girl.

Anyways this movie is entirely in English, like Sympathy for the Devil. That could also make the movie a little easier to watch for people like me whose first language is English.

214. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018, Dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) - The Coens not only return to the Western but have also made an anthology film containing six segments.

I feel like this is a difficult for a variety of reasons for me. The brand of postmodernism filmmaking that the Coens embrace always makes it a little difficult to read their films. With Ballad, there is an immediate nihilism in the plot that would suggest, will, life is meaningless chaos, nothing matters, we might as will just die because death is coming to us anyways…but the curious final entry of Ballad has me questioning this.

The next major reason Ballad was difficult for me is that anthology films are just not something I've seen very many of. I'd have to go back and count but I may have only seen like four or five before this one. A lot of them seem more like an excuse for short films from multiple directors to just be strung together (New York Stories being the most obvious example to me. Is anyone seriously ever going to argue that Francis Ford Coppola's short in that film pairs well with the ones made by Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen?) but other anthology films like Roberto Rossellini's Paisan have all of their entries made by a single director. Ballad is more like the latter.

Anyways there's a level of artifice to the whole film. The anthology here is specifically presented as a book.



You can actually freeze frame the book before the movie even really gets going to get a fictional origin story for several of the stories.



My screengrab isn't really good enough to clearly read it though, but watching it on Netflix in HD on a big enough TV, you can actually read the entire passage here.









In the first story (And only the first story), Buster Scruggs directly talks to the audience (And like a fourth-wall breaking movie character specifically).



He looks directly into the camera, follows it at times. He's really larger than life, while none of the characters of the other stories really are at all like this. It only makes the entire film being named after him really more strange to me, since in a lot of ways it and him are not representative of the overall piece.

Again, upfront its just emphasizing the artifice but I can't quite see the reason for the choice, especially since in the final story at the end of the film the nature of storytelling itself is discussed and why people relate to stories, but its done in a much more contained matter. No such blatant fourth wall breaking as in this first story or arguably even the very nature of the detailed framing device.

There are several parts throughout the film where you can do this to get more details about the various stories. For example the, ending of the first story gives (Also called "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs") gives some more detail about the man that murdered Buster and what his own fate would be.



I wonder how much of this is a choice that the Coens would have done in a normal theatrically released movie anyways, and how much is because it is released through Netflfix, where you can pause and take your time to examine any frame to your heart's content. You could do that anyways through DVD releases so IDK.

Anyways this is only really talking about the framing device the movie used. I still need some time to think about the six stories, what I got out of them, how I'd rank them, what the Coens are saying, so in a lot of ways this whole post is bad and worthless. I did enjoy all six of the stories though.



If anyone else sees this I'd love to dig into some more through discussion and try to come to grips with it.

215. Ben-Hur (1959, Dir. William Wyler) - The 1959 Best Picture winner. The religious angle of this movie doesn't mean much to me, but as a piece of classical Hollywood epic filmmaking I think this is pretty fun example. I certainly enjoyed it more than the previous Wyler movie I watched (The Best Years of Our Lives) and the previous Charlton Heston movie I watched (The Greatest Show on Earth).

For a four hour movie I don't have a whole lot to really say about it, though the big chariot race was as good as I had heard it was for years.

Also I wonder if this shot shortly afterwards was inspired by John Ford's movies. It looks like it came straight out of the ending to The Searchers.

216. A Man for All Seasons (1966, Dir. Fred Zinnemann) - The 1966 Best Picture winner. Actually I was planning on watching Tom Jones instead for this, but the version I had downloaded had ugly windowboxing going on. I decided I might do My Fair Lady instead but sadly it seems I didn't have a copy of that. Next in line was Man for All Seasons which I did have so I'll have to go back to the other two later.

Anyways, Seasons is another middling BP winner. It's not really great but not exactly bad either. Good performances from those involved- is great as Thomas More, Orson Welles (Who I hadn't even realized was in this before I watched it) was good in his brief role, but Robert Shaw as Henry VIII absolutely steals his scenes.

Other than that…good set design, good costumes, that's about it. Looking up a bit about the movie, Andrew Sarris had a pretty critical review which is a little harsher than I am, but is pretty close to how I feel.

A Man for All Seasons is the most edifying experience to hit the screen since The Life of Emile Zola. It seems that almost every year at this time some film or other inspires me to play Horatio at the Bridge. It was Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, Tom Jones in 1963, My Fair Lady and Dr. Strangelove in 1964, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for most of 1966. Does pure perverseness play a part in this reviewer's reactions? Not as much as most nonreviewers suppose. Even the most captious critics have a hankering to come in from the cold, and it is generally much easier and more 'Tiuman" not to resist the rape of the click film, the hit play, the runaway best seller, the bandwagon bonanza, the "of course" complacency of the success story. Even in moments of maximum hysteria, however, there is a place for the long view, and in this corner at least, there is grave doubt that A Man for All Seasons is a film for all time.

Actually the film version of A Man for All Seasons will probably follow the same cultural path as the play. The daily reviewers, surfeited with sensationalism, spoofery, and just plain silliness, are primed to endorse the slightest semblance of seriousness. Then along comes Robert Bolt, England's answer to Arthur Miller, both men monstrous mouthers of rhetorical redundancies. And what is Bolt's message? Simply that every individual must preserve his integrity. Fortunately, Sir Thomas More's martyrdom is remote enough and hence abstract enough to serve as allegory for covert nonconformists from Madison Avenue to MacDougal Street. Barry Goldwater will be edified. So will Norman Thomas. After all, Sir Thomas More doesn't go around burning draft cards or babbling about Black Power. Such contemporary confrontations of authority might offend much of the audience that now applauds More's steadfastness in a world of King-Pope intrigues to which the modern religions of nationalism are relatively indifferent. In fact, the film, even more than the play, tends to subordinate historical facts and ideological issues to abstract arguments about personal conscience. The Spanish ambassador disappears as a character, and with him the information that Spanish troops are terrorizing the Pope in Rome. More's theological arguments in the film actually smack of a rigid medievalism, against which Henry VII's capricious sensuality seems almost sympathetic. What validates More's position is his sufferable moral superiority. Like Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc, he is simply better than anyone else around at the time, but this situation is more the stuff of dogma than drama.

Not that Bolt isn't entitled to write a play about Sir Thomas More, but there is something wrong when the noble hero gets all the best lines, with a veritable stuffing of staircase wit. The bad guys in good westerns get a better break than do the bad guys in A Man for All Seasons. To make matters worse, Leo McKern is cast as the arch villain. McKern is effective when he plays hysterical bullies in Losey's films because Losey has a flair for lyrical love-hate scenes in which characters flail at each other with their uncontrolled feelings. Under Fred Zinnemann's tight direction, with Bolt's tight script, opposite Paul Scofield's tight-lipped ironies, McKern is reduced to stock villainy. The one high note of the film is struck by that wondrous wailing banshee, Wendy Hiller, in the defiance scene in More's dungeon. This is the only scene in the film in which a character is able to shut up Thomas More, and it takes his wife to put her hand over his mouth to do it: "S-s-sh . . . As for understanding, I understand you're the best man that I ever met or am likely to; and if you go, well, God knows why, I suppose —though, as God's my witness, God's kept deadly quiet about it!" Wendy Hiller has only one more sentence to go in her one big scene, but anyone who has ever seen her in The Heiress or Moon for the Misbegotten knows that it takes her only an instant to bring the heavens crashing down on the stage. Lifting her arms, and looking upward in a slow, clumsy, aged, earth-laden movement, this gruff tradesman's daughter and cleric's wife discards the prudence of a lifetime to defy all the universal power arrayed against her poor husband: "And if anyone wants my opinion of the King and his Council they've only to ask for it." The line really isn't that good, but in Hiller's hands it becomes the stuff of sublime theater. "Why, it's a lion I married! A lion! A lion!" Scofield quips fatuously, and as he puts his stage arms around his wife, the mood is muffled by a return to rhetorical display. From frenzy we descend back to forensics, and Scofield takes us the rest of the way to the chopping block with one or two good one-liners, most notably: "For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . but for Wales!" The foregoing line is so good that Zinnemann resists nudging the audience with a reaction shot of period extras chortling at More's wit in the courtroom. Would that Zinnemann had altogether resisted this vulgar method of telling audiences in Topeka that grammatical English prose can get laughs, but then A Man for All Seasons would not be the successful middlebrow enterprise that it is.

In all fairness to Zinnemann, his direction is about as effectively expert here as it was ineffectively expert in Behold a Pale Horse. Every frame is etched and chiseled in terms of the most precise placement of characters, colors, costumes, and period decor. As an academic exercise, A Man for all Seasons will probably be snapped up by the 16-millimeter catalogues unless there are purists who still object to filmed stage plays. The film will probably look better in 16-millimeter. Zinnemann avoids close-ups and sweeping camera movements like the plague, and some of his imagery with stone lions evokes Eisenstein's October. On the whole, Zinnemann's visual style is recessive in that everyone is always seen at a safe distance. I don't like this style particularly. It's safe, tactful, and tentative for a director who doesn't want to get too involved with his characters. Yet it is probably wise for this project. Scofield and Bolt don't really take close-ups. They lack feeling and empathy. Scofield is a virtuoso on the stage, where the dry inflections of his voice can ripple across the footlights with layers and layers of expressive irony and biting cynicism. When you look at his face on the screen, however, you get a guilty desire to look somewhere else. Actually, it's hard to remember what Scofield looks like from one performance to the next. I can't think of another actor of comparable skill with so little physical presence.

A Man for All Seasons is blessed with an extraordinary supporting cast—Wendy Hiller, Susannah York, Orson Welles, Robert Shaw, and Vanessa Redgrave in an unbilled appearance as Anne Boleyn. All I can say is wow! There was Orson Welles down in Spain shooting Chimes at Midnight which will have trouble finding a theater while A Man for All Seasons rolls on and on. Despite such coups as getting Gielgud and Richardson and Moreau, Welles had to make do with such eminently dubbed Shakespearean actresses as Marina Vlady, whose perfect English diction led one wag to dub the film Singin' in the Reign. Chimes at Midnight has all kinds of technical deficiencies, and Welles makes many more mistakes than Zinnemann ever could, and yet I wouldn't trade one shot from the Welles for the entire oeuvre of Zinnemann. With all the faults of the Welles, and all the virtues of the Zinnemann, I firmly believe that the massive passions of Chimes at Midnight will long outlive the miniature pageantry of A Man for All Seasons.

(Village Voice, December 22, 1966)

I think history has shown him right that Chimes at Midnight has ended up being the more interesting film, though I'm entirely sure the comparison is completely warranted even with Welles attached to both films.

217. Likely Consequence (1992, Dir. Edward Yang) - A recording of a one-act stage play that Yang co-wrote and directed shortly after finishing A Brighter Summer Day. In a kind of Hitchcock-ish esque plot, a young husband comes home to his apartment to find his wife with a dead man. In trying to deal with the situation though, fractures in the relationship are revealed.

For a quick 45 minute play I enjoyed it. If I'm understanding right, the guy's ultimate story he made up to defend his wife with the “story" about how she was actually cheating on the husband with the man, and the man only died from slipping and falling was coincidentally the truth, right? The wife's reaction to the story seemed to suggest that to me but Idk. Maybe the guy actually was some kind of rapist and she's also just sad from even needing a story like that to explain why she had to kill (Even if only accidentally) such a guy.

218. Ladies of Leisure (1930, Dir. Frank Capra) - An early Capra film AND an early Barbara Stanwyck film. An artist meets a party girl (Stanwyck), wants to paint a portrait of her, they fall in love, artist's parents don't approve, drama ensures. It meanders a bit and suffers from being an early sound film, though you can see the basis here for better movies that Capra would quickly soon go on to make, like It Happened One Night.

219. A Star is Born (1937, Dir. William A. Wellman & Jack Conway) - I hadn't seen any version of this before, so I figured I might as well start here. It's another solid bit of classical Hollywood filmmaking (The payoff of the star on the Hollywood walk of fame at the end of the film being the best example of this and also one of the film's strongest moments). It was fun, I'm curious to see how the actual musical versions compare to this.



Side note: I've seen like five Wellman movies at this point and I'm a little surprised he doesn't get talked about a little more, even in a Michael Curtiz “You're probably not an auteur but you still have some classics under your belt" kind of way. This movie, Wings, The Public Enemy, and The Ox-Bow Incident are good, dammit!

220. The Living Daylights (1987, Dir. John Glen) - Another Bond film, and one I surprised to see that generally has a low reputation if the average rating on IMDb is to be believed. I think it's pretty fun- Dalton is a great Bond- in some ways he strikes me as a proto-Daniel Craig. More ruthless than Roger Moore though not quite the heartless assassin he sometimes can be.

All of the stuff revolving around airplane setpiece in particular was fantastic.

221. Expelled from Paradise (2014, Dir. Seiji Mizushima) - Something of a mecha anime that is also a detective film? Kind of? Anyways in the future most of humanity has been digitized and live in a virtual realm contained within a space shuttle called DEVA. Someone from the outside world of the regular Earth has been hacking into this virtual reality though to compel people to leave the digital world and journey with them into outer space. The government that runs this virtual world sends out their agent Angela, a busty skimpy blonde (Of course), to find the source of the hacking in the outside world (By growing a body in a vat or something and digitally uploading her consciousness into it so she can explore the physical world). She teams up with up "Dingo", a world weary man skeptical of the life provided by DEVA, but is willing to work for them and investigates with Angela.

I enjoyed this a straight genre work. I think when it tries to make grand statements about the world its not that interesting. This is likely because Gen Urobuchi (Most famous probably for writing Puella Magi Madoka Magica) wrote this, and this is consistently a problem I have with him and his work. I still enjoyed this more than anything else I've seen from him, but I still don't quite see where the Anno-like praise he gets from some are coming from.

Speaking of Anno, while Mizushima is probably most well known for making Mobile Suit Gundam 00 and the 2003 adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist, he also was an episode director on Evangelion, specifically episodes 9-12. Go figure.

Las thing to mention is that the animation here is kind of weird too. I think it's 3D that's also supposed to look like 2D but it's a little odd. It kind of reminds me of the anime Godzilla films on Netflix (Which also have Urobuchi attached to them, come to think of it), though I think this is a little better looking in all honesty.

[Raxivace]

Surprising how IAWL was relatively poorly received at the time of its release.

Yeah that's something I wonder about. I'm still glad that cable TV and the public domain seems to have saved it though.

[Raxivace]

Thread idea for next year: Should we rip off what Eva Geeks used to do and track the most watched movies of Pitter's?

[maz89]

RIP Nicholas Roeg.

I'm a bit late, I know.

[Raxivace]

Yeah it's a real shame. I hadn't even gotten to seeing any of his movies yet but Walkabout and Man Who Fell to Earth have been on my to watch list for the longest time. :(

[Eva Yojimbo]

Jimbo, instead of playing Final Fantasy games go watch Nadia. That way you can finally learn what the Secret of Blue Water is.

Nah, I've got to follow my gaming urge until it dies down. I'm sure I'll get back to movies/series (and music, books, etc.) eventually.

213. British Sounds (AKA See You at Mao, 1970, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Henri Roger) ...it's more of an excuse for Godard to film another pretty girl.

Haven't seen this one, but I remember Godard admitting (I think in an interview for Hail Mary) that he did indeed just like shooting naked girls. There probably wasn't always any point to it beyond that... and, hell, does there really need to be? I would've loved to see what a Godard porn (or even just erotic film) would've looked like.

214. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018, Dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen)

That's quite the epic review! Of course being a Coen film it's immediately going to the top of my Watch list when I get back to films. So as to not stumble on any spoilers, is there anything in particular you want me to read or keep an eye/mind out for whenever I see it?

FWIW, I've seen most of those late Coen films as being basically absurdist pieces about characters searching for meaning/purpose/order in a meaningless, purposeless, chaotic world. NCFOM and A Serious Man being their most potent 1-2 punch on that subject, IMO. That said, they like to HINT at possible meaning/purpose and leave it open to debate. Think of the tornado that closes ASM; if we're following the Job parallel then it could be God come to give the protagonist his lesson. In NCFOM, does Tommy Lee's dream some kind of spiritual warning or lesson, or is it just a dream?

215. Ben-Hur (1959, Dir. William Wyler) -

I really enjoyed this one back when I watched it. It's not a deep/profound movie by any means, but it's a great example of a Classic Hollywood spectacle film, right near the twilight years of those kind of films until the Summer Blockbuster revived the trend (though in different genres).

216. A Man for All Seasons (1966, Dir. Fred Zinnemann)

I also enjoyed this one, though not as much as Ben-Hur. This was a favorite of my mom's, so I might've been slightly biased when I saw it. I do think the acting stood out the most. It always reminds me of The Lion in Winter for some reason. Interesting review from Sarris.

217. Likely Consequence (1992, Dir. Edward Yang)

Wasn't this one of the extras on the ABSD Criterion? I vaguely remember seeing it, but don't remember much about it.

219. A Star is Born (1937, Dir. William A. Wellman & Jack Conway) -

Don't remember much about this but, yeah, it was typically enjoyable classic Hollywood stuff.

220. The Living Daylights (1987, Dir. John Glen) -

Actually one of my favorite Bonds. I agree with you about Dalton being a proto-Craig, and I think they struck the perfect balance here of having that edge but still making it feel like Bond. They pushed it too far over the edge in the next Dalton film. I also loved pretty much all the action sequences in TLD. For some reason the ski bit has stuck in my mind.

Thread idea for next year: Should we rip off what Eva Geeks used to do and track the most watched movies of Pitter's?

I never really understood what the point of that was supposed to be, but do it if you want.

[Eva Yojimbo]

Johnny Guitar -

The Gunfighter -

The Philadelphia Story -

A Star Is Born (1937) -

Mr Smith Goes To Washington -

These are the ones I've seen. Johnny Guitar and Philadelphia Story are the shit. Grant and Hepburn were so great together, I wish they'd made more than just 4 films, but luckily 3 of them are classics and the 4th is pretty darn good (though quite weird!). I thought The Gunfighter was OK. I've personally never cared much for Peck. He always seemed a bit wooden as an actor and his characters were rarely interesting/complex. A Star is Born is good, solid classic Hollywood but not particularly great/memorable. Mr Smith I really liked, but I can't disagree about your quibbles either and it's something that does tend to annoy me a bit about Capra films.

[Eva Yojimbo]

RIP Nicholas Roeg.

I'm a bit late, I know.

I hadn't heard about this either. Very sad. Walkabout and Don't Look Now are both among my all-time favorites. Latter is especially a masterpiece, and former is one of those that's vividly stuck in my mind ever since my first viewing many years ago. I've never been quite as impressed with his other films I've seen, but they're usually quite interesting. He had a great visual eye and was one of the most creative, original editors I've ever seen. I wrote a pretty long review for Don't Look Now way back when:

Don't Look Now [1973; Nicolas Roeg; 110 min; UK/Italy]

9.5/10

The best artists rarely work in genres, and yet many of the best are able to work through genres, often transforming them with their vision and touch. In the realm of the arts, horror and mysteries often reside alongside science fiction and romances as genres that garner huge, popular followings but rarely garner praise and merit from the medium elites. Yet there are exceptions. Great directors like Stanley Kubrick managed to produce masterpieces in both horror (The Shining) and sci-fi (2001). While their impact and influence is obvious and undeniable, perhaps slightly less obvious and less recognized is the influence of Nicolas Roeg's transcendent psychological horror/mystery thriller, Don't Look Now.

Like many of the best films, Don't Look Now's story is superficially simple and yet rich and complex in its execution, suggestiveness, and ambiguity. Early in the film, Laura (Julie Christie) and John (Donald Sutherland) Baxter are devastated after the loss of their young daughter Christine, who died accidentally by falling into a pool and drowning. The film doesn't linger on the tragedy, however, and instead shifts to the beautiful city of Venice where John and Laura are staying while John is at his work, repairing a rundown church.

While there, Laura meets a pair of aging sisters, Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania). Heather is blind but supposedly is a psychic with the gift of “second sight". She informs Laura that she can see her daughter around them, smiling and happy. Laura accepts this and is able to come to peace with her death, but John cannot. Heather tells Laura that John also has the gift, and warns her that he's unsafe while in Venice, but John won't listen to either, and begins seeing an image of a small person dressed in a red raincoat (the same kind his daughter was wearing when killed) running around the streets of Venice.

Don't Look Now was director Nicolas Roeg's second independently directed feature film. Much like its predecessor, Walkabout, it reveals a man who is as artistically audacious as he is self-assured and in control of his craft. Both reveal Roeg's origins and talents as a cinematographer as both make magnificent use of their locales. While Walkabout used the expressive landscapes of the Australian outback, sometimes stark, barren, and brutal, other times strikingly beautiful, serene, and inviting, Don't Look now makes similar use of the Venice streets. What begins as a city of full of breathtaking imagery and architecture disintegrates into a byzantine, moldering maze of death and confusion.

Also as in Walkabout, Roeg opts for a dreamlike, hypnotic rhythm to his editing and narrative flow. Don't Look now is a film that ebbs and flows towards its conclusion rather than moving with a perpetual forward propulsion. This aids Roeg in the subtle development of his characters; this includes one infamous, extended sex scene between Sutherland and Christie. The scene was scandalous not just for its length but for its explicitness, eroticism, and sensuality. While Roeg almost crosses into soft-core, it may yet be the finest sex scene in the history of mainstream film. Roeg brilliantly crosscuts the lovemaking with scenes of John and Laura getting dressed. While it bears almost no superficial importance to the narrative, it is otherwise important on a deeper and subtler level in how it simultaneously suggests the sadness and impermanence of such intimate togetherness and the compression and juxtaposed concurrency of time. This element of past, present, and future co-existing will become one of the major motifs and themes of the film.

The same way Roeg rhythmic patience allows for nuanced character development, it offers the same opportunity for his elaborate motifs and themes. Besides the phenomenal sex scene, the importance of concurrent time is nowhere more portentous than when John sees Laura on a boat with the two ladies all dressed in funeral black, even though his wife had recently left to go home (the significance of this puzzling image will be revealed in the end. The film itself begins with John's daughter playing in the field which is crosscut with him looking over film slides. One slide shows a figure in a red hood sitting in a church pew. At the same time his daughter falls into the water, John knocks over a glass of water that falls on the slide. The water makes the red of the figures hood to bleed (literally and metaphorically) onto the rest of the frame, and that spurs John to jump up and rush out to save his daughter. This is the film's first use of many of its major themes; foreshadowing, foresight, the concurrency of time, and of death.

The scene also introduces another important theme: the illusory perspective. Laura tells John she's reading a book in an attempt to answer Christine's question of “if the Earth is round, why is a frozen lake flat?" The answer to her question is that it's not; one of the great lakes actually curves 3-degrees from its two widest points. It's only flat to our limited perspective. This concept of limiting perspective marks the ultimate downfall for John. While in Venice, Laura is able to accept the “round" perspective that the psychic, Heather, can actually see into the spirit realm where Christine is happy. This acceptance allows Laura a measure of peace that John can't find. Instead, the memory of his daughter and his guilt over her death festers in unconscious, and he begins to “see" her figure running through the Venice streets but, much like the flat lake that's curved, the truth is obscured by his limited vision.

Earlier I spoke of Don't Look Now's influence and I genuinely believe it's grossly underrated. Roeg's surrealist tone, mystery, use of demonized dwarfs and psychological manifestations clearly foretell the masterpieces of David Lynch. Meanwhile, his use of metaphysics and the intangible interconnectivity of individual lives, of life and death, and transcendent time have a profound Kieslowskian element to them. Even the story of a man chasing the ghostly image of his daughter around a nightmarish city seems a direct influence on the video game Silent Hill which, like its predecessor, reveals the daughter to be a metaphoric psychological demon for her father which may kill him if he doesn't find a measure of peace and forgiveness.

While viewing it at the time I felt the film began to drag during its second act after Laura left and John was left alone; perhaps the problem was that the film had built them up so strongly as a couple it wasn't as interesting with just John alone. But the more I think about the film, the more brilliant it all seems. Don't Look Now does everything a great psychological horror film should do; after watching the film it had my senses on edge, leery of what was lurking in the shadows of my own house as those final images had seared itself into my brain. But the remarkable thing is that it manages all of this without every slipping into the campiness or clichés of the horror film. Rather, Don't Look Now reveals one of the universal truths about horror, the truth that the evils and monsters born and residing in the recesses of our subconscious are infinitely more terrifying than anything that an artist can conjure explicitly.

Ultimately, Don't Look Now is a great film, period, above and beyond being a great horror or genre film, it's one that will dig into your mind and stay there. As much as it is affecting viscerally, it's effective psychologically, aesthetically, and artistically.

[Raxivace]

]Haven't seen this one, but I remember Godard admitting (I think in an interview for Hail Mary) that he did indeed just like shooting naked girls. There probably wasn't always any point to it beyond that... and, hell, does there really need to be? I would've loved to see what a Godard porn (or even just erotic film) would've looked like.

It's just weird to me when people feel the need to defend liking or doing this kind of thing with some kind of convoluted feminist pretext. Not that I'm even against convoluted feminist pretexts but sometimes the rationalizations people come up with to cover up their shame just get a bit silly.

That's quite the epic review!

Nah the review sucks, its just a bunch of pictures.

Of course being a Coen film it's immediately going to the top of my Watch list when I get back to films. So as to not stumble on any spoilers, is there anything in particular you want me to read or keep an eye/mind out for whenever I see it?

Just whether you think the artifice of the framing device exists to undermine what appears to be the general themes of the stories or not.

Of course any other thoughts you come up with, of if you notice anything I missed, would be appreciated. Them Coen boys are tricky.

FWIW, I've seen most of those late Coen films as being basically absurdist pieces about characters searching for meaning/purpose/order in a meaningless, purposeless, chaotic world. NCFOM and A Serious Man being their most potent 1-2 punch on that subject, IMO. That said, they like to HINT at possible meaning/purpose and leave it open to debate. Think of the tornado that closes ASM; if we're following the Job parallel then it could be God come to give the protagonist his lesson. In NCFOM, does Tommy Lee's dream some kind of spiritual warning or lesson, or is it just a dream?

Yup there's definitely some of that going on in Buster Scruggs, particularly in the final short.

I also enjoyed this one, though not as much as Ben-Hur. This was a favorite of my mom's, so I might've been slightly biased when I saw it. I do think the acting stood out the most. It always reminds me of The Lion in Winter for some reason. Interesting review from Sarris.

You said your mother was super religious, right? Maybe that aspect of the movie just spoke to her more than it ever could for me.

Wasn't this one of the extras on the ABSD Criterion? I vaguely remember seeing it, but don't remember much about it.

Yeah its an extra on the ABSD disc.

For some reason the ski bit has stuck in my mind.

Lol yeah that ski bit was good. It was a little silly, perhaps more appropriate to the Moore era, but I enjoyed it.

I never really understood what the point of that was supposed to be, but do it if you want.

Idk, I thought it would maybe be an interesting statistic to track.

[Raxivace]

Btw, one of my old college professors was on a radio station a few weeks ago talking about the different versions of A Star is Born.

[Kuribo4]

Nah, I get that. I guess for me, if I get to the point where any of my hobbies feel like they're sucking my energy, I just quite doing them for a while and do something else.

That seems like good advice. I often force myself to do things..

I sold my consoles/games years ago because it really seemed like I was done with gaming. Like, I hadn't played in probably 5 years. I was also sitting on a lot of games that were worth a lot of money, especially because I took good care of my games. Biggest one I sold was Ninja Gaiden Trilogy (the SNES port) for $300.

I can see myself selling games I don't care too much about actually. That's really cool that you had such a high value card!

Thanks for the Death Stranding rec. Sounds interesting. Hideo Kojima seems to be quite the character!

He really is. Can't wait to see what he does this time.

I may get to it eventually, though it'll probably be the PS4 version since I hate the idea of stocking up on consoles. I may do that for PS3 just to play the MGS games...

It would obviously still be the same game on PS4, but if you are getting a PS3 eventually, I'd say wait for that. FFVII looks good on that and is actually cheaper than on PS3 (10$).
And btw, I recently got MGS3 and 4 too. 3 to play it on my PS2 and the PS3 I luckily own. Got a second hand one as a present. It's a model that plays PS1 games too, really convenient.
I sometimes wish playing games weren't so complicated haha.

First two Raimi films were great; third sucked ass. Apparently even Raimi hated it. Really sad they botched the Venom storyline, since he was always my favorite Spidey villain/anti-hero.

Yeah, Spidey 1 and 2 were actually childhood defining for me. 3 I watched in the theater, and though I had fun, even as a 10 year old I could tell it wasn't so good. Raimi wasn't happy with it.

I remember being so frustrated when I couldn't get through the first level and I was so pissed when my mom actually beat it before me, lol!

I also have memories playing with my mother. :)
Apparently, she played Super Mario Bros. before she had me too. She is actually pretty young, had me when she was 23. So we talk a lot about videogames. She plays games like The Witcher, to mention one that was talked about here.
It's cool she was in that time frame where she also grew up with games, we share that hobby now.


@Rax:

MechaGodardzilla...

Amazing.

Love talking to you guys, but as expected it took me some time to come back. This is just because I'm such a chaotic person lol.
I think I should have a certain hour to visit the forum, that way it can be more of a routine.

Btw, I'm rewatching Evangelion. It had been three years and a half since I watched it (which I mentioned back on imdb too).
The plan is watching the show now, watching the Rebuilds some time during 2019, and then I'll be ready for the last film in 2020.

What can I say, we have discussed this show to death lol. One thing interesting to me is how, as I grow older (and having watched more mecha stuff) the first half of the show seems more and more normal to me. And the second one, regardless of how I grow up, is still godly.

[Raxivace]

I think I'll rewatch NGE and the Rebuilds sometime next year before the last movie comes out too. It's been a long time, and I'm curious what they'll look like after seeing everything else Anno did (Though I still have Shiki Jitsu and Cutie Honey left).

I feel like the first half of NGE is kind of underrated though. Its super classical in style but man its so well done.

[maz89]

Will get to the rest of this thread later, but dammit. Now Bertolucci passed away! Only seen The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris from him though, but I really liked both of them.

[Raxivace]

I haven't seen any Bertolucci though I'll see Last Emperor at some point for the Best Picture project.

I'm torn about whether I should watch Last Tango in Paris or not, considering the allegations about the production of that film. It is a historically significant one though.

[Raxivace]

Speaking of Rebuild of Eva, does anybody remember if the term "Pseudo-Evolution" is ever actually used in the movies?

I was talking about Super Robot Wars in the Games thread, and I only just remembered how in one of the English games (V in particular) that's the term they use for what fans usually call "God Mode EVA-01". "Pseudo-Evolution" gives off a pretty different vibe, but I can't remember if it actually originates in 2.22 or 3.33.

That game also refers to the movies as "Rebuild of Evangelion" (Instead of like "Evangelion New Theatrical Edition" or something), which AFAIK is the only time in any of the officially English licensed materials the movies are actually collectively referred to as such.

[Eva Yojimbo]

]Haven't seen this one, but I remember Godard admitting (I think in an interview for Hail Mary) that he did indeed just like shooting naked girls. There probably wasn't always any point to it beyond that... and, hell, does there really need to be? I would've loved to see what a Godard porn (or even just erotic film) would've looked like.

It's just weird to me when people feel the need to defend liking or doing this kind of thing with some kind of convoluted feminist pretext. Not that I'm even against convoluted feminist pretexts but sometimes the rationalizations people come up with to cover up their shame just get a bit silly.

At least with Contempt I get the argument that Godard is actually questioning the appeal of nudity to audiences, but that works with that film's whole metafictional context and how the studio would want Bardot naked. With most of the later Godards, though, there's often not much of a reason. I mean, Sauve qui peut involves prostitution (so it's natural) and Passion has him recreating certain paintings which contained nude images; but stuff like Hail Mary and Prenom:Carmen are just pretty gratuitous.

Of course being a Coen film it's immediately going to the top of my Watch list when I get back to films. So as to not stumble on any spoilers, is there anything in particular you want me to read or keep an eye/mind out for whenever I see it?

Just whether you think the artifice of the framing device exists to undermine what appears to be the general themes of the stories or not.

Of course any other thoughts you come up with, of if you notice anything I missed, would be appreciated. Them Coen boys are tricky.

Gotcha. I think the Coens seem a bit trickier than they are. I actually think Kieslowski does that whole "metaphysical suggestion" thing better, but he doesn't have the postmodernist edge like the Coen's so it's tonally quite different.

I also enjoyed this one, though not as much as Ben-Hur. This was a favorite of my mom's, so I might've been slightly biased when I saw it. I do think the acting stood out the most. It always reminds me of The Lion in Winter for some reason. Interesting review from Sarris.

You said your mother was super religious, right? Maybe that aspect of the movie just spoke to her more than it ever could for me.

Very probably.

I never really understood what the point of that was supposed to be, but do it if you want.

Idk, I thought it would maybe be an interesting statistic to track.

No harm if you want to.

I haven't seen any Bertolucci though I'll see Last Emperor at some point for the Best Picture project.

I'm torn about whether I should watch Last Tango in Paris or not, considering the allegations about the production of that film. It is a historically significant one though.

See The Conformist ASAP. It's a visually glorious film.

I discussed Last Tango a lot when those allegations surfaced. I was a bit on the fence about them, because Romy herself said that they actually discussed the scene beforehand with her. She basically said she felt uncomfortable but went along with it and then regretted it afterwards. I'm not sure why it's Brando/Bertolucci's fault that she was too young/naive to say "no" or even know that she had the right to refuse to do anything that wasn't in the script. She also doesn't even suggest that they forced/pressured her, and she even said that her and Brando remained good friends throughout and after the shoot. To me, it just sounds like a classic case of regret rather than a case where we should blame Brando and Bertolucci for being scummy rapists. It also ended up being one of the most powerful scenes in the film, so it's not like it was gratuitous either.

[Eva Yojimbo]

I may get to it eventually, though it'll probably be the PS4 version since I hate the idea of stocking up on consoles. I may do that for PS3 just to play the MGS games...

It would obviously still be the same game on PS4, but if you are getting a PS3 eventually, I'd say wait for that. FFVII looks good on that and is actually cheaper than on PS3 (10$).
And btw, I recently got MGS3 and 4 too. 3 to play it on my PS2 and the PS3 I luckily own. Got a second hand one as a present. It's a model that plays PS1 games too, really convenient.
I sometimes wish playing games weren't so complicated haha.

Well, I did get the PS3. I'll probably try FFVII on both and see which one I prefer. I also picked up MGS3-5. I also managed to get a PS3 that can play PS2 (and PS1) games, so I'm pretty much set for Playstation! LOL

[

First two Raimi films were great; third sucked ass. Apparently even Raimi hated it. Really sad they botched the Venom storyline, since he was always my favorite Spidey villain/anti-hero.

Yeah, Spidey 1 and 2 were actually childhood defining for me. 3 I watched in the theater, and though I had fun, even as a 10 year old I could tell it wasn't so good. Raimi wasn't happy with it.

The first Spider-Man was probably the last film I saw in the theaters with my mom. I remember us going to the theater and there was a long line of kids, so we went to the mall and browsed the bookstore until the next showing so we wouldn't have to share the theater with a bunch of annoying kids!

[

I remember being so frustrated when I couldn't get through the first level and I was so pissed when my mom actually beat it before me, lol!

I also have memories playing with my mother. :)
Apparently, she played Super Mario Bros. before she had me too. She is actually pretty young, had me when she was 23. So we talk a lot about videogames. She plays games like The Witcher, to mention one that was talked about here.
It's cool she was in that time frame where she also grew up with games, we share that hobby now.

That's really cool. My parents were much older when they had me and neither got into gaming. My dad only played the Top Gun game for the NES a bit when it was out, but that's as far as he ever went.

[Btw, I'm rewatching Evangelion. It had been three years and a half since I watched it (which I mentioned back on imdb too).
The plan is watching the show now, watching the Rebuilds some time during 2019, and then I'll be ready for the last film in 2020.

What can I say, we have discussed this show to death lol. One thing interesting to me is how, as I grow older (and having watched more mecha stuff) the first half of the show seems more and more normal to me. And the second one, regardless of how I grow up, is still godly.

First half of th show is more normal by design; it's meant to draw the viewer in with the sense of familiar before the second half shatters that illusion. I will say say about the first half that while it's more normal it's also much more subtle. There are so many little details and foreshadowings throughout it that really makes you appreciate exactly WHY the second half is so powerful because of how meticulously the first half set it up. Hell, there's stuff in the first half that doesn't pay off until the film!

[Eva Yojimbo]

Will get to the rest of this thread later, but dammit. Now Bertolucci passed away! Only seen The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris from him though, but I really liked both of them.

Both are masterpieces IMO. I've also seen 1900 which is a mess, though a frequently impressive one.

[Raxivace]

At least with Contempt I get the argument that Godard is actually questioning the appeal of nudity to audiences, but that works with that film's whole metafictional context and how the studio would want Bardot naked. With most of the later Godards, though, there's often not much of a reason. I mean, Sauve qui peut involves prostitution (so it's natural) and Passion has him recreating certain paintings which contained nude images; but stuff like Hail Mary and Prenom:Carmen are just pretty gratuitous.

Yeah it's one thing for a movie like Contempt, but some of these other ones it doesn't really feel that way.

Gotcha. I think the Coens seem a bit trickier than they are. I actually think Kieslowski does that whole "metaphysical suggestion" thing better, but he doesn't have the postmodernist edge like the Coen's so it's tonally quite different.

I have to see some Kieslowski too.

Part of the Coen "brand", I suppose, is seeming tricky like that. Maybe I'm buying into their own cultivated image a bit more than I should.

I'm not sure why it's Brando/Bertolucci's fault that she was too young/naive to say "no" or even know that she had the right to refuse to do anything that wasn't in the script.

Well the scene was Brando's idea, he was performing with her, and as the director part of Bertolucci's job is making sure potentially uncomfortable scenes go smoothly, right?

This also gets into the tricky area of consent, what it is or isn't. IF they knew she didn't want to do the scene AND they knew she didn't know she had the right to say no but went along with it anyways THEN that's kind of scummy and manipulative IMO. That's a big IF though, and I don't know how we could reliably determine that all these years later.

You could also make the argument that as a legal adult she had the responsibility to be inform herself on her rights in her profession but fuck man, we've both been 19 before. We're all dumb idiots at that age and I'm not sure its realistic to expect someone not even old enough to drink to make adult decisions like that. We all click "I agree to the terms and conditions" of EULA's without actually reading them or even understanding the legal jargon. Of course this all gets into an issue larger that the production of Last Tango.

She also doesn't even suggest that they forced/pressured her, and she even said that her and Brando remained good friends throughout and after the shoot.

She seemed to have nothing but vitriol for Bertolucci until the end though based on the articles I remember reading. Now its entirely possible there was some other reason she hated Bertolucci that's unrelated to this entire affair.

Idk. I find a lot of reporting on issues of possible sexual misconduct to be kind of sensationalistic and difficult to determine the truth from them. It doesn't help when we're talking about something from several decades ago where all of the major parties have now died too.

To me, it just sounds like a classic case of regret rather than a case where we should blame Brando and Bertolucci for being scummy rapists.

Entirely possible. I'm still not entirely sure myself though, or at least sure enough to a comfortable degree of certainty.

[Raxivace]

There are so many little details and foreshadowings throughout it that really makes you appreciate exactly WHY the second half is so powerful because of how meticulously the first half set it up. Hell, there's stuff in the first half that doesn't pay off until the film!

Seeing that stuff on a second watch was what really confirmed to me that NGE was more than just a pretty good show. So much stuff comes off differently with a fuller context. Even the gag with Misato telling Ritsuko on the phone about how she won't be messing with Shinji gets payoff in the movie.

I think the thing the thing that most impressed me with multiple rewatches though in this aspect is how differently Gendo comes off. That first watch, its easy to buy into that stern evil genius persona he has going. Rewatches really makes it clear that despite the airs he puts on, he really is just like Shinji and that puts A LOT of the show into a different perspective than I had at first.

First time through: "Ah man, Shinji just needs some self-confidence."

Second time through: "Oh fuck, Shinji with self-confidence will just be Gendo and Gendo is a bad guy".

[Eva Yojimbo]

Gotcha. I think the Coens seem a bit trickier than they are. I actually think Kieslowski does that whole "metaphysical suggestion" thing better, but he doesn't have the postmodernist edge like the Coen's so it's tonally quite different.

I have to see some Kieslowski too.

Part of the Coen "brand", I suppose, is seeming tricky like that. Maybe I'm buying into their own cultivated image a bit more than I should.

Kieslowski's hard to get into because his best works are a 10-part TV show (Dekalog) and a 3-part film Trilogy (Blue, White, Red). That said, he did make a few great standalone films, including Double Life of Veronique (probably the best starting place), Blind Chance, and No End. The latter two already has his thematic depth, but visually/cinematically they aren't as good as Veronique, Three Colors, and (to a lesser extent) Dekalog.

I also don't want to make it seem like I'm denigrating the Coens at all. I do love them, but for me it's less their "trickiness" and more their mastery over tone, setting, and genres and how they're able to integrate these cool themes into them so it all works together. I mean, I think their early work was excellent in itself because even back then they had the tone/setting/genre thing down (especially with Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing), but with their newer films they've just added that extra layer of thematic substance so it's deepened their work significantly, even if I don't think they're all that tricky, per se.

I'm not sure why it's Brando/Bertolucci's fault that she was too young/naive to say "no" or even know that she had the right to refuse to do anything that wasn't in the script.

Well the scene was Brando's idea, he was performing with her, and as the director part of Bertolucci's job is making sure potentially uncomfortable scenes go smoothly, right?

This also gets into the tricky area of consent, what it is or isn't. IF they knew she didn't want to do the scene AND they knew she didn't know she had the right to say no but went along with it anyways THEN that's kind of scummy and manipulative IMO. That's a big IF though, and I don't know how we could reliably determine that all these years later.

You could also make the argument that as a legal adult she had the responsibility to be inform herself on her rights in her profession but fuck man, we've both been 19 before. We're all dumb idiots at that age and I'm not sure its realistic to expect someone not even old enough to drink to make adult decisions like that. We all click "I agree to the terms and conditions" of EULA's without actually reading them or even understanding the legal jargon. Of course this all gets into an issue larger that the production of Last Tango.

Yeah, I don't disagree with any of this. I just think these situations are tricky on both sides and that without knowing all the details it's very difficult to pass any kind of definitive judgment. I also think it's possible to feel sympathy for Romy because she was young/naive and didn't know she had the right to say no, but without condemning Brando for suggesting the scene (even if he insisted a bit) or for Bertolucci for going along with it and/or not stopping Brando. I also feel like it's probably really different for veterans like that who likely find it easy to say "it's just a film, anything goes" and for someone like Romy who was young/new and wasn't as comfortable with stuff like that.

She also doesn't even suggest that they forced/pressured her, and she even said that her and Brando remained good friends throughout and after the shoot.

She seemed to have nothing but vitriol for Bertolucci until the end though based on the articles I remember reading. Now its entirely possible there was some other reason she hated Bertolucci that's unrelated to this entire affair.

Idk. I find a lot of reporting on issues of possible sexual misconduct to be kind of sensationalistic and difficult to determine the truth from them. It doesn't help when we're talking about something from several decades ago where all of the major parties have now died too.

To me, it just sounds like a classic case of regret rather than a case where we should blame Brando and Bertolucci for being scummy rapists.

Entirely possible. I'm still not entirely sure myself though, or at least sure enough to a comfortable degree of certainty.

Yeah, I'm with you on not being sure, but that's also why I hate to see people condemning Brando, Bertolucci, and the great film they made. All we know is that Romy regretted that it happened, but people do things they regret all the time that isn't necessarily the fault of someone else (even if it was someone else's idea).

[Eva Yojimbo]

There are so many little details and foreshadowings throughout it that really makes you appreciate exactly WHY the second half is so powerful because of how meticulously the first half set it up. Hell, there's stuff in the first half that doesn't pay off until the film!

Seeing that stuff on a second watch was what really confirmed to me that NGE was more than just a pretty good show. So much stuff comes off differently with a fuller context. Even the gag with Misato telling Ritsuko on the phone about how she won't be messing with Shinji gets payoff in the movie.

I think the thing the thing that most impressed me with multiple rewatches though in this aspect is how differently Gendo comes off. That first watch, its easy to buy into that stern evil genius persona he has going. Rewatches really makes it clear that despite the airs he puts on, he really is just like Shinji and that puts A LOT of the show into a different perspective than I had at first.

First time through: "Ah man, Shinji just needs some self-confidence."

Second time through: "Oh fuck, Shinji with self-confidence will just be Gendo and Gendo is a bad guy".

Yeah, and there's tons of examples like that you mention with Misato and Ritsuko. One I remember noticing in the first episode was how the letter Shinji got from Gendo had been taped back together, which means he must've ripped it apart when he got it, but had second thoughts and put it back together. Of course, there's also all the establishing of the series' various motifs: red/blue dichotomy, hands, water, etc. When you rewatch the first half looking for this stuff, it's surprising just how much is there. Even on a "filler" episode like 10 you have that cool little motif of Rei diving into the blue water, which becomes Shinji/Asuka diving into the molten red lava to really drive home the parallels they're making, which is symbolic of Shinji's whole decision between life/red/maturity/individuality/consciousness/Asuka and death/blue/mother/collectivity/unconsciousness/Rei-Yui.

Very true about Gendo too.

[Gendo]

The reason I was drawn to Gendo as a character to use for internet handles was primarily because he was a romantic who didn't give up. He would do whatever it takes for his wife, and that is all that really matters to him.

[Raxivace]

Kieslowski's hard to get into because his best works are a 10-part TV show (Dekalog) and a 3-part film Trilogy (Blue, White, Red). That said, he did make a few great standalone films, including Double Life of Veronique (probably the best starting place), Blind Chance, and No End. The latter two already has his thematic depth, but visually/cinematically they aren't as good as Veronique, Three Colors, and (to a lesser extent) Dekalog.

Yeah I've heard about the Colors Trilogy and the Dekalog before just through having general film knowledge but for whatever reason I just haven't made the jump to them yet. One of those standalones is probably where I'll start though.

Maybe I'll even go as far as making the Big K here one of my long-term watching projects for next year, alongside finishing Godard, finishing Best Picture winners, exploring Taiwanese New Wave, watching more forgotten mecha anime of yester-year, and...finishing Miyazaki's films.

*le shocking gasp from all Pitter's Placers*

*dramatic thunderbolt crackles in the distance*

*Animals all the way in the forest minding their own business chewing grass or something suddenly look up in disbelief*

Yeah that's right, 2019 is going to be a hell of a year.

I also don't want to make it seem like I'm denigrating the Coens at all. I do love them, but for me it's less their "trickiness" and more their mastery over tone, setting, and genres and how they're able to integrate these cool themes into them so it all works together. I mean, I think their early work was excellent in itself because even back then they had the tone/setting/genre thing down (especially with Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing), but with their newer films they've just added that extra layer of thematic substance so it's deepened their work significantly, even if I don't think they're all that tricky, per se.

Tbh I mostly just wanted to talk about "Them Coen boys" as if I were a stereotypical farmer or something for a moment there lol.

Last Tango stuff

It sounds like we're largely in agreement about the difficulties here. It just makes it hard for me to know if there's a moral problem or not with watching Last Tango even compared to someone like Polanski. At least its not the production of Chinatown itself, for example, that's in question with the controversies around him.

Not that even if I determine that there is a moral issue that I'm trying to condemn audiences or fans of Last Tango or anything, or even to say it isn't technically a good film or whatever.

[Raxivace]

Hot damn, the Netflix announcement has really hyped me for NGE all over again.

Yeah, and there's tons of examples like that you mention with Misato and Ritsuko. One I remember noticing in the first episode was how the letter Shinji got from Gendo had been taped back together, which means he must've ripped it apart when he got it, but had second thoughts and put it back together.

Interesting. I'm not sure I've ever consciously noticed that before.

Of course, there's also all the establishing of the series' various motifs: red/blue dichotomy, hands, water, etc. When you rewatch the first half looking for this stuff, it's surprising just how much is there.

Speaking of motifs, did you ever see this EGF thread? A lot of people seem to take some of Anno's quoted, uh, quotes, as confirmation of that one Tsurumaki quote about the religious symbolism that you just love.

I wonder though. I feel like the one of the Anno quotes that gets brought up...

- During the Eva Boom books such as "Reading the Dead Sea Scrolls" came out. Did you anticipate that?

Anno: I could somehow understand that. When I was in middle school, because I loved the anime "Space Battleship Yamato," being interested in the wave motion gun, warp drive, and so on, I would buy "blue backs" [Kodansha books on popular science]. (laughs) My knowledge of the theory of relativity and so on was due to the influence of Yamato. I feel it's fine by itself if people become interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls because of that [because of Eva]. If through that they get interested in psychology and move on to that direction, it will also be interesting. As for the elements relating to Christianity, I just researched them quickly using dictionary-like books. Because these sort of convenient things exist in the world, (laughs) around the time when we were students, the anime "Macross" was showing on TV, and there was a "catalog generation," a generation interested in nothing but "specs" and catalogs. They would only evaluate things on the basis of "catalog-like" elements. They didn't care about "interior" elements but were only caught up in what was on the surface. So, you can extend that [idea]. [In Eva] there are various "keyword-like" terms but, in truth, these are just symbols. They don't really have meanings taken individually. As they are mixed together, for the first time something like an interrelationship or a meaning emerges. If you investigate each one individually you will very quickly reach the bottom.

...In this bit I've bolded, at least, tends to give more credence to your interpretations of the use of Christian symbols in the series, but I don't see anyone in the thread really addressing that.

At six pages its a bit of read but I'd be curious about your thoughts. You yourself actually come up a couple of times in the thread (From several members who seem to now be banned) lol.

[Raxivace]

The reason I was drawn to Gendo as a character to use for internet handles was primarily because he was a romantic who didn't give up. He would do whatever it takes for his wife, and that is all that really matters to him.

A big part of his character though is that traits that initially seems positive (Wanting to help the people you love, not giving up etc.) can be taken to terrible extremes that only hurts others. Even though Gendo starts from a sympathetic place, I think this ultimately makes him a bad guy.

You see these traits in Shinji at time too, particularly in EoE and especially in the Rebuild films where its a large point of the shift in narrative of those movies.

[Gendo]

The reason I was drawn to Gendo as a character to use for internet handles was primarily because he was a romantic who didn't give up. He would do whatever it takes for his wife, and that is all that really matters to him.

A big part of his character though is that traits that initially seems positive (Wanting to help the people you love, not giving up etc.) can be taken to terrible extremes that only hurts others. Even though Gendo starts from a sympathetic place, I think this ultimately makes him a bad guy.

You see these traits in Shinji at time too, particularly in EoE and especially in the Rebuild films where its a large point of the shift in narrative of those movies.

Yeah agreed. At the time (high school), I didn't care about such things though; it was just like "man this guy is always in charge and in control of everything, he's awesome!"

[Eva Yojimbo]

Kieslowski's hard to get into because his best works are a 10-part TV show (Dekalog) and a 3-part film Trilogy (Blue, White, Red). That said, he did make a few great standalone films, including Double Life of Veronique (probably the best starting place), Blind Chance, and No End. The latter two already has his thematic depth, but visually/cinematically they aren't as good as Veronique, Three Colors, and (to a lesser extent) Dekalog.

Yeah I've heard about the Colors Trilogy and the Dekalog before just through having general film knowledge but for whatever reason I just haven't made the jump to them yet. One of those standalones is probably where I'll start though.

Maybe I'll even go as far as making the Big K here one of my long-term watching projects for next year, alongside finishing Godard, finishing Best Picture winners, exploring Taiwanese New Wave, watching more forgotten mecha anime of yester-year, and...finishing Miyazaki's films.

At least with Kieslowski (unlike, say, Godard) you won't have as much material to watch. It's basically a one-season TV show and then 10 features (in terms of what's available, at least). There are a lot of early documentaries that I haven't seen.

Yeah that's right, 2019 is going to be a hell of a year.

Sounds like it!

Last Tango stuff

It sounds like we're largely in agreement about the difficulties here. It just makes it hard for me to know if there's a moral problem or not with watching Last Tango even compared to someone like Polanski. At least its not the production of Chinatown itself, for example, that's in question with the controversies around him.

Not that even if I determine that there is a moral issue that I'm trying to condemn audiences or fans of Last Tango or anything, or even to say it isn't technically a good film or whatever.

To me, there's more of a moral problem still to this day with something like Birth of a Nation, which is explicitly racist no matter how influential it was to the development of film as an art-form. Sometimes bad people make great art, and even if that's the case with Last Tango or Polanski's films, the content isn't a direct reflection of that unlike with BOAN. It helps that those involved are already dead, so it's not like you're supporting them financially either.

Of course, there's also all the establishing of the series' various motifs: red/blue dichotomy, hands, water, etc. When you rewatch the first half looking for this stuff, it's surprising just how much is there.

Speaking of motifs, did you ever see this EGF thread? A lot of people seem to take some of Anno's quoted, uh, quotes, as confirmation of that one Tsurumaki quote about the religious symbolism that you just love.

I kinda skimmed through the thread. I guess I'm most amused that I'm still on Xard's mind!

Where is Jimbo when I need him?

I WANT THOSE DELICIOUS TEARS

I literally have no idea why he thinks I'd cry over this, or why Alaska Slim would think I'd think Anno was lying. It seems to me that after all these years these people are still, one, utterly clueless as to what my interpretation of the religious symbolism actually was, two, utterly clueless as to what I think that interpretation had to do with Anno's level of knowledge or intention, and three, utterly clueless as to how artists tend to use symbolism and references. When Anno said: "As for the elements relating to Christianity, I just researched them quickly using dictionary-like books," that's literally all that's needed to make significant and/or meaningful use of symbolism. I have no idea why these people think that an artists needs to have been some kind of scholar, or even to have actually read the works they've cited/used, to make their references and symbolism meaningful. Now, sure, sometimes it's completely meaningless; the clue that Anno didn't know much (perhaps anything) about some of his references was pretty obvious with stuff like The Oral Stage or The Sickness Unto Death that had literally nothing to do with anything in NGE or its themes. However, when Anno has Shinji crucified on a cross, it's pretty fucking clear that Anno knew at least how the cross was used in The Bible on a story level even if he didn't know (or care about) its specifically Christian significance. The fact that Misato wears a cross as a reminder of a sacrifice someone else made to save her life must either be pure coincidence, or evidence that Anno also knew that the cross, at the very least, had THAT kind of significance. The fact that Shinji just happens to be such an ironic contrast to Jesus was doubtfully something he consciously thought of either, but it adds that extra layer of significance whether intended or not.

Really, the substance of my interpretation was about the Jungian archetypal significance of these symbols. I'd expressed doubt before that Anno had ever read Jung, but the thing with Jung was that these archetypes were all part of the "collective unconscious" anyway, so whether you intended some kind of meaning with such symbols was rather irrelevant in terms of their archetypal significance. Significance isn't meaning; the latter (usually) must be intended, the former doesn't. Artists tend to be really intuitive about recognizing the significance of whatever symbols or references or sources they're drawing from even if they never consciously parsed it all out. Like, all it would've taken would've been for Anno to know that the "Fruit of Knowledge" caused the fall of man/punishment from God in Genesis to completely appropriate that concept for the show. He didn't have to know anything beyond that, none of the theological stuff about original sin or how that impacted man's relationship with the Christian God, and that's almost certainly he could've learned from a quick scan of some reference book. So, far from thinking he's lying, I actually think his comments pretty much confirm what I've been saying all along. I'm just baffled by the fact that as much I wrote about that stuff back in the day, so many on EGF still don't get it... like, at all. Of course, that bit you quoted/bolded helps as well.

To me, it would've almost been more impressive if Anno had said he'd never read anything about Christianity at all. He just randomly saw a cross one day and thought to use it in the manner similar to how it's used in The Bible, or he'd never heard of The Fruit of Knowledge and just happened to use it as a symbol for a cataclysmic event that impacted all of mankind, or he'd never heard of/read Genesis but just happened to use it as the title for this show where the characters are fighting to get back to a oneness with God, that just happens to accidentally reflect Jung's interpretation of Genesis and how God is the mother and the womb is Eden. If all of that had been by pure accident, and Anno had no knowledge, even purely superficially, of this stuff, then he would literally be on par creatively with the people that wrote the single most significant book in the history of mankind. If anything, I think what Anno ACTUALLY did--skim a few reference books, learn a very little about the things he referenced/used as symbols--is far more normal and typical in terms of what artists actually do. That the people on EGF don't get this is just more proof that they don't seem to understand how creative minds work at all.

Also, and this is completely tangential, I tend to think the misunderstanding of creative minds, or of even the capabilities of naturally creative minds, is one thing that leads to things like religious fundamentalism. Like, people can't grasp metaphor and allegory and symbolism so everything gets taken literally, and because they can't even imagine how creative minds work, they think it must've literally happened because nobody would've been capable of just making this stuff up. I even see something similar in the conspiracy theories that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, most of which revolves around incredulity that some lower-middle-class guy who couldn't have had much schooling could've made up everything he did (never mind all of the blatant factual errors; those don't count, for some reason). You can see it in that EGF thread where there's this false dichotomy that either Anno had to know a lot about all of these symbols and references he used, or it's completely meaningless. It's just reflective of people who just, on a fundamental level, don't understand art or artists or artistry at all.

Just reading through the thread a bit more:

to think that I tried so hard to seek deeper knowledge from Evangelion thinking he was hiding some deep insight about religion and occultism...

Well, yeah, I would've told you that was a mistake.

At the end I think his main contribution is more on the front of "depression psychology" and how much he wanted to "wake up" the otakus by brutally crushing their comfort zone (but at the end neither Anno nor the otakus left anime).

Absolutely, but if you'd look at the religious symbolism in light of this you'd see it fits just fine. The entire idea of the show is that Shinji is being sacrificed so that he and all humanity can return to "God" in the form of being in "mother's womb" (the mother of all mankind). This is symbolic of Otaku escapism, using anime to escape reality because it's comforting. None of this is Christian or occult, but the symbols can be appropriated to express these ideas if you abstract their basic non-religious meanings.

TBH, if I was ever able to interview Anno, the first thing I'd ask him wouldn't be anything about meaning or significance or symbolism or psychology or philosophy or any of that "loldeep" shit: it would be "what the hell is going on in ep. 24?!"

Also:

Except that's not really true either, since one doesn't have to be a student of a particular philosophy (or even familiar with it) to produce works that fit its precepts. Just because NGE isn't existentialist in intent doesn't mean it isn't a good fit for it in practice.

That's a bingo.

OK, I'm done. That thread as raised my hackles enough for one day and is a good reminder of why I ultimately left that place.

[Raxivace]

At least with Kieslowski (unlike, say, Godard) you won't have as much material to watch. It's basically a one-season TV show and then 10 features (in terms of what's available, at least). There are a lot of early documentaries that I haven't seen.

Oh that...sounds fairly manageable actually.

To me, there's more of a moral problem still to this day with something like Birth of a Nation, which is explicitly racist no matter how influential it was to the development of film as an art-form. Sometimes bad people make great art, and even if that's the case with Last Tango or Polanski's films, the content isn't a direct reflection of that unlike with BOAN. It helps that those involved are already dead, so it's not like you're supporting them financially either.

This is fair. Even with BOAN I've always argued in favor of people learning that film for historical significance at the very least (If they're film students or whatever at least), and there's no real argument that I can think of off of the top of my head that makes watching BOAN okay but not Last Tango or Polanski's films. BOAN, after all, is something we know did directly lead to others getting significantly harmed, killed etc.

OK, I'm done. That thread as raised my hackles enough for one day and is a good reminder of why I ultimately left that place.

I'm addressing this first, but tbh reading this whole post and then this last bit I feel kind of shitty for linking it in the first place now and perhaps that I crossed a line I shouldn't have. Sorry, I didn't mean to get you like really worked up or anything. I just thought some of the quotes were interesting, especially the one that seemed to actually go against the one Tsurumaki quote to at least an extent.

I kinda skimmed through the thread. I guess I'm most amused that I'm still on Xard's mind!

To be fair that thread started back in 2011, I just came upon it again when I was looking something up there the other day, though even in my time at EGF Xard continued to mention you from time to time (I think it was in more neutral terms than DELICIOUS TEARS though. A couple of times he seemed to even downright miss you) until he eventually got banned. I think the ban is up now, but from what I can tell he never returned.

I literally have no idea why he thinks I'd cry over this, or why Alaska Slim would think I'd think Anno was lying.

I could understand the Anno argument if Slim meant lying in a John Ford "I'm just a humble guy who makes westerns, now go away Bogdanovich you strange ascot-wearing man" downplaying kind of way, but that's not quite the impression I got.

It seems to me that after all these years these people are still, one, utterly clueless as to what my interpretation of the religious symbolism actually was, two, utterly clueless as to what I think that interpretation had to do with Anno's level of knowledge or intention, and three, utterly clueless as to how artists tend to use symbolism and references. When Anno said: "As for the elements relating to Christianity, I just researched them quickly using dictionary-like books," that's literally all that's needed to make significant and/or meaningful use of symbolism. I have no idea why these people think that an artists needs to have been some kind of scholar, or even to have actually read the works they've cited/used, to make their references and symbolism meaningful.

Right. I don't think the argument from "our camp", so to speak, has ever been Anno himself is some kind of theologian making a comment on the nature of Christian theology or whatever, but some of the responses not only in that thread but to NGE as a whole still seem to treat it like that.

What I specifically liked about your interpretations when I first read them there years ago was that that was the kind of argument you precisely weren't making about NGE's use of religious symbols.

Now, sure, sometimes it's completely meaningless; the clue that Anno didn't know much (perhaps anything) about some of his references was pretty obvious with stuff like The Oral Stage or The Sickness Unto Death that had literally nothing to do with anything in NGE or its themes.

Oral Stage in particular is a weird one because considering the amount of other psychosexual things in NGE (And coming from the studio who named a friggin' character as "Jeung Freud" in GunBuster), the fact that the flashback episode with Gendo and Yui actually has Shinji as a baby etc., it wouldn't have been that hard to actually incorporate in some meaningful fashion.

However, when Anno has Shinji crucified on a cross, it's pretty fucking clear that Anno knew at least how the cross was used in The Bible on a story level even if he didn't know (or care about) its specifically Christian significance. The fact that Misato wears a cross as a reminder of a sacrifice someone else made to save her life must either be pure coincidence, or evidence that Anno also knew that the cross, at the very least, had THAT kind of significance. The fact that Shinji just happens to be such an ironic contrast to Jesus was doubtfully something he consciously thought of either, but it adds that extra layer of significance whether intended or not.

100% agreed.

Really, the substance of my interpretation was about the Jungian archetypal significance of these symbols.

Another paragraph I agree with.

Maybe people assumed you were making a much more convoluted and different argument than you actually were? Idk.

So, far from thinking he's lying, I actually think his comments pretty much confirm what I've been saying all along. I'm just baffled by the fact that as much I wrote about that stuff back in the day, so many on EGF still don't get it... like, at all. Of course, that bit you quoted/bolded helps as well.

Yeah that's why I wanted your thoughts on the quotes from this thread specifically.

That the people on EGF don't get this is just more proof that they don't seem to understand how creative minds work at all.

Well I'm sure they understand art...uh...doesn't fall out of a void fully formed at least?

Also, and this is completely tangential, I tend to think the misunderstanding of creative minds, or of even the capabilities of naturally creative minds, is one thing that leads to things like religious fundamentalism. Like, people can't grasp metaphor and allegory and symbolism so everything gets taken literally, and because they can't even imagine how creative minds work, they think it must've literally happened because nobody would've been capable of just making this stuff up.

Perhaps. From my more hardcore atheism days I'm used to arguing against Biblical claims as completely literal myself and not really used to thinking of them as more poetic, so I'm probably too biased to really have a meaningful opinion here.

I even see something similar in the conspiracy theories that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, most of which revolves around incredulity that some lower-middle-class guy who couldn't have had much schooling could've made up everything he did (never mind all of the blatant factual errors; those don't count, for some reason). You can see it in that EGF thread where there's this false dichotomy that either Anno had to know a lot about all of these symbols and references he used, or it's completely meaningless. It's just reflective of people who just, on a fundamental level, don't understand art or artists or artistry at all.

Again even though I could laugh at the Earl of Oxford nonsense, I myself was pretty vehemently on a single side in the recent Double Falsehood controversy just because how "obviously fake" Lewis Theobald's story about finding Cardenio sounded to me (Perhaps similar to the guy who who claimed to find a "new" Beatles album called Everyday Chemistry when he visited an alternate universe where the band never broke up, though IIRC that came out as just a fun bit of promotion anyways), but scientific evidence in favor of Double Falsehood actually likely being derived from Shakespearean text is against me.

Anyways I of course agree with what you're saying about the false dichotomy. That's pretty close to my impression of people who post on internet forums, Reddit, etc. in general, that the background in the arts just isn't there to any meaningful degree in terms of their collective user base.

Not that I claim to be an expert or anything myself but sometimes it gets frustrating that the level of discourse on much of the internet seems so...low, even on places that occasionally do try to have more indepth discussion.

Just reading through the thread a bit more:

to think that I tried so hard to seek deeper knowledge from Evangelion thinking he was hiding some deep insight about religion and occultism...

Well, yeah, I would've told you that was a mistake.

At the end I think his main contribution is more on the front of "depression psychology" and how much he wanted to "wake up" the otakus by brutally crushing their comfort zone (but at the end neither Anno nor the otakus left anime).

Absolutely, but if you'd look at the religious symbolism in light of this you'd see it fits just fine. The entire idea of the show is that Shinji is being sacrificed so that he and all humanity can return to "God" in the form of being in "mother's womb" (the mother of all mankind). This is symbolic of Otaku escapism, using anime to escape reality because it's comforting. None of this is Christian or occult, but the symbols can be appropriated to express these ideas if you abstract their basic non-religious meanings.

Yeah I thought maybe symbv was joking with that first line looking at it again, I dunno what they're going on about.

TBH, if I was ever able to interview Anno, the first thing I'd ask him wouldn't be anything about meaning or significance or symbolism or psychology or philosophy or any of that "loldeep" shit: it would be "what the hell is going on in ep. 24?!"

I don't think the famous "episode 24 plothole" will ever be filled lol.

[Eva Yojimbo]

To me, there's more of a moral problem still to this day with something like Birth of a Nation, which is explicitly racist no matter how influential it was to the development of film as an art-form. Sometimes bad people make great art, and even if that's the case with Last Tango or Polanski's films, the content isn't a direct reflection of that unlike with BOAN. It helps that those involved are already dead, so it's not like you're supporting them financially either.

This is fair. Even with BOAN I've always argued in favor of people learning that film for historical significance at the very least (If they're film students or whatever at least), and there's no real argument that I can think of off of the top of my head that makes watching BOAN okay but not Last Tango or Polanski's films. BOAN, after all, is something we know did directly lead to others getting significantly harmed, killed etc.

It also kinda sucks that all of these happen to be great films too. Like, if they were mediocre films it wouldn't matter and be easy enough to avoid. You ever read Ebert's review of BOAN? It's pretty much the definitive take on the matter, IMO.

OK, I'm done. That thread as raised my hackles enough for one day and is a good reminder of why I ultimately left that place.

I'm addressing this first, but tbh reading this whole post and then this last bit I feel kind of shitty for linking it in the first place now and perhaps that I crossed a line I shouldn't have. Sorry, I didn't mean to get you like really worked up or anything. I just thought some of the quotes were interesting, especially the one that seemed to actually go against the one Tsurumaki quote to at least an extent.

Nah, don't worry about it man, no reason to feel shitty and you didn't cross a line. It just brought up some sour memories from that place. Still, it was nice to write that in a context where at least I feel like it could be understood/appreciated. Playing Witcher 3 worked me up more than that. :) (I'm actually serious about that; during the month that I played Witcher 3 my resting heart rate was about 10 beats higher than normal!)

I kinda skimmed through the thread. I guess I'm most amused that I'm still on Xard's mind!

To be fair that thread started back in 2011, I just came upon it again when I was looking something up there the other day, though even in my time at EGF Xard continued to mention you from time to time (I think it was in more neutral terms than DELICIOUS TEARS though. A couple of times he seemed to even downright miss you) until he eventually got banned. I think the ban is up now, but from what I can tell he never returned.

Not surprised he eventually got banned. He always did like playing things on the edge with his quasi-trolling.

It seems to me that after all these years these people are still, one, utterly clueless as to what my interpretation of the religious symbolism actually was, two, utterly clueless as to what I think that interpretation had to do with Anno's level of knowledge or intention, and three, utterly clueless as to how artists tend to use symbolism and references. When Anno said: "As for the elements relating to Christianity, I just researched them quickly using dictionary-like books," that's literally all that's needed to make significant and/or meaningful use of symbolism. I have no idea why these people think that an artists needs to have been some kind of scholar, or even to have actually read the works they've cited/used, to make their references and symbolism meaningful.

Right. I don't think the argument from "our camp", so to speak, has ever been Anno himself is some kind of theologian making a comment on the nature of Christian theology or whatever, but some of the responses not only in that thread but to NGE as a whole still seem to treat it like that.

What I specifically liked about your interpretations when I first read them there years ago was that that was the kind of argument you precisely weren't making about NGE's use of religious symbols.

I even remember once saying that had Anno picked some ancient religion nobody would be having this problem, but because he picked the world's biggest religion people seem to naturally assume he must be saying something about that religion. It's a little weird how people wouldn't assume if he used, say, Norse mythology that he was endorsing or commenting on it as a religion, but because he used Christianity he must've been commenting on the religion in some way.

Really, the substance of my interpretation was about the Jungian archetypal significance of these symbols.

Another paragraph I agree with.

Maybe people assumed you were making a much more convoluted and different argument than you actually were? Idk.

I don't know either. It also reminds me of the whole "crossplosions were foreshadowing" thing that I once proposed that turned into a whole controversy. My basic thing was "Anno used stuff like crossplosions to set up a symbol/device that he probably knew he was going to use later," and people weirdly didn't think this was foreshadowing. That thread's a bit of a clusterfuck to wade through, though.

So, far from thinking he's lying, I actually think his comments pretty much confirm what I've been saying all along. I'm just baffled by the fact that as much I wrote about that stuff back in the day, so many on EGF still don't get it... like, at all. Of course, that bit you quoted/bolded helps as well.

Yeah that's why I wanted your thoughts on the quotes from this thread specifically.

I actually think that bolded bit is pretty spot-on. Every symbol/reference in NGE is pretty shallow taken individually, but when you add them up and consider them together it does go much deeper, and I almost feel like what Anno's saying is that, in order to get people looking past the superficial he used these symbols as a way of provoking that kind of reflection and view. It's basically what I've been saying for ages about NGE presenting this superficial, traditional, mecha-anime like veneer early on, but then using all of its various devices to rip through it later on to get to what it was all really about, to the point that surface is completely gone by EOTV, and in EOE it's re-established only to be completely fucked up by all of the allegorical stuff.

That the people on EGF don't get this is just more proof that they don't seem to understand how creative minds work at all.

Well I'm sure they understand art...uh...doesn't fall out of a void fully formed at least?

It's hard to tell sometimes! I mean, I don't want to cast everyone there in one single, broad stroke, but I often did get the distinct impression in many discussions on there that I was talking to people who really hadn't spent much time thinking about this stuff. That said, I'm sure my philosophical ramblings probably came across similarly to Xard who had (or was at the time) studying philosophy in-depth and, I think, was even a philosophy major in college.

Also, and this is completely tangential, I tend to think the misunderstanding of creative minds, or of even the capabilities of naturally creative minds, is one thing that leads to things like religious fundamentalism. Like, people can't grasp metaphor and allegory and symbolism so everything gets taken literally, and because they can't even imagine how creative minds work, they think it must've literally happened because nobody would've been capable of just making this stuff up.

Perhaps. From my more hardcore atheism days I'm used to arguing against Biblical claims as completely literal myself and not really used to thinking of them as more poetic, so I'm probably too biased to really have a meaningful opinion here.

I completely get that as it's something I've done too, in large part because it seems fundamentalism is the dominant mode of religion in America so it's inevitably and largely what atheists like us end up confronting. The things that broke me away from that was reading Blake, Jung, and Stevens. All of them dealt with religions on a symbolic level. Blake, much like Anno, even took a lot of Christian symbols and created his own allegory/mythology that was incredibly dense (so much so his contemporaries thought him mad). Of course, Jung had all of these "collective unconscious" allegorical readings for religions, and Stevens thought of religion as "The Supreme Fiction," or fiction that spoke so profoundly to our experience as humans that we took it as "true" on a level deeper than most ordinary truths (For perhaps the most succinct version of his thoughts in poetry, I always liked the first four sections of The Man With the Blue Guitar). This is also kinda something that someone like Jordan Peterson has taken up today, though I dislike most of his politics and idiosyncratic use of common terms without clarification.

I even see something similar in the conspiracy theories that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, most of which revolves around incredulity that some lower-middle-class guy who couldn't have had much schooling could've made up everything he did (never mind all of the blatant factual errors; those don't count, for some reason). You can see it in that EGF thread where there's this false dichotomy that either Anno had to know a lot about all of these symbols and references he used, or it's completely meaningless. It's just reflective of people who just, on a fundamental level, don't understand art or artists or artistry at all.

Again even though I could laugh at the Earl of Oxford nonsense, I myself was pretty vehemently on a single side in the recent Double Falsehood controversy just because how "obviously fake" Lewis Theobald's story about finding Cardenio sounded to me (Perhaps similar to the guy who who claimed to find a "new" Beatles album called Everyday Chemistry when he visited an alternate universe where the band never broke up, though IIRC that came out as just a fun bit of promotion anyways), but scientific evidence in favor of Double Falsehood actually likely being derived from Shakespearean text is against me.

Anyways I of course agree with what you're saying about the false dichotomy. That's pretty close to my impression of people who post on internet forums, Reddit, etc. in general, that the background in the arts just isn't there to any meaningful degree in terms of their collective user base.

Not that I claim to be an expert or anything myself but sometimes it gets frustrating that the level of discourse on much of the internet seems so...low, even on places that occasionally do try to have more indepth discussion.

Speaking of which I still haven't checked out Double Falsehood or any of the stuff revolving around it. Really should get to it if only for completion's sake. Still, a lot of the plays he co-wrote aren't very good themselves. It's amazing reading the Henry VI trilogy to see just how far he came by the time of writing Richard III, not to mention Henry IV/V.

Just reading through the thread a bit more:

to think that I tried so hard to seek deeper knowledge from Evangelion thinking he was hiding some deep insight about religion and occultism...

Well, yeah, I would've told you that was a mistake.

At the end I think his main contribution is more on the front of "depression psychology" and how much he wanted to "wake up" the otakus by brutally crushing their comfort zone (but at the end neither Anno nor the otakus left anime).

Absolutely, but if you'd look at the religious symbolism in light of this you'd see it fits just fine. The entire idea of the show is that Shinji is being sacrificed so that he and all humanity can return to "God" in the form of being in "mother's womb" (the mother of all mankind). This is symbolic of Otaku escapism, using anime to escape reality because it's comforting. None of this is Christian or occult, but the symbols can be appropriated to express these ideas if you abstract their basic non-religious meanings.

Yeah I thought maybe symbv was joking with that first line looking at it again, I dunno what they're going on about.

I don't think he's joking, I really think a lot of people think like this. Part of it maybe that if NGE has the kind of impact on you as it did on myself, then perhaps it's natural to look for some kind of religious significance in it, because it seems almost too powerful to just be about "human" things. Not that I think that's actually true, but I think perhaps that's where some people's intuitions go to, especially if they have a naturally religious/spiritual bent.

TBH, if I was ever able to interview Anno, the first thing I'd ask him wouldn't be anything about meaning or significance or symbolism or psychology or philosophy or any of that "loldeep" shit: it would be "what the hell is going on in ep. 24?!"

I don't think the famous "episode 24 plothole" will ever be filled lol.

I still think that it might just be something wonky in the English translation. Surely they couldn't have just inserted this huge plothole out of nowhere, right?

[Eva Yojimbo]

And, btw, in case I'm sounding too bitter with the EGF stuff, I'm also reminded that sometimes my idea went over just fine. It's a bit weird even how somteimes I'd say something in one thread and everyone there would agree, and then say the same thing elsewhere and everyone would lose their shit. Here's one of the, errr, more agreeable times: http://forum.evageeks.org/post/252358/R ... on/#252358

[Raxivace]

It also kinda sucks that all of these happen to be great films too. Like, if they were mediocre films it wouldn't matter and be easy enough to avoid. You ever read Ebert's review of BOAN? It's pretty much the definitive take on the matter, IMO.

It's been a while but yeah. I seem to recall him being the one who called BOAN "cinema's original sin", and that always stuck with me.

Did you ever see Rebirth of a Nation? A guy named DJ Spooky tried to take a hiphop approach to the movie by remixing the movie in a way to undermine it. It had a pretty cool score too, though I kind of wish he went further with the whole project. At times it just feels like listening to a DVD commentary.

The intro to the film was put on YouTube as a trailer of sorts if you're curious.

Nah, don't worry about it man, no reason to feel shitty and you didn't cross a line. It just brought up some sour memories from that place. Still, it was nice to write that in a context where at least I feel like it could be understood/appreciated. Playing Witcher 3 worked me up more than that. :) (I'm actually serious about that; during the month that I played Witcher 3 my resting heart rate was about 10 beats higher than normal!)

Ah that makes me feel better.

I even remember once saying that had Anno picked some ancient religion nobody would be having this problem, but because he picked the world's biggest religion people seem to naturally assume he must be saying something about that religion. It's a little weird how people wouldn't assume if he used, say, Norse mythology that he was endorsing or commenting on it as a religion, but because he used Christianity he must've been commenting on the religion in some way.

Yeah I'll never get where that disconnect is coming from. It's not like even these don't have the problem of watching, say, the MCU movies and thinking those endorse any particular religion just because Thor is running around.

I don't know either. It also reminds me of the whole "crossplosions were foreshadowing" thing that I once proposed that turned into a whole controversy. My basic thing was "Anno used stuff like crossplosions to set up a symbol/device that he probably knew he was going to use later," and people weirdly didn't think this was foreshadowing. That thread's a bit of a clusterfuck to wade through, though.

Lol, of course the first line here when I open the link is about Asuka's boobs.

I remember reading the "Omnislashing" (A reference you will soon get once you finish FF7!!!) thread before, but I don't think I knew it sprung from a discussion about foreshadowing of all things.

I'll admit to finding it a little unusual to discuss the crosssplosions as foreshadowing at first (For reasons I'm not entirely sure why)...though thinking about it, people discuss stuff like the oranges in The Godfather the same way without batting an eye, and talking about the crossplosions that way really isn't any different at all. Its certainly easier to see the connection between Shinji seeing visions of crosses after killing angels before he himself eventually gets crucified and faces ego death than it is to see the connection between a delicious citrus fruit and getting murdered.

Maybe if the Godfather example had been brought up, that weird discussion about defining foreshadowing could have gone more smoothly. Perhaps history itself would have changed.

Also the talk of Anno retroactively making something from early in the series to match something at the end reminds me of how I'm like 99.99% certain that Lost did exactly that. If you ever get around watching all 60000 hours of Lost you'll have to remind me to bring it up.

I actually think that bolded bit is pretty spot-on. Every symbol/reference in NGE is pretty shallow taken individually, but when you add them up and consider them together it does go much deeper, and I almost feel like what Anno's saying is that, in order to get people looking past the superficial he used these symbols as a way of provoking that kind of reflection and view. It's basically what I've been saying for ages about NGE presenting this superficial, traditional, mecha-anime like veneer early on, but then using all of its various devices to rip through it later on to get to what it was all really about, to the point that surface is completely gone by EOTV, and in EOE it's re-established only to be completely fucked up by all of the allegorical stuff.

Yeah we're in agreement here.

It's hard to tell sometimes! I mean, I don't want to cast everyone there in one single, broad stroke, but I often did get the distinct impression in many discussions on there that I was talking to people who really hadn't spent much time thinking about this stuff. That said, I'm sure my philosophical ramblings probably came across similarly to Xard who had (or was at the time) studying philosophy in-depth and, I think, was even a philosophy major in college.

I believe Xard did major in that, yeah.

I wouldn't cast that broad stroke either because, well, I myself was a member there lol. I think I'm even the last post in the Bible thread. I'm not sure if I ever told you this before but my user name on there was "The Killer of Heroes", a reference to a goofy video game villain that I think the members didn't get and thought was actually just edgelordy or something lol. :(

This is also kinda something that someone like Jordan Peterson has taken up today, though I dislike most of his politics and idiosyncratic use of common terms without clarification.

Wait what's the deal with Peterson? I know people dislike him but I've never really looked into him before.

Speaking of which I still haven't checked out Double Falsehood or any of the stuff revolving around it. Really should get to it if only for completion's sake. Still, a lot of the plays he co-wrote aren't very good themselves. It's amazing reading the Henry VI trilogy to see just how far he came by the time of writing Richard III, not to mention Henry IV/V.

I didn't care much at all for Double Falsehood itself when I read it back in college. I think its very much a case where everything else surrounding it- the debate around the play's authorship, Lewis Theobald and his goofy ass life, Arden Shakespeare and if they should have even sold the play under their label or not etc. are much much more interesting than the play itself.

I haven't read Henry VI though that reminds me that I still have the second season of The Hollow Crown to watch and they adapt all three parts of that across two films (As well as a third film covering Richard III but I've seen several versions of that already too). I really liked the first season, I should get on that next year.

Not that I think that's actually true, but I think perhaps that's where some people's intuitions go to, especially if they have a naturally religious/spiritual bent.

I guess. That kind of thinking is just so foreign to my own that I can't even put myself in the position of truly thinking that way. Even when I consider the many number of times my brother has almost died it's never been "Oh thank you Jesus thou art in heaven" that goes through my head when he luckily ends up okay, it's been "Oh thank god we have competent medical professionals again" (The latter here of which has not always been the case).

Okay maybe I use "Oh thank god" as an expression without even thinking about it, but that's more a quirk of the atheist experience in America at this point.

I still think that it might just be something wonky in the English translation. Surely they couldn't have just inserted this huge plothole out of nowhere, right?

When I rewatch Eva I'll try and pay attention to this again.

Before I think I settled on it just being a goof (Especially with Rebuild 1.11 immediately telling us and Shinji upfront that its Lilith down there, avoiding that whole weird narrative strand entirely. It of course doesn't even come up in 3.33 either and that's largely a remake of Ep. 24 (Of course this all assumes that trying to determine Anno and co.'s thinking on NGE from something he/they made years and years later after the fact is even possible, anyways.)). The whole "Is it Adam or Lilith in the basement" mixup thing is such a bizarre plotline to begin with that even without the 24' plothole I might honestly consider it something of a mark against the series.

A translation issue is possible, not that I could help identifying or fixing a possible one.

[Raxivace]

Of course its worth bringing up again too that "Adam" also appears in Nadia's final episodes, but that Adam resembles more what we actually call Lilith in NGE, which makes the whole thing .

[Raxivace]

222. Pravda (1970, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Henri Roger, & Paul Burron) - Unfortunately I was able to find a copy of this film on the internet. It was a from cheap VHS rip. It looked terrible. Fitting for a terrible movie. Any aesthetic virtue of this film is rendered invisible. I'm left with nothing but the drabbest of drab lecturing about Communism. Lectures I don't even necessarily disagree with all of, but dull none the less.

Other than that, uh, it was mostly in English I guess. Two of the narrators are named Vladimir and Rosa, which is interesting since of the later Godards I have to watch is just straight up called “Vladimir and Rosa"- perhaps they're in continuity or something.

Anyways if you hate yourself enough to watch this, here is the link below.

http://www.ubu.com/film/vertov_pravda.html

223. Daicon Films' Return of Ultraman (1983, Dir. Hideaki Anno) - From what I can tell this is Anno's directing debut. Back when he was in college, Anno made this >30-minute live action fanfilm where he himself played Ultraman and its about as goofy as you expect.

Even here you can already see a lot of his style in place (Though not quite as developed), and the passion for giant monster battles that would manifest again in Evangelion and Shin Godzilla is here too in all that glory. Of course the character work is sparse but that's not why you watch something like this anyways.

224. A Star is Born (1954, Dir. George Cukor) - It feels weird to say this but this was only my second Judy Garland. I've seen Wizard of Oz so many times over the course of my life though that it sure doesn't feel like only my second one.

Anyways I generally found this to be superior to the 1937 version, largely because of Garland. She's just fantastic here from beginning to end. That extended film within the film sequence right before the interlude in particular is just dazzling. James Mason and the rest of the cast are good too of course but I found myself tapping my foot in enjoyment often to Garland's songs.

The ways this version differs from the previous one is curious though. We don't see Esther's life before coming to Hollywood, and the entire grandmother character is cut out of the film entirely. In a sense, the '54 version actually has a more limited narrative scope because of this, despite the 3-hour run time in the version I watched (It's a shame they had to resort to using audio over production stills to help restore the movie to Cukor's intended vision but I appreciate the effort).

I also didn't like the use of the lipstick Cupid heart in the movie as much. I feel like the use of the Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the '37 version is just way more poignant and fitting as not only a sort of “message of encouragement from beyond the grave", but the ironic repetition of is just much stronger in general (In a sense it confirms the grandmother's bittersweet prophecy from the beginning of the film about how Esther will end up with her heart broken. She's not the naïve newcomer to Hollywood anymore but despite the loss of her husband she has gained so much as a person). It also doesn't invite any goofier questions of “Really? Nobody wiped the lipstick off the wall after all this time?" either.

EDIT: I've been calling it a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but looking at that image I posted earlier again I guess its just Norman Maine's signature and foot prints in the cement in the '37 version. Even though it IS outside the Grauman's Chinese Theater, and even though there ARE Stars and such as a part of the Walk of Fame outside of where the Chinese Theater is now (Which is also now under a different name too)...the actual Star system didn't become a thing until the late '50's based on what I'm seeing on Wikipedia.

The basic idea of what I'm saying is the same though, and I still feel its superior to what the '54 version uses.

[Eva Yojimbo]

It also kinda sucks that all of these happen to be great films too. Like, if they were mediocre films it wouldn't matter and be easy enough to avoid. You ever read Ebert's review of BOAN? It's pretty much the definitive take on the matter, IMO.

It's been a while but yeah. I seem to recall him being the one who called BOAN "cinema's original sin", and that always stuck with me.

Did you ever see Rebirth of a Nation? A guy named DJ Spooky tried to take a hiphop approach to the movie by remixing the movie in a way to undermine it. It had a pretty cool score too, though I kind of wish he went further with the whole project. At times it just feels like listening to a DVD commentary.

The intro to the film was put on YouTube as a trailer of sorts if you're curious.

What stuck with me with his review is the quotation about BOAN being like witnessing the birth of melody, and that great quote that that it's not a bad film because it argues for evil, but a great film that argues for evil, and to understand how it does so it is to understand a great deal about film and evil.

Never even heard of Rebirth of a Nation, but that intro does seem interesting.

I don't know either. It also reminds me of the whole "crossplosions were foreshadowing" thing that I once proposed that turned into a whole controversy. My basic thing was "Anno used stuff like crossplosions to set up a symbol/device that he probably knew he was going to use later," and people weirdly didn't think this was foreshadowing. That thread's a bit of a clusterfuck to wade through, though.

Lol, of course the first line here when I open the link is about Asuka's boobs.

I remember reading the "Omnislashing" (A reference you will soon get once you finish FF7!!!) thread before, but I don't think I knew it sprung from a discussion about foreshadowing of all things.

I'll admit to finding it a little unusual to discuss the crosssplosions as foreshadowing at first (For reasons I'm not entirely sure why)...though thinking about it, people discuss stuff like the oranges in The Godfather the same way without batting an eye, and talking about the crossplosions that way really isn't any different at all. Its certainly easier to see the connection between Shinji seeing visions of crosses after killing angels before he himself eventually gets crucified and faces ego death than it is to see the connection between a delicious citrus fruit and getting murdered.

Maybe if the Godfather example had been brought up, that weird discussion about defining foreshadowing could have gone more smoothly. Perhaps history itself would have changed.

Also the talk of Anno retroactively making something from early in the series to match something at the end reminds me of how I'm like 99.99% certain that Lost did exactly that. If you ever get around watching all 60000 hours of Lost you'll have to remind me to bring it up.

Yeah, that thread was about stuff people didn't like in NGE. J_Faulkner was pretty rabidly against anything he considered remotely fan-service, and he (stupidly) included the EOE hospital scene, hence the discussion of Asuka's boobs. I don't know if that thread started the omnislashing thing, but it was definitely my general interactions with JF that provoked it.

Since you find it unusual too, do you think you could articulate why? For me, I was coming at it from literature where the most infamous example is Chekov's Gun: if you show/mention/talk about a gun, that gun should be used later in the plot. To me, you transfer that to NGE and it becomes, if you show a cross, a cross should be used later to crucify someone. What's strange is that, later in that thread, NemZ even said that the image of Lilith crucified could be foreshadowing of Shinji's crucifixion; but that seems wrong to me. You don't show a crucifixion to foreshadow a crucifixion, you show a cross to foreshadow a crucifixion (similar to Chekov's gun; show a gun to foreshadow a shooting, not a shooting to foreshadow a shooting). Everyone also agrees that Misato's "not going to put the moves on the kid" line is foreshadowing, but in neither of the last two instances is there any more evidence/proof (compared to the crossplosions I mean) that Anno had originally planned it as foreshadowing. Here was my most succinct post on the subject: http://forum.evageeks.org/post/327753/W ... on/#327753

Man, I never noticed (or heard about!) that orange thing in The Godfather! Typically, foreshadowing is more intuitive (gun->something that will shoot someone, cross->something that will crucify someone), but I guess it's perfectly fine to create foreshadowing by the repetition of any device/object that's connected to some event. It's also fascinating that what Coppola said about it's usage ("“It started out as an accident", but once we realized we had used oranges so frequently in the first movie, we used them purposefully in the others.") is precisely what I suggested numerous times in that thread about "retro-foreshadowing" and stuff where an artist can go back, look at the "accidental" motifs they've created, and start using them intentionally. Nobody in that thread even seemed to realize this was possible!

It's hard to tell sometimes! I mean, I don't want to cast everyone there in one single, broad stroke, but I often did get the distinct impression in many discussions on there that I was talking to people who really hadn't spent much time thinking about this stuff. That said, I'm sure my philosophical ramblings probably came across similarly to Xard who had (or was at the time) studying philosophy in-depth and, I think, was even a philosophy major in college.

I believe Xard did major in that, yeah.

I wouldn't cast that broad stroke either because, well, I myself was a member there lol. I think I'm even the last post in the Bible thread. I'm not sure if I ever told you this before but my user name on there was "The Killer of Heroes", a reference to a goofy video game villain that I think the members didn't get and thought was actually just edgelordy or something lol. :(

Lots of geeks on there, I'm sure some got the reference.

This is also kinda something that someone like Jordan Peterson has taken up today, though I dislike most of his politics and idiosyncratic use of common terms without clarification.

Wait what's the deal with Peterson? I know people dislike him but I've never really looked into him before.

Man, how much time do you have? Peterson's a really hard guy to pin down, you almost have to take his ideas/opinions/beliefs piecemeal. I think he's fine when he's doing his Jungian analysis of fictional texts and The Bible. Most of this stuff isn't new/revelatory to me, but I understand how it can be for people who've never read Jung/Campbell and others who've written on these kinds of archetypes and recurring symbols, and he is often quite interesting in terms of what links he finds. He's also a clinical psychiatrist who's perhaps most famous for his "12 Rules for Life" book, which seems to me (I haven't read it, but I've read reviews and people talking about it) a kind of self-help book mostly aimed at young men (or perhaps young men are mostly just those reading it) who are kinda lost and anxious and stuff. It's kind of a "get your shit together" approach that has advice like "make your bed" (the idea being to start taking responsibility for getting your life in order and whatnot). I think that's all fine and well, but it's strange to me how many young men seem to act like he's some kind of guru, but some of that maybe a kind of cult of personality thing--he does seem to have that kind of magnetism that a lot of great/influential leaders have, more so than most "public intellectual" types I see.

What made him infamous, though, was his public denouncement of Canada's C-16 Bill which added gender expression/identity to the list of protected groups against hate propaganda and aggravating factor in sentencing. The way I understand it, it's similar to our hate laws here where, eg, if you assault someone it's a crime, but if you assault someone while yelling the n-word it's a hate crime and carries an added sentence. I think C-16 was the same, just an amendment to a pre-existing law about hate crimes. Peterson, though, claimed that it would force him to use people's preferred gender pronouns or he'd be charged with a hate crime; I don't think he was right about this, and many claimed he was anti-transgender because of it. I also think that was wrong; Peterson's objection seemed to be a more general one about government regulating free speech, which he was fundamentally opposed to. I think this sprang from his study of fascist/genocidal regimes and how many of them began by similarly regulating/limiting free speech. That said, not only do I think he was factually wrong about the bill and the notion that he could be charged with a hate crime for not using people's preferred gender pronoun, I also think he has a bad habit of committing the fallacy of thinking that just because two things share some similar feature--like genocidal/fascist regimes limiting free speech and the government having a hate crime bill that would limit (in some small way) free speech)--that they must share other features, like his fear-based notion that the Canadian government is somehow going to turn into a fascist/genocidal regime because of it. He also seems to have a similarly irrational, fear-based notion about "identity politics" in general, in thinking that by getting people to "identify" with some group it's somehow naturally leading to evil regimes.

Finally, in the public debates I've seen him in (with Sam Harris and Matt Dillahunty) mostly concerning religion, Peterson has a very atypical definition of religion/God (to say the least). To him, God is basically people's set of axiomatic values/ideals and anyone who acts upon those things in religious. Under that definition, people can't be atheists. When asked in the Dillahunty debate what he thought an atheist would be, he offered Raskalnikov in Crime & Punishment, someone who went against his innate values to commit murder because he was able to reason himself out of those values and convince himself that murder in that case was justified. Now, I really don't have a problem with him defining God/religion this way (and under that definition it's the only way I'd say I was religious!), but the problem is that he rarely clarifies that this is what he means unless he's asked directly, and a smart guy like him should know that if he's going around talking about God and religion in a primarily fundamentalist country then people are going to assume he's talking about them in the way they understand these concepts, not the way he understands it. He's also one of those who thinks that most people, even self-professed atheists, are essentially Christian because we're primarily living in nations founded on Christian values and most of us still hold those values. To me, while there's some truth to that I think it really obscures just how much our values have evolved since, say, the early days of Christianity and the church. EG, there's nothing in The Bible against slavery and plenty for it, yet we obviously don't have slaves anymore. Same thing for women's values and rights. I'm also not even certain how many so-called Christian values were/are unique to Christianity. However, I also don't take the other extreme and deny that Christianity has had a huge influence on shaping our morality over the last 2000 years, but not all of that has been for the better either.

So... make of all that what you will. I wouldn't claim to be an expert on him by any means, but he's one of those public intellectuals that I find a really mixed bag in that I seem to vehemently agree and disagree with him in almost equal measure. I do like that he's trying to popularize these more symbolic/Jungian approaches to religion and art, and I think his "personal responsibility" thing to wayward youths is probably a net positive (it strikes me similarly to most motivational speakers; and he's one of the more effective ones), but when you get beyond that I find him really muddled and full of irrationality and fallacious thinking. He's also become something of a hero to many conservatives and even the alt. right, perhaps because of his general anti-political-correctness stance, but much of that I don't think is directly his fault either, as I get the notion many of his most ardent fans don't understand him better than his detractors and don't understand his (rather unusual) reasons for holding the positions he does. Like, most that are anti-political correctness are so because they're actually racist/misogynists/whatever themselves, but Peterson's objections seem more rooted in other more fundamental values. I could be wrong about that, but whenever I seem to hear him expounding on his reasons for holding the views he does it rarely sounds like the typical racist/misogynistic/what-have-you idiocy that most anti-PC people seem to have.

Geez, I wrote so much this probably should've gone in its own thread. :/

Speaking of which I still haven't checked out Double Falsehood or any of the stuff revolving around it. Really should get to it if only for completion's sake. Still, a lot of the plays he co-wrote aren't very good themselves. It's amazing reading the Henry VI trilogy to see just how far he came by the time of writing Richard III, not to mention Henry IV/V.

I didn't care much at all for Double Falsehood itself when I read it back in college. I think its very much a case where everything else surrounding it- the debate around the play's authorship, Lewis Theobald and his goofy ass life, Arden Shakespeare and if they should have even sold the play under their label or not etc. are much much more interesting than the play itself.

I haven't read Henry VI though that reminds me that I still have the second season of The Hollow Crown to watch and they adapt all three parts of that across two films (As well as a third film covering Richard III but I've seen several versions of that already too). I really liked the first season, I should get on that next year.

I'd probably find all that stuff surrounding it interesting too. The whole mystery of Shakespeare's life and the plays is part of the allure, after all.

Henry VI is just really, really pulpy. I guess the equivalent of that day's dime novels or Transformers movies or whatever. It's hard to know how much Shakespeare wrote, but if Richard III is any indication of his solo work around that time, then it couldn't have been much. The more character-driven II Henry VI seems to me the most Shakespeare-like. That said, Shakespeare did also write Titus Andronicus, but it's so ridiculously over-the-top it seems more like a satire on all that stuff (that's how Taymor's version played it as).

Not that I think that's actually true, but I think perhaps that's where some people's intuitions go to, especially if they have a naturally religious/spiritual bent.

I guess. That kind of thinking is just so foreign to my own that I can't even put myself in the position of truly thinking that way. Even when I consider the many number of times my brother has almost died it's never been "Oh thank you Jesus thou art in heaven" that goes through my head when he luckily ends up okay, it's been "Oh thank god we have competent medical professionals again" (The latter here of which has not always been the case).

Okay maybe I use "Oh thank god" as an expression without even thinking about it, but that's more a quirk of the atheist experience in America at this point.

Hah, I remember some comedian making a joke about this in that we should replace all the "thank you, God/Jesus" with "thank you medical science!" Also reminds me of a porn I once saw where the woman was saying "Oh, Jesus!" and the guy said "My name's Manuel, not Jesus." She laughed, and later he was saying "Oh God" and she said "My name's (whatever it was, I forgot!), not God!"

I still think that it might just be something wonky in the English translation. Surely they couldn't have just inserted this huge plothole out of nowhere, right?

When I rewatch Eva I'll try and pay attention to this again.

Before I think I settled on it just being a goof (Especially with Rebuild 1.11 immediately telling us and Shinji upfront that its Lilith down there, avoiding that whole weird narrative strand entirely. It of course doesn't even come up in 3.33 either and that's largely a remake of Ep. 24 (Of course this all assumes that trying to determine Anno and co.'s thinking on NGE from something he/they made years and years later after the fact is even possible, anyways.)). The whole "Is it Adam or Lilith in the basement" mixup thing is such a bizarre plotline to begin with that even without the 24' plothole I might honestly consider it something of a mark against the series.

A translation issue is possible, not that I could help identifying or fixing a possible one.

It's just that, the entire finale of 24 is Kaworu going to the basement and seemingly being surprised to find Lilith and not Adam, so how in the world could they insert a scene where SEELE tells him where Adam is? Thing is, that entire scene just really made confusing what in the world Kaworu's plans were, what SEELE's plans were, and what the hell they were planning together. Just none of it makes any sense, and it's all because of one damn scene they inserted afterwards. It's just utterly bizarre.