Raxivace's 2020 Movies or: (Neo-General Chat IV: Jimbo Gets Lost in Deadwood)

[Raxivace]

44. Seven Sinners (1940, Dir. Tay Garnett) - The first of three collaborations between Marlene Dietrich and, of all people, John Wayne. This particular film feels like a tribute to a lot of the Dietrich/von Sternberg collaborations in a lot of ways, as Dietrich plays a sketchy club singer and Wayne plays a navy officer that falls for her, mirroring Gary Cooper in an earlier movie in some ways.

Dietrich and Wayne surprisingly work together pretty well, likely because Wayne's performance is a bit softer than the westerns and such he's more famous for. IMDb's Trivia Page for the movie suggests Dietrich and Wayne were actually sleeping together at the time, which is frankly even more surprising than them working together.

45. The Spoilers (1942, Dir. Ray Enright) - The second Dietrich/Wayne collaboration, this one being one of the rare Alaskan westerns. The drama here mainly revolves around a gold mine in the town of Nome that a crooked gold commissioner (Randolph Scott) is trying to snatch up. Wayne fights to keep the gold mine in the hands of Nome, and is assisted by Dietrich.

It's just a solid western all around. Wayne, Dietrich, and Scott are all good here, and its just a generally good looking movie- a lot of mud and such in the town (Which strikes me as unusual for westerns of this period), a heist scene that's delightfully misty etc. There's a pretty cool fist fight scene at the end of the film that goes for something like five minutes.

46. Pittsburgh (1942, Dir. Lewis Seiler) - The last of the Dietrich/Wayne collaborations. This one is unusual for a few reasons- to start with, it the first of these movies that doesn't wait about 10 minutes for Wayne to appear. Secondly, Wayne still has third billing here, with Dietrich being labeled as the main star (Despite Wayne clearly being the lead character here).

Of these three, this is also Dietrich's most atypical role because she's just kind of a plain Jane girlfriend/wife type of character that others fight over, which is fine but unusual for her since she was a kind of seductress of sorts in Seven Sinners (Reminiscient of her von Sternberg movies) and a saloon owner in The Spoilers (Sort of reminiscent of her in a film like Destry Rides Again). She's good in it, its just odd for Dietrich.

Wayne is arguably even weirder though here, since while his “Duke" persona is pretty firmly established by this film, this isn't a western. It's a contemporary rags-to-riches-to-corruption story, where Wayne is almost playing a Charles Foster Kane or even a Lonesome Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd type of figure, but filtered through his Duke persona which is just an odd combination. The biggest difference between this movie's story and those other films though (Well, one of the big differences anyways besides obvious formal superiority of a director like Orson Welles) is that Pittsburgh very much turns in World War II propaganda at the end, as Wayne's character redeems himself for his being asshole concerned with profit/status above all us by ultimately joining the war effort on the manufacturing end after he's had his fall from the high life.

I did enjoy this movie overall and had fun seeing such actors in kind of unusual roles, even if its weird seeing Wayne wear a suit and tie in a movie.

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Haibane Renmei (2002) - This was pretty interesting to watch with Lost on the mind, because it seems like Haibane has lot of the same DNA that Lost does but filtered though A) A much more sad, elegiac tone (Like even the general premise of still having to work a 9-to-5 after you die is kind of fundamentally sad) and B) Generally much lower stakes plot, and C) A mostly female cast. For similarities though, you've got a mysterious location seemingly closed off from the rest of society, what seems to be life after death, strange and seemingly arbitrary rules, a character falling down a well, mysterious laughter instead of "whispers" etc.

Haibane's approach to those things is very different, not only because of the general tone but I feel like its more willing to let mysteries and ambiguities about the setting remain in the background for the most part instead of the weird way that Lost would kind of half-address something. It also helps that characters in Haibane seem to at least somewhat care about the general strangeness of the setting (Particularly when Kuu has her "Day of Flight and disappears from the story completely. That this mysterious thing even happens and there isn't an easy answer to it is generally frustrating to several characters and informs a lot of the drama of the last episodes).

Anyways I'm not trying to frame Haibane Renmei as the better version of Lost necessarily, they're still really really different shows, though the similarities and contrasts are interesting to note. I personally prefer Haibane between the two though.

If I had a complaint about the series, its that some of the animation in its last few episodes looks really half-assed. Its generally a good looking show for an early digitally animated anime, but then you get stuff like this shot from the very end of episode 11 that's held for a few seconds.



^Poor Reki's face is just awful looking here, and there are quite a few examples of shots like this in the last chunk of the show. This particular shot is somewhat alleviated by the fact that the "camera" pulls back a bit before cutting, but still. The rest of the series is good enough that I don't mind it too much (Which perhaps makes a difference compared to other times where I've complained about this sort of thing like with Elfen Lied or the 2006 Fate/stay night adaptation), but they stand out as smudges on a work that is otherwise masterful.

As far as how it compares to the "trilogy" it forms with Serial Experiments Lain and Texhnolyze, I definitely preferred it to Lain but I'm not sure if I like better than Texh or not. My gut instinct is that Texh is a little better but damn Haibane was still really good too. Like you know you've got a good trilogy when Lain is the worst of the three and that show is still pretty awesome in its own right.

EDIT: Holy shit I just saw that Kow Otani did the soundtrack to Haibane Renmei. I really like the fairly understated but still kind of sad music here, but man this score sounds almost nothing like what Otani did in Gundam Wing or Shadow of the Colossus!!! Even the sad music in SotC that plays whenever you defeat a colossus has a bit more bombast than anything in Haibane.

I'm really surprised at how different all of three of these scores feel- they should feel different, mind you, because all three have very different tones they're going for. Typically though I feel composers for Japanese pop-culture stuff like games, anime tend to go for the same sound a lot (I'm guessing they're asked to) but Otani has really surprised me for NOT doing that (At least in these three examples).

[Derived Absurdity]

Working a 9-to-5 even after you die is the most horrific idea that is even capable of entering my brain.

[Eva Yojimbo]

Finished S3 of Deadwood and the film. If the highlights of S1 and S2 of Deadwood was the direction and dialogue, the highlight of S3 was probably the drama/conflict. With the arrival of George Hearst, the town finally has a legit BBEG to contend with. Though he's not as charismatic or engaging as Swearengen, I think as a near-caricature of the ultimate "uber-rich capitalist who only cares about profits and damn any people who get in his way" he's still compelling. It's also very clear that S3 wasn't meant to be the end of the series given how many unresolved storylines it leaves. In particular, the arrival of the theater troupe seems utterly pointless in the wake of no 4th season. I suspect they were introduced because the real-life Swearengen eventually owned a theater, so I assume he would've taken it over in future seasons.

However, despite the unresolved storylines, another highlight of the season is just how much development they finally gave the female characters. Alma buys a bank, finds out she's pregnant, gets married, and gets back on opium after a near-miscarriage; Trixie comes to work at the bank, but finds herself continually conflicted over whether to confront Alma, and whether she wants to stay with Sol or go back to Al; Joanie finds herself caring for the schoolchildren; and, finally, Calamity Jane gets a sense of purpose also revolving around the schooldchildren and Joanie, and she also has one of the best monologues of the entire series. So YAY on finally doing something with the female cast.

As for the film, I didn't realize beforehand that it was shot over 10 years after the series ended, and it was quite shocking to see how much everyone had aged. I had somewhat mixed feelings about the film itself. While it (for the most part) resolves the town's conflict with George Hearst, it does so in a way that feels a bit too... easy, I guess you might say. I think part of it is that the "slow burn" style of the series feels rather manic and frenetic when compressed down to 110 minutes. Still, it's hard for me to imagine how things could've been handled better given the size of the cast and the number of balls they were trying to juggle when the series ended. At the least I can say that it's not a dull ending of the series; if anything, there was probably more action in the film than in the entire series combined.

It's also strange how the film makes the series feel in retrospect. While it's clear S3 wasn't meant to be the end, there's almost something more compelling about the note of ambiguity the series ended on. If anything, the series ends with Hearst being the "winner" in the conflict between him and the town, and I feel like that historically, and as a commentary on how unfettered capitalism, and particularly the most successful and unscrupulous practitioners of it, can easily destroy individuals and even communities in the name of "progress." To an extent, the film almost feels like a kind of revenge porn against Hearst and everything he represents. Even though the film doesn't end in any kind of conclusive triumph either, it has that "feel-good" quality to it.

What I did very much like about the film, though, was how much the characters were haunted by their pasts, in particular the murder of the prostitute that saved Trixie's life. The "missed opportunity" love affair between Bullock and Alma also hovers frequently over the film, adding a nice wistful tone to it. Though even here I almost wish a bit more had been made of this. Having the film 10 years after the series was an interesting opportunity to explore those feelings we get when we're confronted by our pasts, and though the film does touch on it they definitely had to spend more time developing and resolving the central conflict. Understandable, I guess, but the end result is a slightly awkward balance between those tonal/emotional qualities and the story.

Despite the quibbles, I still think the series and film was overall extremely solid and probably in the upper tier of TV shows I've seen in terms of craftsmanship. It's lacking the big ideas of Lost, or the artsiness of Twin Peaks, or the deep characterization of Breaking Bad (and perhaps The Sopranos), but I think in terms of the overall picture it's perhaps the most consistently good on every level.

Jimbo, I can't help but notice you've ignored the excellent budget Photoshop masterpiece I made using Microsoft Paint...

Like, I get you're probably extremely jealous of my incredible artistic abilities that put Da Vinci, Renoir, and Hokusai to shame but c'mon man. It took me like a whole five minutes to make that!

LOL, you made that? I thought it was some meme I wasn't aware of! Good job, anyways.

You've mentioned similar complaints with how the female characters on Lost were handled. Why do you suppose some of these American prestige shows seem to not know what to do with their female cast?

Thankfully, S3 was much better in terms of developing its female characters, but in general I do think this is a problem not just with American prestige TV, but films as well. I think it just comes down to the fact that men dominate the writing and direction of TV and film and too many men are uncomfortable writing women, especially if it involves anything other than their relationships with men. With Deadwood it's slightly more understandable because back then women weren't given a lot of freedom or options. If you were lower class you were either a service worker, married well, or became a prostitute. The upper classes could live off their money with some independence, of course. Deadwood infrequently even touches on this point, especially with Trixie's who's quite independent-minded and strong-willed but is still dependent on the men in the town for a livelihood. At one point she flat-out tells Alma about how women aren't given many choices, and to appreciate the ones they have.

I might also say that all the political stuff got a bit confusing, mostly because (similar to Lost) the inciting parties were, to a large extent, kept off-screen, so you kinda just had to decipher what was going on based on how the characters were reacting to stuff.

I find this kind of writing technique really frustrating sometimes. The visual novel series Umineko no Naku Koro ni particularly had a lot of this kind of thing- it perhaps made some sense there since it was hugely influenced by Golden Age mystery novels and the like where of course you're supposed to take character actions and reactions as hints, though there's ultimately no clear answer given the various mysteries at the end of the damn story despite asking you to invest like 80 hours into it.

I think it just tends to depend on a lot of factors. One is just how important the off-screen characters are to what's happening, another is whether or not they're ever revealed and become part of the story. Thankfully, Deadwood did pretty much do this in S3 with George Hearst's arrival, though they never did quite resolve the disputes in terms of bribing politicians and annexation (you don't hear what state they ended up being a part of until the film).

Well I'll try and give Maverick a look as well.

One thing to keep in mind with Maverick is that James Garner (who's in the film) played the original Maverick in the TV series. There's a reveal/joke late in the film that's a bit meta about that.

BTW, are there any other shows you were planning on watching here soon?

One I had in mind was the last season of Twin Peaks. I was also thinking of perhaps checking out Doctor Who. Thought it might be fun to dive into a new sci-fi mythology, and it's a series I've always thought sounded interesting when fans talk about it.

I'd forgotten about that, though I'm not sure I'm seeing how it's a "jab" at Deadwood... though the series does use the word "cocksucker" a fuckton.

IIRC the argument is something like "David Simon is criticizing these other shows that use base vulgarities to entertain instead of doing social critique" or something like that. I can't remember if I read that critique online or in one of the books I read about the show.

I'm not sure how much I buy into that though, especially because The Wire itself wasn't exactly above that sort of thing.

Well that "jab" really doesn't make much sense considering Deadwood does have social critique (perhaps social depiction is a better term), even if it's not as pronounced as perhaps The Wire was. For one, there's a constant sense of casual misogyny and racism, and one thing I like about the series is how these things are just accepted by everyone. I think that's a refreshing change compared to the shows and movies that tend to present the past as a conflict between the "evil racist stereotypes" and the "white saviors." Even though the series does have its "blatantly evil racist" stereotype, he's mostly just a down-on-his-luck drunk, but it's quite clear that the racism isn't just limited to him, that it's pretty pervasive among everyone. The two black characters are frequently commenting on how they're afraid of being lynched if they do something wrong (one ends up running away after an accident). There's also a running conflict between the Chinese in town and everyone else. I also spoke of the misogyny above.

In general I feel like Deadwood is probably the most accurate depiction I've seen of what racism and misogyny was like in the past; not a clash between the "good egalitarians" and the "evil racists/misogynists," but as something that was so normalized that it was just accepted. Though there might've levels of animosity and the overtness of the racism/misogyny, even at the best of times there was a palpable unease with those power dynamics. Even Calamity Jane, who befriends one of the black characters, routinely calls him "little Nigger general" (which, granted, he also calls himself).

***

Well, this is already long and it's already quite late here. I think I'll pause and pick up our Lost convo tomorrow as well as respond to your Haibane Renmei review.

[Eva Yojimbo]

Working a 9-to-5 even after you die is the most horrific idea that is even capable of entering my brain.

I think there might be something very Japanese about that idea. I remember an old EvaGeeks thread where Tomino (the guy who created Gundam) said something like art should inspire people to "work happily until they die," which I actually thought was a pretty depressing thought. Lemme see if I can find the quote... here it is:

So I was very upset when I saw Evangelion, because it was apparent to me that the people who made it weren't thinking at all about making fun for or gaining the sympathy of the audience. Instead they tried to convince the audience to admit that everybody is sick, practically in the middle of a nervous breakdown, all the time. I don't think you should show things like that to everybody. It's not entertainment for the masses--it's much more interested in admitting that we're all depressed nervous wrecks, I thought. It was a work that told people it was okay to be depressed, and it accepted the psychological state that said if you don't like the way the world works, then it's okay to just pick up a gun and attack someone. I don't think that's a real work of art. When people see that, they begin to realize they are the same way. I think that we should try to show people how to live healthier, fuller lives, to foster their identity as a part of their community, and to encourage them to work happily until they die. I can't accept any work that doesn't say that.

[Raxivace]

It's worth saying that as crazy as that bolded bit is, it doesn't even ping on the radar of "baffling horseshit that Tomino has said over the years" for me anymore.

Like just a year or so ago he was complaining that Shinkai's movies of all things suffer from a lack of sex scenes.

[Raxivace]

Jimbo you should watch The Wings of Rean. Wings of a Rean is a fucking terrible series, but you should watch it so you can then go and read the utterly mindboggling interviews Tomino gave on it.

BTW I did start Deadwood myself though I'm only on like, episode 4.

[Eva Yojimbo]

Well, the last several days were sucky. Hot water heater went out on Friday and we couldn't get anyone out until Monday, which meant three days of no workouts and no showers. I hate missing showers because I hate feeling gross, and I hate missing workouts because I just feel irritable and tired. So I basically didn't do anything but waste time on YouTube.

I did, however, start watching Doctor Who. Not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't quite this! I guess you could call it a B-Sci-fi series. At times it seems quite low-budget and cheesy, but it also has an undeniable charm and humor that's hard to put my finger on. Like, the first episode is about a sentient blob of plastic trying to take over the world, and it starts with killer mannequins! Later there's a scene where a trash can swallows a guy and is then able to turn into a mannequin form of him. Second episode takes place billions of years in the future on the day the sun destroys the Earth and the last human left is just a giant piece of stretched out, flat-skin with eyes and lips. Third episode was quite interesting where the doctor travels back to Dickensian England (literally: Charles Dickens is a character!) to deal with ghosts that travel through gas and take over corpses. Ep. 3 actually has some interesting themes about Dickens being concerned his novels will last, about how confrontations with the new/unknown can serve as artistic inspiration, and it climaxes with a moral dilemma about whether or not it would be moral to let these endangered, extra-terrestrial beings inhabit the bodies of dead humans to save their species.

It's kinda weird after watching a "prestige drama" like Deadwood that's so well made to transition to something like Doctor Who that's, perhaps intentionally, a bit schlocky, but that's also undeniably fun and imaginative. There's something about it that takes me back to childhood, perhaps to all the schlocky action/sci-fi kids shows I watched back then.

I wonder what would happen if they did destroy the island. I would say that the "purpose" that Mother/Jacob are trying to protect does exist on the literal level; it's the electromagnetic source that has all kinds of powers, including the ability to manipulate spacetime. When they do get close to destroying the island in the finale, my thought was the unleashing of that power might end up destroying more than just the island. Jacob uses the metaphor of a corked wine bottle keeping the evil in at one point, and I'm wondering if instead of just referring to the MIB he was also referring to the island itself. When Desmond actually gets to the source it can't be accidental that it's essentially a giant cork that he removes that drains the pool and starts unleashing hell.

What's funny about the cork is that when the Richard flashback episode first, there was a huge argument online as to the whether the cork was just a metaphor or if there was a literal cork. I was in the metaphor camp myself, and well I was wrong lol.

Yeah I dunno what would have happened if the Island was destroyed, which is frustrating. Some have used the fact that the Island was sunk in the flashsideways to suggest that nothing would have happened, that the world would be fine. Of course its hard to take anything about the FSW as a comment on the nature of Lost's physical world, though the sunken Island is a kind of random inclusion otherwise in the grand scheme of things.

I actually think it's kinda cool that they took what was obviously a metaphor and found a way to wave it into the literal story like that.

I'm inclined to think that destroying the island probably would've had major consequences beyond just the island itself. Otherwise, I'm not sure what sense it would make that the island must be protected. If the island just disappears, then people go back to their ordinary lives in the rest of the world and have no access to an island with magical healing and spacetime manipulation properties... which doesn't seem like much of a consequence.

The Nibelungen treasure is an interesting comparison. I forget its function in Lang's film, but I know in Wagner it's the gold in the water guarded by the Rheinmaidens that can be turned into the "ring of power," but only once a person renounces love. Though the work is more complex than just that, the central conflict there is probably between love and the corrupting drive for power. I think there's some of that too in Lost (I perhaps see it most in how they handle Rose/Bernard during the later seasons, living their blissful married life on their own, disconnected from the power struggles of everyone else), but it's complicated by the whole purpose/nihilism dichotomy.

IIRC the treasure is just riches and jewels and such in Lang's film. Interesting to hear that its pretty different in Wagner.

I always thought Bernard and Rose were kind of weird with their disconnectedness in the later seasons. Like its almost like they're a standin for people who aren't watching Lost or something, its strange and perhaps makes them the polar of opposite of someone like Hurley who feels like a fan standin to some extent.

If you want you can check out the prelude/opening scene of Wagner's Ring to pretty much hear how it handles the treasure. It's the first ~22 minutes here (English subtitles should be working):


Yeah, I still can't quite figure out if Rose and Bernard are supposed to represent the kind of happiness/bliss that can be found in love when you disconnect from the "will to power" of most in society or not, but it makes sense.

To some extent I can agree with this, but the thing is that there are characters that do seem to know what the rules are and just don't say anything.

Like I can't even tell if the thing where Jacob and MiB is some kind of supernatural rule that literally prevents them from doing so, or just something social. Both MiB and Jacob seem to have some kind of belief about this, I just don't know what it is. Same thing with Ben and Widmore- it gets especially confusing when Ben goes on about Widmore changing the rules.

Or maybe they just THINK they know what the rules are? I do think there's something supernatural happening with Jacob and MIB, otherwise you couldn't explain why they don't age and why MIB becomes "human" once they pull the cork from the island. With Ben and Widmore it could be more like they had some vague understanding of those rules (maybe manipulated by the MIB) and perhaps had some others just between them about what they should/shouldn't or could/couldn't do.

In RL I can think of something like homosexuality. In ancient cultures when tribes were small and under constant threat of death and extinction, marriage and procreation was less about love and a desire to have a family, and more a crucial element of survival. So back then, the idea of sex-for-fun (in any capacity) was probably considered "sinful" merely because it showed people were putting personal pleasure ahead of what was best for society. Of course, once societies get large/strong enough, that should no longer be a concern, yet people carried that mentality along for centuries, passed down generation-to-generation, with many not even considering (or not considering very deeply) why it existed until it was challenged in the last several decades (at least in the west).

In this example though, what's lost to time is the reason for the rule, not what the rule itself is.

Like I would be cool if the reasons for the rules on Lost are ultimately revealed to be irrelevant to modern times, I just would have liked a better idea of what the rules even were.

Good point. I do think there's something in Lost's themes about the reason for the rules being lost or unknown too. Like, I think Mother seems the type that just intuits that there's something important/special about the source and that it needs protecting, but why and how and all that she really doesn't know.

I think it's easy to imagine cases where even something like murder would, indeed, only help the individual doing it while not hurting society enough to really affect them. If that's true, then what's the rational argument against doing it?

The only scenarios like this that I can easily think of are killing in self-defense and the like, where few people would even argue against the morality of that killing.

Beyond that though, a "logical" case depends on what your starting principles are. Whether its humanistic belief in society, capitalistic self-interest, religiously motivated, some combination of these beliefs and/or others etc.

I think what you say about starting principles/values are true, but it's absolutely possible to question where those values come from and choose to change (if not completely eliminate them) and it's hard to reason why someone's wrong for doing it if, indeed, they don't accept the same principles/values that most of us have. I think the extreme of that is, indeed, either nihilism or complete selfishness (or maybe selfishness because of such nihilism). I also suspect that many religious-minded folks intuit this fact about secular thought so they feel a need to ground morality in something external to them so as to prevent that kind of thinking. Of course, this is more of a mental trick than anything based on facts and reason.

I think that's too easy of an answer, especially given how it wouldn't apply to sociopaths, or even (perhaps) people who had, indeed, taking the questioning of such social values to its extreme conclusion.

Its not like sociopaths can't also be among the humanists you mentioned earlier, and understand the benefits of living in society.

That's true too, but a sociopath might also look for those opportunities to get their way by harming others in a way that wouldn't, in isolation, affect society too much. Since you're doing a lot of reading lately, you should also really check out Crime & Punishment which deals a lot with this theme. I just think Dostoevsky takes an easy way out by making Raskolnikov have a guilty conscience about his actions. In fact, Hitch's Rope deals with basically the same theme as well. In both cases, though, it's more a sense of superiority that allows them to ignore/transcend social morality as opposed to selfishness stemming from nihilism.

The one I was thinking of most was Michael, though, TBH, I can't remember if any of the ghosts Hurley sees would've said anything relevant to the MIB.

Michael is a whisper though, not a MiB manifestation.

Did you see the Epilogue? They even address Michael there somewhat.

Ooh, no, I guess I missed the epilogue. The blu-ray I downloaded didn't have it. Watching now... OK, so why wouldn't Michael be someone the MIB could control since he died on (or near?) the island?

Good points. I'll be interested in a rewatch of seeing how this dichotomy plays out in different situations over the course of the series. One thing that confused me early on is how frequently the series frustrated both the "faith" and "skepticism" aspects.

For me of course, it seemed pro-faith when I looked at it and that bothered me because of the general anti-intellectualism that America keeps seeming to devolve into. Not that I think Lost caused that of course, but it just seems like the wrong message for the times we were and still are in.

If you put a gun to my head right now I would agree that it leans pro-faith, but as I've argued I think it does enough to play on the pros and cons of both sides. Especially when you think of how Hollywood and TV has, historically, been almost totally pro-faith in the faith Vs rationality debate, even in things where this shouldn't be the case. Yudkowsky loves making of fun of Star Trek, eg, where Spock is the "rational one" who, when he gives these ridiculous odds against something working, is always wrong because Kirk's "faith" managed to succeed. Yudkowsky basically argues that, at some point, if Spock was a true rationalist, he'd re-evaluate his odds to match the fact that things always turn out good when Kirk does them!

It would also be an interesting discussion as to why fiction almost always leans pro-faith on the subject. My instinct is it does for the same reason that chaotic characters are more appealing to artists in general (Milton's Satan, Mozart's Queen of the Night, right down to Darth Vader), and that's because the same kind of unconscious intuitions artists use to create is very close that kind of faith, while reason/science is largely about ignoring/overcoming that aspect of human psychology.

Yeah, Jin's death bothered me too and for the same reason. I also think it's understandable on the literal level, especially given that Jin has never met Ji Yeon and also especially after how most all of S5 and S6 is about Jin trying to reunite with Sun, and how often you hear that "I'm never leaving you again" line. So while in the moment I think his decision makes sense for the character, theme-wise it seems to feed negatively into the "shitty fathers" idea.

Yeah.

This might be a weird comparison, but it reminds me of when the show tries to suggest in that S5 Kate episode that Sawyer jumping off the helicopter in S4 was just him being selfish and running away from his problems or whatever. I always thought that was a weird angle to bring to Sawyer kind of out of nowhere, but thinking about it isn't kind of similar to this Jin thing? The difference being that the show doesn't seem to want to make the case about Jin.

Good point and an interesting comparison. With Sawyer I can see it making more sense just because that kind of selfishness was always in his character, but Jin was never really portrayed like that so it seems to just be something that was either overlooked or just not really dealt with.

BTW, Parisfal is the only Wagner opera that I know that's been made into a feature film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsifal_(1982_film) It's also one of the best opera films out there (probably the most overtly artistic). Syberberg definitely brings his own visual take to the story (extremely surrealistic), but it also contains all of Wagner's music and words.

Sounds interesting. I might have to try giving it a watch sometimes. And yeah I can see that parallel you draw with Widmore.

Only thing to keep in mind if you watch it is that everything you SEE is Syberberg's interpretation, while everything you hear (music/dialogue) is written by Wagner. Opera is interesting in that there's a very clear divide between what composers/authors do and what directors do. In fact, Michael Haneke even directed a version of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, which is interesting in that he tried to turn a farcical comedy into a pretty dour, existential tragedy.

I'm also wondering, does the series ever really explain how much or even how Ben/Widmore are aware of Jacob and "the rules?" All I could ever figure from that is that Richard must've told them.

Ben has some idea of who Jacob is, since he mentions him a few times throughout the series, like in the S4 finale where he turns the wheel ("I hope you're happy, Jacob." or whatever the line way).

What gets really weird though is how Ben thinks Jacob is the one in the Cabin. I think the last word on that is that it was actually MiB in there the whole time, though that doesn't explain why Jacob told Illana to go the Cabin when she reaches the Island in S5. Or why there was ash around the Cabin. Or why Ben ever believed Jacob was in the Cabin, since Richard should know he was in the Four-Toed statue (Unless Richard just told a lie to Ben? Unless MiB somehow tricked Ben into believing Jacob was in there, but when/why/how?). The Cabin honestly just doesn't make sense no matter how you slice it.

I have no idea how much Ben knows about Jacob's rules though, and what Richard was actually doing for like 100 years is vague.

I have even less idea about Widmore. The only direct connection I can even think of between him and Jacob is that thing we talked about with him saying Jacob met him in S6, and that's vague too of course.

EDIT: A line I just remembered that may be relevant to this was when Ben says something about how he thought he was summoning the Smoke Monster, but it turns out the Smoke Monster was summoning him. On one level I think it clearly means that Ben realizes he was being manipulated by MiB this whole time, but the "how" is lacking there which makes it confusing.

Thanks for all the info. I'm willing to just chalk most of this up to story elements that got butchered in the making, similar in nature to NGE's episode 24 plothole. Yeah, I remember Ben summoning the smoke monster; maybe up until then he thought the smoke monster was just a defense mechanism he could somewhat control and didn't really know about the MIB and his machinations? So it wasn't until after he learned about MIB he said that?

Anyways sorry it took me a couple of days to type all this out. I got sick a few days ago (Not with coronavirus!! Well, hopefully not. I don't think it is anyways since I was vomiting pretty bad a few days ago and its not one of the known symptoms IIRC), so something like this took me even longer than usual to get written up.

LOL, Given that I sometimes take weeks (even months) to respond, never feel you need to apologize to me for "late responses!"

Haibane Renmei (2002) -

I think we're pretty much in agreement about Haibane Renmei. Here's the review I wrote for it waaaaaaaaay back in 2007 (I think it's pretty horribly written by my standards now, so pardon the vagueness and rough structure):

What a divine series this is - in every aspect of the word. I finished watching Haibane Renmei I began enthusiastically recommending it to my friends. When one asked "So what makes it good?", funny thing was, I couldn't really answer it. There's almost no conflict or action in the series. There's no traditional good guys VS bad guys, no spellbinding magic, no science fiction - not a trace of computers, aliens or mecha. There are fantasy elements, but they're kept to such a small, human level that you can't really call this series a fantasy in the traditional sense. So what is Haibane Renmei?

It tells the story of a group of angel-like beings called Haibane. They're born from cocoons, grow wings, given halos, and have no memories of their past other than the dream each has in the cocoon. They all live in a protected city called Glie, where nobody is allowed to go beyond the walls. The Haibane are watched over and protected by a group called the Haibane Renmei. Haibane must each work to support themselves, and do their best to be a "good Haibane". It tells the story of one such Haibane - Rakka - coming into the world, and learning how to live in it. The supporting cast of Old Home (where they live) is equally essential. Towards the finale, much of the focus shifts from Rakka to Reki - one of the elder Haibane, who is a mother figure to those in Old Home. Then there's Kuu, Kana, Hikari, and Nemu whom all have very different, but likable personalities.

Haibane Renmei moves at life's pace. Slow and deliberately it moves through its stages - dealing with many humanistic themes along the way. Moving through seasons and emotions with dignity and grace. It would be very easy for fans of traditional anime to consider this series "boring", as it's certainly not exciting in any traditional sense. You really have to be in a certain mood to appreciate Haibane Renmei's charm.

Yoshitoshi ABe (Original Story, Character Designs) said when he began Haibane Renmei that he had no set idea where he was going with it all, creating the story in the moment. In this light, Haibane Renmei becomes like a stream of conscious meditation on life. He also said that while Haibane Renmei has a religious feel, it is not about any particular religion. It is really a type of spiritual and emotional journey. There are anime series that that are very much allegorical. Haibane Renmei works more like CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia in that it deals more in allusions than strict allegory. This means its more open to personal interpretations - and all the better because of it.

In a way, this series reminds me of the anime equivalent of Yasujiro Ozu's films. Ozu is a director who focused on regular people in everyday life confronting life's small, but meaningful moments. His films, like Haibane Renmei, rarely have any big emotion or big drama. It's all about calm reflection as we move through life. The viewer is never forced into the story or the characters. Rather, we're given time to relate these characters to our own life. Their moments of sorrow and pain, as well as joy and triumph has been our own. Their search for meaning has been our own. It's through this very human level that we're able to connect with the Haibane and share in their emotions. This makes moments like Rakka's monologue inside Kuu's room profoundly moving.

The animation is superb. It's easy to miss in such a quiet setting, but almost every frame reveals subtleties of the Haibane's world. They use a wealth of Earth hues - wonderful greens and browns - that provide a very warm and inviting tone. The animation itself is beautifully fluid as well. But it's probably the town itself that's best rendered. The world of Glie is so well conceived and drawn, giving a real sense of a heartwarming environment. The skies, for example, are almost always drawn like beautiful paintings - often reflecting the seasons. Beyond the animation, the direction and cinematography is superb as well. The ease at which the viewer can get lost in this beautiful world is astounding. ABe mentioned that previous to working on anime he was a Japanese style artist, and his works show it. I think more than anyone currently working in anime, ABe understands what a visually powerful medium anime can be. The music is equally as accomplished; consisting of mostly simple, elegant orchestral pieces. The infusion of music in the series is adeptly applied as well - entering at all the right times and evoking all the right moods.

If there are flaws in the series, they are almost too insignificant to mention. The voice acting is not the best (sub or dub), but the cringe worthy moments are kept to a minimum. The finale perhaps comes too suddenly, making it perhaps less dramatic than it should have been. I also felt some of the characters could've been better developed, and a bit more history and background given about them. I especially wish they would've slowly developed Reki's history, instead of saving it for the end. But all of these are minor grievances, and really not worth even subtracting a single star for.

I've seen Haibane Renmei three times, and each time I'm extremely saddened by the end. Not because the story is sad, but because theirs is a world I'd never want to leave. This series has a great, meditative "zen" like quality, and for those in the right frame of mind, you will become thoroughly engrossed in both the lives of its characters and the world in which they exist. You'll smile at their joys and triumphs, and you'll cry at their losses and sorrows. In the end you will be left with a wonderful feeling akin to a spiritual cleansing. The result is nothing short of divine.

It is cool to compare/contrast to Lost, especially in how you can have such polar opposite takes on a similar premise. I think the biggest difference is perhaps that Lost very much tries to tackle the themes that its premise revolves around, and most of its failings and struggles are in its inability to do that coherently and tie the themes to the story. HR is content to merely let its mysteries be mysteries, and let whatever themes it does have sit in the background, supplying (in part) the tone and drama for its characters. Of course, it's much less flawed because, in a sense, it's much less ambitious. It's harder to create a coherent allegory than to create a world that merely alludes to its themes. I guess it could be the case of where you have one work that's more ambitious that, in some cases on some levels, fails to achieve those ambitions, and another work that's much less ambitious but largely succeeds on every level. I have an appreciation and sympathy for both and it would be hard to say which I prefer. I would note, however, that HR didn't keep me thinking the way Lost did, but neither did Lost make me feel the way HR did either.

As for that "shitty animation" shot you mentioned, it's been ages since I saw HR, but that seems to be one of the shots/scenes where things were quite dark (tonally), and I was just wondering if maybe the "shittiness" is somewhat intentional there, trying to give off a vibe of how bad things are? I can't say for sure because I don't remember, but that shot LOOKS quite sad, especially in how drab the setting is depicted. It stands out against how colorful most of the rest of the show is.

Also agree about the Lain/HR/Tex trilogy. Choosing between HR and Tex is hard given how utterly different they are, but Lain is definitely the least-good of that trio, and even Lain is damn awesome. I think I slightly prefer Tex too, but it's not by much. The ending of Tex is just haunting in a way that nothing else in that trio is. But, then again, I don't think anything in Tex is quite as moving as the best moments of HR either.

Like just a year or so ago he was complaining that Shinkai's movies of all things suffer from a lack of sex scenes.

WTF?

Jimbo you should watch The Wings of Rean. Wings of a Rean is a fucking terrible series, but you should watch it so you can then go and read the utterly mindboggling interviews Tomino gave on it.

BTW I did start Deadwood myself though I'm only on like, episode 4.

LOL, I might just do that (watch Wings of Rean) given how short it is.

Any thoughts on Deadwood yet?

[Raxivace]

I'll get to the rest of this later, but I just have to get this Tomino stuff off my chest first.

WTF?

Tomino said that he created Gundam: Reconguista in G to remind children today of the style of older anime. However, these kinds of works have been superseded by Kyoto Animation and Shinkai works. When asked what he thought of Kyoto Animation and Shinkai anime, he said, "I see them as my rivals. From my generation's perspective, you don't have to go out of your way to make an anime that feels like an introspective novel ('I novel')." He then went on to describe Shinkai's works as "stories about a boy and a girl who are always stretching out their hands towards each other," and said, "And yet the boy's hand never reaches the girl's crotch."

"Why do they never go any further?" Tomino went on. "I want him to make a story where they aren't just satisfied with no physicality. Well, Shinkai is still a young director, so I suppose he can make films like that."

It doesn't seem like the Gundam: Reconguista in G film itself will have any steamy scenes, however. In another interview with the Mainichi Shimbun's online publication Mantan-Web, Tomino said that it was "a film I want kids to see" and that "mothers and fathers will definitely not understand it."

Source: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/intere ... cy/.152531

"WTF?" indeed.

LOL, I might just do that (watch Wings of Rean) given how short it is.

The craziest thing about Wings of Rean is that it was THE THIRD FUCKING TIME HE TRIED TO TELL THAT STORY (EDIT: Fourth if you consider his original novels as well!!!!!!!!!!!!). The first being Aura Battler Dunbine, the second being the infamous Garzey's Wing (Which at least has that hilariously bad English dub that elevates the material into camp), and then Wings of Rean.

In fact I would say watch dubbed Garzey's Wing and Wings of Rean together at least, since Garzey's Wing is only 3 episodes long itself. But man both of them are bad.

Dunbine is pretty bad too FWIW, though its kind of the prototype for Zeta Gundam but with a much worse cast, much more repetition (The show literally can't go 15 minutes without somebody trying to kill somebody else and usually in an extended sequence), and the fantasy setting which at least paved the way for much better shows like Escaflowne down the line.

I go into all three of these series in this post btw, though I feel like I could have said more about them.

If you're interested in more bad Tomino there's Brain Powerd too of course, supposedly Tomino's anti-Evangelion about how the real problem with society is mothers joining the workforce, though that's a full 26 episodes.

Any thoughts on Deadwood yet?

Not much so far, just that its a bit of a shame to lose Wild Bill Hickock so early into the series even if it was inevitable.

I do feel the swearing is a bit much though for a western tbh.

EDIT: BTW Jimbo have you heard from Lyndon lately? Seems like its been a while since he's checked in here.

[Eva Yojimbo]

Any thoughts on Deadwood yet?

Not much so far, just that its a bit of a shame to lose Wild Bill Hickock so early into the series even if it was inevitable.

I do feel the swearing is a bit much though for a western tbh.

EDIT: BTW Jimbo have you heard from Lyndon lately? Seems like its been a while since he's checked in here.

Thanks for the info on the Tomino stuff. I may check them out for the lulz when I need a break from Doctor Who (which I'm really enjoying right now, despite how very un-artsy it is... maybe because of it).

As for Deadwood, I knew Hickok wouldn't last long because one of the few pieces of history I knew about the West was that he was shot from behind in Deadwood while playing poker holding Aces and Eights, which is still considered the "dead man's hand" among poker players. I know there's a ton of swearing, but it didn't really bother me, especially with how artsy the writing often is otherwise. Plus, I have a feeling that's probably closer to how people like that talked back then.

[Raxivace]

On EGF they used to call him "LOLTomino" for a reason. Even his best work shares commonalities with his worst shit- he's a true auteur in that sense.

Yeah I knew about the "dead man's hand" before (Though I don't think it actually comes up in Deadwood itself? At least I didn't notice the hand). I remember reading about it years ago after I saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance for the first time, because Valance has a variation on aces and eights in the movie before he goes out to duel Ransom Stoddard.

Yeah the general writing is good, but I think I would just prefer period appropriate slang (Or at least what my preconceptions lead me to believe to be period appropriate). Like the first recorded use of the word "cocksucker" isn't until the 1890's (Yes I looked it up), while this show takes place in the 1870's where its all over the dialogue. Yes technically its possible people were saying cocksucker in the 1870's, but it just feels a bit self-conscious to me in the series though not enough to detract from the series in a major way for me.

EDIT: Lol the first episode I watch after writing this mentions Hickock's poker hand.

[Raxivace]

I did, however, start watching Doctor Who.

Doctor Who is one of those franchises I just never got into.

I do know that Douglas Adams used to write for it though, and his third Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book is based on an unused Doctor Who script of his IIRC. The one about the genocidal aliens obsessed with Cricket.

I actually think it's kinda cool that they took what was obviously a metaphor and found a way to wave it into the literal story like that.

It was a little too on the nose for me.

One podcast I used to listen to referred to the cork as the Giant Stone Penis though which I always got a chuckle out of.

I'm inclined to think that destroying the island probably would've had major consequences beyond just the island itself. Otherwise, I'm not sure what sense it would make that the island must be protected. If the island just disappears, then people go back to their ordinary lives in the rest of the world and have no access to an island with magical healing and spacetime manipulation properties... which doesn't seem like much of a consequence.

Well centuries of conventional narrative storytelling would lead us to believe that destroying the Island should have more of an effect on the outer world, I just don't think there's anything in the show to actually show that.

We just have to take it on faith that Jacob was right. And well...it's Jacob we're talking about.

Or maybe they just THINK they know what the rules are?

It's possible, but again I don't even know what they believe the rules to be in that case.

I do think there's something supernatural happening with Jacob and MIB, otherwise you couldn't explain why they don't age and why MIB becomes "human" once they pull the cork from the island. With Ben and Widmore it could be more like they had some vague understanding of those rules (maybe manipulated by the MIB) and perhaps had some others just between them about what they should/shouldn't or could/couldn't do.

Yeah that's true, there must be at least SOME supernatural aspect to them, and I could totally by the "Rules" being a mix of cultural beliefs about the Island and genuinely observable supernatural stuff like the Cork. I just want to know what they are.

Good point. I do think there's something in Lost's themes about the reason for the rules being lost or unknown too. Like, I think Mother seems the type that just intuits that there's something important/special about the source and that it needs protecting, but why and how and all that she really doesn't know.

Sure, and you could even argue a parallel between Mother and, say, Season 1 Locke who goes on about the Island demanding sacrifices and such.

I think what you say about starting principles/values are true, but it's absolutely possible to question where those values come from and choose to change (if not completely eliminate them) and it's hard to reason why someone's wrong for doing it if, indeed, they don't accept the same principles/values that most of us have. I think the extreme of that is, indeed, either nihilism or complete selfishness (or maybe selfishness because of such nihilism). I also suspect that many religious-minded folks intuit this fact about secular thought so they feel a need to ground morality in something external to them so as to prevent that kind of thinking. Of course, this is more of a mental trick than anything based on facts and reason.

Well I'd say such a person who doesn't accept base values as us isn't even necessarily wrong, as long as difference in values isn't leading them to come into conflict with us or harm us really. A completely selfish person that say, just loves to murder everyone they can is obvious public menace who at the very least needs to be detained.

Actually I'm in a bit of a cynical mood today so perhaps such a person merely needs to be redirected toward people I'm currently mad at. In another life I probably could have been a cruel dictator who terrorized their local populace.

That's true too, but a sociopath might also look for those opportunities to get their way by harming others in a way that wouldn't, in isolation, affect society too much. Since you're doing a lot of reading lately, you should also really check out Crime & Punishment which deals a lot with this theme. I just think Dostoevsky takes an easy way out by making Raskolnikov have a guilty conscience about his actions. In fact, Hitch's Rope deals with basically the same theme as well. In both cases, though, it's more a sense of superiority that allows them to ignore/transcend social morality as opposed to selfishness stemming from nihilism.

Actually in the last few weeks quarantine has caused my reading to fall off.

I'd like to get to Crime & Punishment eventually. Rope probably needs a rewatch from me too.

OK, so why wouldn't Michael be someone the MIB could control since he died on (or near?) the island?

There's no reason Michael isn't someone that MiB couldn't take the form of, it just doesn't make any narrative sense for MiB to become Michael so he could explain the Whispers mystery from season 1? Like that just doesn't benefit MiB in any reason way.

If you put a gun to my head right now I would agree that it leans pro-faith, but as I've argued I think it does enough to play on the pros and cons of both sides. Especially when you think of how Hollywood and TV has, historically, been almost totally pro-faith in the faith Vs rationality debate, even in things where this shouldn't be the case.

I agree that Hollywood/American TV generally has been that way, I was just disappointed Lost was yet another show that ultimately fell into pro-faith camp, even if yeah there's at least some stuff there to complicate it a bit as you've argued.

Yudkowsky loves making of fun of Star Trek, eg, where Spock is the "rational one" who, when he gives these ridiculous odds against something working, is always wrong because Kirk's "faith" managed to succeed. Yudkowsky basically argues that, at some point, if Spock was a true rationalist, he'd re-evaluate his odds to match the fact that things always turn out good when Kirk does them!

I'm not too familiar with the original Star Trek, though perhaps a better example of this might by Scully on The X-Files where by like season 2 its clear her world view doesn't match the world of the show she exists in like at all.

Also didn't one of the Star Trek films try and actually challenge that aspect of the show? I seem to remember one of the more celebrated movies being about Kirk having to confront a situation he couldn't actually take an easy way out of, though I never saw it myself.

It would also be an interesting discussion as to why fiction almost always leans pro-faith on the subject. My instinct is it does for the same reason that chaotic characters are more appealing to artists in general (Milton's Satan, Mozart's Queen of the Night, right down to Darth Vader), and that's because the same kind of unconscious intuitions artists use to create is very close that kind of faith, while reason/science is largely about ignoring/overcoming that aspect of human psychology.

I'm reminded of a girl from my college, who didn't like the idea of having to learn about logical fallacies and such because she felt it restrained creativity.

I think that's kind of silly personally, though I don't doubt a lot of artists have felt that way over time.

Good point and an interesting comparison. With Sawyer I can see it making more sense just because that kind of selfishness was always in his character, but Jin was never really portrayed like that so it seems to just be something that was either overlooked or just not really dealt with.

With Sawyer I thought it was odd because his arc at that point of the show seemed to be him becoming less selfish (Since around when he killed Locke's dad at least), though I suppose there's something to be said about how others will view your actions when they don't have the full context of what you've gone through.

But yeah with Jin its probably not just thought through.

In fact, Michael Haneke even directed a version of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, which is interesting in that he tried to turn a farcical comedy into a pretty dour, existential tragedy.

That sounds like the most Haneke thing in the world.

I'm willing to just chalk most of this up to story elements that got butchered in the making, similar in nature to NGE's episode 24 plothole. Yeah, I remember Ben summoning the smoke monster; maybe up until then he thought the smoke monster was just a defense mechanism he could somewhat control and didn't really know about the MIB and his machinations? So it wasn't until after he learned about MIB he said that?

Yeah I think he probably thought the smoke monster was just a defense mechanism (That was a popular early theory about the smoke monster even, that it was a Dharma nanobot experiment run amok or something. I think there's stuff on the Blast Door Map that people even point to to "prove" this though that's getting into 15+ year old internet theories), though its the second part of Ben's statement that baffles me. Still makes me wonder where exactly some of Ben's ideas of Jacob come from too.

I think we're pretty much in agreement about Haibane Renmei. Here's the review I wrote for it waaaaaaaaay back in 2007 (I think it's pretty horribly written by my standards now, so pardon the vagueness and rough structure):

Ah that's a perfectly decent review, even if its pretty different than your style nowadays. Lots of "You do [x]"'s in there and such, seems kind of Pauline Kael-ish almost.

I'm kind of surprised you took issue with the voice acting though, I thought it was fine (In Japanese anyways, I didn't watch the English dub).

It is cool to compare/contrast to Lost, especially in how you can have such polar opposite takes on a similar premise. I think the biggest difference is perhaps that Lost very much tries to tackle the themes that its premise revolves around, and most of its failings and struggles are in its inability to do that coherently and tie the themes to the story. HR is content to merely let its mysteries be mysteries, and let whatever themes it does have sit in the background, supplying (in part) the tone and drama for its characters. Of course, it's much less flawed because, in a sense, it's much less ambitious. It's harder to create a coherent allegory than to create a world that merely alludes to its themes. I guess it could be the case of where you have one work that's more ambitious that, in some cases on some levels, fails to achieve those ambitions, and another work that's much less ambitious but largely succeeds on every level. I have an appreciation and sympathy for both and it would be hard to say which I prefer. I would note, however, that HR didn't keep me thinking the way Lost did, but neither did Lost make me feel the way HR did either.

Now that I think about, season 1 of The Leftovers is pretty close to Haibane Renmei's approach, though Lindelof goes back into the Lost style for seasons 2 and 3 and I really didn't like those seasons very much at all (Of course seasons 2 and 3 ended up with much better reviews as a result, which frustrated me a lot).

Its funny, I never really though of myself of being against the narrative style of something like Lost, but perhaps my own tastes really do lean toward the Haibane style if I really think about it.

As for that "shitty animation" shot you mentioned, it's been ages since I saw HR, but that seems to be one of the shots/scenes where things were quite dark (tonally), and I was just wondering if maybe the "shittiness" is somewhat intentional there, trying to give off a vibe of how bad things are? I can't say for sure because I don't remember, but that shot LOOKS quite sad, especially in how drab the setting is depicted. It stands out against how colorful most of the rest of the show is.

My problem isn't with the drab setting, that tonally makes sense for the scene, its how terrible Reki's face looks. Its just a nondescript blob.

Anyways I only used that example because it was easy to find again since it was at the end of an episode. There are several shots like that throughout the last part of the show though, where the characters' face just look uncharacteristically horrible.

Also agree about the Lain/HR/Tex trilogy. Choosing between HR and Tex is hard given how utterly different they are, but Lain is definitely the least-good of that trio, and even Lain is damn awesome. I think I slightly prefer Tex too, but it's not by much. The ending of Tex is just haunting in a way that nothing else in that trio is. But, then again, I don't think anything in Tex is quite as moving as the best moments of HR either.

Yeah.

Btw have you seen any of this ABe's other shows? Looks like he only has two others- some comedy thing about space aliens called "NieA under 7", and looks like he had a new show a few years ago called "RErideD: Derrida, who leaps through time".

After spending 10 years in stasis, a robotics engineer awakens to a war-torn world and a fight for his life against machines that he and his father had a hand in creating.

Apparently the main character is just straight up named after Jacques Derrida too. Sounds like a trip at any rate, I'll try and get to both of these shows later this year.

[Eva Yojimbo]

I'll try to fully catch up tomorrow (or at least in a few days), but I did finish S1 of Doctor Who.

I think beyond what I said in my last post about its positive/negative qualities, I also got to thinking how long-form (multi-season) TV seems more suitable for this kind of serial/episodic storytelling than the kind of you more typically see with shows like Lost and Deadwood. Maintaining and developing a continuous storyline is difficult enough to do when you can sit down and write the whole thing out from beginning to end and then edit it as with a novel, but trying to write such a thing as a weekly serial seems almost impossible without numerous plotholes and inconsistencies, which will likely increase exponentially the longer something runs, the more ambitious it is, and the more people you have writing and directing. Something like Doctor Who has none of these problems. It easily accommodates multiple writers/directors, long multi-season runs, and "ambition" (so long as it's contained to a few episodes). So, eg, there was a kind of overarching motif of the season that points towards the finale, but it was just subtly woven in among what were otherwise stand-alone episodes. So there can be a kind of quasi long-form storytelling there, but not to the extent that everything that's happening is contingent on what happened last week (and the week before that, etc.). Come to think of it NGE was, in itself, a model in terms of how to balance the extremes of episodic, stand-alone elements and long-form storytelling. Of course, it was a mini-series so there wasn't a need to continue that beyond a single season, but it just goes to show how even with a mini-series it's helpful to have a balance of those elements.

As far as specific critiques of the series, I think I'd just extend what I said last time about. It's certainly not going to win any technical awards, but it's very much one of those shows, kinda like Buffy, where the low-budget, slightly cheesy/schlocky nature is off-set by the passion, charisma, and charm of everyone making it, not to mention the kind of conceptual ambitious that sci-fi does so well. Like, this was made in '05 and, much like MGS2, it had one episode of how a corporation came to control humanity merely by controlling the news. The season finale was an extension of that episode 100 years in the future, where, because The Doctor had destroyed the centralized news, everyone had turned to mindless game/reality TV shows; both episodes ended up being "covers" for the evil masterminds behind it all, and there's a pretty good metaphor there for how society today functions (news as a means of manipulation; game/reality shows as a means of distraction.)

Probably my favorites of the season was The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances two-parter. Pretty much everything about those two episodes were outstanding. For starters, they had a noir-tinge to them being set in 1940s England as they were being bombed by the nazis, so they were quite moody/atmospheric compared to most of the season. It was also the first episode to really split up The Doctor and Rose (his companion), and both got interesting simultaneous storylines that ended up merging back together, with Rose meeting another time traveler (the very dashing, charismatic Captain Jack; who later gets his own spinoff series called Torchwood) and The Doctor meeting a young girl who's being haunted by a child in a gas mask asking "are you my mummy." So between the noir-ish atmosphere, the setting, the intertwining narratives, the character development/dynamics, the humor, and the horror elements you have the recipe for really great TV on a small-ish budget.

==========

Given how much I enjoyed S1 of Doctor Who I basically decided to invest in some legit blu-rays of the rest of the series, including what few blu-rays are available of the "classic" series (the stuff before the '05 reboot; there's like 26 prior seasons, but only 6 are available on blu-ray so far). So while they're in transit, that'll probably give me time to catch up on my housecleaning and try to get my audio system set back up. It's been disconnected for ages because I haven't been watching films or anything I really needed surround sound for, so I've been using headphones. Setting up will take some time, though, since it's a good day's long project just to get everything connected and calibrated.

[Raxivace]

I won't stand for this slander of people who watch gameshows and reality shows!

Match Game '78 alone justifies the entire genre.

[Raxivace]

Also why is Torchwood an anagram of Doctor Who?

[Eva Yojimbo]

I won't stand for this slander of people who watch gameshows and reality shows!

Match Game '78 alone justifies the entire genre.

LOL, I think we talked about our love of game shows before. Still, I don't think you'd like them as much if they were the only thing on TV and robotic host disintegrated the losers who weren't there by choice!

Never really got into Match Game myself. I miss the old morning GSN lineup with Card Sharks and Pyramid.

Also why is Torchwood an anagram of Doctor Who?

Good catch! I suck with anagrams so I never would've noticed that myself. It's actually what they labeled tapes of S1 of Doctor Who to prevent it from being leaked.

[Raxivace]

LOL, I think we talked about our love of game shows before. Still, I don't think you'd like them as much if they were the only thing on TV and robotic host disintegrated the losers who weren't there by choice!

Honestly that would just make them even better. No stakes are better than life or death stakes!

Anyways I'm joking slightly and I do remember those conversations about game shows, though I do think there's something of a bias against game shows and reality TV even from "TV people". Like one of the things that surprised me about my two year long Survivor marathon was how a lot of the supposed innovations of "prestige TV" are all over these reality shows too (Long-form storytelling conventions mainly I'm thinking of here, shit people even have "character arcs" on these reality shows too), though I never hear people talk about them in those terms and I can only assume its because game shows are a "lesser" genre than crime dramas or whatever. Its kind of an interesting phenomenon.

Never really got into Match Game myself. I miss the old morning GSN lineup with Card Sharks and Pyramid.

Match Game is awesome because its just a bunch of b-tier celebrity actors + Betty White (Who is S+ tier obviously) drunk off their asses and half the time they're just making crude sexual innuendo that I'm not sure you could get away with on prime time anymore. Its worth revisiting sometime if you're bored.

Card Sharks and Pyramid are fun too of course, but have very different energies.

Good catch! I suck with anagrams so I never would've noticed that myself. It's actually what they labeled tapes of S1 of Doctor Who to prevent it from being leaked.

To be fair I think I had actually heard of the Torchwood one before lol. But anagrams are cool.

FUN FACT: "Raxivace" is an anagram based on an older user name I used to use online, but there's a junk letter thrown in there! Few people seem to have solved it over the years though.

On another forum I post at, there's even a user there I knew from a third site that I don't think even realizes they knew me before because of that. If only they would solve the anagram, they would realize the truth and have their mind blown. Its been about five years now though, I don't think they'll get it anytime soon.

[Raxivace]

Jimbo if you're still interested in Wings of Rean, each DVD is currently on sale for an entire U.S. dollar. That means you can own the entirety of Wings of Rean for three whole U.S. dollars.

They normally MSRVP at $39.98 a piece.

https://www.rightstufanime.com/Wings-of-Rean-DVD-1-S
https://www.rightstufanime.com/Wings-of-Rean-DVD-2-S
https://www.rightstufanime.com/Wings-of-Rean-DVD-3-S

[Raxivace]

47. Shenmue: The Movie (2001, Dir. Yu Suzuki) - So essentially all this movie is cutscenes from the video game Shenmue stitched together with combat sections put in as interstitials and it really doesn't work. Part of this is because Shenmue as a game is not really meant to be a lean 90-minute plot (And they make some shaky jumps a few times to move the story along anyways here), the game is kind of about being lost in Ryo Hazuki's hometown and generally being both amazed and frustrated by it, and part of it is because directorially video game cutscenes typically aren't not the most imaginative thing in the world and 90 minutes of that just makes that stand out more. It gets really noticeable where during the action scenes that are clearly just video game combat with the HUD removed.

Still, it is kind of interesting as an early example of machinima perhaps, predating stuff like Red vs. Blue by a few years, and perhaps foretells the rise of Let's Plays on YouTube years down the line. As an actual film though I don't think Shenmue: The Movie really comes together unfortunately.

48. National Treasure (Rewatch, 2004, Dir. Jon Turteltaub) - I had a soft spot for this movie as a kid, and I still do. Its really goofy but its so committed to Nic Cage being a historian treasure hunter that I still can't help but love it.

49. Perry Mason: The Case of the Sinister Spirit (1987, Dir. Richard Lang)

50. Perry Mason: The Case of the Murdered Madame (1987, Dir. Ron Satlof)

51. Perry Mason: The Case of the Scandalous Scoundrel (1987, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II*)

52. Perry Mason: The Case of the Avenging Ace (1988, Dir. Dir. Christian I. Nyby II*)

53. Perry Mason: The Case of the Lady in the Lake (1988, Dir. Ron Satlof)- I'll probably always think of Rear Window or the American versions of Godzilla movies more than anything else when it comes to Raymond Burr, though for many Burr will always be defense attorney Perry Mason first and foremost. While the TV series with Burr started in the 50's, there was an a revival in form of the TV movies with Burr as Mason in the 80's and I've been going through those on and off over the years.

They're formulaic but pretty fun. They all follow a bit of a formula for the most part- we get a 20 minute prologue where some poor shmuck is framed for murder, however they usually have some connection to Mason who ends up defending them and in the process of doing so actually solve the damn mystery himself. Of course most detective mysteries in the last 130 years or so have followed this formula to some extent, but its an effective one.

The movies may not be lighting the world on fire on a formal level (Though Avenging Ace had some weird oblique angles in its prologue), though they're pretty fun for what they are. Some neat guest stars across them too, from Robert Stack (Who will always be the host of Unsolved Mysteries to me), to the guy that played Gimli in Lord of the Rings, to David “The Hoff" Hasselhoff even.

I have to say though, there's this supporting character in these movies, Mason's assistant Paul Drake (Apparently he's the son or something of a character from the 50's series). I don't understand this character. Like ostensibly he's supposed to be doing a lot of field work for Mason in tracking down witnesses and stuff but he's like weirdly edgy. He's always sneaking into people's houses and stuff giving off this real creeper vibe in order to find “evidence", so of course every one of these movies has some woman walking in on him having broken into their house. Hell in Murdered Madame, he had to keep chasing some witness around town for half the movie because she thought he was some kind of a rapist and you know what, she had decent reason to believe that since he snuck into her apartment under false pretenses.

These women usually hook up with Drake too at the end of these movies, only to be forgotten by the next one.

That made me think maybe he's meant to appeal to younger audiences, and that would make some sense considering the bizarrely high number of action scenes he's in. People have tried to shoot Drake, have tried to run him off the road, have gotten into fist fights with him, and hell Avenging Ace had Drake riding in a helicopter and some nutbag tried to fucking snipe the helicopter down like he was a damn James Bond villain, and the craziest part is that it almost worked since it caused the helicopter to crash but Drake was miraculously okay.

OTOH Drake is like, not attractive at all and has a really bad mullet and just generally isn't charming. One of these movies even had Drake bitch about how much he hates rock music, which seems like it might alienate kids in the 80's. Also his name is Drake, that just kind of naturally has ominous connotations especially for a character that is already kind of shady.

Anyways I wish I could tell you more about this strange character, but apparently he stops appearing in these movies after Lady in the Lake (There's something like 21 of these movies after that one). No information about why actor William Katt stopped playing the character seems to be available online, and this mystery will probably bother me until the day I die.

*For those wondering, this guy is in fact the son of the credited director of The Thing From Another World (1951), though of course plenty of people argue that version of The Thing was actually directed by Howard Hawks and not Nyby Sr.

54. Troy (Director's Cut, 2004, Dir. Wolfgang Petersen) - Honestly this is kind of underrated. I say “kind of" while there are still issues with it (I'm still I'm not sure I like the gods being removed as actual characters or not), its honestly pretty decent for the most part. Some solid action, a fairly morally ambiguous take on the Trojan War (This is called an adaptation of The Iliad, but really they throw a lot of The Aeneid in here as well, particularly with the ending featuring the actual sacking of Troy), and for the most part I like these takes on the characters (Even Brad Pitt as Achilles I think mostly works, if one remembers how whiny he was in Homer to begin with. If anything that aspect seems toned down here). I kind of wish we had more of Sean Bean as Odysseus as well, he fits the part pretty well.

[Lord_Lyndon]

Regarding Wolfgang Petersen... He directed one of three most famous German films of all time. It is called Das Boot. It is probably the best film that takes place in a submarine. I strongly suggest you to see it because it is an amazing achievement in directing.

[Raxivace]

Yeah I'd like to see Das Boot eventually. Its been on my list of stuff to get to for a while now.

[Gendo]

Woah, I've seen a well-known movie that you haven't!

[Raxivace]

There's probably more examples of that then you might expect- there's a ton of famous stuff I haven't seen yet. As far as foreign language stuff goes the Apu Trilogy is another big one I haven't gotten to yet and I know Jimbo's been egging me to get to that for a while now.

The problem is perhaps that I usually mine into single filmmakers more than covering a wide breadth of films, so while I've seen far more Hitchcocks and Godards than most people (Though the latter I need to get back to and finish off here soon), unfortunately that means stuff like Das Boot takes me longer to get to if isn't attached or related to some random watching project I'm into at the moment.

[Gendo]

Fun fact; the reason I've seen Das Boot is because about 11 years ago I asked the people at the IMDB Religion forums (which was basically the original version of this forum) to recommend a movie for me to buy, and Azaezel (on these forums; though hasn't been around in over a year) told me to get Das Boot. So I bought it just like that, and watched it soon after.

[Raxivace]

Fun fact; the reason I've seen Das Boot is because about 11 years ago I asked the people at the IMDB Religion forums (which was basically the original version of this forum) to recommend a movie for me to buy, and Azaezel (on these forums; though hasn't been around in over a year) told me to get Das Boot. So I bought it just like that, and watched it soon after.

I remember I was chatting with some girl in college once and she recommended Das Boot to me. I made a note to check it out at some point and well I still haven't gotten to it yet.

I can't even remember what her name was, but I remember the recommendation lol.

[Raxivace]

Fished S1 of Deadwood. I don't think I have a lot of substance to say on it yet beyond the fact that it's a really solid drama (with surprisingly dark humor elements). Perhaps the thing that stands out to me the most is just the level of richness and detail they put into the setting and how the stylistic choices seem to be based as much around its location as anything. There are tons of shots through objects--doors, windows, bars--and shots where people, wagons, horses, or some combination will walk through shots. It really brings the feel of the setting to life in a way I feel most TV doesn't... or, hell, even most Westerns, for that matter. I think in comparison to classic westerns this has a much more grittier, realistic feel to it, like you can half smell the mud, flies, dust, and shit everywhere. Of course, it's not perfect; the show still suffers from a lot of the flaws of TV where too often the style becomes functional. Still, there's more cinematic touches here than the vast majority of TV, especially in the episodes directed by Walter Hill and Davis Guggenheim (hell, ep. 2 had some shots one could almost call "painterly").

I'm also enjoying the characters, though I think it's less consistent than Lost. By far, Ian McShane role as the saloon/brothel owner Al Swearengen is the standout here. I don't know how far ahead S1 was written, but if wasn't very far I get the feeling the writers knew they had a hit with his character almost immediately because the first few episodes makes Timothy Olyphant's Seth out to be the protagonist; the problem being that anyone who's seen Tombstone already knows how the story of the "former lawman trying to escape his past into a lawless town" ends, and so he's not given much to do but develop a relationship with the married woman with the prospecting claim. That leaves Al as really the primary focus for most of the episodes as most everything that happens revolves around him, which keeps the show interesting if only because he's a fun-as-hell character; like if you mixed Tony Soprano with Han Solo, the immoral, ruthless mob boss with the lovable, wise-cracking rogue. Robin Weigert's awesome to as Calamity Jane, but unfortunately she's given little to do in S1 other than weep over the murder of Wild Bill Hickok until she disappears in the season's latter half.

After a "big ideas" show like Lost that gets real abstract, it's kinda fun to dig into a show that primarily just seems to be about reveling in its world, characters, and all the amorality that they allow. It's almost fascinating, too, how the almost caricatured nature of the characters play off against the gritty realness of the setting.

I got around to finishing season 1 of Deadwood the other day myself. That caricatured nature you mention took me a while to get used to (Particularly with Swearengen) but I did get used to it eventually and really started getting into how the characters played off of each other. Kind of funny to see pre-Lost Titus Welliver here too at the end.

If I had problems with the series its the same ones I have with most prestige dramas like that the cinematic style did seem to revert to "functional" like you mentioned pretty quickly, and I honestly do think this first season is too long. That period inbetween Hickcock's death and the last third of the show did kind of drag on for a bit, and some of the subplots felt a bit whatever to me (The kid thieves for example, and while it was a bit spooky with current events the "plague" seemed to come and go pretty quickly). Having Calamity Jane just kind of vanish was strange too, unless I missed a bit of dialogue where she said she was leaving town or something.

My biggest issue beyond general TV criticisms is that I'm not sure how well Timothy Olyphant works as Seth. At first I thought he was trying to play him as an uncaring psychopath struggling to maintain a facade of normalcy in a new society, but the character seems written as a guy trying to hold back his passions more than anything (Beating the shit out of the bad dad, the love affair etc.), which just does not come across in Olyphant's bored performance very well at all.

[Raxivace]

Finished S2 of Deadwood. Again I'd say it was solid with good solid world/character development overall. I'd say the major things that marked this season was the introduction of the political machinations about what state was going to annex the Deadwood camp that is set-off against the more personal stories/struggles of the characters and how much (if at all) they're willing to work together. I was pleasantly surprised by how much development they gave the female characters compared to S1, with Trixie starting to learn math so she can work as an accountant rather than a prostitute and Joanie opening up her own brothel; they don't do a ton with either storyline, but it's better than S1 where they just seem helplessly at the service of their pimps. Probably the last major development was the introduction of Bullock's wife and step-son, which introduces the awkward triangle between them and Alma, who became Bullock's lover before his wife arrived; but Bullock remains such a bland character that this is probably the least interesting development of S2.

Perhaps the other thing I noticed this season, to an extent that I was wondering how much it was already there in S1 and I just missed it, was how florid the writing was at times. There are moments where character break into speech that's damn near Shakespearean, especially EB Farnum, who's perhaps become my favorite character next to Swearengen (who gets sidelined with life-threatening kidney stones this season). Of course, Farnum is meant to be this weaselly, pretentious character so it makes sense that he tries to project that in his speech, and it's also funny how that floweriness contrasts with the abundance of obscenities. Just for a few examples:

E.B. Farnum:
Could you have been born, Richardson? And not egg-hatched as I've always assumed? Did your mother hover over you, snaggle-toothed and doting as you now hover over me?

Richardson:
I loved my mother.

E.B. Farnum:
Puberty may bring you to understand, what we take for mother love is really murderous hatred and a desire for revenge.

And (after he's been given the title of mayor):

E.B. Farnum:
August commencement to my administration, standing stymied outside a saloon next to a degenerate tit-licker.

As for flaws, besides the Bullock stuff, the series still doesn't really know what to do with Calamity Jane. She mostly just hovers around the camp for comic relief. Other than the opening episodes I don't think I found this season quite as well-directed either. It still has its moments, but they're fewer and farther between. I guess you might say the focus shifted slightly from the direction/atmosphere to the writing. Normally, I would say that's a step backwards, but given how good the writing is, it's hard to complain too much. I might also say that all the political stuff got a bit confusing, mostly because (similar to Lost) the inciting parties were, to a large extent, kept off-screen, so you kinda just had to decipher what was going on based on how the characters were reacting to stuff.

Also, though I don't think this series is theme-heavy, one of the interesting turns this season is how almost like a dysfunctional family the camp becomes, and how even a ruthless murderer like Swearengen starts forming some bonds and maybe even something of an emotional attachment, while still trying to keep his distance from everyone. It's like watching the formation of a community from the ground up.

Just finished Season 2 myself. I generally agree with what you have to say about it, though I didn't find myself quite as confused by the George Hearst stuff. I will say I think it helped once he actually became a character and joined the cast (Side note, I find myself wondering if Deadwood won't get cute and show us his son William Randolph Hearst running around at some point). I'll also say I like him and Wolcott much better as villains than like than anyone else in the series so far (Like those kids in S1, or the "San Francisco cocksucker" that didn't quite get enough attention as a supporting character even if I guess he's connected to Hearst).

Farnum has also really started to grow on me too, and he really does seem to have really grown into that semi-Shakespearean diction and speech-giving that you mentioned. My own favorite character right now though has to be Doc Cochran- the way he's just fed up with everyone's nonsense really hits home in our current situation in 2020.

EDIT: One thing I should also mention that I'm enjoying about the show is how a lot of this cast were memorable bit players in other shows/movies. Like I didn't recognize Farnum at first, but the dude also played Oldham in Lost of all characters and was also fucking Sebastian in Blade Runner.



^Like its really obvious when you look back, he totally sounds the same.

[Raxivace]

I'm a little behind on Deadwood again, still in early season 3. I did watch some more movies though.

55. Perry Mason: The Case of the Lethal Lesson (1989, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

56. Perry Mason: The Case of the Musical Murder (1989, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II) - More Perry Masons. That weird Paul character is just flatout gone now (From what I can tell online apparently he left to do some TV series), and is replaced with two new characters- law student Ken and his rich fiancé Amy. Since they're a couple their dynamic is completely different than Paul's- they're kind of just incompetent when it comes to street work and it is fun seeing them bumble through lawyer show nonsense while Perry actually argues in court.

Anyways “Lethal Lesson" is about Ken being wrongly accused of murder, and “Musical Murder" is about an asshole theater director who killed. The latter also features Debbie Reynolds, which is fun.

56. Matchmaker Mysteries: A Fatal Romance (2020, Dir. Terry Ingram) - Another mystery TV movie, similar to the Perry Masons. The basic premise of the lead character Angie in these movies though is that she runs one of those dating reality TV shows, but like also just kind of stumbles into solving murders too. So like in this one the A-plot is Angie is trying to figure out who murdered a famous novelist, and the B-plot is her trying to find a boyfriend for some participant on her dating show. But like, Angie will use her dating show connections or the excuse of filming her dating show somewhere to find clues and stuff. This is actually the second movie in the series too, so there may be some context from the first movie I'm missing.

Look, the quarantine may be getting to me okay.

57. Killing Them Softly (2012, Dir. Andrew Dominik) - Basically a gangster movie about how neoliberalism has failed America. Its pretty on the nose (Especially with Brad Pitt's fairly didactic speech at the end that more or less amounts to criticizing Obama's “hope" being ultimately kind of empty), but it's a perfectly fine movie.

I remember hearing that people we're pretty hard on it when it came out (I do still think Dominik's previous movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was better), but the point the movie was trying to make was at least vindicated somewhat by history, even if the some of the artistry could have been a bit better. The death scene of Ray Liotta's character comes to mind- like him getting shot in the head in slow motion works well enough, but then his car gets hit in slow motion too etc. and it starts to feel a bit over the top.

58. You Can't Get Away With Murder (1939, Dir. Lewis Seiller) - A gangster played by Humphrey Bogart drags some poor kid into a life of crime. The kid's family tries to get him out of it, but they fail. Bogart drags the kid into a botched a robbery where a man is killed- however, the gun used by Bogart was given to him by the kid, who stole it from his innocent brother-in-law so all three end up in prison as a result. In prison, the kid considers ratting out Bogart, but he gets dragged into a scheme by Bogart to break out of the prison which ends with Bogart just straight up murdering him for trying to turn on him.

Good little film, and its bleak tone seems to foretell what the more bitter noir films would start doing in a few years.

59. Across the Pacific (1942, Dir. John Huston & Vincent Sherman) - Another Bogart film, this one reuniting him with several cast members from The Maltese Falcon (Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, and of course director John Huston). This is basically a World War II propaganda thriller, revolving around Bogart trying to stop a Japanese plan to attack the Panama Canal.

Propaganda aspects aside, for the most part this still works as a decent thriller though even with that in mind there are a few hiccups here and there. While I'm not a huge fan of him as a director, I usually think of Huston as a competent albeit completely unremarkable craftsman though here there are moments where the editing gets really jumpy and odd (Particularly at about 57 minutes in). Reading about it online, apparently Huston had to leave the film partway through filming to join the real life war effort (Where he'd go on to make documentaries like Battle of San Pietro which use footage of actual World War II battles), leaving Sherman to come in to finish the movie which probably explains some of the bumpiness.

Still, Bogart and Astor have some great chemistry and their scenes together where they're bantering are some of the best in the film.

60. Amakusa Shirou Tokisada (AKA The Revolutionary, 1962, Dir. Nagisa Oshima) - Oshima's story about the failed Shimabara Rebellion.

I can't say I was a huge fan of this one. Stylistically it feels like Oshima trying to find a middle ground between the jidaigeki work of Kurosawa's mythologizing on one end and the more down to Earth “reality" of the era in someone like Mizoguchi on the other (While lacking the weird unmotivated formal flourishes Oshima uses in some of his other movies like Boy), but I don't think it really works here. A doomed rebellion can probably work with either approach, but the way Oshima just doesn't quite give enough meat to this story to make it either about how brutal and wrong the oppression of Christians in Japan at this time was (Stock scenes of individual painter getting fucked with aside) and how hellish that would be to live through, nor does he find enough romanticism in Tokisada's death to make it work as some kind of tragic action story like Seven Samurai or something. Like the ending of the movie is just a title card telling us that Tokisada was killed and that 30+ thousand Christians were executed and just hearing about it doesn't make it land dramatically really.

The other major problem with the movie is that the completely wrong guy is cast as Tokisada. The actor who plays him is Hashizo Okawa, who was 33 years old by the time this came out and was probably 32 while filming it. The thing, is the historical Tokisada was freaking 17 years old when he was captured and beheaded, which is wildly different from how Oshima chooses to portray him and honestly would really change how you view the character- much easier to buy a teenager being in way over his head from the very beginning here than some seasoned veteran. The reality seems to have been that he was kind of a Japanese Joan of Arc more than anything (She was only about 19 herself when she died), whereas Oshima just kind of makes him feel like another jidaigeki character which feels wrong to me.

[Raxivace]

Found a fascinating link online yesterday: an incredibly huge collection of PDF's academic books and articles on film (With some some other stuff thrown in as well).

Some of these I've been trying to get print copies of for a while now, like Godard's Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television. You could probably spend months going through all of these.

[Raxivace]

Oh boy, here we go. Some of these probably deserve more attention but I only have so much energy.

61. Julius Caesar (1953, Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) - I don't hear this talked about much when it comes to Shakespeare adaptations, but this seems like a pretty solid one. I thought Brando may have been miscast at first but he just absolutely kills it as Mark Antony- the “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" speech in particular is just delivered hell of a lot of power and contempt toward Brutus and co.

The acting by this whole cast is pretty solid across the board though, with the Shakespearean dialogue feeling understood by the actors in a way that doesn't always come across with these kinds of adaptations. Brando is just the standout though.

62. The Day After Tomorrow (2004, Dir. Roland Emmerich) - It's a pretty dopey disaster movie in a lot of ways, though its one of my mom's favorites and I had fun watching it. The most notable thing about watching it though is that a lot of its political criticisms, jokes, and ironies arguably play with even more bite toward the Trump era of today than the Bush era it was made in. Like the whole plotline about Mexico being the one to close their borders to illegal immigration from Americans during a time of crisis feels like it could have easily been written today. There's another line where somebody complains that nobody in the White House understands science and its like oh buddy, you have no idea.

63. Scoob! (2020, Dir. Tony Cervone) - It was cute, and kind of brought me back to the watching old Scooby Doo cartoons as a kid. Some of the jokes might be too trapped in the moment (Shaggy listening to Ira Glass podcasts etc.), but I dunno I enjoyed it.

64. New York New York (2020, Dir. Spike Lee) - A short that's basically a tribute to New York City, mostly comprised of shots of various landmarks and such. Well intentioned but I don't have a whole lot to really say about it.

65. Doctor X (1932, Dir. Michael Curtiz) - Early Curtiz thriller about whacky mad scientist guy killing people. Most interesting thing here is that the movie is in an early form of Technicolor- its kind of rough on that front, though it really makes how good the Technicolor work even at the end of the 30's like Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz stand out even more.

66. Into the Forest (2015, Dir. Patricia Rozema) - This one was kind of a mess. The first hour of the movie is about a father and two older daughters who live in a nice house but in the forest kind of detached from society. They lose power one day, but its implied that the whole country has kind of lost power so something vaguely apocalyptic must have been going on.

Anyways the family tries to take care of themselves, but the dad somehow dies trying to saw down a tree, leaving the daughters on their own. The movie is basically them just kind of fighting with each other about how to live without power, whether to use gasoline to power their generator for a little bit or to save it for their car etc., until like 70 or so minutes into the movie one of the daughters is raped by Chekhov's Creeper who is introduced in the first 15 minutes, and then the last chunk of this movie is one of the daughters deciding to go through with having the rapist's child.

The whole rape thing is where the movie lost me. I feel like that's just too big of an event to wait for over an hour for a movie to introduce (In a movie that's only like 100 minutes long). Or at least they need to do more to sell Evan Rachel Wood's character wanting to keep the baby- like there's some amount of dramatic irony going on here since earlier in the film she criticizes Ellen Paige for having a boyfriend and becomes worried that she'll get pregnant by him, but when Wood decides to keep her child I don't really see what motivates it.

67. Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: The Afterglow of Zeon (1992, Dir. Takashi Imanishi) - A compilation film of the 1991 OVA “Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory".

Fairly torn on this one. When it comes to being a compilation movie it's actually a really successful paring down of Stardust Memory into the bare essentials of its story (For the most part)- maybe the most successful one from Gundam during this period. The problem is that Stardust Memory is a fundamentally stupid story to begin with. Kou is still a fairly idiotic lead, Gato is still a fairly bland space Nazi written without much self-awareness, and Nina and the big twist around her motivation is still one of the most poorly executed plot twists in all of writing.

So in a sense the movie cut really does accurately give you the experience of watching the OVA series, since its still a bad story. Still some bits of really good animation in there though.

68. Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: The Mayfly of Space (Rewatch, 1993, Dir. Takashi Imanishi)

69. Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: The Mayfly of Space 2 (2016, Dir. Takashi Imanishi) - Two shorts that I guess are meant to give more screentime to the Cima character from Gundam 0083? I had seen the 1993 one before and it seemed kind of pointless, and the newer 2016 short didn't seem to add anything either.

70. Keep Your Right Up! (1987, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard) - Godard trying to do…slapstick? I guess? None of the comedy really lands that well and it kind of feels like it brings back the worst trends of the Dziga Vertov Group era films with circuitous ramblings and footage of people not doing a whole lot (Mainly thinking of the stuff with the musician in the studio here). The DVG stuff at least have a clear if not incredibly misguided purpose to their madness, I can't really tell what Godard is getting at here.

71. Night and Fog (1955, Dir. Alain Resnais) - Honestly I'm not sure what I can really say about this one. Its difficult to create any kind of real intellectual response to this when such things just seem so weak and small and feeble compared to just the fucking horrors that the Nazis filmed.

Like it really can't be overstated how sanitized so much of the Holocaust feels in history textbooks or even other films like Schindler's List or even other documentaries compared to what's shown here. So many severed heads, bodies shoveled around like fucking mounds of dirt and rubble, skin grafted off of people…

Since I've had Godard on my mind again lately, I thought of his Historie(s) du cinema again. One common interpretation of that is that he argues that all of cinema is tainted by its failure to truly document the Holocaust. I'm not sure that really stands up to intellectual analysis (After all, a film like Night and Fog exists), but I can understand the feeling now. Like seeing the way one of the horrid “Holocaust Trains" in the Nazi archival footage is filmed at exactly the same angle as the train in Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat does feel like something of a sick joke.

72. The Gift (2015, Dir. Joel Edgerton) - A kind of dopey thriller about a dude named Gordo who was bullied in school over rumors of being gay, and gets revenge on his bully decades later through making him uncertain about whether he raped and impregnated his wife or not.

Its kind of stupid, especially when the whole idea of the plan can fall apart with a basic paternity test.

73. Contagion (2011, Dir. Steven Soderbergh) - People have been going on about how this seems to have a lot of parallels with the Covid-19 outbreak and oof they're right. People blaming China, a fake “cure" being hawked, the term “social distancing", Dr. Sanjay Gupta being on TV talking about it etc.

Even without all of that its still a solid ensemble film (And one of the better films about fighting a virus in all likelihood), but man. I often wonder what modern films are going to be remembered 20+ years from now but it really does seem like the current outbreak has cemented Contagion as a film to some extent if only for the eerie parallels to reality.

74. Glass (2019, Dir. M. Night Shyamalan) - The sequel to Unbreakable and Split, and I have to be honest I think its kind of underrated. Having most of the movie set in a mental institution was a bizarre choice (Reminded me more of the one Hammer Frankenstein film more than it did something like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest if I had to make a comparison), but I think it kind of worked? Whole thing ended up being a lot more bittersweet than I was expecting too.

------------------------
Deadwood (2004-2006) - Finally finished this, though I'm waiting a bit on the movie. I'm not sure I really have much to add to what I've said before though. I will say I think the final episode still kind of works as an ending honestly despite the show being cancelled. Hearst basically winning while Swearengen is left once again with yet another bloodstain to clean up just kind of seems like an appropriate note to end on, though I'll see how the movie's ending compares.

I don't want this to come off like I didn't enjoy the show or anything because I did like it quite a bit, though I still can't help but find myself wishing this had been like a contained 4-hour epic film or something instead of a TV show.

I do wonder though how influential Deadwood was on other HBO shows in particular. Like the scenes where Swearengen gives a soliloquy while receiving a blowjob do seem to foretell the infamous "sexposition" scenes of Game of Thrones to some extent, though I don't know if there's a direct influence there or not.

[Gendo]

We've watched the exact same number of movies this year so far!

Yeah I like The Day After Tomorrow, as with most Emmerich.

Had a small debate on Facebook a couple days ago with someone who really loved Glass. Not that I think it's bad or anything, but I just didn't think the first 2/3 or so made much sense.

[Derived Absurdity]

Hey! The Gift was good!

[Raxivace]

Had a small debate on Facebook a couple days ago with someone who really loved Glass. Not that I think it's bad or anything, but I just didn't think the first 2/3 or so made much sense.

What didn't make sense about it to you?

Hey! The Gift was good!

The ambiguity they're going for in that ending just falls so flat for me that it ruins the goodwill I had for the movie beforehand.

[Gendo]

Had a small debate on Facebook a couple days ago with someone who really loved Glass. Not that I think it's bad or anything, but I just didn't think the first 2/3 or so made much sense.

What didn't make sense about it to you?

I talked about it a bit in my 2019 thread, but basically the premise that someone would be trying to convince David that he isn't a superhero... There's a prerequisite that David claims to be a superhero, which he never did, and nothing in his character we saw in Unbreakable suggests that he ever would. If some doctor asked David why he thinks he's a superhero, David would simply say “um, I'm not, where did you get the idea that I was? I never said I was." Of course given what we find out at the end about the doctor, it didn't really matter what a David claimed or didn't claim. But the premise of him being in a mental institution in the first place for that reason just doesn't make any sense to me.

[Raxivace]

75. Do the Right Thing (Rewatch, 1989, Dir. Spike Lee)
76. Public Enemy: Fight the Power (1989, Dir. Spike Lee)
79. 3 Brothers: Radio Raheem, Eric Garner and George Floyd (2020, Dir. Spike Lee)
80. Making “Do the Right Thing" (1989, Dir. St. Clair Bourne)
81. “Do the Right Thing": 20 Years Later (2009, Dir. Spike Lee) - I had been meaning to rewatch Do the Right Thing with the recent Criterion blu-ray release (Which looks fantastic now btw, they seem to have fixed the orange tinting that was missing from the previous Universal blu-ray), but with the murder of George Floyd it seemed very timely.

It's still an excellent film. This time around the flaws of Sal's character really stood out to me, particularly how disconnected from the Bed-Stuy community he really is. While I don't think he's one-dimensional by any means, his beliefs about how “[these kids] grew up on my pizza" and his really petty bickering with Radio Raheem and Buggin' Out really make Sal look really bad, worse than I remembered, even before the confrontation at the end of the film. One reason I think the whole conflict works so well dramatically too is that that the “Making Of" documentary shows that Spike Lee and Danny Aiello disagreed on whether Sal was racist or not- Lee says he is, Aiello says he's not. That tensions still works dramatically though because of course Sal the character is going to feel he isn't, and it feeds right into the themes of the story.

As for the rest of these- the Public Enemy music video that Lee directed is neat and worth a look. The documentary I mentioned earlier has other interesting bits, particularly with the real Bed-Stuy community's skepticism about the filming of Do the Right Thing contrasted with the production crew's thrill about working on a film with that's primarily staffed by black crew members. The “20 Years Later" special is a nice bit of reunion interviews with some cast members but isn't too insightful unfortunately.

The “3 Brothers" short isn't on the blu-ray but something Lee put out online a few days ago, cutting footage together of the fictional murder of Radio Raheem with the real murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd. Its hard to watch for obvious reasons but shows how little has changed in some ways since 1989 when Do the Right Thing was released.

77. Cloverfield (Rewatch, 2008, Dir. Matt Reeves)
78. 10 Cloverfield Lane (Rewatch, 2016, Dir. Dan Trachtenberg) - Rewatched these as well. I meant to rewatch The Cloverfield Paradox but I feel asleep about 30 minutes in to that bad movie. First two Cloverfields hold up really well though. I think 10CL is still the best by a margin, but honestly the original Cloverfield is better than I remember.

82. Deadwood: The Movie (2019, Dir. Daniel Minahan) - Yeah this fell really flat for me unfortunately. When you get past the novelty of seeing everyone again and older, it just doesn't seem to add much to the story at all beyond feeling like a fanservice-y retreated of Season 3's plot (Like when you think about it all the basic beats here are just repeats of what season 3 already did). Beyond that though it just seems far too…optimistic for a Deadwood story really- all too easy and certain to take down Hearst. Even if you take Swearengen as having died in the ending, that's still dying in his bed and not alone, which really seems at odds with how his character lived through the series, doing some heinous things to maintain a fragile peace.

It also makes me think that I was wrong that the main show could have ever worked as even a single long film, because of how little impact the film really leaves even with the existence of the show having already done a lot of heavy lifting for this. Honestly I think much more of El Camino now, which came out the same year this did. That has a similar problem in feeling like it didn't add much of anything to the story of Breaking Bad, but really captured the tone and feel of the show exactly. OTOH uf Deadwood the TV show was the true history buried with “a lie agreed upon", then Deadwood: The Movie isn't even the lie. It's a flat-out fairy tale.

83. The Return of Doctor X (1939, Dir. Vincent Sherman) - I had thought this was going to be a sequel to Doctor X but nope, no plot relation. There's some mad scientist stuff going on but that's about all they have in common. This particular film involves a scientist bringing his assistant back to life, but to maintain his life the assistant has to go around draining blood from people for sustenance. The thing is, Bogart of plays the assistant and uh…

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Yeah. Bogart as a sci-fi/horror b-picture villain sure is a thing. He almost makes it work too, but he's clearly several notches above all the other actors here. Kind of wish he had tried more things like this though.

84. It All Came True (1940, Dir. Lewis Seiler) - A kind of neat movie where Bogie plays a gangster hiding out and turning a boarding house into a night club. Its slight but fun.

85. L'Avventura (1960, Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) - Prototype for not only Antonioni's own Blow-up but also Picnic at Hanging Rock as well. Perhaps a movie like Cache as well. I really enjoyed this overall, I easily just got lost in the atmosphere, particularly in the first half of the movie at sea and on the island and such. I don't have much to really say about the actual plot or what happened to the missing woman, but that all seems kind of beside the point.

86. Enemy (2013, Dir. Denis Villeneuve) - Hitchcock-lite but with a bunch of spiders? I typically like Villeneuve but I don't feel like these Aronofsky-esque symbolic additions really added to this story, though even if you subtracted them this story still feels like it has nearly as much going on as the movies this takes inspiration from like Vertigo.

87. Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988, Dir. Francis Ford Coppola) - When I was in high school one of my teachers kept a VHS copy of this on his desk for years. I never knew why and always wondered. I'll still be wondering since that teacher died of a brain tumor several years back unfortunately. I wish I had just asked him about it at some point, especially after having actually seen this.

The movie itself is typical of post-Apocalypse Now Coppola's in that its a decent story told with some basic competence but that's about it. There's something to be said perhaps about Coppola seeing himself in the story of an ahead of his time genius like Preston Tucker, though Coppola never matching his 70's streak of films again (And even that I think people are beginning to cool down on somewhat. Like should The Conversation really be considered a masterpiece when compared to Godfather 1/2 and Apocalypse Now?) casts some shade on the idea.

88. Da 5 Bloods (2020, Dir. Spike Lee) - In a lot of ways this is Spike's update on Treasure of the Sierra Madre, played out against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and its legacy. While not a perfect film this is some good stuff- it at least leaves you a lot to think about it in regards to how much has really changed in the world since the 1960's and today (In some ways I wonder if the movie wouldn't be better titled “Apocalypse Again") which is more than I can say about many new movies these days. Delroy Lindo absolutely kills it here too, playing an interesting variation on Bogart's character from Huston's movie.

89. Bad Boys (Rewatch, 1995, Dir. Michael Bay) - Anything that isn't Martin Lawrence and Will Smith bantering together in this movie is just awful. I remember thinking this was one of the better Bay films but NOPE.

90. Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill (2020, Dir. Joe DeMaio) - An okay stand-up special with some repeated material, though I really do think Seinfeld is kind of out of touch at this point. I'm not sure his generally irreverent attitude just really plays strongly anymore in times of continuing social upheaval. Like the show Seinfeld worked largely because the joke was always on the characters to some extent, but I'm not sure that's the case with the standup really.

[Gendo]

I enjoy Bad Boys 2 more, even though it's too long. I liked Enemy ok, but Prisoners was a far better 2013 Gyllenhaal film by Villeneuve.

[Raxivace]

Maybe I should have rewatched Bad Boys 2 as well but ugh Bad Boys 1 just fell flat so flat for me this time.

Yeah its odd that Prisoners and Enemy both came out the same year and even both have Gyllenhaal when Prisoners seems to work so much better.

[Eva Yojimbo]

Catching up:

LOL, I think we talked about our love of game shows before. Still, I don't think you'd like them as much if they were the only thing on TV and robotic host disintegrated the losers who weren't there by choice!

Anyways I'm joking slightly and I do remember those conversations about game shows, though I do think there's something of a bias against game shows and reality TV even from "TV people". Like one of the things that surprised me about my two year long Survivor marathon was how a lot of the supposed innovations of "prestige TV" are all over these reality shows too (Long-form storytelling conventions mainly I'm thinking of here, shit people even have "character arcs" on these reality shows too), though I never hear people talk about them in those terms and I can only assume its because game shows are a "lesser" genre than crime dramas or whatever. Its kind of an interesting phenomenon.

Survivor is an interesting case because it maybe the first hybrid reality/game show hybrid, and one of its selling points was the drama so it makes sense that it would've borrowed from prestige dramas as well.

Never really got into Match Game myself. I miss the old morning GSN lineup with Card Sharks and Pyramid.

Match Game is awesome because its just a bunch of b-tier celebrity actors + Betty White (Who is S+ tier obviously) drunk off their asses and half the time they're just making crude sexual innuendo that I'm not sure you could get away with on prime time anymore. Its worth revisiting sometime if you're bored.

Card Sharks and Pyramid are fun too of course, but have very different energies.

I guess what I've noticed is that some game shows are either more "game" or "show" and I tend to prefer the ones that are more "game." Match Game can definitely be funny, but as a game show it's pretty terrible because who wins entirely depends on the question that's asked. If the possible answers are obvious and all/most the celebrities say it, then all that contestant has to do is guess that obvious answer and win, especially if the other question is less obvious with more possible answers then there's no way for the other contestant to win. Family Feud is similar in that it basically all comes down to who wins the last round. I think America Says actually has a better/fairer "game" format than Family Feud, but the lack of Steve Harvey's humor is certainly noticeable. Pyramid is great because it's just a perfectly designed and balanced game that's all about skill rather than luck.

FUN FACT: "Raxivace" is an anagram based on an older user name I used to use online, but there's a junk letter thrown in there! Few people seem to have solved it over the years though.

On another forum I post at, there's even a user there I knew from a third site that I don't think even realizes they knew me before because of that. If only they would solve the anagram, they would realize the truth and have their mind blown. Its been about five years now though, I don't think they'll get it anytime soon.

Ah, I've often wondered where you got your username from but I never really thought to ask. I kinda assumed it was an obscure reference to something I wasn't familiar with. What was the username you made the anagram from?

Yeah I'd like to see Das Boot eventually. Its been on my list of stuff to get to for a while now.

I saw Das Boot once in my early teens and didn't care much for it, but I very well may like it more if I rewatched it now. Tons of films I saw back then that are now among my favorites.

I got around to finishing season 1 of Deadwood the other day myself...

It seems we're pretty much in agreement about S1. Olyphant is probably the weakest point for the entire show, and it really sucks to have a protagonist that bland. I think a big problem is that he just never really developed any kind of nuance or subtlety besides having "anger issues," and his emotional expressivity seems limited to being apathetic, apoplectic, or pretending to be apathetic when he's apoplectic. It didn't sink the series if only because everyone around him IS so interesting, and he by no means dominates the focus or runtime. I can agree that the series does drag a bit in places, in S1 and elsewhere, but because the setting/characters were so good it rarely bothered me. I do think Jane mentioned leaving in S1, but I wouldn't swear to it.

Just finished Season 2 myself...

FWIW, it wasn't so much the Hearst stuff that had me confused, but the nature of who exactly they were dealing with when it came to making it a territory or part of some state. The Hearst stuff seemed to be part of that, but not the whole thing. I'd have to rewatch it, but it seems like there was a whole political angle that never quite materialized beyond Hearst's involvement, but I seems to remember there being more to it than just him. Him and Wolcott definitely made for good villains, though I halfway wonder if they were introduced because they'd originally planned for Swearangen to be the villain, but he ended up being too popular so they made him something of an antihero. I mean, Swearengen was on the edge of being pretty damn evil in parts of S1; don't forget he was going to have the young girl killed because she was a witness to his guys that murdered her family. I also agree how good Farnum was. Looking back, I'd say the chemistry between him and Swearengen was one of the series' highlights and I kinda wish they'd played that up even more, because they kinda go their separate ways in S2 and S3. Doc was good too, though I wish he'd played a bigger role.

Deadwood (2004-2006) - Finally finished this, though I'm waiting a bit on the movie...

Deadwood: The Movie (2019, Dir. Daniel Minahan) - Yeah this fell really flat for me unfortunately...

One thing I find interesting about the end of S3 compared to the film is how even though S3 ends on an obvious note of ambiguity that was meant as a kind of cliffhanger for S4, in a way it works better than the film that wrapped everything up almost TOO well in a way that came off as something close to a fanfiction/fantasy. Like, the ambiguity of S3's end is, as you say, really more appropriate given the general tone and nature of the series, and I think the juxtaposition of the two says something interesting about the nature of endings in general. Sometimes conclusive endings work, of course, but I think it really depends on the work. As an unrelated example, you simply couldn't end films like No Country for Old Men or A Serious Man on scenes that neatly resolved everything as that would defeat the entire theme of uncertainty in those films. If it was about anything, Deadwood was probably about the lawless formation of community and how easily that could be destroyed/corrupted by the rich and powerful in a capitalistic society, so to have the series end with the rich/powerful guy essentially "winning" makes sense, while the film just comes off almost as fantasy revenge porn.

OTOH, I don't think I'm quite as negative on the film as you, I just think it emphasized the wrong things and took a wrong turn with the fantasy "revenge porn" ending, but I really like the moments where characters were meditating on the past and showing how it affected them. I mean, there's a really good film in there somewhere that focuses more on the nature of time/memory than the film it turns out as where it gets too wrapped in taking revenge on Hearst. I still enjoyed most all of the character-driven moments, and I actually think the film is the only place where Olyphant's Seth is tolerable as he seemed to play wistful/regretful pretty well, though maybe a lot of that was just how it was shot/edited.

Given the large cast I'm not sure how much they've could've done with a 4-hour film. Maybe they could've condensed it down to a single-season mini-series though, basically something roughly the length of NGE. No idea how influential the series was either, but "sexposition" is a great term!

Oh boy, here we go. Some of these probably deserve more attention but I only have so much energy.

61. Julius Caesar (1953, Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) -

I actually love this adaptation. It's certainly a very Hollywood take on Shakespeare, but that's not a bad thing, and Brando's "Friends..." speech is the best iteration of that speech I've heard. The entire film is riveting and it even manages to make the final couple acts hold together with some great drama, which isn't easy to do.

62. The Day After Tomorrow (2004, Dir. Roland Emmerich) -

One of those films that's perfectly enjoyable while it's playing but there's nothing much memorable afterward. If you want to watch a really memorable disaster film, check out the Norewegian film The Wave from 2005. THAT one has stuck with me.

70. Keep Your Right Up! (1987, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard) -

That's a candidate for Godard's worst film, IMO. I guess some of the Vertov stuff is more intolerable, but among his narrative films at least it's definitely the worst I've seen. The weird thing is that Godard isn't without a sense of humor, even it's more of a wry one that's not literally LOL funny. Like, Prenom: Carmen was probably funnier than KYRU, and maybe that's because the latter was Godard trying too hard to meld his intellectual style with Buster Keaton and that combo just doesn't work.

71. Night and Fog (1955, Dir. Alain Resnais) - Honestly I'm not sure what I can really say about this one. Its difficult to create any kind of real intellectual response to this when such things just seem so weak and small and feeble compared to just the fucking horrors that the Nazis filmed...

Yeah, Night and Fog is one of those films that's difficult to watch precisely because no film captures the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust like it does. It does put into stark relief how short narrative cinema has came in capturing that horror, though I'm honestly not sure how you could while still creating something that had any sense of traditional drama, which would almost by necessity lessen some of the impact. A film like that does make me sympathize with why Godard turned away from narrative cinema, because it's true there are some things in reality that fiction seems incapable of capturing.

FWIW, Resnais's following film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, is, in a way, a companion piece to Night and Fog. If Night and Fog is the horrors of the Holocaust as raw and stripped down as possible, HMA is like a meditation on memory and how people move on, forget, and remember such events. It's a gorgeous film and a masterpiece in its own right. Come to think of it, I almost wonder if Last Year at Marienbad was Resnais's version of some kind of unreality where everyone is incapable of remembering such things, but that's probably going too far down the rabbit hole for now.

75. Do the Right Thing (Rewatch, 1989, Dir. Spike Lee)
76. Public Enemy: Fight the Power (1989, Dir. Spike Lee)
79. 3 Brothers: Radio Raheem, Eric Garner and George Floyd (2020, Dir. Spike Lee)
80. Making “Do the Right Thing" (1989, Dir. St. Clair Bourne)
81. “Do the Right Thing": 20 Years Later (2009, Dir. Spike Lee) - I had been meaning to rewatch Do the Right Thing with the recent Criterion blu-ray release (Which looks fantastic now btw, they seem to have fixed the orange tinting that was missing from the previous Universal blu-ray), but with the murder of George Floyd it seemed very timely.

Yeah, DTRT is a masterpiece. It's also one I'd really like to get back to if only to appreciate it more in the wake of George Floyd and the recent protests. I still wish someone could make a film-equivalent of the kind of unconscious racial bias "racism" that was shown at the end of that Roseanne episode, because as great as DTRT is, it does feel like the kind of racism it's presenting, where there's direct conflict and racial tensions between races being in such close contact with each other, is very different than what I think is the most prevalent form of racism that's happening today.

77. Cloverfield (Rewatch, 2008, Dir. Matt Reeves)
78. 10 Cloverfield Lane (Rewatch, 2016, Dir. Dan Trachtenberg) - Rewatched these as well. I meant to rewatch The Cloverfield Paradox but I feel asleep about 30 minutes in to that bad movie. First two Cloverfields hold up really well though. I think 10CL is still the best by a margin, but honestly the original Cloverfield is better than I remember.

Never saw 10CL, but the original Cloverfield is probably my favorite film of its kind (that kind of found-footage genre). I still think it's a brilliantly original hybrid concept and the execution really leaves nothing to be desired. Even outside the novelty of the found-footage/monster hybridization the film is just a superbly exciting thriller that barely lets up on the tension one it gets going.

85. L'Avventura (1960, Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) - Prototype for not only Antonioni's own Blow-up but also Picnic at Hanging Rock as well. Perhaps a movie like Cache as well. I really enjoyed this overall, I easily just got lost in the atmosphere, particularly in the first half of the movie at sea and on the island and such. I don't have much to really say about the actual plot or what happened to the missing woman, but that all seems kind of beside the point.

This is one of the first super arthouse films I remember seeing and loving when I got really into films for the second time after NGE. It's just a beautiful, haunting film with a mysterious power that's hard to put your finger on. I think the general idea is that when people lead such vacuous lives, it's easy for any interruption into their world to expose that emptiness. For whatever reason, a lot of films around that time were concerned with the apathy of the upper-middle classes. Fellini's La Dolce Vita was one, and Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel was another. In a way, I kinda feel like Renoir's Rules of the Game was the predecessor to these films, though set in a very different mode and genre.

Antonioni's two follow-up films were nearly as good, IMO. La Notte is probably his most straight-forward drama, though still excellent and very Bergman-esque in the writing. L'Eclisse I now think I probably prefer to L'Avventura. It's just as beautiful but even more experimental and avant-garde in its editing and use of symbolism. Antonioni's Red Desert is another masterpiece where he took that style, transferred it to color, and made it more personal. I'd also be very curious to hear your thoughts on The Passenger, which initially wasn't one of my favorite Antonioni's, but it's stuck with me since seeing it and it's definitely ripe for interpretation similar to Blowup. Basically, you just need to do an Antonioni marathon, lol.

86. Enemy (2013, Dir. Denis Villeneuve) -

I feel like I saw this one but I honestly don't remember much, though you mentioning spiders makes me think I saw it. Isn't that the film that ends with the guy walking into a room and a giant spider climing up the wall?

89. Bad Boys (Rewatch, 1995, Dir. Michael Bay) - Anything that isn't Martin Lawrence and Will Smith bantering together in this movie is just awful. I remember thinking this was one of the better Bay films but NOPE.

I enjoyed this when I saw it as a kid, but that's been ages ago.

[Raxivace]

Catching up:

Ketchup is pretty good, but over the last few years I've started to enjoy mustard more than I used to.

Survivor is an interesting case because it maybe the first hybrid reality/game show hybrid, and one of its selling points was the drama so it makes sense that it would've borrowed from prestige dramas as well.

Its interesting because the drama is baked straight into the game mechanics, but it took several seasons for players to really realize what the game even was (There's even a funny moment in the very first season where one contestant says something like "Hey this isn't a game show we're on...wait a second, this totally is a game show!"). You have to vote people out one by one, but if you actually make to the end you have to a convince a jury of the same people you had a hand in screwing over one way or another that you deserve the million more than the other two people sitting next to you (Or just one if you go by the older seasons and a few one offs here and there). That generates drama by design, and its delicious. Its a pretty ingenious set-up to structure a show around too, and in a way kind of reminds me of the Old Hollywood "factory" style of filmmaking since it allows them to make two whole seasons of TV a year that for the most part are pretty coherent as stories (The Kaoh Rong season being the only exception that immediately pops in my mind because seriously wtf was that).

That also makes it a really fascinating mix of like, game theory and how that conflicts with subjective biases and social perception. If you're just an asshole the whole time and don't give a shit about any of the people you're screwing over then all of your plotting and scheming and challenge wins and digging up bullshit magical game items has accomplished nothing, as many players have learned the hard way- some of whom are still complaining about their multiple losses in unhinged drunken YouTube rants 10+ years later. Likewise if you're too nice you get voted out pretty quickly for being a "social threat", because hey who wants to sit next to the handsome single dad with four kids and a great story to tell. And sometimes none of that applies at all. It's all about reading the room under circumstances that are designed to be incredibly difficult.

There's an argument to be made that the game awards psychopathy but there's really only one winner that I'd describe as probably a psychopath, and it was still at least interesting to get his perspective on things and something of an insight into how someone like that thinks.

I may have spent too much time thinking about this, which may or may not have included listening to a 300 hour, 30 volume audiobook.

I guess what I've noticed is that some game shows are either more "game" or "show" and I tend to prefer the ones that are more "game." Match Game can definitely be funny, but as a game show it's pretty terrible because who wins entirely depends on the question that's asked. If the possible answers are obvious and all/most the celebrities say it, then all that contestant has to do is guess that obvious answer and win, especially if the other question is less obvious with more possible answers then there's no way for the other contestant to win. Family Feud is similar in that it basically all comes down to who wins the last round. I think America Says actually has a better/fairer "game" format than Family Feud, but the lack of Steve Harvey's humor is certainly noticeable. Pyramid is great because it's just a perfectly designed and balanced game that's all about skill rather than luck.

I think there's still some luck in Pyramid. Like if you land a shitty partner who just sucks at describing things then that's not your fault really, no more than just getting particularly bizarre survey answers in Family Feud.

Some amount of luck is unavoidable in any of these games of course, and I don't really have a problem with that as long as you need some skill for the luck to mean anything in most circumstances. Press Your Luck is maybe one of the few exceptions and that launched a whole scandal when a guy actually figured out how to beat the system that turned out not to be as random as it appeared.

Ah, I've often wondered where you got your username from but I never really thought to ask. I kinda assumed it was an obscure reference to something I wasn't familiar with. What was the username you made the anagram from?

Ah, it would ruin my fun if I just told you!

I saw Das Boot once in my early teens and didn't care much for it, but I very well may like it more if I rewatched it now. Tons of films I saw back then that are now among my favorites.

That's definitely happened to me a lot. Tons of a movies that frustrated me as a teen ended up becoming favorites as I got obsessed with why I didn't like something and trying to "prove" why they were bad, only for the abyss itself to claim me in the end.

It seems we're pretty much in agreement about S1. Olyphant is probably the weakest point for the entire show, and it really sucks to have a protagonist that bland. I think a big problem is that he just never really developed any kind of nuance or subtlety besides having "anger issues," and his emotional expressivity seems limited to being apathetic, apoplectic, or pretending to be apathetic when he's apoplectic. It didn't sink the series if only because everyone around him IS so interesting, and he by no means dominates the focus or runtime. I can agree that the series does drag a bit in places, in S1 and elsewhere, but because the setting/characters were so good it rarely bothered me. I do think Jane mentioned leaving in S1, but I wouldn't swear to it.

Seth is kind of weird too because the show does seem to swerve between him actually being a lead and him just being the audience's way into the ensemble cast. Like I'd have to imagine Seth would have been written differently had they known how popular Al would become.

FWIW, it wasn't so much the Hearst stuff that had me confused, but the nature of who exactly they were dealing with when it came to making it a territory or part of some state. The Hearst stuff seemed to be part of that, but not the whole thing. I'd have to rewatch it, but it seems like there was a whole political angle that never quite materialized beyond Hearst's involvement, but I seems to remember there being more to it than just him.

Wait, I thought it was Hearst himself trying to make Deadwood a part of a state. Is that not the case? Maybe I'm more confused than I thought.

Him and Wolcott definitely made for good villains, though I halfway wonder if they were introduced because they'd originally planned for Swearangen to be the villain, but he ended up being too popular so they made him something of an antihero. I mean, Swearengen was on the edge of being pretty damn evil in parts of S1; don't forget he was going to have the young girl killed because she was a witness to his guys that murdered her family.

Yeah that's why his ending in the movie fell flat for me, because you know there was a lot of bad shit Al did in the actual show. Still even in season 1 his mercy killing of the preacher showed that he wasn't completely heartless, and even tried to do acts of kindness at times in his own way.

Hearst's appearance forcing Al into a more protective role is a development I'm fine with, but at the cost of whitewashing his more troubling aspects I don't like. Which is mostly a problem I have with the movie again, but you could probably argue that about how he's written in the series at times too.

I also agree how good Farnum was. Looking back, I'd say the chemistry between him and Swearengen was one of the series' highlights and I kinda wish they'd played that up even more, because they kinda go their separate ways in S2 and S3. Doc was good too, though I wish he'd played a bigger role.

Honestly, I had a crazy crackpot idea that Farnum would be the one to burn the town down after getting frustrated with being the laughingstock of it, but whelp. They never even get around to burning the fucking town.

Supposedly one of the potential S4 storylines would have involved a literal snake oil salesman coming into Deadwood and becoming a rival to Doc. Could have been interesting.

One thing I find interesting about the end of S3 compared to the film is how even though S3 ends on an obvious note of ambiguity that was meant as a kind of cliffhanger for S4, in a way it works better than the film that wrapped everything up almost TOO well in a way that came off as something close to a fanfiction/fantasy. Like, the ambiguity of S3's end is, as you say, really more appropriate given the general tone and nature of the series, and I think the juxtaposition of the two says something interesting about the nature of endings in general. Sometimes conclusive endings work, of course, but I think it really depends on the work. As an unrelated example, you simply couldn't end films like No Country for Old Men or A Serious Man on scenes that neatly resolved everything as that would defeat the entire theme of uncertainty in those films. If it was about anything, Deadwood was probably about the lawless formation of community and how easily that could be destroyed/corrupted by the rich and powerful in a capitalistic society, so to have the series end with the rich/powerful guy essentially "winning" makes sense, while the film just comes off almost as fantasy revenge porn.

And while we're dealing with fictionalized historical figures, there's still some basis in history too. Like, we as audience know that the Hearst family itself specifically did not stop being huge assholes. Cinephiles are well aware about George's son William Randolph Hearst, his feud with Orson Welles etc.

I think someone like Quentin Tarantino can get away with this kind of thing because in a movie like Inglourious Basterds is self-conscious enough about being a bullshit fantasy that it ties back into themes of that film about nature of fiction, propaganda. It knows what it is. Deadwood tries to be way more grounded from the beginning, which makes the direction of the movie feel so off to me.

Going back to purely fictional films though, yeah certain endings just would not work with No Country for Old Men or A Serious Man. A lot of people outright cannot handle uncertainty it seems- or at least, that's the best explanation I can come up with for the critical and fan consensuses both preferring the Deadwood The Movie's ending to S3's.

On something of an unrelated note, it seems Deadwood fans really, really hate the theater plot in S3. Its not my favorite plot myself but I kind of like it- sure it would have been more interesting had it continued into a potential S4, but even as is it sort of works as a counterpoint to the "show" that Al and Cy and Seth and everyone else is putting on for Hearst until its shattered at the end of the S3.

OTOH, I don't think I'm quite as negative on the film as you, I just think it emphasized the wrong things and took a wrong turn with the fantasy "revenge porn" ending, but I really like the moments where characters were meditating on the past and showing how it affected them. I mean, there's a really good film in there somewhere that focuses more on the nature of time/memory than the film it turns out as where it gets too wrapped in taking revenge on Hearst. I still enjoyed most all of the character-driven moments, and I actually think the film is the only place where Olyphant's Seth is tolerable as he seemed to play wistful/regretful pretty well, though maybe a lot of that was just how it was shot/edited.

I'm okay with that stuff I guess, but that's also the kind of a theme a lot of these franchise revivals tend to deal with. Twin Peaks: The Return deals with similar themes for example, but obviously Lynch is a way different kind of artist than someone like David Milch and explores the idea in a vastly different and arguably way more bitter way.

Still, even with Milch's style I would have loved a version of this story that wasn't about getting revenge, but everyone wallowing in the fact that they lost the great war against Hearst 10 years ago and just trying to move on despite the fact they were defeated. Or maybe they try and get revenge and come out worse for it, with Hearst being the one to just burn the fucking town down. There are a lot of ways to go with this that I think are better than what was come up with.

Part of my distaste for the movie too is that inbetween seeing the movie and writing about it I looked at reactions to the movie online, and people seem to love the shit out of it precisely for that bullshit ending where Hearst finally gets his comeuppance. And if it were just fans that would be one things, but critics seemed to really like it too. It just all leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and makes me wonder if the movie wasn't cynically written to appease "fans".

Given the large cast I'm not sure how much they've could've done with a 4-hour film. Maybe they could've condensed it down to a single-season mini-series though, basically something roughly the length of NGE. No idea how influential the series was either, but "sexposition" is a great term!

Yeah maybe NGE length would have been preferred, I dunno.

Are you ever gonna watch Game of Thrones btw? That was a much more controversial ending than Deadwood The Movie's, though I personally liked GoT's better even though Deadwood The Movie's seems to have a much more positive general reception. It seems they often got pitted against each other since they both aired the same year on HBO. As a show GoT is way more uneven than something like Deadwood or Breaking Bad though, but it has its moments.

I actually love this adaptation. It's certainly a very Hollywood take on Shakespeare, but that's not a bad thing, and Brando's "Friends..." speech is the best iteration of that speech I've heard. The entire film is riveting and it even manages to make the final couple acts hold together with some great drama, which isn't easy to do.

It's so good, I'm just surprised that I'd never heard anyone talk about it before in terms of great Shakespeare films.

One of those films that's perfectly enjoyable while it's playing but there's nothing much memorable afterward. If you want to watch a really memorable disaster film, check out the Norewegian film The Wave from 2005. THAT one has stuck with me.

I'll try and check it out at some point.

That's a candidate for Godard's worst film, IMO. I guess some of the Vertov stuff is more intolerable, but among his narrative films at least it's definitely the worst I've seen. The weird thing is that Godard isn't without a sense of humor, even it's more of a wry one that's not literally LOL funny. Like, Prenom: Carmen was probably funnier than KYRU, and maybe that's because the latter was Godard trying too hard to meld his intellectual style with Buster Keaton and that combo just doesn't work.

Yeah, Godard's comedy can't carry a film on its own but works as a topping to something else.

Yeah, Night and Fog is one of those films that's difficult to watch precisely because no film captures the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust like it does. It does put into stark relief how short narrative cinema has came in capturing that horror, though I'm honestly not sure how you could while still creating something that had any sense of traditional drama, which would almost by necessity lessen some of the impact. A film like that does make me sympathize with why Godard turned away from narrative cinema, because it's true there are some things in reality that fiction seems incapable of capturing.

Yeah, I think that's why something like Schindler's List never quite connected with me. Just knowing that Spielberg has complete control over all of the images, the actors etc. just lessens the impact like you say, and that's even before you get into the landmine about whether "Hollywood's film" about the Holocaust should have ever been about Oskar Schindler to begin with.

FWIW, Resnais's following film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, is, in a way, a companion piece to Night and Fog. If Night and Fog is the horrors of the Holocaust as raw and stripped down as possible, HMA is like a meditation on memory and how people move on, forget, and remember such events. It's a gorgeous film and a masterpiece in its own right. Come to think of it, I almost wonder if Last Year at Marienbad was Resnais's version of some kind of unreality where everyone is incapable of remembering such things, but that's probably going too far down the rabbit hole for now.

There are definitely memory themes in Night and Fog too, even if arguing that film as an auteur work does feel kind of beside the point somewhat.

There's a good chapter in the book "Documenting the Documentary" on Night and Fog that goes into some of the memory themes, though I'd have to look at it again to really talk about it.

Yeah, DTRT is a masterpiece. It's also one I'd really like to get back to if only to appreciate it more in the wake of George Floyd and the recent protests. I still wish someone could make a film-equivalent of the kind of unconscious racial bias "racism" that was shown at the end of that Roseanne episode, because as great as DTRT is, it does feel like the kind of racism it's presenting, where there's direct conflict and racial tensions between races being in such close contact with each other, is very different than what I think is the most prevalent form of racism that's happening today.

I think it helps that in DTRT there's a lot of that unconscious racism in the film before things actually do get violent in the climax (In fact you could argue that the entire debate about whether there should be photographs of black people on the wall of Sal's Famous or not and if not having them makes Sal a racist is similar to that Roseanne example), but yeah it wouldn't hurt to have lower key films about this too that really focus in on what you're talking about.

Never saw 10CL, but the original Cloverfield is probably my favorite film of its kind (that kind of found-footage genre). I still think it's a brilliantly original hybrid concept and the execution really leaves nothing to be desired. Even outside the novelty of the found-footage/monster hybridization the film is just a superbly exciting thriller that barely lets up on the tension one it gets going.

Interestingly, none of the sequels use the found footage format at all. Not even that terrible manga spinoff does (This has been your yearly reminded that there's a Cloverfield manga). Cloverfield Paradox of course was a completely unrelated film to begin with though that was edited into being a Cloverfield sequel, but IIRC I think 10CL was originally written as something separate but ended up working much better.

This is one of the first super arthouse films I remember seeing and loving when I got really into films for the second time after NGE. It's just a beautiful, haunting film with a mysterious power that's hard to put your finger on. I think the general idea is that when people lead such vacuous lives, it's easy for any interruption into their world to expose that emptiness. For whatever reason, a lot of films around that time were concerned with the apathy of the upper-middle classes. Fellini's La Dolce Vita was one, and Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel was another. In a way, I kinda feel like Renoir's Rules of the Game was the predecessor to these films, though set in a very different mode and genre.

I can definitely seen the Rules of the Game connection. I don't really know what to make of it being such a common theme though. Like I guess you could reduce it to "lol capitalism kills the soul" or whatever but that feels like a bit simplistic of an explanation for the trend.

Antonioni's two follow-up films were nearly as good, IMO. La Notte is probably his most straight-forward drama, though still excellent and very Bergman-esque in the writing. L'Eclisse I now think I probably prefer to L'Avventura. It's just as beautiful but even more experimental and avant-garde in its editing and use of symbolism. Antonioni's Red Desert is another masterpiece where he took that style, transferred it to color, and made it more personal. I'd also be very curious to hear your thoughts on The Passenger, which initially wasn't one of my favorite Antonioni's, but it's stuck with me since seeing it and it's definitely ripe for interpretation similar to Blowup. Basically, you just need to do an Antonioni marathon, lol.

I'd actually seen La Notte before. I liked it, but maybe because its so straightforward the specifics of it haven't stayed with me much. I even often describe it as the best film I've forgotten that I've seen lol. I do have L'Eclisse on my DVR though, need to watch at some point though I have to be in the right mood for Antonioni.

I do want to see Red Desert too, and I'll make a note about The Passenger. Zabriskie Point is another I'm curious about since Welles was, supposedly, specifically mocking that film with the film-within-the-film in The Other Side of the Wind (To the point even filmed near one of the shooting locations that Antonioni used IIRC). I say "supposedly" because that film-within-the-film is just too good for it be a simple mocking, so actually seeing Zabriskie Point may clarify things somewhat.

I feel like I saw this one but I honestly don't remember much, though you mentioning spiders makes me think I saw it. Isn't that the film that ends with the guy walking into a room and a giant spider climing up the wall?

Yeah, that's the one.

I enjoyed this when I saw it as a kid, but that's been ages ago.

Yeah I had last seen it as a kid myself, and well it was better off staying in my memories.

[Lord_Lyndon]

Here is chaos_rampant's review of L'Avventura. It is one of his favourite films.

Appearances, in a transparent reality

At some point in the film Monica Vitti turns to her love partner and passionately proclaims "I want to see clearly!". They're standing atop a convent, and saying this, accidentally she tugs on a rope. Bells go off around them. A moment later, from a church in the distance bells ring back an answer.

Wow.

And so finally I arrive at the end of my Antonioni quest going backwards in time from The Passenger, back at the start. This will not be the last of his films that I see, but I feel I've reached a point that enables closure. I'm where it all began, in the craving mind, where all the formations of life and cinema are born. I will rest from my travel here, with the magnitude of this film.

But L'Avventura is famously a mystery of disappearance, so why do I speak in the title of this review of 'appearances'?

Perhaps because, in the aftermath of that disappearance, Antonioni sketches for us the first appearance of desire. Romance in his later films was already stale or not allowed to blossom (it appears again in Zabriskie Point, under a different context), but here feelings are pursued, in an effort to reflect if love can be our saving grace.

That appearance, born in a barren rock in the middle of the sea, rests on a twofold interpretation.

On one level, perhaps in understanding by Anna's inexplicable disappearance the precarious balance in which hangs our fleeting existence, the randomly cruel laws that govern it, the two partners turn to each other for solace. And perhaps more, seeing deep down in their own selves how quick life can be forgotten, how everything we hold to matter ultimately matters little and how this speck of life we value is merely transient and will come to pass, they turn to each other to desperately defy it, to prove to each other and the world that love cannot simply vanish.

Antonioni frames first this realization of transience against the elements of nature, the imperishable, secondly he frames, traps, blocks within the desperate relationship, mostly faces in silhouette, against old medieval buildings, man's folly to mimic the imperishable. This is Antonioni's spatial stroke of genius, the visual vocabulary which he consistently executed for the rest of his career.

But whereas in the subsequent films I was fascinated with the abstraction of human struggle, here I'm also fascinated with the struggle itself of human beings fumbling in the dark. The woman cautious of love at first, then allowing herself to be swept in it, believing if something can make her "see clearly" that it should be love. The man pushing obsessively for that love then, having consummated the need, conquered his prey, losing interest, aimlessly wandering the streets. The sated beast now becomes casually destructive, as we're shown in the scene where for no reason he spills ink over a young man's drawing.

Antonioni fills this with portents and divinations, like the woman's premonition that Anna has returned.

More subtle sketch of the madness of desire is the surreal scene where a mob in the grip of sexual paroxysm gathers in the street to ogle at a beautiful woman. Monica Vitti's character later experiences the same oppressiveness of the "male gaze", yet doesn't feel threatened by it, until her man emerges from a building, at which point she runs and hides.

The finale in this sense is a poignant enigma like few in cinema, the smile of a Mona Lisa. The two lovers, now bitterly broken by how their desire has failed them, stand in a plaza with the view of a mountain in the horizon. The woman lays a hand on the man's head, but is the gesture forgiveness or reproach and is she telling him to stay or absolving him to go?

Rushing back through his career, a chronicle emerges. Here the appearance of desire in the hope that it will liberate, later the failure of that desire to liberate, the willingness to not pursue it at all in L'Eclisse. Later yet, the liberation from desire, the realization in Deserto Rosso that we need to make ourselves whole from within, the chimera of the mind in Blowup and the liberation from it, the chimera of ideas in Zabriskie Point and the liberation from it, until the eventual, stunning to behold emergence of nirvana in The Passenger. A state of awareness where all bonds to clinging and desire are severed, the illusions of ego and identity dissolved, the characters now embracing their transience.

This is why Antonioni matters to me. Not because Kubricks, Polanskis, and Peter Weirs all took from him, planting seeds in the fertile ground of his cinema, and not because he did more for cinema as we know it than all of them together, but because his enduring legacy, mastery of medium, conceptual exploration of ideas, all of this cannot fully account for the experience of the spiritual journey they enable. Which is to say that something elusive exists embedded in the frame, a true perception, that makes his films mysteriously extend into the soul.

Antonioni saw further perhaps than any other director, before or after.

[Eva Yojimbo]

Survivor is an interesting case because it maybe the first hybrid reality/game show hybrid, and one of its selling points was the drama so it makes sense that it would've borrowed from prestige dramas as well.

Its interesting because the drama is baked straight into the game mechanics, but it took several seasons for players to really realize what the game even was...

Interesting stuff. Makes me wish I'd watched it more growing up. I remember when the first season was a big deal, and I think I caught an episode or two but that was back before I had a DVR so if I wanted to watch a show weekly I had to program the VCR, which was a PITA.

I guess what I've noticed is that some game shows are either more "game" or "show" and I tend to prefer the ones that are more "game." Match Game can definitely be funny, but as a game show it's pretty terrible because who wins entirely depends on the question that's asked. If the possible answers are obvious and all/most the celebrities say it, then all that contestant has to do is guess that obvious answer and win, especially if the other question is less obvious with more possible answers then there's no way for the other contestant to win. Family Feud is similar in that it basically all comes down to who wins the last round. I think America Says actually has a better/fairer "game" format than Family Feud, but the lack of Steve Harvey's humor is certainly noticeable. Pyramid is great because it's just a perfectly designed and balanced game that's all about skill rather than luck.

I think there's still some luck in Pyramid. Like if you land a shitty partner who just sucks at describing things then that's not your fault really, no more than just getting particularly bizarre survey answers in Family Feud.

Some amount of luck is unavoidable in any of these games of course, and I don't really have a problem with that as long as you need some skill for the luck to mean anything in most circumstances. Press Your Luck is maybe one of the few exceptions and that launched a whole scandal when a guy actually figured out how to beat the system that turned out not to be as random as it appeared.

Even with Pyramid's "luck" aspect it's balanced because, for one, both contestants have to play with both celebrities, so if one of the celebs is awful then it hurts both players equally; and two, even if one is bad at giving clues, each round each player/celeb pair does 3 categories so the one that's bad only has to give the clues one of the three times. Other than that, the only "luck" element is getting a category that's hard, which typically revolves around proper names.

I heard about that Press Your Luck guy. I know they did a documentary on that, as well as the guy that cheated on UK's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Seth is kind of weird too because the show does seem to swerve between him actually being a lead and him just being the audience's way into the ensemble cast. Like I'd have to imagine Seth would have been written differently had they known how popular Al would become.

I think I said something similar when I reviewed S1 (or maybe S2) about them changing the show because of Al's popularity.

FWIW, it wasn't so much the Hearst stuff that had me confused, but the nature of who exactly they were dealing with when it came to making it a territory or part of some state. The Hearst stuff seemed to be part of that, but not the whole thing. I'd have to rewatch it, but it seems like there was a whole political angle that never quite materialized beyond Hearst's involvement, but I seems to remember there being more to it than just him.

Wait, I thought it was Hearst himself trying to make Deadwood a part of a state. Is that not the case? Maybe I'm more confused than I thought.

You could definitely be right and I'm just the one confused, LOL.

Him and Wolcott definitely made for good villains, though I halfway wonder if they were introduced because they'd originally planned for Swearangen to be the villain, but he ended up being too popular so they made him something of an antihero. I mean, Swearengen was on the edge of being pretty damn evil in parts of S1; don't forget he was going to have the young girl killed because she was a witness to his guys that murdered her family.

Yeah that's why his ending in the movie fell flat for me, because you know there was a lot of bad shit Al did in the actual show. Still even in season 1 his mercy killing of the preacher showed that he wasn't completely heartless, and even tried to do acts of kindness at times in his own way.

Hearst's appearance forcing Al into a more protective role is a development I'm fine with, but at the cost of whitewashing his more troubling aspects I don't like. Which is mostly a problem I have with the movie again, but you could probably argue that about how he's written in the series at times too.

I wouldn't say the show whitewashed Al's troubling aspects as much as it sidelined them when dealing with Hearst. I don't know where S4+ would've went, but I imagine there would've been some kind of reckoning with Al. It's hard to tell from the film too since it was so preoccupied with wrapping up the Hearst stuff.

I also agree how good Farnum was. Looking back, I'd say the chemistry between him and Swearengen was one of the series' highlights and I kinda wish they'd played that up even more, because they kinda go their separate ways in S2 and S3. Doc was good too, though I wish he'd played a bigger role.

Honestly, I had a crazy crackpot idea that Farnum would be the one to burn the town down after getting frustrated with being the laughingstock of it, but whelp. They never even get around to burning the fucking town.

Supposedly one of the potential S4 storylines would have involved a literal snake oil salesman coming into Deadwood and becoming a rival to Doc. Could have been interesting.

Would've been cool to have a Doc-centered storyline that didn't solely revolve around a plague or someone else's illness. Definitely would've been funny too if Farnum was the one to burn everything down because of his petty bruised ego, lol.

And while we're dealing with fictionalized historical figures, there's still some basis in history too. Like, we as audience know that the Hearst family itself specifically did not stop being huge assholes. Cinephiles are well aware about George's son William Randolph Hearst, his feud with Orson Welles etc.

I think someone like Quentin Tarantino can get away with this kind of thing because in a movie like Inglourious Basterds is self-conscious enough about being a bullshit fantasy that it ties back into themes of that film about nature of fiction, propaganda. It knows what it is. Deadwood tries to be way more grounded from the beginning, which makes the direction of the movie feel so off to me.

Going back to purely fictional films though, yeah certain endings just would not work with No Country for Old Men or A Serious Man. A lot of people outright cannot handle uncertainty it seems- or at least, that's the best explanation I can come up with for the critical and fan consensuses both preferring the Deadwood The Movie's ending to S3's.

On something of an unrelated note, it seems Deadwood fans really, really hate the theater plot in S3. Its not my favorite plot myself but I kind of like it- sure it would have been more interesting had it continued into a potential S4, but even as is it sort of works as a counterpoint to the "show" that Al and Cy and Seth and everyone else is putting on for Hearst until its shattered at the end of the S3.

All good points here. Yeah, Tarantino gets away with it because he's very self-aware and Basters is very open about being historical fantasy. Deadwood very much wasn't that, or wasn't that until the film at least. Dead on about people disliking uncertainty and ambiguity, especially when it comes to endings. I'd also say it's even more true when it comes to TV because people invest so much time into TV I think they feel like they deserve to end on some kind of conclusive note. Sopranos received a lot of hate for its ending for similar reasons (its ambiguity). I haven't seen GOT but I've wondered if the hate around its final season/ending isn't for similar reasons.

As I mentioned in one of my reviews, the S3 theater plot was setting up for Al to take over the theater because that's what happened in real life. Not sure where exactly they would've gone with it, and without that there's not much point to the theater plot of S3 on its own so I can understand the hate. Interesting point about it paralleling the "show" being put on by the other characters.

Still, even with Milch's style I would have loved a version of this story that wasn't about getting revenge, but everyone wallowing in the fact that they lost the great war against Hearst 10 years ago and just trying to move on despite the fact they were defeated. Or maybe they try and get revenge and come out worse for it, with Hearst being the one to just burn the fucking town down. There are a lot of ways to go with this that I think are better than what was come up with.

Part of my distaste for the movie too is that inbetween seeing the movie and writing about it I looked at reactions to the movie online, and people seem to love the shit out of it precisely for that bullshit ending where Hearst finally gets his comeuppance. And if it were just fans that would be one things, but critics seemed to really like it too. It just all leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and makes me wonder if the movie wasn't cynically written to appease "fans".

Yeah, I agree with all of this. I can understand fan reactions being positive because fans root for the good guys and want the bad guys to get their comeuppances; but it is weird how critics have accepted it so, errr, uncritically. I'm sure Milch wanted to make the film to have an appropriate end of the series, but I do wonder how much pressure he felt to please fans and wrote it with that in mind.

Are you ever gonna watch Game of Thrones btw? That was a much more controversial ending than Deadwood The Movie's, though I personally liked GoT's better even though Deadwood The Movie's seems to have a much more positive general reception. It seems they often got pitted against each other since they both aired the same year on HBO. As a show GoT is way more uneven than something like Deadwood or Breaking Bad though, but it has its moments.

When I eventually get my system set up, my plans were to do several more seasons of Doctor Who, take a break and then watch Twin Peaks, then watch more Doctor Who, then probably start GoT. TBH, with my recent love of D&D and now Dark Souls I've been in the mood for some dark fantasy TV and GoT would definitely fit the bill.

TBH, the thing that's taken me so long with my system is that I'd really love to invest in a full 4K system, but 4K AVRs are still kind of a mess and I also need to serve as a music system (which means an AVR with Dirac) as well as a home theater, and it's tough finding an AVR and player that can do everything I need. I keep thinking that if I wait long enough the ideal products will come along, but every time I check AVS forums people are complaining about the newest players/AVRs not being stable and tons of features having bugs. The good AVRs with Dirac are also still stupidly expensive ($4k is on the cheap side. :( ).

I actually love this adaptation. It's certainly a very Hollywood take on Shakespeare, but that's not a bad thing, and Brando's "Friends..." speech is the best iteration of that speech I've heard. The entire film is riveting and it even manages to make the final couple acts hold together with some great drama, which isn't easy to do.

It's so good, I'm just surprised that I'd never heard anyone talk about it before in terms of great Shakespeare films.

I've actually seen it on TCM a few times, so at least it's not completely unknown. There are some really great but really obscure Shakespeare films out there.

FWIW, Resnais's following film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, is, in a way, a companion piece to Night and Fog. If Night and Fog is the horrors of the Holocaust as raw and stripped down as possible, HMA is like a meditation on memory and how people move on, forget, and remember such events. It's a gorgeous film and a masterpiece in its own right. Come to think of it, I almost wonder if Last Year at Marienbad was Resnais's version of some kind of unreality where everyone is incapable of remembering such things, but that's probably going too far down the rabbit hole for now.

There are definitely memory themes in Night and Fog too, even if arguing that film as an auteur work does feel kind of beside the point somewhat.

There's a good chapter in the book "Documenting the Documentary" on Night and Fog that goes into some of the memory themes, though I'd have to look at it again to really talk about it.

Resnais was definitely the filmmaker most obsessed with memory. Muriel and Providence are about memory too, and Je t'aime, je t'aime is even a sci-fi film where a guy takes part in an experiment that backfires and he ends up reliving his past at random (that film was a huge influence on Eternal Sunshine too).

Yeah, DTRT is a masterpiece. It's also one I'd really like to get back to if only to appreciate it more in the wake of George Floyd and the recent protests. I still wish someone could make a film-equivalent of the kind of unconscious racial bias "racism" that was shown at the end of that Roseanne episode, because as great as DTRT is, it does feel like the kind of racism it's presenting, where there's direct conflict and racial tensions between races being in such close contact with each other, is very different than what I think is the most prevalent form of racism that's happening today.

I think it helps that in DTRT there's a lot of that unconscious racism in the film before things actually do get violent in the climax (In fact you could argue that the entire debate about whether there should be photographs of black people on the wall of Sal's Famous or not and if not having them makes Sal a racist is similar to that Roseanne example), but yeah it wouldn't hurt to have lower key films about this too that really focus in on what you're talking about.

True that there's definitely still some unconscious racism in DTRT, but it's not the focus. TBH, I imagine it would be difficult to make an entire film on that concept, and I also think it would be hard to balance being subtle/ambiguous but still noticeable. It makes me appreciate that Roseanne episode more and more for how it managed to do that.

Never saw 10CL, but the original Cloverfield is probably my favorite film of its kind (that kind of found-footage genre). I still think it's a brilliantly original hybrid concept and the execution really leaves nothing to be desired. Even outside the novelty of the found-footage/monster hybridization the film is just a superbly exciting thriller that barely lets up on the tension one it gets going.

Interestingly, none of the sequels use the found footage format at all. Not even that terrible manga spinoff does (This has been your yearly reminded that there's a Cloverfield manga). Cloverfield Paradox of course was a completely unrelated film to begin with though that was edited into being a Cloverfield sequel, but IIRC I think 10CL was originally written as something separate but ended up working much better.

TBH, I always thought Cloverfield was an odd film to make into a franchise, maybe because the initial film just works so well as a standalone entity, and, from what I've heard, 10CL is pretty tenuously connected to the events in the first film.

I can definitely seen the Rules of the Game connection. I don't really know what to make of it being such a common theme though. Like I guess you could reduce it to "lol capitalism kills the soul" or whatever but that feels like a bit simplistic of an explanation for the trend.

Combination of a few things probably. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that most of the directors making these films were middle-class themselves so they were simply writing what they knew. I also think there was something of a post-war malaise that's tangible in those films, and the same way Resnais was disgusted by the middle class's indifference to Hitler, I think other filmmakers were disgusted by their indifference to Vietnam (though I'm not sure how relevant this was to Italy). Finally, it was probably the influence of Modernism/Postmodernism in general, which was largely about the anxiety of being in this increasingly globalized world with the erosion of traditions and the difficulty of finding any coherent philosophy or ideals or even religion that could accommodate such diversity. L'Avventura and L'Eclisse (arguably the latter even more than the former) are very obsessed with the fleeting nature of life and the illusory nature of values.

I'd actually seen La Notte before. I liked it, but maybe because its so straightforward the specifics of it haven't stayed with me much. I even often describe it as the best film I've forgotten that I've seen lol. I do have L'Eclisse on my DVR though, need to watch at some point though I have to be in the right mood for Antonioni.

I do want to see Red Desert too, and I'll make a note about The Passenger. Zabriskie Point is another I'm curious about since Welles was, supposedly, specifically mocking that film with the film-within-the-film in The Other Side of the Wind (To the point even filmed near one of the shooting locations that Antonioni used IIRC). I say "supposedly" because that film-within-the-film is just too good for it be a simple mocking, so actually seeing Zabriskie Point may clarify things somewhat.

I will say I remember writing a long, pretty detailed review of L'Eclisse back in the day. I think it's still somewhere on EGF but who knows where. As my reviews got longer I started hiding them under spoiler tags to take up less room on the forums, but the downside is that now I can't find them with a Google search.

Zabriskie Point is one of those "interesting failures." I think its biggest problem is that Antonioni was trying to make this grand, exuberant, symbolic film about love in an age of empty materialism and it just came off as a mess. Antonioni was always at his best when he was at his most subtle, and Zabriskie was a bit like trying to cross his symbolism with Fellini's over-the-top extroversion and that's a combo that just doesn't work.

[Eva Yojimbo]

Here is chaos_rampant's review of L'Avventura. It is one of his favourite films.

That's a great review. Thanks for posting it.

[Lord_Lyndon]

I'm also posting tieman's review of L'Avventura. It works well as an overview of Antonioni's filmography. It is more in tune with the usual analyses of Antonioni's work. (Words like 'alienation' and 'ennui' come to mind.)

Trouble In Paradise

Many of the post-war new wave European directors seemed to have problems making "American Films" that addressed US concerns. Today the distinction no longer arises, media globalisation/colonization being almost complete. But while Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point" was a weak attempt at "portraying America", his previous films have become only more relevant, working as effective portraits of very specific modern conditions.

Unlike the neorealist films that he was reacting against, Antonioni's major films don't portray any working class alternatives to the lives of the bourgeoisie. Instead, his films induce a kind of paralysis. They have a noxious and toxic quality, which his characters experience and his audience is forced to share. This paralysis is itself the consequence of what happens when gender stratification and class domination are pushed to the extreme points that they are in a medium-late capitalist society. In other words, Antonioni's internal suffering, his existential nausea, is the precise "subjective" consequence of an "objective" regime of accretion for its own sake.

Antionioni's cinema embalms the viewer in a sort of suffocating subjectivity, until we feel nothing but the neuroticism, narcissism, and cataclysmic disinterest of his characters. And yet, his camera constantly forces us into a distant, almost inhuman, position. It is this strange juxtaposition between an inhuman, almost anthropological distance, and a subjectivity so suicidally sickening, that makes Antonioni's films so unique.

More importantly, it is because of this internal malaise, that Antonioni's characters are constantly on the run. One of man's greatest flaws is his incessant belief that some external flight is capable of inducing some meaningful state of internal happiness. That by retreating to another location, man's problems may disappear. That by superficially changing his environment, escaping to a fantasy world, indulging in physical pleasures or acquiring and accumulating material objects, man may finally be at peace. But time and time again, Antonioni reveals these tactics to be nothing more than temporary distractions.

As such, Antonioni's characters seem to fall into two categories. His Italian trilogy (and Red Desert), for example, focuses on wealthy characters who haven't a financial care in the world. If we think in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, then this is a group of people whose requirements - financial, physiological, social or otherwise - are always amply met. But it is precisely because their needs are met, that these characters are trapped in a state of contemplation. They are free to think. And it is precisely this freedom which brings about a painful sort of super-awareness. Rather than struggle to survive, they question their own survival. And so they suffer from self-imposed loneliness, from an inability to connect with other people except on the most superficial level (they stage shark attacks and bouts of sex for quick thrills), and from, not frustration so much as anhedonia, an inability to take pleasure, and also, more shockingly, an inability even to have dreams or desires.

While Antonioni's "wealthy characters" now work as apt stand-ins for post-modern man, for every man and woman in the developed world, Antonioni's English-language films tend to focus on photographers and radicals. That is, they are artists and voyeurs, outside of both paralysis and capitalist logic. They seek to escape their identities, live free on the margins of society, or bring about some social disruption or even revolutionary action. But again, there is no solution. Antonioni's filmography never resolves the problems he tackles.

Unique with Antonioni is the way his characters fail to comfortably inhabit the spaces in which they exist. Antonioni's characters always seem to be in an awkward relationship with their personal environments. They slide within vacant houses, are suffocated by industrial wastelands, search ragged islands, and though they dream of blissful beaches or utopian deserts, there is no escape, only an ever-expanding landscape of paralysis.

And within these spaces, all Antonioni's drama is internal. Antonioni's cinema is a cinema of inaction. Nothing external happens. Instead, we witness the immense tiredness of the human body. We witness the outcome of some unseen drama and the result of some long past trauma. Watch how Antonioni begins his films with relationships, not only long established, but already dissolved. These characters carry the burdens of a complete past history. A history forever unknown to us. Think of "The Passenger" which begins with Jack Nicholson already lost and in the wilderness, or "The Eclipse", which begins with lovers breaking up.

In a sense, Antonioni also predicts the after-glow of the Sexual Revolution. He portrays a universe dominated by the superego injunction "to enjoy". Pleasure is the goal, but partaking in such pleasures, now readily accessible with the collapse of religion, culture and morality, only lead to a callous indifference to pleasure itself. And so we have a desensitisation to pleasure: an inability to find gratification in money, love, ideology or objects.

Monica Vitti, Antonioni's beautiful leading lady, thus becomes a symbol for this dissatisfaction. Antonioni objectifies Vitti, treats her as a pillar of sex and beauty, an object of temptation and ripe possibility, yet simultaneously portrays her as a disinterested and disaffected zombie. Love cannot flourish without sex, but love is impossible precisely because of sex. Sex is thus, to put it in Zizekian terms, simultaneously the condition of the possibility and the impossibility of love.

Unsurprisingly, as we begin the 21st century, the problems faced by Antonioni's middle-aged characters seemed to have been transferred to an even younger generation. Indeed, if Antonioni were making films today, his characters would probably be in their late teens. Perhaps this is why today's younger viewers (the very viewers who would benefit most from his films) find it hard to identify with Antonioni's films. Perhaps what we need is an Antonioni of the 21st century. A younger, hipper Antonioni. The kind of Antonioni that Antonioni tried to be with "Zabriskie Point".

8.5/10 - Masterpiece.

[Raxivace]

Yeah both of those are very good reviews.

[Raxivace]

Interesting stuff. Makes me wish I'd watched it more growing up. I remember when the first season was a big deal, and I think I caught an episode or two but that was back before I had a DVR so if I wanted to watch a show weekly I had to program the VCR, which was a PITA.

I think its a very engaging show but man there is a lot of it if you start now. They just wrapped up airing their 40th season a couple of months ago, and you have to commit for that much of something.

Even with Pyramid's "luck" aspect it's balanced because, for one, both contestants have to play with both celebrities, so if one of the celebs is awful then it hurts both players equally;

I'm not sure even then it would hurt both players equally necessarily, but any arguments I can think up seem pretty pedantic really.

I heard about that Press Your Luck guy. I know they did a documentary on that, as well as the guy that cheated on UK's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

I've seen both of these documentaries, but its been a very long time since the Press Your Luck one. The WWTBAM one is interesting because the first hour is just a typical documentary about the guy, how they cheated, the consequences etc., and then the last 20 minutes or whatever are just his segment of the WWTBAM episode he was on played uninterrupted. You go into that footage now knowing how he was cheating though (IIRC it was a friend of his in the audience that would cough when the host would read the correct answer to a question), allowing you to "spot" the methods and such being used in real time- it becomes almost a game in its own right. Good stuff.

I think I said something similar when I reviewed S1 (or maybe S2) about them changing the show because of Al's popularity.

Yeah I think you did, and that probably planted the idea in my head lol.

I wouldn't say the show whitewashed Al's troubling aspects as much as it sidelined them when dealing with Hearst. I don't know where S4+ would've went, but I imagine there would've been some kind of reckoning with Al. It's hard to tell from the film too since it was so preoccupied with wrapping up the Hearst stuff.

"Sidelined" does seem to be a more accurate word, but yeah it would have been interesting to see him get a "reckoning" of sorts.

Would've been cool to have a Doc-centered storyline that didn't solely revolve around a plague or someone else's illness. Definitely would've been funny too if Farnum was the one to burn everything down because of his petty bruised ego, lol.

There's the whole war veteran angle with Doc too that was interesting.

I think it honestly could have worked with Farnum. Like seeing a guy that was nominally the mayor just turning like that could have been good.

All good points here. Yeah, Tarantino gets away with it because he's very self-aware and Basters is very open about being historical fantasy. Deadwood very much wasn't that, or wasn't that until the film at least. Dead on about people disliking uncertainty and ambiguity, especially when it comes to endings. I'd also say it's even more true when it comes to TV because people invest so much time into TV I think they feel like they deserve to end on some kind of conclusive note. Sopranos received a lot of hate for its ending for similar reasons (its ambiguity). I haven't seen GOT but I've wondered if the hate around its final season/ending isn't for similar reasons.

I'll try and dance around spoilers here, but with GoT its more that a character many people projected hard onto ended up not being the hero they thought they were going to be despite the character doing plenty of questionable shit throughtout the entire series and them doing something awful at the end of it that they had been saying they were going to do that entire show anyways.

Like its the kind of thing that makes sense with just a few minutes of thought and retrospection about the character but that required actually thinking about the story and well, those are qualities the internet collectively is not known for. Its perhaps another example of "fan" culture impeding people's ability to actually engage with the thing they are a fan of.

I hope this is sufficiently vague. I'm not sure that qualifies as "ambiguity" necessarily (And to be fair there are other legitimate things to criticize about how this character is written), though perhaps you could say its a kind moral ambiguity, I dunno.

As I mentioned in one of my reviews, the S3 theater plot was setting up for Al to take over the theater because that's what happened in real life. Not sure where exactly they would've gone with it, and without that there's not much point to the theater plot of S3 on its own so I can understand the hate. Interesting point about it paralleling the "show" being put on by the other characters.

Yeah I remember. It would have been fun seeing Al try and manage that lol.

Yeah, I agree with all of this. I can understand fan reactions being positive because fans root for the good guys and want the bad guys to get their comeuppances; but it is weird how critics have accepted it so, errr, uncritically. I'm sure Milch wanted to make the film to have an appropriate end of the series, but I do wonder how much pressure he felt to please fans and wrote it with that in mind.

Supposedly Milch had Alzheimer's already while writing the movie too, and well I don't make light of that but I have to imagine that affected the quality of his writing.

When I eventually get my system set up, my plans were to do several more seasons of Doctor Who, take a break and then watch Twin Peaks, then watch more Doctor Who, then probably start GoT. TBH, with my recent love of D&D and now Dark Souls I've been in the mood for some dark fantasy TV and GoT would definitely fit the bill.

Cool, would love to hear your thoughts on all of these.

TBH, the thing that's taken me so long with my system is that I'd really love to invest in a full 4K system, but 4K AVRs are still kind of a mess and I also need to serve as a music system (which means an AVR with Dirac) as well as a home theater, and it's tough finding an AVR and player that can do everything I need. I keep thinking that if I wait long enough the ideal products will come along, but every time I check AVS forums people are complaining about the newest players/AVRs not being stable and tons of features having bugs. The good AVRs with Dirac are also still stupidly expensive ($4k is on the cheap side. :( ).

Dirac...as in, Dirac sea. That's that thing from Eva. I understand these words you're saying and what they mean.

Resnais was definitely the filmmaker most obsessed with memory. Muriel and Providence are about memory too, and Je t'aime, je t'aime is even a sci-fi film where a guy takes part in an experiment that backfires and he ends up reliving his past at random (that film was a huge influence on Eternal Sunshine too).

Tbh I've never quite seen Eternal Sunshine before. A teacher in high school put it on at the end of the year once, but the sound quality was basically inaudible and I had no idea what was happening. I dunno if that was also because of the Dirac sea but it sucked.

TBH, I always thought Cloverfield was an odd film to make into a franchise, maybe because the initial film just works so well as a standalone entity, and, from what I've heard, 10CL is pretty tenuously connected to the events in the first film.

That the connection is only tenuous honestly works in 10CL's favor, because the characters themselves don't actually know what's going on because they're locked in a bunker the whole movie, and its like you're trying to figure out alongside the characters if its actually a Cloverfield sequel or just a thematic connection a la Twilight Zone or something.

Even without that though, John Goodman of Pyst fame is just awesome in the movie.

Combination of a few things probably. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that most of the directors making these films were middle-class themselves so they were simply writing what they knew. I also think there was something of a post-war malaise that's tangible in those films, and the same way Resnais was disgusted by the middle class's indifference to Hitler, I think other filmmakers were disgusted by their indifference to Vietnam (though I'm not sure how relevant this was to Italy). Finally, it was probably the influence of Modernism/Postmodernism in general, which was largely about the anxiety of being in this increasingly globalized world with the erosion of traditions and the difficulty of finding any coherent philosophy or ideals or even religion that could accommodate such diversity. L'Avventura and L'Eclisse (arguably the latter even more than the former) are very obsessed with the fleeting nature of life and the illusory nature of values.

I'll have to keep this in mind when I was L'Eclisse. I ordered the Red Desert blu-ray too btw.

As my reviews got longer I started hiding them under spoiler tags to take up less room on the forums, but the downside is that now I can't find them with a Google search.

You might have more success if you use EGF's internal search function.

Zabriskie Point is one of those "interesting failures." I think its biggest problem is that Antonioni was trying to make this grand, exuberant, symbolic film about love in an age of empty materialism and it just came off as a mess. Antonioni was always at his best when he was at his most subtle, and Zabriskie was a bit like trying to cross his symbolism with Fellini's over-the-top extroversion and that's a combo that just doesn't work.

Yeah I've not seen many people say Zabriskie is a successful film but that does make it sound curious in its own right.

Maybe I'll marathon it with, I dunno, Heaven's Gate or something with a similar reputation lol.

[Gendo]

Have you not been watching movies lately, or are you just behind in writeups?

[Raxivace]

Have you not been watching movies lately, or are you just behind in writeups?

Mostly just behind. Hopefully I'll be caught up by tonight or tomorrow.

[Raxivace]

91. She's Gotta Have It (1986, Dir. Spike Lee) - Spike's debut feature film. This one didn't land for me super well though- the central character Nola to be all that interesting and wasn't entirely sure just what about her made so many men as devoted to her as they were. Still, it's interesting to see an early version of Spike's style, even if it was kind of rough around the edges compared to even his next film like School Daze.

92. Perry Mason: The Case of the All-Star Assassin (1989, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

93. Perry Mason: The Case of the Poisoned Pen (1990, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

94. Perry Mason: The Case of the Desperate Deception (1990, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

95. Perry Mason: The Case of the Silenced Singer (1990, Dir. Ron Satloff)

99. Perry Mason: The Case of the Defiant Daughter (1990, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

101. Perry Mason: The Case of the Ruthless Reporter (1991, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

104. Perry Mason: The Case of the Maligned Mobster (1991, Dir. Ron Satloff)

106. Perry Mason: The Case of the Glass Coffin (1991, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

107. Perry Mason: The Case of the Fatal Fashion (1991, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

108. Perry Mason: The Case of the Fatal Framing (1992, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

109. Perry Mason: The Case of the Reckless Romeo (1992, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

110. Perry Mason: The Case of the Heartbroken Bride (1992, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

111. Perry Mason: The Case of the Skin-Deep Scandal (1993, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

112. Perry Mason: The Case of the Telltale Talk Show Host (1993, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II)

113. Perry Mason: The Case of the Killer Kiss (1993, Dir. Christian I. Nyby II) - Uh, yeah I watched a bunch of these recently. I won't take the time to really talk about any of them in detail, but they all follow more or less the same formula as the other movies I've mentioned. Probably the big thing to mention about the changes to the show are Ken's fiancé character eventually disappearing after a few movies and him eventually devolving into Paul Drake Jr. 2.0. Ken's adventures never get quite as over the top as Paul getting sniped at while in a helicopter though, but one movie DID feature a crazed art gallery owner trying to attack Ken with a chainsaw.

Still, what's fun about these series is that its at an odd intersection of history where the guest stars include old Hollywood people, famous television stars from the time, and people that would really blow up afterward. Regis Philbmen, Geraldo Rivera (Playing an asshole talkshow host that gets murdered lmao), Valerie Harper, Angela Bassett etc.

The two most notable movies for this thread though are "Case of the Skin-Deep Scandal" which had Jonathan Banks (Who had previously been in an older movie in this series. Here though he plays a scientist developing aging cream of all things) and Tippi Hedren. There was also "Case of the Desperate Deception" which featured Ian McShane playing a businessman with a terrible French accent AND Terry O'Quinn playing a secret Nazi, which about damn near made me fall out of my chair considering I named this thread "Lost in Deadwood" well before I actually watched this particular film.

They're fun for what they are. Sadly "Case of the Killer Kiss" was Raymond Burr's final screen performance, and he didn't even get to live to see it air on TV.

96. Promare (2019, Dir. Hiroyuki Imaishi)

97. Promare: Galo-hen (2019, Dir. Hiroyuki Imaishi)

98. Promare: Lio-hen (2019, Dir. Hiroyuki Imaishi) - A weird mecha anime thing about fire fighters and fire fighting being coopted by a fascist dictatorship, with Galo-hen and Lio-hen being two shorts that add a bit of backstory. Like Imaishi's other stuff (Gurren Lagann, Kill la Kill etc.) its an exercise in over-the-top style more than anything, though I feel like Gurren Lagann still had the strongest story of his work. Still, what a fun expressive style it is and not something we get all that much of.

100. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, Dir. Tay Garnett) - A really solid little noir about a guy helping a woman murder her husband. The biggest problem I had with it though is that as good as it is it still doesn't quite match up to Double Indemnity to me, which I feel like is the definitive take on this premise. Still, Postman is fun. The diner is a solid location for a location, and everything about the blackmail scheme in the later part of the movie is cool.

102. The Tartars (1961, Dir. Richard Thorpe & Ferdinando Baldi) - A bad action movie about Tartars fighting Vikings that not even the prescence of Orson Welles can save. Not much to really say about this one.

103. The Warped Ones (1960, Dir. Koreyoshi Kurahara) - Sort of like Cruel Story for Youth in that it's a Japanese New Wave movie about trouble youth (I think they're both even in 1960 releases), but I'm similarly kind of ambivalent about this. The jazz score is really cool, and I like the general aimlessness of these asshole delinquent kids in the film.

Where the movie loses me is the ridiculous rape plot. At one point one of the delinquents kidnap the wife of a detective that arrested them. Fine. Where the movie gets stupid is when the wife later pays one of the female delinquents to rape her husband. I'm sorry, but what? The movie even ends in a clinic where its revealed where the wife is pregnant with one of delinquent's babies while the female delinquent is pregnant with the detective's baby. Everything about this plotline is just stupid and it kind of ruins the movie.

105. Black Panthers (1968, Dir. Agnes Varda) - This was actually the first Varda film I've seen, and it was pretty underwhelming. It's a documentary that lightly interviews Black Panthers during the 60's as they protest the arrest of Huey P. Newton, but I dunno being only half an hour long I feel like Varda didn't really bring much insight into this. Perhaps it was too “in the moment" or something- I wonder what she would have made with even, say, 5 years to reflect on this.

114. The Great Silence (1968, Dir. Sergio Corbucci) - I'm not the biggest spaghetti western guy outside of Leone's films, but this one was honestly really damn good. Its deeply cynical, though hot damn does it look good even on the cheap letterboxed DVD copy that I have. The snowy mountains and such are a marvel, making it one of the few wintery westerns.

Klaus Kinski steals the show here though (Even with the bad English dub over him), and he's one of the few villain characters that actually WINS in one of these movies but in true Kinski fashion he's a huge asshole while doing it, killing the mute heroic gunman at the end and ending the movie by just murdering a bunch of prisoners. Wow, what a prick.

Kind of odd to see a Kinski character being so mechanically effective in a movie too, because I feel like in the Werner Herzog movies after this his persona is more frustrated, playing characters like Aguirre and Orlok/Dracula that just get owned hard. Even Fitzcarraldo sort of has that going on, and he's the most successful character that Kinski played for Herzog in terms of actually accomplishing his goals.

115. The Big Boss (1971, Dir. Wei Lo & Chia-Hsiang Wu) - I hadn't actually seen any of Bruce Lee's famous movies before, but damn watching this it was a lot of fun. What kind of surprised me though was that it honestly wasn't that much less cynical of a movie than The Great Silence really. Like yeah Bruce Lee kills the bad guy, but most of his friends are still dead by the end of it and Bruce's character is still arrested by the police at the end of the day.

The Criterion blu-ray of this is top-notch btw. The production story about the making of this is fascinating- like its crazy to think that the script to the movie was still being worked out while this was being filmed, and was left open enough to kill off Bruce's character half an hour in if it was decided he was less charismatic than James Tien's character, who would then take over as the lead. Crazy how things could have been different.

The blu-ray also contains several different scores and audio tracks for the movie. I watched the original Mandarin version with subtitles, though they also have the original English dub which has a totally different soundtrack. I think another version had yet another score too.

[Gendo]

And here I thought I'd caught up to you!

[Raxivace]

And here I thought I'd caught up to you!

Even if you did I'm sure Lyndon is still well ahead of me!

[Eva Yojimbo]

I'm also posting tieman's review of L'Avventura. It works well as an overview of Antonioni's filmography. It is more in tune with the usual analyses of Antonioni's work. (Words like 'alienation' and 'ennui' come to mind.)

Also a good review, though it's a bit "Theory"-ful for my tastes--lots of abstract statements/conclusions with too little supporting evidence. But I still think it hits the mark with most of it.