Main character screws up the lives of (almost) everyone around him just to cadge and keep a job. Screw that dude...and the massively acclaimed director he rode out on.
I recall reading that Richard Harris and Oliver Reed had a long-running, perhaps only half-serious feud, and that Harris once sent Reed a pair of crutches, one marked “Ken Russell” and the other “Glenda Jackson.”
I didn't know who Glenda Jackson was until my son and I watched her on The Muppet Show last night. She was a pirate who took over the show. Fantastic episode.
He was slated to be James Bond when Connery retired, but the studio got nervous that he would drink his way through the production. Alas, what a glory that 007 would have been...
As we know or can assume, I have a high tolerance for stuff that I dislike. I don’t walk out on stuff. And if something’s well done, I can like it for what. Like the Dylan movie: failed as any meaningful sort of biopic but can’t and won’t deny that it was well done for what it was.
But the one piece of pulp I completely hated and still do was the last Bond. Didn’t buy anything in the plot starting with a biohazard-development lab in London run by M. The movie went downhill from there. On top of that, it was just an awfully produced movie. Approximately nothing redeeming to it. [*shudder!*]
Now I'm imagining James Bond regenerations and I will not be denied my headcanon.
Speaking of The Doctor, though, I just the other day had the displeasure of watching "Delta And The Bannermen", a Dr Who story I understood to be widely considered The Absolute WORST, and, yeah, it's a flaming trainwreck. Not even fun-bad. Incomprehensible. Stupid. Fucking ChatGPT could have done a better plot (I'm still not totally sure what was going on and don't care enough to watch it again). The original script must have been "Stuff happens. Roll credits." with a dog turd stapled to the bottom. JFC.
I did enjoy seeing a holiday camp in Delta & the Bannerman, a piece of British culture/history I knew of only thanks to Tommy lyrics. But my plan to watch all the Sylvester McCoy episodes stopped at Happiness Patrol (the doctor faces an evil baker's gingerbread henchmen). It stopped in spitting-on-the-poster fury, and I never went back to McCoy (though I hear his later seasons are good).
Puzzling how the writing has always swung so wildly on Dr Who. The decade that gave us Delta also gave us Androzani. And in the modern era: Tennant gets The Girl in the Fireplace (wow) and Fear Her (did the script win a middle school contest?). I bailed during Capaldi, probably won't ever resume... but in another 5-15 years? Maybe I'll cool down enough to try whatever McCoy episode comes after Happiness Patrol.
I guess they were trying to give us something we’d never seen before. But after two fucking years of epidemic, and four fucking years of Trump, that was NOT what I wanted to see.
Not to put excessive energy into this but they lost me with M’s biohazard creating business in the heart of London. I mean, suspension of believe is part of for the course but this was kicking me down and asking for far too much.
And the biohazard crap itself was far too credible.
I was underwhelmed by the direction — there was something witless. Of course, the only attractions were Lynch and de Armas’ performances. Otherwise, all the wit here was as soggy as wet cardboard.
Well, I mean, Christ, badfilm is one of my obsessions, and I've seen some peee-yew stinkers over the years even outside MST3K. But there's a fucking parsec of distance between an enthusiastic yet crap piece of work like, oh, Starcrash or Samurai Cop, and the kind of waste of film you refer to.
There are bad films that are just crap on every level. By and by, I have no interest in them, don’t enjoy them. But some may be dumb at its core but at least well enough produced as to be engaging and entertaining. Which is to say there’s bad and there’s bad.
As for MT3K, I’m still creeped out by the original “Invaders from Mars” or whichever one had the well-hidden martians who gained control of earthlings by sticking a needle in the back of necks. [*shiver!!*]
I don't recall ever actually being pissed off at a work of art that didn't involve me and my petty little ego. I'm beyond those kinds of feelings now, but once upon a time I, along with five others, was invited to take part in a show documenting how women overcame negative body images they had of themselves. And there was a money prize for whoever the jury chose as their favorite. I put a shitload of time and effort into it and was very happy with the results, but the prize went to some guy that did fucking boudoir photos that couldn't have possibly been more stereotypical.
Oh, but now that I think of it, I was really pissed off at The Holdovers. Guy sacrifices his dream career for a fucking rich kid and we're supposed to feel good about it. Kind of sums up our current politics on one level, dunnit.
I did not like the Holdovers one bit, despite liking Giamatti. And nothing against Da'Vine Joy Randolph, but that character was written as a big ol' cliche.
i never saw it (haven't seen an Allen since Vicky Cristina Barcelona) but i was confused by the praise for it since it seemed to be just a remix of a couple of his old short stories
I liked it. I thought the point was more not to revere the past so much, but to appreciate the present. Otherwise, yea, a large part of his work is as you say, particularly his favorite jazz genre.
What? I thought the whole point of the movie was that there are always Good Old Days, and wallowing in them is simply nostalgia and avoidance of committment. I mean, the end of the movie is Owen-as-Woody in his dream world of 20's Paris finding people there longing for the Belle Epoch (however its spelled) and being offered a chance to go back there.
There was an incredible BBC miniseries in 1985: Edge of Darkness : an eco/nuclear/murder thriller: ultimately about the Gaia hypothesis;fantastic (in several senses) plotting: great performances (including Joe Don Baker) and a Willie Nelson song.
It was gripping and affecting.
I was seriously pissed to recognize it's looting by Mel Gibson in 2010: it's message turned into a routine revenge/action thriller we've come to expect from Mel.
I was furious: but it was 2012 when I saw it.
In the 70s-80s I saw several lame desecrations of Shakespeare, Moliere, etc: nothing pissed me off like Mel's deracination of a fine show.
I rewatched "The Year Of Living Dangerously" for the first time in about fifteen years. Still love it. Have you ever noticed how Mel does his best work when he plays a skunk?
And by the way, I LIKE baseball. At AVAM, I am possibly the only docent who really, really loves the baseball section of Good Sports, our current exhibition. What I don't like is the elevation of baseball to a religion, America's real essence etc etc. And I am also someone who once helped my ex-husband win his fantasy baseball league by telling him to draft Dustin Pedroia in his rookie year. My single biggest fangirl moment was meeting Brooks Robinson in the bar at the Brass Elephant. But -- it's just baseball!
Think of it this way. The only way you can get a certain kind of powerful American man to like baseball--or any spectator sport, really--is to reassure him that it's the essence of patriotism and sportsmanship and teamwork and all those fine and improving things. Otherwise it's just a game, which he can dismiss as merely sissy and aesthetic like any other form of art.
Caveat: personally I think America at the moment is more WWE. Loud, dumb, flashy, macho, corporate-backed, heavy on the bullshit, likely to get someone injured or killed.
I was going through some boxes of books that had been in storage for years, and came across a copy of that George Will book on baseball. Who the fuck in my family bought this shit? Anyway, it was quite a pleasure to toss Will's smug, smiling face into the recycle bin.
On the other hand I have a copy of Open Net by George Plimpton somewhere on my shelves, a history of hockey I quite enjoy by a guy I largely only knew for his old Intellivision TV ads where he said mean things about Atari 2600 games and so I hated him.
Sorry, maybe I should, but I can't hate that movie. Don't recall the exact words, but "wanna have a catch?" caught me totally off guard and has me blubbering every time I see it.
This is true of every man I know. And I think it's great that it moves you.
But I'll just note that what makes men cry is elevated to profundity and what makes women cry is downgraded to sentimentality. As it turns out, there is SO much crying in baseball. But it's by men.
About five years back I was in NYC for the weekend, always a rare treat. It was a gorgeous spring day in May, and I spent part of the afternoon at the NY Historical Society on Central Park West. Their sumptuous, permanent exhibit of Tiffany lamps is large and lavish, and indescribably gorgeous, but I really come to see a small collection of original Audubon paintings. I knew they were large (a Great Blue Heron, actual size) but the reproductions don't convey the exquisite and complex brushwork in the originals, and the subtle colors, sometimes metallic or iridescent. Other people have and continue to paint birds, but Audubon was a perceptive naturalist, a skilled craftsman, and a real artist.
Then I walked all the way down to Rockefeller Center, and had a gin & tonic overlooking the skating rink while waiting to meet my sister. I think it's mere contrariness to dislike Rockefeller Center, because ever since I was a bridge & tunnel kid coming to see the Rockettes at Christmastime I've found it elevating, welcoming, and inspiring: a declaration that the common man and woman deserve nice things.
Only on this lovely spring afternoon, looming over the statue of Apollo bringing fire to humanity was a giant, shiny pile of Jeff Koons' shit. I'm still furious when I think about it.
It seemed maliciously juvenile, Koons thumbing his nose at anyone who presumed to enjoy what had been designed to be a real commons, an adolescent sneering at the hopes of working people — and all the while getting the fabulously wealthy to fork over big bucks so they, too can join him in getting one over on the proles.
That man has earned a spot in hell, and I've reserved one for him right between Thomas Kinkade and the guy who invented Precious Moments figurines.
I have devised the perfect revenge, but I need your help in choosing where to site it:
In some public area frequented by the arty rich, we erect a 30'-tall sculpture of a googly-eyed poop emoji, made out of that same Mylar-like material. Nearby a plaque reads, "The Invisible Hand," by pseudonymous artist, "Jeph Coons."
I'm pretty sure art has been entirely an elaborate troll & a dare for the uber-wealthy to buy. That Koons is not horrible entirely, but awful in situ, for sure. The situs is not situ-ing.
I'm hardly one of those Prager U "shocking decline in art standards" butt-wipes -- after strolling through the Barnes Foundation, I often feel a bit oppressed by its concatenation of Renoirs (love that naive color pencil thing & the ample women -- but maybe a bit too ample in this context).
I mean, Kinkade might have a lotta detail and look realistic (kinda), but these, even over the Net, are EVOCATIVE. There's someone who actually FELT something about the landscape. This is the kind of art that'd go in a modern Entartete Kunst display so the feebs could slouch in and chortle about how incorrect the color scheme is. Fuck 'em. Philistines.
Yes and he had to push a boulder up a hill for all the rest of time, and have an eagle peck out his liver every day. I have a small statue of Prometheus and the boulder on my desk as I type this. No eagles as I am no Donald Trump
Oh man, I could write a book just on music alone. Hell, I could probably write a book about books I hated. But I’ll pick a harmless movie: The Incredibles. Saw it with my 5 year-old kid, left the theater fuming about Ayn Rand and objectivists or some such bullshit. That was a bit of an OG moment. Happened a lot when I was a young, callow fuckup about town (the good ol’ days!). I can’t imagine getting worked up about shit like that anymore. But since you brought it up, I kinda miss it.
I liked it, but the underlying message bothered me. I think it was pitched as being for "diversity", but the idea that the extraordinary people are held back by the littlebrains with their demands for safety and accountability - well, that hasn't aged well in the years since. It's probably every TechBro's favorite movie. How DARE they complain when my self-driving cars kill pedestrians!
I can think of only such work of “art” that fits this FF prompt. One Sunday afternoon I was immobile, donating platelets to the Red Cross. DVDs are available to watch while reclining, to ease the stress of being unable to move even my arms for the 2-3 hours apheresis requires to complete. I chose a movie about the Civil War, starring Robert Duval as Robert E. Lee. It was basically a hagiography of the Confederate generals, portraying them as benificent overlords who treated even their slaves with respect and afforded them their dignity. I lost it when the Stonewall Jackson character was talking to one of his slaves about the righteousness of the Confederate cause and then he says, “Let us pray.” I got the attending nurse to take it the fuck away. I can’t remember the name of the movie, but it still pisses me off, THANKS ROY FOR DREDGING THAT UP!!!
I liked "Gettysburg," though. There was some soft-pedaling of the Confederates, but it was incidental to the gratifying valorization of J.L.Chamberlain.
If it's anything like plasma donation, you aren't strapped in but you ain't going nowhere for a while. When I worked at Octapharma they'd show movies for the donors, and while the floor techs weren't *supposed* to be watching, it was hard to miss. Minion Death Cult did an episode on the movie Unstoppable the other day, and, while it's been something like eleven years since I've seen it, I could visualize all the scenes they referred to from my repeated unintentional viewings.
Hah! I was a contributing writer for the book that accompanied that movie's release. (“Gods and Generals," for the record.) It was such a wonderful experience, and everyone I dealt with — from the dialect coach to one of the stars (not Duvall) to the director himself — was so kind and generous and well intentioned that I have only the fondest memories of the movie.
A work of art that pissed me off? I had to restrain myself from hurling “A Gentleman in Moscow" against a wall. Bad writing, uninteresting characters, unconvincing dialogue. I still remember the page on which I gave up in fury: 109.
"Forest Gump" does it for me. At the point where the girl says that she is just so tired after obviously being sick for a while, I shouted out in the theater: "She has AIDS God damn it." I was right of course every bad thing that could happen, happened to her.
The other one was "Saving Private Ryan." Apparently Spielberg and I saw the same B war movies in our childhoods. Every scene after the first 10 minutes was one cliche after another. "Shakespeare in Love" was definitely the better movie, no matter what people say.
As for "Stardust Memories." Well there ain't no accountin' for taste I guess.
My partner showed me the "Forest Gump" clip of the girl spacing/freaking out on her balcony, and she said they should have let her fall off, and then... roll credits! I couldn't bring myself to watch that movie, as I knew from the previews and the hype that I'd hate it.
I kind of sort of watched it on one night on the psych ward where I was *trying* to be sociable but working more on reading the copy of A Canticle For Leibowitz I found in the book collection.
"Ya wanna help mankind? Tell funnier jokes" is what convinced me Woody saw his early movies as the same kind of cage Dylan saw in The Voice of a Generation, and was hellbent on smashing it to bits. Looks like he succeeded.
They should have whacked Tom Hanks right when he made it to the top of the cliff and restarted the movie. That would have given the punters a taste of what war is like
Yes to Saving Private Ryan. Infuriating. The end, when saintly Tom tells Ryan to "earn it," thereby viciously burdening him with a lifetime of crippling guilt for this stupid mission he never asked anyone to undertake for him, and when he's already traumatized by the loss of all of his brothers - WTF??
And we see him at the beginning, an old man, happy and seemingly well-adjusted. Come the fuck on, no way that guy doesn't return to the States for a life of drug and alcohol abuse ending in an early death, possibly self-inflicted.
Heh. That reminds me of “Wait Until Dark”, which was a fine movie. I saw it in a theater when it first came out, and we were all thrilled. Audrey Hepburn plays a married woman who was recently left blind after a car accident. She’s bravely trying to become more independent and capable, and Efrem Zimbalist, her husband is supportive without trying to baby her. He’s out of town, and Audrey undergoes a horrific experience with drug dealers and murder and home invasion, victimized by ruthless psycho Alan Arkin. She emerges bloody but victorious and in the wreckage the police are there and Efrem arrives and calls her name, but instead of rushing to her and holding her in his arms, he says “Walk to me. You can do it!”
At that point the whole audience groaned and laughed almost like we screamed at the earlier jump scare. Dude, don’t make her perform, just go embrace your wife. It was actually sort of funny after the high tension.
The War-As-Crucible-Of-Manhood shit should have been dead and buried before the moving pictures ever began. But no. Still with us. My brain jumps to Cancer-Is-A-Battle-That-Will-Shape-You. Fuck that. All those cancer-as-war metaphors can bite me. Hard.
Everything by Tarantino makes me angry; I can’t quite hate that gabby hack plagiarist because he seems so …alive and/or loopy, but every one of his movies is the stupidest puerile crap imaginable. Derivative dog shit, or I guess dog shit another dog ate and re-shit, and that’s his movies.
--and then Eric Roth, who won the Oscar for the FG screenplay, did not mention even once Winston Groom, who wrote the original novel. That still bugs me.
Coincidentally reading a Winston Groom right now--"Shrouds Of Glory", about the 1864 Middle Tennessee campaign by John Bell Hood--and the man *can* tell a story.
The Ghosts of Versailles. Bad enough for a composer to evoke Mozart and Rossini--those two masters of operatic action--while getting so caught up in his own drones and recitatives that the music never went anywhere it needed to. Bad enough for the composer to rise to the lyrical occasion only in moments of dramatically unnecessary nostalgic neo-romantic reflection. Worse still for the librettist to promulgate the most royalist possible spin upon Marie Antoinette's situation that made Edmund Burke look like Thomas Paine and the Norma Shearer Marie Antoinette look like The Grapes of Wrath. But the ultimate outrage was to be told that this barely competent musically and politically reactionary farrago was really some sort of decisive blow we gays should support against homophobic academic modernism, as though the only reason for creating a comic grand opera was to score points in the interminable Style Wars that dominate American classical music discourse to this day.
I hesitate to say this because it sounds pretentious as all get-out, but I've been working my way through War and Peace at about 10 pages a day since November. And Tolstoy on Opera is freakin' HILARIOUS.
In my youth, I dated a woman who was an excellent artist. Sculpture, painting, ceramics--everything she set her hand to became a marvel of beauty and joy. She was a student at Hofstra, and we got invited to a showing of one of her professor's works at The Hyde. We walked in and the very first work on display was a large (3'X2') canvas with a whitish-blue wash and thin pastel lines running horizontally across it. "That's Sanitess!" I said. "Fucking cabinet-shelf liner!" Price tag: $40,000. My girlfriend was mad about my reaction, but two weeks later we were in Pergament (a department store) and I found a roll of Sanitess with exactly those colors and line patterns. She was stunned. But I remained enormously pissed that this asshole art professor was painting this crap and palming it off on buyers as original masterpieces.
Or there was the Soho gallery I went to to train the owners on their new phone system. The major installation piece on the main floor was a wood bar stool with a piece of 1x6 pine board on it. Attached to the board was a battery, a light bulb, and a knife switch. Close the knife switch and the bulb lit up. Price tag: $10,000. I'm pissed about that one to this very day!
I don't get Tarkovsky, but I imagine it's because I'm not smart enough.
I really liked Heavens Gate.
I remember waiting for years to see Kiss Me Deadly and being so disappointed. You know, Robert Aldrich was never even nominated for an academy award.
I bet they're three or four David Lean films I've never seen the end of -
I have little use for Tarantino. Now that I think about it, I was hella disappointed in Pulp Fiction. I thought Django was weak and I haven't even seen Inglorious Basterds because I have no interest in watching Eli Roth beat people's heads in with a baseball bat. The only Quentin Tarantino work that I really like is " From Dusk till Dawn" which he wrote and the totally terrific Robert Rodriguez directed.
Kill Bill mostly sucked too. Parts of it look great but the plot was nonsensical. Stupid even.
I was genuinely disappointed with Inherent Vice. I didn't like the book much - lesser Pynchon IMO, but I thought if anybody could do it it was Anderson. His latest film, "The Battle of Baktan Cross" is a big budget action picture loosely based on Pynchon's Vineland. I'm pulling for him! Hopefully he's working his way up to Gravity's Rainbow.
I'm definitely not a big fan of Tarantino, but I don't really dislike him. I find he tries a little too hard to show everyone how "cool" he is, and it just falls flat pretty frequently. Our favorite film of his is "Jackie Brown." There is, as always in a QT film, excessive use of the "N" word ("See how cool I am that I get to use that, huhhhh???" "No, Quentin, you're not."). I heard an interview with Samuel L Jackson, and he said that that was how people talked when he was growing up. Sure, that may be true, but who directed the film, SLJ, or QT? Anyway, I can't help thinking that the thing that contributed most to the quality of "Jackie Brown" was that it wasn't his story - Elmore Leonard wrote it. QT is credited for the screenplay, but he seems to have shown a bit of restraint , for a change.
As far as "Kill Bill" goes, I think they could have stretched the first one out about 20 minutes and squeezed the two films together into one.
As long as I'm yacking about Quentin Tarantino, I have to mention his comments about David Lynch and his movie "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me". He claimed the he'd never watch another Lynch film because he felt Lynch had "crawled up his own ass". Seriously? Coming from Quentin, that's pretty damned rich.
Hahaha! I didn't say Lynch ~didn't~ do some weird-assed things in TP. I feel a lot of that stuff comes across as what we call "dream logic". And, while it may seem to not make sense, or even seem like it belongs in the film/show, it's like the garnish you find on your meal at a restaurant that you never eat but still consider to be part of the meal.
My partner feels David Lynch is a pretty good horror writer/director.
We haven't seen "Inland Empire" yet, but have seen snippets of it that are very intriguing. We did quite enjoy "Mulholland Drive". The scene with the director (Kesher) meeting the cowboy is a favorite. "I agree with what you said." "What'd I say?"
Pretty much anything by Spike Lee. There are scenes in individual movies that I love, usually involving music, but in the end? As someone cleverer said, I don't like being beaten with a message stick.
I have heard this POV a lot about didacticism in general, and at least partially agree with it. I love didacticism in old novels, like Trollope or George Eliot or the like, but yeah, when movies are being particularly heavy-handed about the moral of the story it doesn't work for us modern folks.
19th century novelists had a thing for just stopping the action right in mid-scene to make some general observation about human nature. And now, back to our tea party!
Tootsie.
Main character screws up the lives of (almost) everyone around him just to cadge and keep a job. Screw that dude...and the massively acclaimed director he rode out on.
Yeah, crap like that doesn't really fly these days. Did you actually walk out (or just stop watching)?
Nah. Stayed to the bitter end. Sometimes I like me a good fume.
Tootsie sucked .
Also –
"Simon’s very brief review of Tommy, in which he said anyone who found anything to like in it “has nothing to say to me, nor I to him,” "
reads painfully, almost shockingly sexist now...I guess I'm slightly less unenlightened these days...or just more DEI/woke.
As a grown man (now), I'd never walk into a Who movie with Oliver Reed and Ann Margaret. They're both awesome, but in a fucking Who movie?
I miss Oliver Reed. He did brooding menace so well.
I recall reading that Richard Harris and Oliver Reed had a long-running, perhaps only half-serious feud, and that Harris once sent Reed a pair of crutches, one marked “Ken Russell” and the other “Glenda Jackson.”
Ha ha ha ha
I didn't know who Glenda Jackson was until my son and I watched her on The Muppet Show last night. She was a pirate who took over the show. Fantastic episode.
She has a central role in Marat/Sade. Recommended. (Ditto Ian Richardson.)
Acted like an MP for 23 years.
Oliver Reed in a movie is like a guarantee of brooding menace, if not downright brutality.
He was slated to be James Bond when Connery retired, but the studio got nervous that he would drink his way through the production. Alas, what a glory that 007 would have been...
I assumed they ALL drank their way thru it.
Those eyes!
Hey! It's great!
I shall cut you dead in the street next we meet, SIR.
Ann Margaret and bake beans pouring out of a broken TV screen. The Ur- moment of the 60s , brought to you in a movie from 1975.
The older I get the more I love the work of Ken Russell. Saw Lair of the White Worm a year or so ago. It was pretty great!
This exists - I had no idea. Seems like daily I find out the world is stranger and more complex than I ever knew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Kitten_for_Hitler
It can be a double feature with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Clown_Cried
https://www.rogerebert.com/features/found-footage-snippets-of-the-jerry-lewis-project-the-day-the-clown-cried-see-the-light-of-day
I never was a fan of Lewis, but hearing about that film made me cringe. I can give him credit for recognizing that awfulness of the entire project.
As we know or can assume, I have a high tolerance for stuff that I dislike. I don’t walk out on stuff. And if something’s well done, I can like it for what. Like the Dylan movie: failed as any meaningful sort of biopic but can’t and won’t deny that it was well done for what it was.
But the one piece of pulp I completely hated and still do was the last Bond. Didn’t buy anything in the plot starting with a biohazard-development lab in London run by M. The movie went downhill from there. On top of that, it was just an awfully produced movie. Approximately nothing redeeming to it. [*shudder!*]
That said, the crap I’ve enjoyed…
Hearted for "That said, the crap I’ve enjoyed…"
😘
Seems like it should be a Sinatra song, old man looks back on his life, like Autumn Leaves or My Way.
Or The Hiiiiiiiiigh Waaaaaay
I'd walk out on any movie that killed Bond, but that was right at the end, so all I could do was weep innerly as I left.
Killing him off, by that point, was no big deal.
The scene at the M drinking to the death he caused, please.
Now, if the next movie starts with Fiennes-M being NuBond's first kill, I'd be there for that.
Th' fuck?
Did he regenerate into David Tennant?
I liked the initial direction the series went with the first Daniel Craig outing, "Casino Royal."
"Skyfall" soured me pretty quickly. Not enough to go ballistic. Just disappointed by the lazy plotting to fill the gaps between action sequences.
I liked Craig's Bond and how the series got darker (but still fucking ridiculous!) with him.
Now I'm imagining James Bond regenerations and I will not be denied my headcanon.
Speaking of The Doctor, though, I just the other day had the displeasure of watching "Delta And The Bannermen", a Dr Who story I understood to be widely considered The Absolute WORST, and, yeah, it's a flaming trainwreck. Not even fun-bad. Incomprehensible. Stupid. Fucking ChatGPT could have done a better plot (I'm still not totally sure what was going on and don't care enough to watch it again). The original script must have been "Stuff happens. Roll credits." with a dog turd stapled to the bottom. JFC.
I did enjoy seeing a holiday camp in Delta & the Bannerman, a piece of British culture/history I knew of only thanks to Tommy lyrics. But my plan to watch all the Sylvester McCoy episodes stopped at Happiness Patrol (the doctor faces an evil baker's gingerbread henchmen). It stopped in spitting-on-the-poster fury, and I never went back to McCoy (though I hear his later seasons are good).
Puzzling how the writing has always swung so wildly on Dr Who. The decade that gave us Delta also gave us Androzani. And in the modern era: Tennant gets The Girl in the Fireplace (wow) and Fear Her (did the script win a middle school contest?). I bailed during Capaldi, probably won't ever resume... but in another 5-15 years? Maybe I'll cool down enough to try whatever McCoy episode comes after Happiness Patrol.
Puzzling how the writing has always swung so wildly on Dr Who.
They change writers/show runners pretty frequently. Douglas Adams did it for a season or two
I guess they were trying to give us something we’d never seen before. But after two fucking years of epidemic, and four fucking years of Trump, that was NOT what I wanted to see.
I thought we had an agreement that Bond movies don’t have any rugrats in them.
Unsolicited material:
https://richardvonbusack.medium.com/bang-bang-sob-sob-5ed94d4de488
Not to put excessive energy into this but they lost me with M’s biohazard creating business in the heart of London. I mean, suspension of believe is part of for the course but this was kicking me down and asking for far too much.
And the biohazard crap itself was far too credible.
I was underwhelmed by the direction — there was something witless. Of course, the only attractions were Lynch and de Armas’ performances. Otherwise, all the wit here was as soggy as wet cardboard.
I enjoyed your review, tho’.
Holy crap! I'll never dig my way outta that opus!
And now I remember you – SJMN! Was a long time ago in Bern years.
Actually Metro!
Told you it was a long time ago...
Well, I mean, Christ, badfilm is one of my obsessions, and I've seen some peee-yew stinkers over the years even outside MST3K. But there's a fucking parsec of distance between an enthusiastic yet crap piece of work like, oh, Starcrash or Samurai Cop, and the kind of waste of film you refer to.
Time for Talmudic clarification maybe.
There are bad films that are just crap on every level. By and by, I have no interest in them, don’t enjoy them. But some may be dumb at its core but at least well enough produced as to be engaging and entertaining. Which is to say there’s bad and there’s bad.
As for MT3K, I’m still creeped out by the original “Invaders from Mars” or whichever one had the well-hidden martians who gained control of earthlings by sticking a needle in the back of necks. [*shiver!!*]
That’s a really good movie. On last year’s LOC list. I hated the remake at the time, but it seems much better now.
I don't recall ever actually being pissed off at a work of art that didn't involve me and my petty little ego. I'm beyond those kinds of feelings now, but once upon a time I, along with five others, was invited to take part in a show documenting how women overcame negative body images they had of themselves. And there was a money prize for whoever the jury chose as their favorite. I put a shitload of time and effort into it and was very happy with the results, but the prize went to some guy that did fucking boudoir photos that couldn't have possibly been more stereotypical.
Oh, but now that I think of it, I was really pissed off at The Holdovers. Guy sacrifices his dream career for a fucking rich kid and we're supposed to feel good about it. Kind of sums up our current politics on one level, dunnit.
I did not like the Holdovers one bit, despite liking Giamatti. And nothing against Da'Vine Joy Randolph, but that character was written as a big ol' cliche.
That was a DNF for me.
The Magical Negress.
"I don't recall ever actually being pissed off at a work of art that didn't involve me and my petty little ego."
I factor mine in because it ain't going away.
That part seemed very French to me. He didn’t get what he needed or what he wanted, unlike any American story where he gets one or both.
It’s American in that it’s the rich kid that mattered.
Hated Midnight in Paris. Felt like Woody Allen lecturing us on how we should revere what he reveres, which are all rendered in the hackiest ways.
"...how we should revere what he reveres"
Woody is like the Final Boss of Boomers
i never saw it (haven't seen an Allen since Vicky Cristina Barcelona) but i was confused by the praise for it since it seemed to be just a remix of a couple of his old short stories
I liked it. I thought the point was more not to revere the past so much, but to appreciate the present. Otherwise, yea, a large part of his work is as you say, particularly his favorite jazz genre.
What? I thought the whole point of the movie was that there are always Good Old Days, and wallowing in them is simply nostalgia and avoidance of committment. I mean, the end of the movie is Owen-as-Woody in his dream world of 20's Paris finding people there longing for the Belle Epoch (however its spelled) and being offered a chance to go back there.
Man, There's Something About Woody.
Hey I avoid commitment but live in the now
There was an incredible BBC miniseries in 1985: Edge of Darkness : an eco/nuclear/murder thriller: ultimately about the Gaia hypothesis;fantastic (in several senses) plotting: great performances (including Joe Don Baker) and a Willie Nelson song.
It was gripping and affecting.
I was seriously pissed to recognize it's looting by Mel Gibson in 2010: it's message turned into a routine revenge/action thriller we've come to expect from Mel.
I was furious: but it was 2012 when I saw it.
In the 70s-80s I saw several lame desecrations of Shakespeare, Moliere, etc: nothing pissed me off like Mel's deracination of a fine show.
I rewatched "The Year Of Living Dangerously" for the first time in about fifteen years. Still love it. Have you ever noticed how Mel does his best work when he plays a skunk?
There's a reason for that.
Weird coincidence, huh?
Or else doesn't talk at all?
Can I get in a time machine and walk out on Field of Dreams?
And by the way, I LIKE baseball. At AVAM, I am possibly the only docent who really, really loves the baseball section of Good Sports, our current exhibition. What I don't like is the elevation of baseball to a religion, America's real essence etc etc. And I am also someone who once helped my ex-husband win his fantasy baseball league by telling him to draft Dustin Pedroia in his rookie year. My single biggest fangirl moment was meeting Brooks Robinson in the bar at the Brass Elephant. But -- it's just baseball!
Think of it this way. The only way you can get a certain kind of powerful American man to like baseball--or any spectator sport, really--is to reassure him that it's the essence of patriotism and sportsmanship and teamwork and all those fine and improving things. Otherwise it's just a game, which he can dismiss as merely sissy and aesthetic like any other form of art.
“Baseball is what America was. Football is what America is.”—Margaret Atwood
Damn, that's right up there with her assessment of men and women.
The 1919 White Sox are what America was.
And will be again, if the gamey industry has its way.
Reminder that this already happened: https://apnews.com/article/mlb-gambling-marcano-ban-948cce07c953494e7c7621e47692e1ba
Caveat: personally I think America at the moment is more WWE. Loud, dumb, flashy, macho, corporate-backed, heavy on the bullshit, likely to get someone injured or killed.
Mebbe, but WWE doesn't have tens of millions of fighter jets flying in close formation over its crappy little rings, unlike the NFL...
Not yet.
That's "tens of millions of DOLLARS of fighter jets"
Self-oof.
I would have gone for MMA
Being a fan of both, I can appreciate this. See also: George Carlin's comparison of baseball and football.
The cohort that feels that way about baseball is dying out, Laura; the new choads all go for Grand Theft Auto and racial slur hurling contests.
You work at AVM? Pat the building for me, that place is cherce. And the Good Sports show is great!
A classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QcVhyAaLnM
Can't remember where I heard it, but "If baseball was as complicated as baseball writers make it out to be, baseball players couldn't play it."
Thanks for that, George Will had it coming.
The beauty of that bit is how magnificently unfunny it is.
You met Brooks Robinson !!!!!
I was going through some boxes of books that had been in storage for years, and came across a copy of that George Will book on baseball. Who the fuck in my family bought this shit? Anyway, it was quite a pleasure to toss Will's smug, smiling face into the recycle bin.
Dude is a self-proclaimed Cubs fan from Downstate (where they normally root for the Cardinals). That right there is proof of his un-trustworthiness.
Ugh, I had forgotten he was from my home state of Illinois. Sorry about that, America.
On the other hand I have a copy of Open Net by George Plimpton somewhere on my shelves, a history of hockey I quite enjoy by a guy I largely only knew for his old Intellivision TV ads where he said mean things about Atari 2600 games and so I hated him.
Out of his league...
Sorry, maybe I should, but I can't hate that movie. Don't recall the exact words, but "wanna have a catch?" caught me totally off guard and has me blubbering every time I see it.
This is true of every man I know. And I think it's great that it moves you.
But I'll just note that what makes men cry is elevated to profundity and what makes women cry is downgraded to sentimentality. As it turns out, there is SO much crying in baseball. But it's by men.
(sorry, super caffeinated, avoiding work)
Have another cup! You're on fire today!
[Picturing Laura furiously shaving, the meats piling higher and higher]
"Sentimentality" or outright anguish. FWIW I don't disagree.
"what makes men cry is elevated to profundity and what makes women cry is downgraded to sentimentality"
This is brilliant, epigrammatic, even.
About five years back I was in NYC for the weekend, always a rare treat. It was a gorgeous spring day in May, and I spent part of the afternoon at the NY Historical Society on Central Park West. Their sumptuous, permanent exhibit of Tiffany lamps is large and lavish, and indescribably gorgeous, but I really come to see a small collection of original Audubon paintings. I knew they were large (a Great Blue Heron, actual size) but the reproductions don't convey the exquisite and complex brushwork in the originals, and the subtle colors, sometimes metallic or iridescent. Other people have and continue to paint birds, but Audubon was a perceptive naturalist, a skilled craftsman, and a real artist.
Then I walked all the way down to Rockefeller Center, and had a gin & tonic overlooking the skating rink while waiting to meet my sister. I think it's mere contrariness to dislike Rockefeller Center, because ever since I was a bridge & tunnel kid coming to see the Rockettes at Christmastime I've found it elevating, welcoming, and inspiring: a declaration that the common man and woman deserve nice things.
Only on this lovely spring afternoon, looming over the statue of Apollo bringing fire to humanity was a giant, shiny pile of Jeff Koons' shit. I'm still furious when I think about it.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7e/33/29/7e3329f79a5900824939675cc7e19e5a.jpg
It seemed maliciously juvenile, Koons thumbing his nose at anyone who presumed to enjoy what had been designed to be a real commons, an adolescent sneering at the hopes of working people — and all the while getting the fabulously wealthy to fork over big bucks so they, too can join him in getting one over on the proles.
That man has earned a spot in hell, and I've reserved one for him right between Thomas Kinkade and the guy who invented Precious Moments figurines.
Now THAT's pique!
With you all the way on that. Making Koons a public nuisance (he is or was also on the DC mall BTW) is how we got Trump.
I have devised the perfect revenge, but I need your help in choosing where to site it:
In some public area frequented by the arty rich, we erect a 30'-tall sculpture of a googly-eyed poop emoji, made out of that same Mylar-like material. Nearby a plaque reads, "The Invisible Hand," by pseudonymous artist, "Jeph Coons."
Yep. I remember stumbling across Koons work before he was famous and thinking "WTF?!?!" Art that insults your intelligence.
I'm pretty sure art has been entirely an elaborate troll & a dare for the uber-wealthy to buy. That Koons is not horrible entirely, but awful in situ, for sure. The situs is not situ-ing.
I'm hardly one of those Prager U "shocking decline in art standards" butt-wipes -- after strolling through the Barnes Foundation, I often feel a bit oppressed by its concatenation of Renoirs (love that naive color pencil thing & the ample women -- but maybe a bit too ample in this context).
The Barnes is wonderful. I love this portrait, makes up for all the Renoirs.
https://collection.barnesfoundation.org/objects/6865/A-MontrougeRosa-La-Rouge/
If you can get to NYC before February 15, go see this 100-year-old guy's paintings. (The online renderings don't do them justice.) It's not all a troll, not by a long shot. https://acagalleries.com/exhibitions/73-richard-mayhew-a-life-in-art/
I mean, Kinkade might have a lotta detail and look realistic (kinda), but these, even over the Net, are EVOCATIVE. There's someone who actually FELT something about the landscape. This is the kind of art that'd go in a modern Entartete Kunst display so the feebs could slouch in and chortle about how incorrect the color scheme is. Fuck 'em. Philistines.
I think it’s Prometheus, but fuck Jeff Koon’s cynicism
Of course it is. D'oh!
Yes and he had to push a boulder up a hill for all the rest of time, and have an eagle peck out his liver every day. I have a small statue of Prometheus and the boulder on my desk as I type this. No eagles as I am no Donald Trump
That's how I feel about the giant Marilyn Monroe atrocity outside of the Palm Springs Art Museum. The locals seem to love it.
I hate it. Never heard of it before today.
I was born there, but haven't been back in 20+ years.
God, that's awful. Beat him to death with Claes Oldenburg's bat.
[slinking away from the Three-Handed Brother of Four Other Jacksons, thinking "Best not mention how I like this one"...]
Looks like a woman setting her drink (highball) down while on the toilet.
As the song goes: beat him with a rake to make him pay for his mistake.
Oh man, I could write a book just on music alone. Hell, I could probably write a book about books I hated. But I’ll pick a harmless movie: The Incredibles. Saw it with my 5 year-old kid, left the theater fuming about Ayn Rand and objectivists or some such bullshit. That was a bit of an OG moment. Happened a lot when I was a young, callow fuckup about town (the good ol’ days!). I can’t imagine getting worked up about shit like that anymore. But since you brought it up, I kinda miss it.
It's Harrison Bergeron in movie form.
It IS? Huh. I have it on DVD, need to give it a rewatch. The only time I've seen it was the night after Mom passed, and, well.
I liked it, but the underlying message bothered me. I think it was pitched as being for "diversity", but the idea that the extraordinary people are held back by the littlebrains with their demands for safety and accountability - well, that hasn't aged well in the years since. It's probably every TechBro's favorite movie. How DARE they complain when my self-driving cars kill pedestrians!
Oceangate Titan should have put the stake in the heart of that bullshit.
But I guess we're too fucking stupid.
My wife said the same thing! Wait a second. You’re not...?
I can think of only such work of “art” that fits this FF prompt. One Sunday afternoon I was immobile, donating platelets to the Red Cross. DVDs are available to watch while reclining, to ease the stress of being unable to move even my arms for the 2-3 hours apheresis requires to complete. I chose a movie about the Civil War, starring Robert Duval as Robert E. Lee. It was basically a hagiography of the Confederate generals, portraying them as benificent overlords who treated even their slaves with respect and afforded them their dignity. I lost it when the Stonewall Jackson character was talking to one of his slaves about the righteousness of the Confederate cause and then he says, “Let us pray.” I got the attending nurse to take it the fuck away. I can’t remember the name of the movie, but it still pisses me off, THANKS ROY FOR DREDGING THAT UP!!!
Gods and Generals. So we all know what to avoid in future.
I liked "Gettysburg," though. There was some soft-pedaling of the Confederates, but it was incidental to the gratifying valorization of J.L.Chamberlain.
The First Minnesota was way more important but has slowly been written out of the story because Chamberlain was an Easterner
Atun Shei Films has a 3 part series on how to make Gettysburg better
Fuck. I heard it was an inferior sequel, but sucking off Johnny Reb, screw that. I'd rather watch Gettysburg again. Or Glory, as sad as the ending is.
This kind of sums it up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3E2FdedPwU
This is so special for the captive audience part. And for having the nurse take it the fuck away.
"Why, I wouldn't watch that movie if I was strapped to a chair donating platelets!"
If it's anything like plasma donation, you aren't strapped in but you ain't going nowhere for a while. When I worked at Octapharma they'd show movies for the donors, and while the floor techs weren't *supposed* to be watching, it was hard to miss. Minion Death Cult did an episode on the movie Unstoppable the other day, and, while it's been something like eleven years since I've seen it, I could visualize all the scenes they referred to from my repeated unintentional viewings.
Hah! I was a contributing writer for the book that accompanied that movie's release. (“Gods and Generals," for the record.) It was such a wonderful experience, and everyone I dealt with — from the dialect coach to one of the stars (not Duvall) to the director himself — was so kind and generous and well intentioned that I have only the fondest memories of the movie.
A work of art that pissed me off? I had to restrain myself from hurling “A Gentleman in Moscow" against a wall. Bad writing, uninteresting characters, unconvincing dialogue. I still remember the page on which I gave up in fury: 109.
You were better off. I read it all, and it doesn't end, it just Hollywood-Movie's its way into the sunset.
At least Stonewall dies in the end. Then Stephen Lang shows up as Pickett in Gettysburg.
Of course chronologically the movies were made in reverse of historical events.
"Forest Gump" does it for me. At the point where the girl says that she is just so tired after obviously being sick for a while, I shouted out in the theater: "She has AIDS God damn it." I was right of course every bad thing that could happen, happened to her.
The other one was "Saving Private Ryan." Apparently Spielberg and I saw the same B war movies in our childhoods. Every scene after the first 10 minutes was one cliche after another. "Shakespeare in Love" was definitely the better movie, no matter what people say.
As for "Stardust Memories." Well there ain't no accountin' for taste I guess.
My partner showed me the "Forest Gump" clip of the girl spacing/freaking out on her balcony, and she said they should have let her fall off, and then... roll credits! I couldn't bring myself to watch that movie, as I knew from the previews and the hype that I'd hate it.
Same. I’ve never watched it. I’m glad people enjoyed it but I knew I’d hate it.
I kind of sort of watched it on one night on the psych ward where I was *trying* to be sociable but working more on reading the copy of A Canticle For Leibowitz I found in the book collection.
There was also a Madea movie. I did not enjoy it.
You're absolutely right about the cliches in SPR, but I give Spielberg a pass on basis of the first 20 minutes.
"earlier funnier movies" was one of the few recognizable jokes. (Sharon Stone in the railcar was the other.)
"Ya wanna help mankind? Tell funnier jokes" is what convinced me Woody saw his early movies as the same kind of cage Dylan saw in The Voice of a Generation, and was hellbent on smashing it to bits. Looks like he succeeded.
They should have whacked Tom Hanks right when he made it to the top of the cliff and restarted the movie. That would have given the punters a taste of what war is like
Yes to Saving Private Ryan. Infuriating. The end, when saintly Tom tells Ryan to "earn it," thereby viciously burdening him with a lifetime of crippling guilt for this stupid mission he never asked anyone to undertake for him, and when he's already traumatized by the loss of all of his brothers - WTF??
And we see him at the beginning, an old man, happy and seemingly well-adjusted. Come the fuck on, no way that guy doesn't return to the States for a life of drug and alcohol abuse ending in an early death, possibly self-inflicted.
And maybe a
Best-selling War Novel!
Writers gotta stick together, eh boss?
I'm not sure how ANYONE could make it across Omaha Beach and not get fucked up. I'm not sure how anyone made it across, period.
Heh. That reminds me of “Wait Until Dark”, which was a fine movie. I saw it in a theater when it first came out, and we were all thrilled. Audrey Hepburn plays a married woman who was recently left blind after a car accident. She’s bravely trying to become more independent and capable, and Efrem Zimbalist, her husband is supportive without trying to baby her. He’s out of town, and Audrey undergoes a horrific experience with drug dealers and murder and home invasion, victimized by ruthless psycho Alan Arkin. She emerges bloody but victorious and in the wreckage the police are there and Efrem arrives and calls her name, but instead of rushing to her and holding her in his arms, he says “Walk to me. You can do it!”
At that point the whole audience groaned and laughed almost like we screamed at the earlier jump scare. Dude, don’t make her perform, just go embrace your wife. It was actually sort of funny after the high tension.
The War-As-Crucible-Of-Manhood shit should have been dead and buried before the moving pictures ever began. But no. Still with us. My brain jumps to Cancer-Is-A-Battle-That-Will-Shape-You. Fuck that. All those cancer-as-war metaphors can bite me. Hard.
Forest Gump beat out Pulp Fiction at the Oscars
Everything by Tarantino makes me angry; I can’t quite hate that gabby hack plagiarist because he seems so …alive and/or loopy, but every one of his movies is the stupidest puerile crap imaginable. Derivative dog shit, or I guess dog shit another dog ate and re-shit, and that’s his movies.
Professional courtesy, shocking lack of
--and then Eric Roth, who won the Oscar for the FG screenplay, did not mention even once Winston Groom, who wrote the original novel. That still bugs me.
Winston Groom woulda been a better title of that movie.
Coincidentally reading a Winston Groom right now--"Shrouds Of Glory", about the 1864 Middle Tennessee campaign by John Bell Hood--and the man *can* tell a story.
I saw Saving Private Ryan at a weed dealers' apartment. I annoyed the assembled worthies with my compulsive quips à la MST 3000.
The Ghosts of Versailles. Bad enough for a composer to evoke Mozart and Rossini--those two masters of operatic action--while getting so caught up in his own drones and recitatives that the music never went anywhere it needed to. Bad enough for the composer to rise to the lyrical occasion only in moments of dramatically unnecessary nostalgic neo-romantic reflection. Worse still for the librettist to promulgate the most royalist possible spin upon Marie Antoinette's situation that made Edmund Burke look like Thomas Paine and the Norma Shearer Marie Antoinette look like The Grapes of Wrath. But the ultimate outrage was to be told that this barely competent musically and politically reactionary farrago was really some sort of decisive blow we gays should support against homophobic academic modernism, as though the only reason for creating a comic grand opera was to score points in the interminable Style Wars that dominate American classical music discourse to this day.
We don't get much o' thet operatic talk 'round here. [Spits in cuspidor]
When you say that, smile. [Hand moves towards butt of sixgun]
Cantcha just hum a few bars an' calm 'im down?
Bo? Izzat yew?
You are absurdist artist Glen Baxter and I claim my £5.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfhFhXppZbEPtsQV2Z8joWALZ_osYPzs8hKuRQCoZrMxldu3PmDEl9xU1ey6bjM3lMlyjWm_YuwIzknS7ZYLIi0qrGxXjOyPxJ5tLpXK2XeCW-YZCfYgtqWW3noQhMbAfVfkNVEuyprdjq/s1600/Glen+Baxter+Cowboy+Austin.jpg
Like many works of art, I don't understand much of what you wrote, yet it still kicks-ass.
I'm ready to appoint Brian REBID's in-house Opera Critic.
And Roy could jump in occasionally, channelling Andy Griffith...
"Now I know, that you all say that opera ain't nuthin' but hollerin'....and it ain't."
I hesitate to say this because it sounds pretentious as all get-out, but I've been working my way through War and Peace at about 10 pages a day since November. And Tolstoy on Opera is freakin' HILARIOUS.
Sounds stressful. Cantcha just jump straight to Peace?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkQUT1F9b3I
Art that pissed me off . . . where to begin?
In my youth, I dated a woman who was an excellent artist. Sculpture, painting, ceramics--everything she set her hand to became a marvel of beauty and joy. She was a student at Hofstra, and we got invited to a showing of one of her professor's works at The Hyde. We walked in and the very first work on display was a large (3'X2') canvas with a whitish-blue wash and thin pastel lines running horizontally across it. "That's Sanitess!" I said. "Fucking cabinet-shelf liner!" Price tag: $40,000. My girlfriend was mad about my reaction, but two weeks later we were in Pergament (a department store) and I found a roll of Sanitess with exactly those colors and line patterns. She was stunned. But I remained enormously pissed that this asshole art professor was painting this crap and palming it off on buyers as original masterpieces.
Or there was the Soho gallery I went to to train the owners on their new phone system. The major installation piece on the main floor was a wood bar stool with a piece of 1x6 pine board on it. Attached to the board was a battery, a light bulb, and a knife switch. Close the knife switch and the bulb lit up. Price tag: $10,000. I'm pissed about that one to this very day!
You shoulda got Marine Todd in there to kick their asses!
Honestly Roy, I like your funny essays better.
( That's a joke)
I didn't hate Stardust Memories. - I love
8 1/2 and I thought the homage parts of
the film were clever and funny. The rest
was pretty whiny. The Gordon Willis black and white photography is magnificent.
Ebert's good on this
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/stardust-memories-1980
I don't get Tarkovsky, but I imagine it's because I'm not smart enough.
I really liked Heavens Gate.
I remember waiting for years to see Kiss Me Deadly and being so disappointed. You know, Robert Aldrich was never even nominated for an academy award.
I bet they're three or four David Lean films I've never seen the end of -
I have little use for Tarantino. Now that I think about it, I was hella disappointed in Pulp Fiction. I thought Django was weak and I haven't even seen Inglorious Basterds because I have no interest in watching Eli Roth beat people's heads in with a baseball bat. The only Quentin Tarantino work that I really like is " From Dusk till Dawn" which he wrote and the totally terrific Robert Rodriguez directed.
Kill Bill mostly sucked too. Parts of it look great but the plot was nonsensical. Stupid even.
I was genuinely disappointed with Inherent Vice. I didn't like the book much - lesser Pynchon IMO, but I thought if anybody could do it it was Anderson. His latest film, "The Battle of Baktan Cross" is a big budget action picture loosely based on Pynchon's Vineland. I'm pulling for him! Hopefully he's working his way up to Gravity's Rainbow.
For Tarkovsky you just have to slow your mind way the fuck down. It’s more likely you’re too smart.
I'm definitely not a big fan of Tarantino, but I don't really dislike him. I find he tries a little too hard to show everyone how "cool" he is, and it just falls flat pretty frequently. Our favorite film of his is "Jackie Brown." There is, as always in a QT film, excessive use of the "N" word ("See how cool I am that I get to use that, huhhhh???" "No, Quentin, you're not."). I heard an interview with Samuel L Jackson, and he said that that was how people talked when he was growing up. Sure, that may be true, but who directed the film, SLJ, or QT? Anyway, I can't help thinking that the thing that contributed most to the quality of "Jackie Brown" was that it wasn't his story - Elmore Leonard wrote it. QT is credited for the screenplay, but he seems to have shown a bit of restraint , for a change.
As far as "Kill Bill" goes, I think they could have stretched the first one out about 20 minutes and squeezed the two films together into one.
As long as I'm yacking about Quentin Tarantino, I have to mention his comments about David Lynch and his movie "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me". He claimed the he'd never watch another Lynch film because he felt Lynch had "crawled up his own ass". Seriously? Coming from Quentin, that's pretty damned rich.
https://youtu.be/h0YI_eHg3Aw?si=xoS-KRscHQ_D8gUH
Hahaha! I didn't say Lynch ~didn't~ do some weird-assed things in TP. I feel a lot of that stuff comes across as what we call "dream logic". And, while it may seem to not make sense, or even seem like it belongs in the film/show, it's like the garnish you find on your meal at a restaurant that you never eat but still consider to be part of the meal.
My partner feels David Lynch is a pretty good horror writer/director.
I love that scene. Lynch is great.
I watch Inland Empire for the first time last year. It's amazing.
We haven't seen "Inland Empire" yet, but have seen snippets of it that are very intriguing. We did quite enjoy "Mulholland Drive". The scene with the director (Kesher) meeting the cowboy is a favorite. "I agree with what you said." "What'd I say?"
The Human Centipede. Oh, wait, you said art 😁
Pretty much anything by Spike Lee. There are scenes in individual movies that I love, usually involving music, but in the end? As someone cleverer said, I don't like being beaten with a message stick.
I have heard this POV a lot about didacticism in general, and at least partially agree with it. I love didacticism in old novels, like Trollope or George Eliot or the like, but yeah, when movies are being particularly heavy-handed about the moral of the story it doesn't work for us modern folks.
19th century novelists had a thing for just stopping the action right in mid-scene to make some general observation about human nature. And now, back to our tea party!
The thing about Horace’s “instruct and delight” is that the art actually needs to delight, not just browbeat pedantically.