Egg Moron posted:

MizPiz posted:

I'm in the mood to watch The Fall but there aren't any legal options for me to do so. I firmly believe this is part of a conspiracy to surpress the knowledge of good cinematography and set design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEi-v6aJD7Q

vyelkin posted:

pop culture thread: "HIRE 👏 MORE 👏 BLACK 👏 FASCISTS"

God Hole posted:

in anticipation of the new adaption of dune i'd like to take this opportunity to express my admiration for the life and career of Denis Villeneuve, whose entire body of work felt perfectly in tune with my own growth and coming of age. each film seemed to be a gentle and natural unveiling of some previously intangible aspect of white supremacy, toxic masculinity, and imperialist milieu. as a former self-described cinephile (cringe) and lib as hell, Villeneuve is the one director I can say truly radicalized me through liberal media.

this all culminated with blade runner 2049, which i went to see alone opening night. it was less of a cinematic experience and more of a sensory overload. i found myself sobbing ten minutes into the movie during gosling's first baseline test, i went straight home and borrowed pale fire from the library and burned my way through its nearly 600 pages in a couple of days, all the while examining how i was an imposter, Charles Kinbote-ing my way through life, rewriting others' struggles as my own, taking moral credit for the victories won by real revolutionaries out on the streets. believing i was the one in the dream, protecting the wooden horse.

the killing blow was of course delivered by Bong Joon Ho with parasite, but without Villeneuve i shudder to think about what cringe bullshit i'd be doing today in service to like Elizabeth warren or something.

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

Egg Moron posted:

the cast is really the thing that Dune has going for it as this point in time

Jason Momoa, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård from Deep Blue Sea

should have been John Cena instead of Dave Bautista

the design for the stillsuits sucks, imo, sadly



poo poo's too busy

Hodgepodge posted:

ah yes, fremen stillsuits, notable for being spotlessly clean and always looking fresh off the rack

i'm a fan of dune, but i'm not sure how much to expect from an adaptation of novels that are ultimately about the tragic burden of being unable to actualize the ideal of heterosexual monogamy as an incredibly powerful man, by a man who didn't write love interests as actual characters because he can write exactly one woman, who i assume was based on his mother

grate deceiver posted:

Annihilation is dogshit tho. Just watch the 15minute 'good part' on youtube or smth

sebmojo posted:

Saw the old guard and it was a fine time if you like an icy cool charlize theron zotting endless streams of mooks. Also the black marine character was really good.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Zizek does a pretty good takedown of the film’s ethical failure. If you break down the logic of the time-travel in the film, the Amy Adams character has the potential to radically alter the fabric of the universe, but instead goes along with a status quo that is literally an unending cycle of eternal suffering.

In what’s curiously reminiscent of that subplot in Sixth Sense, Adams knowingly causes her daughter to suffer a debilitating illness - purely in order for her to have someone to love and provide care for. (In the same way, Adams’ eventual marriage to Jeremey Renner is a sham marriage where she doesn’t actually mean her vows - she fully anticipates a divorce in a few years.) and yeah, that is kind-of inextricably linked to the broader liberal ideology at play.

Still an ok movie, but it gets a lot of mileage using that beautiful Max Richter music to pave over the implications.

A4R8 posted:

Dredd, Ex Machina, Alien, Underwater, annihilation, Fury road, and The Counselor all have good anticapitalist themes if that is what you’re into

Some Guy TT posted:

if were dumping on scifi movies that were hyped to be ultracool that fell flat for you im really not a fan of arrival couldnt quite articulate why until i saw this supermechagodzilla post


for all the praise the movie got for very wokely having a woman in the lead role she is like an outrageously passive character whose arc is about her ultimately surrendering having agency to a literally fatalistic alien language

up until i read this the only specific thing i didnt like that i could really pinpoint was the dumb closed time loop at the end but the entire drat movie runs on the same logic of amy adams just inevitably solving problems less because shes good at her job or even particularly intellectually curious but because from the very beginning the whole crisis of solving the alien language is just presented as inevitable and the only conflict comes in the form of all those rear end in a top hat militaries deciding to have a dick waving context instead of listening to the scientists

considering all the implications of this i think i genuinely dislike arrival even more than interstellar which might have been a garbage movie that wore its liberal ideology on its sleeve but at least its characters expressed agency and made actual decisions every once in awhile

General Dog posted:

I don't think there's much to support the premise that Amy Adams can really change anything. She's just along for the ride, a spectator to her own life's story.

grate deceiver posted:

I kinda half-remember it, but doesn't she go back in time at the very end to give someone information or smth like that?

God Hole posted:

saw and appreciated all of these, thanks!

annihilation really has earned its status in more esoteric circles as just a clumsier roadside picnic (I read them both back-to-back last year) but the sequel novels, while meandering a bit, do explore more intriguing anti-capitalist themes (emasculation, alienation, oedipal exploitation & humiliation) but it all kind of ends in a wet fart imo. the movie has some really cool sequences, particularly the lighthouse at the end, but ultimately it's just a frankensteins monster of scenes other movies did better.

i've had oblivion on my mind a lot lately. for all his faults, i really have to give some credit to tom cruise for like singlehandedly keeping sci-fi alive in the early 2010's

Egg Moron posted:

Oblivion was pretty solid until the end for me. They should have taken it all the way to sad town instead of doimg the fake out

I really liked edge of tomorrow live die repeat though. The best movie about video games in cinema history

General Dog posted:

I don't think there's much to support the premise that Amy Adams can really change anything. She's just along for the ride, a spectator to her own life's story.

StashAugustine posted:

I'll just settle for the writers realizing Paul isn't a goodguy

galagazombie posted:

My utterly serious prediction: Paul will be straight written as a "Heroic Liberal Fascist" in the same vein as the HBO Watchmen, Lady Jessica and/or Chani will be written as Clinton expy "Girl-Boss" types, and Baron Harkonnen will be a thinly veiled Trump stand-in who is evil because he's racist (in the modern American way) and sexist and most definitely not because he is a mirror of the stagnant classist galactic society.

vyelkin posted:

edge of tomorrow freakin owns, tom cruise may be a nutjob but he really knows how to make good action movies

God Hole posted:

ftfy(?)

agreed, but it's another solid movie kind of ruined by forcing in a happy ending

Egg Moron posted:

i thought live die repeat was just the tag line, but I remember seeing that plastered all over the subway that year but all my say Edge of Tomorrow

also I still get sad every time I see bill paxton in something, usually celebrity deaths don't register all that much with me but his does for some reason

God Hole posted:

yeah i think even the heptapods are locked into their life paths, they have no choice in the matter.

they give humanity the tool that grants them access to their entire life's memories and allows for manipulations, for instance Amy Adams snagging a future memory and bringing it to the present, but the giving of the tool and the retrieval of the future memory is what always happened. the future never changed, Amy Adams "preventing" a world war by accessing a future memory is always what was going to happen. she was never not going to learn the language that gave her the ability to do that.

it's the scene of colin farrel catching the red ball in minority report "because it was going to fall" but spread out to feature-length. the ball was never going to fall, colin farrel is there to catch it.

Hodgepodge posted:

the only flaw really is that we hardly need aliens to show up and get us to see the universe deterministically; if anything, we have enough problems from about three centuries of naive determinism based on deeply flawed assumptions that were effectively monotheism masquerading as science that were on their way out even before quantum physics showed up, and even then people cling to it as what amounts to a pure superstition

the most amusing observation in that regard is that even aside from empirical evidence of nature being fundamentally schoastic, there's a problem with the determinism of newtonian phsycis where we assume our basic numbers (1, 2, etc) exist at all in nature. based on relationships observed in nature (pi being the best know example), integers are unnatural and ultimately innaccurate estimations. the whole idea of a clockwork universe likely breaks down even without chaos theory, qm, or Brownian motion, simply because there actually is no such thing as precise math in physics, just close enough rounding that our bridges don't fall down.

of course an actual math student could tell you that there are really simple equations that give different answers depending on how you approach them, making them indefinable. that's the problem with dividing by zero: it isn't incoherent, you just get different answers depending on your method and there's no way to call one answer correct and the other incorrect.

Atrocious Joe posted:

The Wall Street Journal tries to write about rap
https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1280154129940328450?s=20

Taintrunner posted:

still a threat

Hodgepodge posted:

the only flaw really is that we hardly need aliens to show up and get us to see the universe deterministically; if anything, we have enough problems from about three centuries of naive determinism based on deeply flawed assumptions that were effectively monotheism masquerading as science that were on their way out even before quantum physics showed up, and even then people cling to it as what amounts to a pure superstition

the most amusing observation in that regard is that even aside from empirical evidence of nature being fundamentally schoastic, there's a problem with the determinism of newtonian phsycis where we assume our basic numbers (1, 2, etc) exist at all in nature. based on relationships observed in nature (pi being the best know example), integers are unnatural and ultimately innaccurate estimations. the whole idea of a clockwork universe likely breaks down even without chaos theory, qm, or Brownian motion, simply because there actually is no such thing as precise math in physics, just close enough rounding that our bridges don't fall down.

of course an actual math student could tell you that there are really simple equations that give different answers depending on how you approach them, making them indefinable. that's the problem with dividing by zero: it isn't incoherent, you just get different answers depending on your method and there's no way to call one answer correct and the other incorrect.