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josh04 posted:"you imagined liking it" Lol yes. I do appreciate Prometheus just for how divisive it is and for that fact alone will be remembered more by people then just some schlock marvel action trash. Its actually added something to the world in that effect.
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Aug 25, 2020 11:12
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Hodgepodge posted:oh c'mon, just reducing it to "projecting" things as if it's all some unknowable mystery instead of basic poo poo like metaphor in the context of a different medium? you at least talked a better game than that. Really makes you think... About society 🤔
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Aug 25, 2020 11:18
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thatfatkid posted:Really makes you think... About society 🤔 i mean, looking at gun culture in america and saying "the cure for this is unleashing an inherently healthier sexual masculine identity" is, uh... well let's say that a young sean connery makes a great case but at this point we have some reservations also I haven't seen it other than that one scene, but its on my list because my understanding is that it does not get any less batshit as it goes on Hodgepodge has issued a correction as of 11:34 on Aug 25, 2020 |
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Aug 25, 2020 11:32
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Hodgepodge posted:i assume you're just relating the logic here because the director of alien and blade runner not being able to "do subtle subtext" could only be arrived at by someone who has no idea what subtext is other than a magic word for sounding smart when talking about movies, and is really funny I don't think alien is the best example of subtle subtext tbh
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Aug 25, 2020 12:03
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mandatory lesbian posted:I don't think alien is the best example of subtle subtext tbh i kind of talked about this a little, but to be less vague i think there are examples of subtle subtext (for example the observation that the title may not refer to the xenomorph) and then there's the parts that are about as subtle as magazine shoved down your throat
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Aug 25, 2020 12:15
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Some Guy TT posted:anyway i saw a bunch of david foster wallace chat so im gonna repost this somewhat out of nowhere take i plugged in the succ zone awhile back That's painful to read. Just the actual writing, let alone what it's describing. I once read a bunch of DFWs journalism and on the whole liked it. Too long-winded, irritating style in places but it had observant things to say. Much like that oft quoted commencement speech of his.
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Aug 25, 2020 12:16
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Gonna try to get back into reading with Hydrogen Sonata. What's y'all's favorite Iain M Banks book and why?
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Aug 25, 2020 12:17
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Broom of the System was a novel DFW wrote when he was like 20 or 22. of course it’s loving stupid IJ is a lot better but I will admit I liked it when I was 23 and I like it less at 31
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Aug 25, 2020 13:37
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I'm halfway through Excession and it's already my favorite in the series because it's getting into the relationships between the Minds and their hand wringing over the individual desires of some Culture members
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Aug 25, 2020 13:41
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Also I hope Ridley makes another Alien movie because they are batshit loco and sincere
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Aug 25, 2020 13:43
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Fleetwood posted:Also I hope Ridley makes another Alien movie because they are batshit loco and sincere Same. I'm saddened we may never get the third film of the David/Prometheus trilogy. They're not good movies, but they at least have a soul and are actually doing something interesting.
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Aug 25, 2020 13:54
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Organic Lube User posted:Gonna try to get back into reading with Hydrogen Sonata. What's y'all's favorite Iain M Banks book and why? I think I liked Excession best too, it's p much weird 4-d chess and intrigue between the various Minds fractions, which is my fav part of these books. The core concept is I think also the most out-there of the entire series. Player of Games is my most recent one and that was strong as well. And people seem to not like Matter that much, but the adventures of a medieval noble failson coming in contact with all the weird Culture poo poo was pretty fun. And that ending setpiece was pretty dope too.
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Aug 25, 2020 14:14
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Fleetwood posted:I'm halfway through Excession and it's already my favorite in the series because it's getting into the relationships between the Minds and their hand wringing over the individual desires of some Culture members excession has one of the best premises and also critiques of culture's humanoids as being juvenile or stuck in a societal adolescence that results in rifts among the minds. plus i preferred its depiction of the idiran (that the name?) war minds as being frenetic and finding satisfaction in speed and efficiency of violence as opposed to the kinda edgelordy goth avatars in the later books, although i understand why the context of the culture's operation would change the tuning of the minds. look to windward may be my overall favorite, simply by being one of those books you happen to read while in the perfect state of mind for its mood of grief and irreparable consequences whatever one it is with the animatronic teddy bear telling the guy hes been crushed and the foam that fills up the person's lungs and stomach to keep them from turning to inertia paste inside a warship had the best action setpieces transition's setting had fantastic potential but i didn't really enjoy the book itself and just pushed through whenever it turned narration back to the torturer or finance bro chapters. other than the constant, setting inappropriate male gaze at the bodies of lead characters (inversions, against a dark background, and surface detail were the worst about this) i like his writing, but he sometimes commits to narrative devices and keeps using them long after they've served their purpose
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Aug 25, 2020 14:15
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its much easier for me to pick out the least favorite, which was inversions. "ok so this is another story about a medieval king that's going to talk at length about his harem and how hot they are and how he fucks them and what all the different women in it look like, but this time it's because ____ and also it's ok because there's a culture person who watches this with stern disapproval" his editors mustve just had a whole filing cabinet for these
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Aug 25, 2020 14:21
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blue squares posted:Broom of the System was a novel DFW wrote when he was like 20 or 22. of course it’s loving stupid while true ive always taken its obvious badness contrasted with the outrageous scale of dfws reputation as being proof of concept of the idea that being a writer has more to do with you being able to talk somebody into giving you a contract as opposed to actually being any good at writing
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Aug 25, 2020 14:35
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The thing that really jumped out was how Wallace definitely had Gravity's Rainbow on his mind when he wrote whatever the hell that was. Everyone in the excerpt had names that sounded like Dollar General versions of Pynchon jokes, which are fun to come up with (Gloria Tenderflop, Wendy "Big" McWhopper, Ivan T. Evenstarted, Pardo Snoldfree, etc), but are weird to see trotted out in a published novel. It definitely reads like something a precocious 20 year old would write, and I guess good on him for getting it published.
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Aug 25, 2020 15:16
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Hodgepodge posted:i kind of talked about this a little, but to be less vague i think there are examples of subtle subtext (for example the observation that the title may not refer to the xenomorph) and then there's the parts that are about as subtle as magazine shoved down your throat Hmm, I would argue the second movie is a stronger example of humans being the "alien" since they're literally colonizers in that movie, but I see your point.
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Aug 25, 2020 15:42
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The biggest problem with DFW is that he's the poster boy for the "I can roll my eyes harder than you" method of literary ctiticism. I've never read an internet argument about his work that got above the level of a string of people saying "GUH! c'mon you guys he suuuucks." At this point you all might as well be arguing about marvel movies or star wars.
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Aug 25, 2020 15:49
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did i mention that broom of the system features a character whos literally trying to eat himself into embodying the entire universe thats not a metaphor its his actual stated motive
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Aug 25, 2020 15:56
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I've swung back and forth on prometheus and mostly enjoy it but I think 90% of it is that they actually did make a scifi thing that was scary and unnerving as poo poo it just wasn't the aliens, it was that absolutely horrific surgery table
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Aug 25, 2020 15:59
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Farm Frenzy posted:it has some cool ideas and i really wanted to like it but it just feels really cheap and hokey to me idk. probably not going to watch the rest after the loving gil-scott heron montage in the second episode lol https://twitter.com/MKupperman/status/1297720712346705920?s=20
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Aug 25, 2020 17:20
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Organic Lube User posted:Gonna try to get back into reading with Hydrogen Sonata. What's y'all's favorite Iain M Banks book and why? Use of Weapons stuck with me the most. Matter had my favorite setting.
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Aug 25, 2020 17:50
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Zardoz owns because it predicts people getting cancelled for posts on social media amazingly well.
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Aug 25, 2020 18:12
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I haven't seen the show, and it's been a while since I read Lovecraft Country, but I wasn't super impressed with it. The author's idea of critiquing Lovecraft's racism was to have Black characters that explain how Lovecraft was racist. Which isn't wrong, but was sort of shallow. It had some neat fantasy set pieces, but I only really recall the broad outline of what happened. I guess overall I felt the Lovecraft connections were pretty slight. But Lovecraft Country is a better title than Urban Fantasy Country, so I understand why they did it. The most interesting and Lovecraftian story to me was the sister's story, where she gets a potion that turns her white. Everybody remembers Cthulhu and cultists, but weird brain-swapping and body transformations occur pretty often in Lovecraft too. Lovecraft even had symbolic racial transformations with stuff like the protagonist of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" realizing he's a fish monster. Also, less subtly, that story where the guy realizes his grandma was a gorilla. "the ballad of black tom" was a more entertaining and interesting exploration of a Black protagonist in a Lovecraft story.
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Aug 25, 2020 19:20
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"black tom" had a tv adaptation announced years ago but I haven't heard anything since.
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Aug 25, 2020 19:32
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true detective season 1 is still the best lovecraftian horror adaptation also extremely prescient
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Aug 25, 2020 19:41
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Yeah it could go either way at this point but I'm not expecting other than a monster-of-every-other-week serial at this point. I kind of wonder if it should have just been titled "Edgar Rice Burroughs Country" instead lol
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Aug 25, 2020 19:42
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Bro Dad posted:true detective season 1 is still the best lovecraft adaptation Lovecraft and Prometheus chat colliding is close to making me watch it again
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Aug 25, 2020 19:43
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Jurnee owns. Friday Night Lights owns. That's my take. I'll wait til the season ends for L-Country to make a full judgement
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Aug 25, 2020 19:44
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https://twitter.com/Quadristan/status/1298123543352287232?s=20
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Aug 25, 2020 21:20
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Yeah ok, Ep2 Lovecraft Country leaned p heavily into goofy wizard poo poo. Also, calm down with songs every 5 minutes, jeez Jurnee does own tho
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Aug 25, 2020 21:35
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Robert Pattinson is so cool
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Aug 26, 2020 01:33
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watch the whole thing https://twitter.com/darth_erogenous/status/1298762001225744384?s=21
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Aug 27, 2020 03:04
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I just watched Hail, Caesar! last night. It's about the production of a sword and sandal film in the 60's where movie star Baird Whitlock gets kidnapped (by communists!) while studio fixer Eddie Mannix attempts to get him back. I understand this movie gets a lot of flak, I personally found it very funny. I also thought since it's partly about communists I'd come here and post. The movie within the movie is a Ben Hur-like story about Christ. It seemed to me like Christianity and Communism were juxtaposed in deliberate ways throughout the film. There's a scene where clergy invited to share their thoughts on the film argue about the nature of Christ. Later there's a similar scene where the communist kidnappers debate the nature of capitalists and workers. Herbert Marcuse is part of their circle, which is funny. I don't know anything about what Marcuse actually wrote, but in the movie it seems like it's just nonsense made to sound technical, just sprinkled with terms like "dialectic", "end of history" and "new man". The Cohen brothers know enough about Communism to make fun of it (deterministic, has answers to everything). The communists are ridiculous, which isn't so strange for a comedy, but I still felt like the movie allowed them to make a few points. They're all screenwriters and correctly point out that they see very little of the huge profits from the movies they've written. Whitlock becomes sympathetic to their side, similarly to how his character in the movie, a Roman, accepts Christ's divinity in the end. When Whitlock returns, he starts ranting at Mannix about how Hollywood is an instrument of capitalism and the status quo. Mannix hits him and threatens to out him as a communist sympathizer for insulting the producer, Nick Schenk. The "new faith" in the movie within the movie, Christianity, is a revolutionary faith which calls into question the oppression of slavery. The communists are "for the little guy". At one point they make a sacrifice to the Comintern by throwing a suitcase full of cash at a Soviet submarine. They look for salvation "from below" so to speak, from the little guy or even the submarine. Christianity is salvation from above, and the camera pans upwards to the sky in the last shot of the film with a text "BEHOLD" on a water tower. Mannix is a Catholic of strong faith and moral fiber, as shown when by his frequent confessions over minor infractions like having lied to his wife about smoking cigarettes. He is also a firm believer in the system and loyal to Nick Schenk. His role is to make sure movies get made and make a profit, while their artistic quality is secondary or irrelevant. Near the end of the movie he turns down an offer of a job from Lockheed Martin, not because he finds what they do objectionable but because it "feels right" to continue working as a fixer. His faith in God and loyalty to Schenk seem two sides of the same coin. The voice-over explains that "The Story of Eddie Mannix will never end..for his is a tale written in light everlasting." I was how to understand those words and the movie as a whole. On one level the movie seems obviously sympathetic to Mannix; he makes sure the movies get done, he is faithful and diligent. But he's also just blindly serving the producer, he doesn't care about how the movies end up as long as they make money. So I had two ideas about how to take the ending of the film last night: 1) The role of people like Mannix will always be around because they're the kind of person who makes sure things get done. Or 2) I honestly forgot what this was that I thought last night but it was something a bit subversive
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Aug 27, 2020 07:04
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the movie’s raison d’etre is to deliver the hammer-blow line of “the studios control the means of production”
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Aug 27, 2020 07:12
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i think hail caesar is satirising hollywood generally. its set in the golden age but all the movies they make are lovely and disposable in genres that dont exist anymore. mannix loves the business but he only really cares about disciplining his workers and the entire efforts of the subversive communist intellectuals ends up being sneaking lines into singing cowboy movies and then getting tricked by soviet propaganda
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Aug 27, 2020 07:26
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Wraith of J.O.I. posted:watch the whole thing lmfao
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Aug 27, 2020 07:36
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The Legend of Korra just dropped on Netflix and everyone seems to agree within a few years Avatar's gonna be where Harry Potter is right now. No argument from me.
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Aug 27, 2020 07:52
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bloodbending is a metaphor for lobbying
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Aug 27, 2020 09:05
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theflyingexecutive posted:the movie’s raison d’etre is to deliver the hammer-blow line of “the studios control the means of production” Farm Frenzy posted:i think hail caesar is satirising hollywood generally. its set in the golden age but all the movies they make are lovely and disposable in genres that dont exist anymore. mannix loves the business but he only really cares about disciplining his workers and the entire efforts of the subversive communist intellectuals ends up being sneaking lines into singing cowboy movies and then getting tricked by soviet propaganda Well in that case the final message is just incredibly pessimistic?
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Aug 27, 2020 09:24
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