#film contemporan

[mariocki]

Final Exam (1981)

"Why are you so apprehensive? When are you going to realise that the whole world isn't made of psychopaths skulking about?"

"But they are out there. They do exist. People are killed every day for no reason at all. Perfect strangers wake up in the morning and decide, 'Hmm, I think it's a good day to snuff somebody". And these are people who eat at our restaurants with us, use our highways and vote for the President, which probably explains something about him, too. I'm not paranoid. I'm just facing unhappy facts."

[canon-gabriel-quotes]

Transcript:

Who hell do you think you are? You’re any kind of artist? Anybody knows who you are?

Maybe everybody else wants to enjoy the peace and quiet. This is one of the most important places in North America, and who are you? Who are you? You miserable, presumptuous, no talent- you’re no artist. An artist respects the silence. It serves the foundation of creativity. 

You obviously don’t have the talent. You don’t have enough respect for yourself or other people to know what it means to respect yourself, in music or any form of creativity, and I’m an NYU film school graduate. Sucker. And the school of visual arts in the academy of art university in San Francisco.

You suck. You’re a no talent. If you really have talent go practice and then get yourself a gig instead of ruining the day for everybody down here. You disgrace. You are everything that’s gone wrong in this world. You’re a self consumed, no talent, mediocre piece of shit. And I’ve earned my right to say it, okay? In 1975, I walked Bob Dylan up on stage. Who the fuck are you? I knew the Grateful Dead from 1966.

Who the fuck are you?

You’re nothing. You are nothing. And you will never be anything. Never. How dare you? You miserable mediocre nothing. Shame on you. You crack a stupid little smile, you little pimp. Go learn to play. You’re flat. You can’t even carry a fucking note. I don’t care about your little horn lip, it doesn’t mean you know how to play. You’re flat. I’ve trained classically, I’ve trained contemporaneously, and

you suck. 

Audio source

Original video that's being referenced

[murfpersonalblog]

IWTV S2 Ep8 Musings - The Ep8 Script (Pt1)

Thanks to slitwrstsavior sharing the script and @memorian for digitizing it! <3

Imma have to do this in chunks, cuz of Tumblr's 30-pic limit.

SHADE.

AMC. I'm finna smack y'all. I NEED those alternate outtakes! 😭🙏

😳 JACOOOOOOB! 😱

SIR ANDERSONNNNNNNNN~!!!!

You ain't have to commit to the bit like THAT! They said suck the BLOOD DROP on the FLOOR, not the effing ROCKS themselves! XD Your improvs are IMMACULATELY UNHINGED! 😍

This is VERY cool & interesting!

HH's OCD mirrors Lou's mad ravings during his PTSD unhinged Revenge Plot, but it's also really cool that he was from vinatge Hollywood, contemporaneous with Louis' film noir aesthetic in 2x7, AND HH's association with aviation, and Lou's dream learning to fly (a plane)--perhaps in honor of Claudia mad that Les wouldn't teach her to fly (with the Cloud Gift? 😭💔) NO ONE EFFING TOUCH ME!

Ahhhhhh~! They're his triggers; AND his reset-buttons. U_U

He was finna KIIIIIIILLLLLL Lestat, IKR!? XD

I love how the use of ellipses can stand for either interruptions (Louis shushing him) or deliberate pauses (Armand actively tryna think of a lie).

Rolin's goofy arse. XD He really meant it when he said he wanted Dan's music to come in clutch.

Can't help but notice that it's SILENT during this part though. The "tense" film noir music only starts AFTER Louis' finished speaking. Which I think was a better choice. Let Louis' words sink in--HIS voice is the only one that should matter. THEN let the music come in. 👌

I EFFING KNEW THAT WAS HER ASHES OMG!? That ain't LIPSTICK!

I'm STILL MAD we didn't effing SEE the ear/jaw. But thank you for the movie nod from Akasha's BAMF exit.

Ahhh, that answers my question about if Louis was still using the Fire Gift from halfway across Paris--that is AWESOME, wow!

[EDIT] Forgot to add this in, cuz AMC!Lou's officially OP:

EXCUSE YOU!? Since when did Santiago know Armand's birthname!?

So either: Armand told Santiago his backstory, OR Santiago stole it from his mind (highly unlikely), OR he eavesdropped Loumand. SNAKE!

There's a typo--it should say "They are there to...." Which they took out anyway, and good riddance; Lou immediately cuts him off, cuz ain't nobody tryna hear your effing excuses, a-hole.

I DO wanna hear what he would've said though--pour some more Kool-aid down everyone's throats whydontcha!? "I knew the wisdom of the Great Laws," as if! I NEED to know what REALLY went down with the coven in S3--Imma make a separate post, cuz I have so many questions, that this Ep8 script unfortunately is NOT answering.

SUFFER, bish.

Imma cut off right here, and make a separate post.

[transmutationisms]

ok maybe this is just me BUT. the thing i disliked the most about triangle of sadness was the vomiting scene. it seems to be a trend to use large amounts of vomit or diarrhea in art movie these days and i'm not even emetophobic or anything (i'm literally bulimic) but it feels so forced and gross for absolutely no reason. it doesn't feel like it's making a point or accomplishing something deep. it just feels like an eleven year old making fart jokes.

that was ultimately a really frustrating sequence to me, and one that i think is emblematic of a lot of the film's shortcomings. initially i thought it could go in a few different directions—using bodily functions as symbolic of the way wealth can produce misery even for those who have it; using the breakdown of a fine dining scene as a microcosm of the capitalist class's attempts to ignore crises that are occurring right in front of their faces; using the juxtaposition of waste and opulence to say something about the cost and production of luxury. i could have gotten interested in any of these reads, or others; there's a lot to say about how and when we depict bathrooms, excrement, &c onscreen.

however, i think 'triangle' ultimately gets stuck on a pretty superficial "eat the rich" line, and the whole food poisoning sequence end up being indicative of this sensibility. i'll go ahead and compare it to 'succession' because they're contemporaneous, about the ultra-wealthy, and depict bodily excretions. however, what works for me about the bodily functions and fluids on 'succession' is that the show is much more interested than 'triangle' in the psychologies of its characters. invoking piss, shit, or vomit on that show generally tells us something about their emotional states; it's also effective because we see specific ways in which those characters are uncomfortable with the idea that they have bodies, and continually try to deny them. 'triangle' doesn't develop its characters nearly so well (the most developed are both models, ie people who in fact are intimately aware of their own embodiment), so when we see them vomiting and shitting uncontrollably, it's not so much a psychological beat for them as it is an ostensibly cathartic (for us) way of humiliating these wealthy villains. this ties in with the film's suggestion that the characters have brought the food poisoning on themselves (by demanding the staff entertain them, thus causing the food to sit out too long), which give the whole vomiting sequence a pretty moralistic tone, like we're supposed to be smugly watching them get their comeuppance.

using incontinence specifically in this way is pretty casually ableist (again, it's less a psychological point where we're meant to understand that the characters themselves see this as particularly humiliating, and more a didactic point where we're invited to gawk at the spectacle of these people losing control of their bowels because they 'deserve' it), and it's consistent with an overall sensibility throughout the film that invokes superficial regurgitations of anti-capitalist politics and transforms them into mean-spirited retributive 'justice' presented as catharsis. there are numerous points in the third act specifically where it seems the film is interested in using the 'uninhabited' island setting as an opportunity to question and problematise established social forms by dialectically contradicting them—the flip in carl and yaya's relationship, abigail distributing resources to those who labour for them, the way carl being coerced into a sexual relationship and jarmo killing a donkey make explicit the positions they were perviously implicitly occupying in wealthy society as, respectively, a model and a tech mogul.

however, the film really fumbles an opportunity to do much of interest with this setup, because it's never willing to go beyond its insistence on punishing its characters for their previously luxurious existence. carl gets a partner who's using his body rather than his wallet and instagram followers, as he perceived yaya was doing. paula is stripped of her managerial role and treated like an employee, plainly echoing how she used to talk to abigail and the others. jarmo and dimitry are placed in a situation where they can't make themselves valuable by wealth, and instead must become bodily resources if they want to survive. none of this is developed or goes anywhere—it's stuck on, again, a sensibility of punishing the characters. i don't get the sense that anyone writing this film was interested in how these social forms come to exist, what sustains them, how they might be altered or broken—instead it's just a series of unsubtle attempts to match each character 1:1 with a suitable comeuppance. this is also why abigail, by far the most interesting character in the film, is so underdeveloped (to the point of not even existing until act 3!) and why the film doesn't succeed in saying much of interest about how, eg, racism or ableism produce and interact with structures of class exploitation. the most it can do is gesture in the direction of the things it wants to talk about (nelson and therese are both written really disappointingly in this respect).

i don't really find any of this cathartic, and it's often so heavy-handed as to strain credibility (every scene with the weapons manufacturing couple). ideologically it's deeply moralistic in a way that is incapable of saying much beyond a condemnation of rich people (which is not the same as a condemnation of riches, or the social forms that produce them). although i didn't initially read the food poisoning sequence as funny, in retrospect i do think it was intended that way—which is, again, ableist in a pretty insidious way, and is also just not really successful imo as a piece of comedy. as a film it's really no more interesting or insightful than any of like a thousand other milquetoast gestures toward the same superficial understanding of capitalism as little more than a result of wealthy people being greedy or lazy. justice (a better film) for abigail 2k23

[wrenaspun]

tagged by @princessniitza to answer several questions and tag five people!! Thank you frond 🥰 Let's go:

1. How did you get into writing fanfiction? A fanart blog! After I finished the HP series I was googling it passionately and in so doing found fanart, followed it to a wordpress art blog, and then upon an offhand comment about fanfiction googled 'harry potter fanfiction'. And the rest is history

2. How many fandoms have you written in? 7 that i've published on ao3! I think 9 if we count stuff I've posted elsewhere, and probably a few more if we count stuff I've written but not published

3. How many years have you been writing fanfiction? My first one was published in mid 2013.... 11 years. Good lord

4. Do you read or write more fanfiction? Oh read, for sure. I keep a spreadsheet for both reading and writing -- I'm nearly at 6million words read thus far this year, vs 80k written. A slight disparity !

5. What is one way you’ve improved as a writer? Loool is it cheating to say in every way?? I think if you compared any of my fics now to those of 11 years ago they would simply not be in the same league. But I'll say my command of language, and my ability to communicate emotions more subtly.

6. What’s the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project? Polythene growing tunnels, firewood growing and coppicing techniques, for one fic I read (bits of) the muqaddimah and the safarnama of nasir khusraw... I'm sure there are more but I tend not to end up using much from my more unhinged research holes lmao

7. What’s your favorite type of comment to receive on your work? All of them of course, but the ones that dive into specific lines or story elements they liked are a special gift

8. What’s the most fringe trope/topic you write about? I think amnesia and selkies are the 2 I've returned to across multiple fandoms :')

9. What is the hardest type of story for you to write? The long ones with lots of plot and moving plates, alas! I've been wrestling with the main longfic I'm working on for ages and ages, but we forge on

10. What is the easiest type? I don't know if there's anything that binds them, but there is a type of fic that just comes bubbling up from my id and demands to be written, and those tend to come out relatively quickly and smoothly! 'bathed in light' was one such fic, and 'send me a little word' was another

11. Where do you do your writing? What platform? When? Scrivener! But it's version 1.9 because the update to v3 made everything look different and frightening. And as for when/where it's usually late night, on my couch or in bed

12. What is something you’ve been too nervous/intimidated to write, but would love to write one day? My beloved film reviews fic -- though it is less a case of intimidation and more a case of "but if i want to write fictional film reviews of 5 films that get made about the historical figures King Laurent and King Damianos I have to first sort out what the future film industry looks like and how it developed and did they have a Hays Code also? How did their censorship policies change over time? And when did three-strip technicolor get dropped in favour of eastmancolor, and were there any wars or geopolitical conflicts which shaped the production of contemporaneous films, and is there a 1948 New Artes v. Paramount antitrust case that breaks up the distribution channels and affects the way that independent productions are able to come onto the scene, and and and ----" SO basically you can tell I did film studies. And ALSO what DATES would I use for the speculative future of this secondary world fantasy ?? But I do hope that one day I will power thru my brain's panicked worldbuilding questions and write this fic!!

13. What made you choose your username? I was looking through the Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary for reasons I no longer remember and saw the entry 'spin a wren = dance with a woman' which I thought was so cute that I made it my ao3 name. Wrenaspun is just a silly play on that :')

tagging without pressure @kybelles @sideraclara @folfar @thevorpalsword @penguinmerchant 🥳🥰

[thirdity]

The cinema does not obey the same schedule of contemporaneity as the novel; thus, it would appear anachronistic to us if someone wrote a novel like Jane Austen, but it would be very “advanced” if someone makes a film which is the cinematic equivalent of Jane Austen. This is no doubt because the history of films is so much shorter than the history of narrative fiction; and has emerged under the peculiarly accelerated tempo at which the arts move in our century.

Susan Sontag, "A Note on Novels and Films"

[fossil0000]

The following description was written by Sloane Angel Hilton, the creator of the facebook group for this aesthetic: Its rise and fall between the years 1996-2002 - a movement in pop culture that is spawned from the research of The Y2K Aesthetic Institute. A notable shift in the visual mood of pop culture happened during the turn of the millennium, but it wasn’t Y2K Aesthetic. One thing I have found is that it was en vogue to be between 25-35, the prime age of Gen X at this time. I think of the “Music First” era of Vh1 programming. Contrary to contemporaneous Y2K Aesthetic, and also McBling style of the early 2000s, Gen X Y/AC models in editorial fashion or artist marketing were much more "natural". You will see tons of nude lipstick, hair parted down the middle or natural textured hair, natural leathers, knee high boots, duster jackets, natural and muted colors - especially greens, beiges, tans, greys, and black. Design and fashion was moving from 60s revival into early 70s. Retro-futurism was Y2K Aesthetic, but Gen X YAC was more terrestrial. Its futurism was a mix of sterile and organic. McBling was a full blown disco revival, but here, we just see hints of the 70s. Depictions of city life through a colonialist lens. First wave gentrification. Urban life influenced graphic design, such as in the use of Helvetica as inspired by the NYC subway signs. The rise of a minimalist design revival. On the runway, the rise/peak of the modern supermodel - Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, and Linda Evangelista, who were all peaking at 25. In photography and film, prevalence of bleach bypass, cross processing, “Lomo effect”, and other color grading trends. Hit music in the US was heavily influenced or even imported from the UK and Europe. Notably, we saw a surge in french house/disco, big beat, electronic, trance, uk garage, and “easy listening”/adult contemporary marketed for Generation X. Less Pure Moods and more Cafe Del Mar. Pop artists were reinvented to fit, like Madonna (Ray of Light). "Soft Club" refers to club culture trickling down into mainstream culture. As the style shifts into McBling, club culture becomes so huge that only the rich can enjoy it in Ibiza. R&B + hip hop had a marked shift in production, due to producers like Soulshock and Karlin, Trackmasters, Darkchild/Rodney Jerkins, in addition to many more who formed top of the millennium sounds working with both these genres. Pop music was equally transformed by club music, R&B, and Latin pop. Rock, pop and poetry were put over trip/hip-hop & breakbeats. Songs that may not have been written for the dance floor were produced as club music. See: soft club. Get X young adults were into entrepreneurship, which supposedly fueled the 90s economic recovery, especially via tech industry. This is why they have been considered a generation which "sold out". Discussion is much deserved regarding the nature of media diversity, both genuine (largely POC in leading production roles across mediums) and as a marketing tool, and the start of gentrification as it would come to be known in post-industrial cities.

[shakespearenews]

Before the film’s release last month, Cooper’s prosthetic schnoz drew criticism from many Jews, alert to the re-emergence of a hateful caricature that had trailed them for centuries, often attached to actors. It wasn’t so long ago that gentiles playing Shylock in William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” did so in “Jewface,” with a large and pendulous hook nose meant to telegraph animality and greed. (Shakespeare describes Shylock variously as a “wolf,” a “cur” and a “cutthroat dog.”) Whether the actor who originated the role in the 1590s wore a wax honker is unknown, but the stereotype was certainly familiar by then. In Christopher Marlowe’s nearly contemporaneous “The Jew of Malta,” the title character’s Moorish slave says, “Oh, brave master, I worship your nose for this.”

Even without the noses — and despite, in Shakespeare’s case, the mitigating poetry — both plays are viciously antisemitic. There’s a reason “The Merchant of Venice,” according to some historians, was the most produced Shakespeare play in Germany during the Third Reich. As the theater scholar Farah Karim-Cooper notes in her book “The Great White Bard” (2023), audiences are strongly influenced by disinformation onstage. In a 2010 study she cites, playgoers in Sweden, Germany and England were asked to evaluate the statement “The reason for antisemitism is the behavior of the Jews in history” both before and after seeing “Merchant.” One out of four found the statement “more correct” afterward. And Shylock was seen as a “typical” Jew by nearly a third.

[sloshed-cinema]

Godzilla vs King Ghidorah [ゴジラvsキングギドラ] (1991)

Is it truly a ripoff if the scenes that are blatantly torn from other movies are some of the funniest shit I’ve ever seen? Buried deep within this gently absurd entry into the otherwise serious Heisei journey is a clip reel of all of Hollywood’s greatest hits circa the late 1980s and early 90s. Terminator? You got it, as villainous turned suddenly heroic android M11 escapes a burning car and sprints at superhuman speed to catch our heroes, equal parts T-11 and Ash from Alien (though his physique is more in that latter category, to be sure). Mustache-twiddling corpo-villains control the levers of power from the shadows. And our himbo hero says “Go on… make my day” as he shoots a thing on the UFO. This is pop culture fed through a pipeline of cable TV shows and imprinted upon impressionable minds. This is the stuff of Turbo Kid or maybe Psycho Goreman, earnest pulp homage made from a loving place, though this is more contemporaneous. All the same, I couldn’t classify this in good faith as an Asylum type film by any stretch. It simply cares too much. To that end, I also have to shout out the commitment to making a bunch of artificially inserted cute marketable creatures for the express purpose of making them the primary antagonist.

But the roots of Godzilla, no matter how goofy the outcome, have always been in existential horror and trauma. In its more serious veins, this film attempts to reconcile with the burgeoning economic successes of a Japan venturing into the 21st century. A figure who survived the initial incarnation of this avatar of destruction has gone on to become a corporate mogul and the harbinger of his own sort of terror as he owns nuclear weapons of his own. Godzilla was his savior in the Pacific Theatre, and becomes his executioner in the final moments, the two seeming to share a moment. Crucially, shockingly, King Ghidorah is briefly glimpsed destroying Hiroshima, the Atomic Bomb Dome visible in the foreground as these conquerors from the future seek to put Japan in her place. This is about resilience and defiance, uncertainty about how to move forward as a potential economic superpower.

Akira Ikufube’s score absolutely rips. Aside from the plodding, inevitable Godzilla theme, the opening sequences especially are rife with a dense and frenetic score. It has such interesting instrumentation compared to the usual reliable hits, opening on bass-register piano, timpani, and contrabassoon before being reinforced by a denser palette of woodwinds and pitched percussion than typical. Godzilla is evolving, and so are his harmonic sensibilities.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone says 'UFO' or 'dinosaur'.

A time jump occurs.

Close-up of the Dorats.

Time paradox shit.

BIG DRINK

Blatant, amazing, bizarre Hollywood reference.

DO YOU BLEED, GODZILLA?

Flawless early 90s computer graphics.

[mariocki]

The Nesting (Massacre Mansion, 1981)

"It may come as a surprise to you that a physicist could even contemplate the existence of paranormal phenomena."

"But you admit to the possibility."

"I admit the possibility of the unknown. I admit that science is only beginning to understand its own discoveries. But I do not believe in evil spirits or painted phantoms in windows."

[boredtechnologist]

The original "Danger Girl" comic series was created by J. Scott Campbell and Andy Hartnell and debuted under the Wildstorm Productions imprint of Image Comics in 1998. The series is known for its vibrant artwork, a blend of espionage, adventure, and humor, and its homage to spy films like James Bond and TV shows like "Charlie's Angels." The comic follows a team of female secret agents led by Abbey Chase, who engage in globe-trotting missions against a variety of nefarious villains.

The "Danger Girl" video game sought to capture the essence of the comic’s over-the-top actio n and character-driven storytelling. The developers at n-Space faced the challenge of translating the dynamic, highly stylized visuals of the comic into the 3D graphics of the PlayStation era. While the hardware limitations of the time meant that the game couldn’t fully replicate J. Scott Campbell’s detailed artwork, it aimed to maintain the same sense of adventure and tongue-in-cheek humor.

In the game, players control one of the three main characters from the comic—Abbey Chase, Sydney Savage, and JC—each with unique abilities. The game is a third-person shooter, and the levels are filled with action-oriented missions, stealth sections, and puzzle-solving elements.

Abbey Chase is the main character, specializing in shooting and acrobatic moves.

Sydney Savage has a whip and focuses on stealth and agility.

JC is a more technical character, often involved in solving puzzles or using gadgets.

The gameplay involved a mix of shooting enemies, completing mission objectives, and navigating various environments that were reminiscent of the locations seen in the comic series.

Upon its release, "Danger Girl" received mixed to average reviews. Critics praised the game for its attempt to capture the feel of the comic, particularly the character models and voice acting, but noted that the gameplay itself was somewhat derivative and failed to stand out among other action-adventure titles of the time. The controls were also a point of criticism, as they were considered somewhat clunky and not as smooth as other contemporaneous games in the genre.

The visual style, while ambitious, suffered from the technical limitations of the PlayStation hardware, leading to some compromises in the quality of the in-game graphics compared to the source material. However, fans of the comic appreciated the effort to bring the world of "Danger Girl" into the interactive medium.

While "Danger Girl" didn't achieve significant commercial success, it remains a point of interest for fans of the comic series and collectors of video games from that era. The game is often cited as an example of the challenges involved in adapting comic book properties into video games, especially in a period when the technology wasn't quite capable of fully realizing the artistic vision of the source material.

[odetoviscera]

Liveblogging Mission: Impossible, I Guess

alright let’s start with FOR THE RECORD this is ENTIRELY the fault of @leupagus, who always does this to me, i swear to god i have been onboarded to more media by this villain (affectionate)’s posts than any other, so goddamnit it here we go MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE I GUESS

I GOT A PARAMOUNT+ SUBSCRIPTION FOR THIS AND BY GOD I’M GONNA BLOG ABOUT IT

warning: liveblogging below.

FIRST MOVIE. 1996. I AM SIX YEARS OLD. I DO NOT WATCH THIS FILM CONTEMPORANEOUSLY FOR OBVIOUS REASONS. i have a vague memory of watching it at some point in my teens, but remember almost nothing except a vague impression of like. A Claustrophobic Hallway. might not be from this movie. i’ll call it out if it’s real!

OH my god the paramount military drum roll is alternating left and right channel in my headphones. brain is flustered. inauspicious beginning.

(dead prostitute even less auspicious beginning.)

(undead prostitute/agent?)

ah I see they are spying on Russian Rocky Balboa and the (un)dead prostitute is a plant.

OH Tom Cruise is the cleaner, I was wondering why he wasn’t in the room with all the surveillance equipment. hang on, did MI INVENT the Suspiciously Lifelike Plastic Mask Gag? also yes that was the least horrific screengrab i could manage.

so undead prostitute and Mr. Cruise clearly have Chemistry. I do sort of wish undead prostitute’s first lines had not been in a ridiculous baby voice lol.

OPENING CREDITS. god, that was the logo? very b-average middle school powerpoint presentation. wait, tom cruise was a producer on this? on the FIRST one? damn, this really is the man’s anchor franchise.

these opening credits have TV Show vibes-- you know, “here’s a bunch of split-second clips of future episodes” except all for one movie. which is... oh right, movies used to be under 2 hours.

is this how we did movies on flights back in the day? a stewardess walks around with a tray of cassettes like she’s shilling the in-flight snacks??? nowadays to pull this stunt you’d have to have a coded conversation with a chatbot and convince it you know which squares contain stop signs before it would deliver your self-destructing message.

also the contrasting formality of codewords and passphrases and top-secret clearances and shit (displayed where any passing passenger could see it walking to the bathroom MY GUY WHERE IS YOUR OPSEC)-- paired with the Voice On The Radio calling mr. phelps JIM several times is kind of wild. everything is simultaneously deadly serious national security threat and “two dads discussing their respective divorces at a barbeque”. also i can’t tell them apart yet and their hair is too similar, which of these lady agents is undead prostitute and is it claire, jim’s wife (which, btw, seems like a conflict of interest) bc if so the divorce thing may be more literal, tom “ethan hunt” cruise was getting pretty soft-boy handsy with her face

mid-briefing YEP UNDEAD PROSTITUTE IS THE WIFE, also in person it’s very clear how much younger she is than jim, wonder how that relationship came about. also also SEEDS OF SUSPICION sown about why jim is always swanning off on “recruiting assignments” and the team doesn’t know where he is during these times. also maybe i’m paranoid I DID READ THE POSTS @leupagus

"if they're exposed, they'll be executed." bit of a buzzkill there jim

so much intra-team flirting! you’d think that would be counter-regulations but i guess jim is married to one of his operatives so the rules must be pretty lax lol

okay no mr. hacker/the team q making ethan a stick of EXPLOSIVE GUM when ethan has been chewing gum this ENTIRE set of scenes during the planning of the op-- that is a piss-take, lol. that is a loving piss-take. this is “here you dumb bastard i made something in your colour” energy. JUST DON’T CHEW IT. i’m love them. i know they die and i will be upset about it.

the first-person perspective is fascinating film-making. (obviously i, obsessive video game nerd, am making immediate parallels to video games that won’t come out for another half decade or so, lol.) this feels so disjointed and claustrophobic, though-- it’s a narrower FOV than you usually see in a first-person perspective, and we don’t have any of his peripheral vision. being trapped in ethan’s head (or more correctly, i suppose, in the camera on his glasses) seeing only what’s in his field of vision for these scenes is making me overanalyze everything lol. i feel like half the guests are staring at him.

oop, meanwhile jack is fighting elevators. i worry for my boy. i have known him five minutes. i should not have learned he had a name other than “mr. hacker” now i’m invested.

dslkfhas;ldkfhas;lkh stop roasting him ethan he’s in an elevator shaft! on a 1996 laptop!

elevator/spy tetris

oh my god this mark had a FLOPPY DISK on his person. the 90s were insane.

The Flirting Continues

ah, the classic Lover’s Embrace Distraction. kind of interesting to see this done with sarah, who is NOT ethan's flirtatious love interest (that's claire; sarah has something maybe going somewhere someday with jack, hypothetically) honestly it kind of reinforces that this is very much just an "it's part of my day job" move for them, i like it. and they both move into it very fluidly, without discussion or hesitation-- it's a standard play.

oh noooo jack. “i don’t have control” says jim, man who just had control. HMM I HAVE DOUBTS YOU ASSHOLE. :(((

…hang on, is the drunk laughing couple the pair i clocked staring at ethan earlier in the night or am i hallucinating bc i can’t tell actors apart

ooooh, ethan’s going off book. admittedly the book is bad but still, bad form.

“they’re covering this frequency, cut all radio communication” mmkay except what’s your evidence of that, bc we’ve seen nothing to indicate that’s the case-- jack was killed where he was supposed to be during the whole op, and you could have been spotted and shadowed from the safehouse. none of that had to be gleaned from radio communications

Convenient Les Miz River Death. also the angle on that gun ethan saw in his little camera watch was pretty sus, but he's under a lot of stress, so i won't hold it against him for not noticing.

ethan, babe, how you gonna call an abort right after ignoring an abort, of course she’s not listening to you. (however, heartbreaking: the tiny little “god!” when he takes off running back to sarah. guy is having the worst night of his life and it’s just getting started.)

WELL THERE GOES CLAIRE AND HANNAH

sarah's still following the mark so i assume she was too far away to hear that. and i KNEW there was something shifty with the drunk couple

damn the mark is getting got too. aaaand finally sarah. full house.

EVERYBODY got fucked on this op

kdfjal;skdhf;lakh god idk if i’m even supposed to trust the nice calm voice on the phone (Kittridge) like my dude ethan is focused on relaying the vital intel (little bit of shouting but the circumstances are, admittedly, DIRE AS FUCK) and you’re using your soothing kindergarten voice.

“one hour, i’ll be there myself” BITCH? HOW? YES ETHAN EXACTLY THE FUCK, WHY IS THIS GUY IN PRAGUE??? SUSPICIONS RAISED AGAIN

aquarium diner is kind of out of place/distinctive here. like, cool location, but damn, not what i’d call inconspicuous. 

i think the shock is setting in, ethan’s walking like he’s half-dead already and so far the worst that’s happened to him physically is Running A Lot.

oooh, ethan spotted something. OH OKAY the drunk pair and the embassy pair were two differently suspicious pairs lol.

extreme dutch angle on kittridge. spooky boy. not the first dutch angle we've seen so far, even in this scene, but definitely the one i've noticed the most.

oof. whole team died for Nothing. ethan’s resistance to aborting the mission was AT LEAST partly predicated on the threat that had been presented-- literally dozens, if not hundreds, of lives directly in the crosshairs if that list got out. and it’s fucking. Nothing. and as far as ethan can possibly know at this point, the only reason the WHOLE team got wiped out is that he ignored the abort. sarah, at least, he could have hypothetically saved by keeping her with him instead of sending her after the mark.

“dying slowly in america, after all, can be a very expensive proposition.” BITCH. MURDER HIM ETHAN. SET THIS WHOLE PLACE ON FIRE. anyway, this was in 1996, nice to see capitalism hasn’t improved at all in nearly thirty years. doing great. oh the explosive gum, YES BABE, jack’s last gift to you! blow a bitch up!

“kittridge, you’ve never seen me very upset” ooooh the VENOM. ethan has been kind of a kitten so far-- soft boy, very few stunts actually! kind of a jokes boy! he’s a PERFORMANCE ARTIST, his role has been Wear The Mask and play a specific part. he is, in leverage terms, the SOPHIE, not the eliot. we have not actually seen a SINGLE instance of real violence from him yet-- even taking out Russian Rocky Balboa was with a drugged drink that sarah delivered.

alright admittedly blowing up the aquarium was probably the better move but i would have liked to see kittridge get it in the face

also holy FUCK ethan can run

now here's a logistical question: does this count as an Ethan Stunt? bc so far he hasn't done any of the characteristic No One Else Would Do This shit that is famously his hallmark. i don't think this does count, honestly-- it's fairly low stakes by the standards of an Ethan Stunt, and although obviously the fish are gonna be upset about it, the overall risk to ethan himself is not high. worst case scenario if he couldn't outrun the flood was getting arrested. i'm gonna call this Typical Spy Nonsense unless someone can convince me otherwise.

listen i know all this counter-espionage shit like crunching the lightbulb to make a broken glass noise trap and unscrewing the hall light is shit he was taught in Spy School however i would like to forward that my IMMEDIATE thought whenever he does something clever is just OH MY BOY IS SO SMART

i have trauma-bonded with ethan hunt. it took exactly half an hour. goddamn it, i get it now @leupagus

And Now He Has A Gun, let’s see if he uses it.

okay the emergency money not being in the safehouse is another dick move by jim.

job 314… job 3:14?

OH MY GOD IT IS

seriously is this what the internet was like in 1996. i was an aol kid, i missed the usenet era, but i also don’t trust hollywood to know what the internet was like lol

MY BOY IS SO SMART

although doing all this in what must be the compromised safe house maybe is less so

here begin the PTSD Nightmares

oh shit! claire’s not dead! alright maybe the gun wasn’t such a great addition to the inventory lol although i’ll given ethan points for what looks, to my very untrained eyes, like a pretty solid firing posture. maybe got his elbows locked a little but he’s Stressed.

the Aggressively Sexual Frisking i could do without. very 90s though lol, and i will forgive ethan’s behaviour bc he’s having a Very bad night and claire’s shock isn’t helping with his justifiable paranoia. STILL. BE BETTER.

claire still using that baby voice. ma’am please speak with your whole chest, you sound like a toddler, i can’t take you seriously.

Spy Shenanigans ahead. back in ethan’s limited POV for a bit! i like the framing on the pickup car responding to the match.

ooh, max is a maxine.

dutch angle on max. they like that technique a lot. and a very tight framing. 

fkjha;djfh;lksh MA’AM. you haven’t even CLEANED THE BLOOD OFF, you’re gonna gunk up your disk reader

imf sure is efficient-- okay no i love the cleaning lady just “fuck it, i keep vacuuming”

Fucking Kittridge. this man has the most smarmy affect upon this earth outside of an actual british butler in a murder mystery. also what looks like an extremely fake tan. hate his guts. wish him death.

ethan has been 100% Manic Grin at max since the mask came off and i am not sure how much of that is a front and how much is ethan running at 100% capacity on 10% fuel. let this man have a nap.

lol max likes him. he’s Charmed her. “aggressive, but playful” is her type lol.

god are claire and ethan STILL staying in the safehouse? i mean I GUESS at this point imf must not know the location but this still seems dicey.

i get the impression claire actually loved jim, which makes this whole setup Wild. The Chemistry is there with her and ethan, but clearly nothing has actually come of it at this point, and if/when it does, it will be totally justifiable bc she is, to her knowledge, A WIDOW. really played yourself there, jimbo.

oooh, they’re gonna hook up with other disavowed ex-spies. …however, i will observe that it seems ULTRA FUCKING STUPID to keep a list of the people you’ve explicitly decided to cut ties with??? isn’t the point of disavowing/burning an agent that they can’t be legally tied to your organization? imf competency varying wildly lol

damn, they’re getting fucking leon on the team lol. hang on i have to google something-- yes, leon: the professional came out two years before mission impossible, this joke works.

ethan as mission planner is Much ballsier than he was as a point man/Face lol

oh my god luther’s Hacker Names lol

luther the fact that you know this much about the system already suggests you’ve thought about it lol

ethan: i’m hiring you for an impossible job the team: no such thing ethan:  Let Me Explain

luther looks like his hopes and dreams are crashing down around his ears during this security breakdown lol

Theme Music!

we love an Emergency Services Scam. big bulky costume and everybody’s in too much of a panic to think too clearly.

oop, krieger’s a loose cannon, lol. (leon!) guess ethan is still hoping to get his job back, doesn’t want to Kill Coworkers. understandable. holding out hope for an exception being made for kittridge.

i wondered if this vent crawl might count as the first proper Ethan Stunt, but krieger’s doing it with him, so i think it’s still on the side of “a comparatively sane operative would do this”.

sidebar, tom cruise in this glasses headset getup is giving me farscape john crichton vibes, which is baffling given john crichton does not wear glasses.

oh we TRAP the laser instead of turning it off. Clever.

krieger sneeze into your ELBOW my guy.

and this is the iconic Hanging From The Ceiling Scene! oh holy shit i didn’t realize krieger was there to HOLD ETHAN’S BODY WEIGHT, damn.

excellent treatment of the tension with the silent shot and only luther’s whispered warnings. ethan is remaining REMARKABLY phlegmatic.

holy shit this guy would be the most annoying officemate. i mean i know he’s been poisoned but still. get thee to a cubicle nowhere near me.

that flip! my boy is BALLETIC

OOOOH NO WHY ARE THERE MICE IN THE VENTS OF THIS SUPER SECURE AGENCY. MOUSE THEY GOT LASERS HERE WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING

df;lakddf;laklsh;lk aaaand the slip

excellent handling of the tension again

legit how did ethan get his hand into position for this catch with so little space

KRIEGER YOU DUMB BITCH SECURE YOUR KNIFE

and now there actually is an evacuation! lol. back to the safehouse.

krieger is gonna be a problem if you don’t communicate, ethan. ah, yes, and here we see him proving me right. we know a bastard when we see one.

MY BOY. IS SO. SMART.

i’ll be surprised if we keep working with krieger lol he doesn’t seem like he takes an insult well

OH HO. DRAKE HOTEL IN THE GIDEON BIBLE. the penny drops.

oh, i think ethan’s suspicious of claire again. jim’s wife, after all.

oop! kiss! but is it legit or is it to throw him off his game?

man, no one play poker with ethan hunt.

“i’m not gonna let this get out in the open.” luther for best boy

oh my god kittridge you fuckwit

seriously ethan do a murder you’ve earned it

holy shit is that jim in the phone booth next to ethan???

IT IS

blaming kittridge. couldn’t throw a nicer asshole under the bus, lol

oh excellent touch with ethan envisioning it with the knowledge that it’s actually jim. doesn’t fall for it for a second, but plays along, and lets the audience in on it. we get to see exactly how smart ethan is, without a doubt, but jim doesn’t get clued in. smart, smart movie.

oh shit! krieger was the assassin on the op! i missed that completely

and now ethan's debating claire’s involvement with himself.

my poor boy looks like he’s gonna have a breakdown right here at the table

“you got a lousy marriage and 62 grand a year” first of all, bitch, your wife is extravagantly attractive and doesn’t seem to be an idiot or an asshole, your marriage is probably fine; second of all, in the year of any lord 2023, NEVERMIND in 1996 money, i would kill for 62 grand a year. shut the fuck up.

okay, jim keeping the secret from claire PROBABLY clears her

love ethan continuing to write to max with bible verses bc she thought it was fun the first time lol

tasteful fade to black lol

honestly why are they bothering with having the shade pulled down to hide jim’s face lol

dlfkahsd;lkfhas;lk max enjoys ethan SO MUCH lol. i am undecided on whether she wants him carnally but i suspect she wouldn’t complain if he suggested it

oh no! overly helpful train attendant gave the game away!

oooh, max is playing both sides. unsurprising lol

i’m here for claire’s Itty Bitty Skirt.

oh shit! she DOES know about jim! damn it claire, i believed in you! fortunately ethan is more suspicious than me lol

“having tasted the goods” fucking classy, jim

eyyyy! foiled by the camera glasses! can’t believe i have to be team kittridge. offensive.

well, there goes claire. and ethan still isn’t quite at full Action Man, so he gets the shit knocked out of him.

okay i think ethan climbing the back of a bullet train with no assistive devices is his actual first Ethan Stunt. this is where this shit starts to get beyond “spy shenanigans” and into “i have no time to plan and no one else to rely on, so my improvisation is the WILDEST SHIT YOU’VE EVER IMAGINED”

fkha;ldkfha;lskhdl;kh he never did actually use that gun outside of pointing it at claire Once or perform any other acts of violence, so ethan’s first confirmed attempted murder is tying a helicopter to a train to fuck kreiger. of course.

the gum again! ethan did jack give you a whole PACK of that. also i’d like to point out that, while the circumstances are certainly warranting it-- he hasn’t got his hands free, he’s holding on to a helicopter-- when jack first presents ethan with the explosive gum, ethan handles it like it is a Very Delicate Grenade, and now he’s pulling it out of the packaging with his teeth. we are definitely past ethan caring much about his personal safety.

ethan legit came like. two inches from death.

wonder if luther’s gonna get reinstated for his part in this stunt

sounds like yes!

aaaand the chatbot stewardess is back and not taking no for an answer. guess ethan doesn't get to retire after all.

-----

ALRIGHT. LIVEBLOG COMPLETE. Claustrophobic Hallway never appeared, although there was a generally claustrophobic feeling to the whole film due to the very tight shots sometimes. i was haunted by the vague sense that i should know more about this movie than i did, lol.

in summary: ethan hunt is such a good boy and he is having SUCH A BAD TIME. literally at the end of his harrowing revenge/name-clearing adventure he just gets on a plane to england-- maybe back to those london apartments he liked? seems like it would have bad memories now, which has some interesting implications for how ethan deals with his traumas, namely “go roll around in them for a while and see if they start to feel comfortable instead of horrifying”. he’s so disillusioned with the whole pack of them that the tells luther he can’t imagine why he’d be doing it if he went back, and promises to remember luther as “disreputable”.

something i noticed while going back to get some screengrabs to illustrate a few of these points-- in the team briefing, the whole team is never framed together around the table. in fact, i believe this is the only time we’ll even see them all in the same frame. in the opening shots, sarah is on the other side of the room, pulling the shade down. claire is sitting next to ethan, and ALWAYS finds a way to be very close to ethan outside of the actual operations, which leads me to wonder how much of the Chemistry™ was being manufactured even this early on (and, by extension, earlier than the film shows us.) also poor hannah gets almost no job on this op and almost no characterization in this movie. they could have cut her out entirely and nothing would have been lost.

also in retrospect there were more clues about claire’s culpability-- she tells ethan later (during the Aggressively Sexual Frisking) that she walked away when the abort was called, but we SAW HER sitting in the car, watching ethan speedwalk past her with a frown, after she said she had already complied with that order. ethan says this when he's holding her at gunpoint, and she never actually produces a compelling explanation, she just kind of hustles us all past that by getting teary-eyed! excellent manipulation! she already knew the plan at that point, and presumably if ethan had complied with the command to abort the mission, he would have been somewhere else that claire and jim had predicted he’d be for their frame job to work. possibly claire’s Wiles would have come into things at some point there, instead of the 4am Frisk that ended up happening.

also also not to be "ethan hunt is feminine-coded" on main, but ethan hunt has quite a few Cinematically Feminine traits, especially in this action spy genre. he is the subject of violence, not the performer of it. he runs AWAY from confrontations instead of engaging them. his most successful grifts are Conversations and Disguises, and he mostly uses those tools to de-escalate. claire tells him how many bullets he has for his TWO GUNS at one point, and he never fires a single one. he is blind-folded, taken to the villain's lair, charms the villain with his good looks and witty banter. his one moment of really Macho Aggression is in a panic after a PTSD nightmare, is ultimately defused, and never recurs. will be interested to see how this develops in further films.

10/10, if ethan hunt was a dog he would be a border collie.

[world-cinema-research]

The Conversation (1974)

By Cris Nyne

Harry Caul is involved in espionage. The couple that he is listening to are walking aimlessly in circles through a park while being followed by a mime. There are eerie, alien-like electronic noises that are woven into their dialogue from the wiretap. Why are they being followed? What or who are they discussing? Harry also seems to be in the dark about his subjects, but he is determined to find the answers to these questions. This is the review of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 murder mystery The Conversation.

The Conversation takes place in San Francisco. Coppola released the film in the same year as one of his more well-known films, The Godfather part II. It was quite a prolific year. Spy for hire Harry Caul, played by Gene Hackman, is regarded as a master of his craft by those in the business. He is well known from New York to California for his exploits. He uses new age technology to tap into what was thought to be private conversations, exposing secrets and returning them to the rich beneficiary who paid for his services. Harry is a loner and is cautious about anyone who tries to get too close. He is in the business of invading people’s privacy but is highly skeptical and paranoid when anyone tries to pry into his personal life. Harry is trying to decipher the broken dialogue between a man and a woman that are planning something, and he is trying to figure what that something is. He is supposed to return the tapes to his current employer, but not before he finds out more for himself.

“One of the lessons implicit in "The Conversation" is that private enterprise, as always, leads the way. Government breakthroughs, like break-ins, are usually a mistake. The film is haunting because its suggestion that technology has gotten out of hand, though not exactly new, is so convincingly and fastidiously detailed.” -Vincent Canby for The New York Times, April 21, 1974

Original movie poster for The Conversation.

The Conversation was well received by critics and audiences alike. The budget for the film was an estimated $1.6 million, and during its release year pulled in just shy of $4.7 million, internationally. Coppola tapped his friend and previous collaborator, Walter Murch, to be sound editor for the film. Murch would go on to win two BAFTA awards for Best Soundtrack and Best Film Editing (along with Richard Chew). Hackman was BAFTA nominated for best actor (lost to Jack Nicholson for The Last Detail/Chinatown). Coppola was BAFTA nominated for Best Director (lost to Roman Polanski for Chinatown.) Coppola was also nominated for Best Picture for the 1975 Oscars. He did win the Oscar, but for his other film from 1974, The Godfather part II. The Conversation also won Cannes top prize in 1974, the Palme d’Or. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 97%.

For historical context, 1974 was a massive year in American history. Richard Nixon resigned due to his involvement in the Watergate scandal coverup. I find this contemporaneous timing as uncanny, considering The Conversation and Watergate both were based on espionage and wiretapping. Hank Aaron would also go on to smash Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs in 1974, a record once thought of as impossible to beat. I can only imagine the pressure and the threats Mr. Aaron was under during this time. 1974 is still relevant in 2024.

“Coppola, who wrote and directed, considers this film his most personal project. He was working two years after the Watergate break-in, amid the ruins of the Vietnam effort, telling the story of a man who places too much reliance on high technology and has nightmares about his personal responsibility.” -Roger Ebert, February 4, 2001

San Francisco in the mid-seventies was gritty and raw. The Conversation encapsulates this era with the same visual intensity. No feelings are reserved and there is very direct dialogue between Hackman and his co-stars. Because the film is steeped in the realms of secrecy and spying, we have some very interesting aerial shots as if someone is watching from above. At one point, we have a car chase between Harry Caul and some loose associates through the streets of San Francisco as they tail a sports car that just cut them off. Hackman does a brilliant job of portraying a man under duress and some of the cinematography gets up close and personal in his apartment and a hotel room where he is spying on the couple that he is being paid to follow. Hackman also has a momentary break down where he is squirming around his hotel room, gripping his head in anxiety and twisting under the blankets as he becomes overwhelmed by the possibilities of what his subjects are doing next door. Coppola goes out of his way at times to prove a point.

There was paranoia and anxiety throughout the film. The ending could leave the viewer with a feeling of unease as we steamroll towards a future of technological advances and lack of privacy. These were a couple of elements that can incorporate some notions of The Conversation being an unconventional movie. Otherwise, The Conversation has most of the ingredients to a mainstream Hollywood film. The actors were all white and the women were portrayed as mere objects to Hackman’s occasional need to fill sexual desires. Francis Ford Coppola released The Godfather in 1972 and had become an international name-brand director. The film was released under Paramount and had an A-list of established and up-and-coming stars Like Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, John Cazale, and Teri Garr.

If The Conversation fell unnoticed through the cracks created by Coppola’s other 70’s releases of The Godfather films and Apocalypse Now, I highly suggest you check out his most personal film of them all.

[dalesramblingsblog]

Brief Look at Judge Dredd Novels, Part X: Dredd vs Death by Gordon Rennie

So. We've... skipped ahead a bit. About eight years, to be precise. And there's absolutely nothing major that we need to talk about that happened in the interim which might have an impact on how we read the decaying urban hellscape of Mega-City One. I mean, yeah, I suppose I was born in that gap and am currently less than a year old at the time of the novel's publication, but why are you trying to pin all this post-apocalyptic stuff on me?

Oh alright, in the grand tradition of "science fiction released in the year 2003," let's stop playing coy and simply admit that it's tough to read Dredd vs Death, the first of Black Flame's newly launched set of Judge Dredd novels, without viewing it through the prism of 9/11 and the Iraq War.

The most obvious culprit here is undoubtedly the Church of Death's attempt to break the Dark Judges out of their imprisonment by crashing an h-wagon into the tower above said prison, but even the nature of the Church as a decentralised group of religious fundamentalists waging warfare in urban environments feels pointed.

Similarly, Rennie includes a moment in which Dredd ruminates on the vampires' undead status depriving them of the meagre rights possessed by an average citizen of Mega-City One, evoking Donald Rumsfeld's infamous categorisation of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as the "living dead." More literally, the presence of hordes of zombies ties the novel into a post-9/11 fascination with those particular members of the undead, from 28 Days Later through to Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil films and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead.

All of this, however, makes Dredd vs. Death sound considerably more complex and nuanced than it actually is. I mean, that's not to say that it's completely without depth, but it is, first and foremost, concerned with serving as a novelisation of Rebellion Developments' contemporaneous PS2/Xbox/Gamecube/PC game of the same name.

Putting all my cards on the table here, I'm forced to admit that I've never actually played the game, but it's nevertheless quite apparent that Rennie has had to do some finessing of the narrative in order to better measure up to the different standards inherent to the change in medium from video game to prose. Some of these tricks work quite well, including giving Anderson a more active role than she seems to have had in the original game.

Particularly delicious is the reframing of the zombies' attack on the megamall from the point of view of a "living mannequin" caught up in the chaos, a nice way of adding tension to what was presumably just another level in the game itself. Added on to this is the cute touch of having the living mannequin's brother-in-law, referenced in his internal monologue, show up later in the novel for a similar sequence.

But ultimately, once it comes down to the climactic showdown with the four Dark Judges, it's impossible to avoid the impression that we're simply watching a progression of boss battles committed to the printed page. They're very well-translated, mind you, and the decision to distribute the boss battles between Anderson and Giant as well as Dredd is a characteristically shrewd one, but it becomes very clear that any post-9/11 depth one might care to read into it is largely incidental.

Still, the whole thing has an endearingly propulsive, runaway freight train quality that helps it avoid the fate of overstaying its welcome, so it's hard to complain too much. As far as novelisations of video games go - a genre in which I haven't dabbled too much, but that I find hard to believe contains too many gems - my intuition tells me that this is likely to be one of the stronger examples.

Current ranking:

Dreddlocked

Deathmasques

Wetworks

Silencer

The Medusa Seed

Dread Dominion

Dredd vs Death

Cursed Earth Asylum

The Hundredfold Problem

The Savage Amusement

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[tenderlady]

(Phantom Thread anon again) Yes exactly, that's J&Y! I can see it with the Master too, that same desire or need to hand over the reigns to someone else, something that John has alluded to in pretty much all the major relationships of his life (Mimi, Stu, Paul, Yoko). I think any good Beatles film would have to focus on just a fragment and my top choice would depend on what the angle was, but PTA would be a great choice for anything delving into their psyches not just because he's a top tier director but because so many of his films deal with Fucked Up relationships seemingly without judgement. He doesn't sanitise, but his characters are allowed to come across as charming despite the focus on dysfunctional elements.

Also while there's the obvious mommy issues thread, but a lot more that could be explored and isn't much about John's relationship with power in general, especially in the 70s. How he seemed to want it less the more he had it, especially from about '67 when he appeared to make conscious efforts to be less manipulative and even assertive. His old friends say he had to be the top dog in the early days which certainly isn't the John I saw in the Get Back sessions. That thing Harry Nilsson mentioned him saying about "powerful men" wanting to "swallow the world" and how he related it to his own physical appetite was very revealing imo. And how he often talked about "fat kings" (and Elvis specifically as the "fat king" fate he feared most) - I wonder how much of his disordered eating and preference for looking what most would consider too thin was rooted in those kinds of thoughts. And well, put all that together and the appeal of submitting to Yoko is blindingly obvious to me without the need for some evil witch magic to put him under her command!

Hey, bestie, welcome back! Always a pleasure to talk shop with a fellow Understander.

I totally agree with all of this, and I think you did a better job of picking up what I was attempting to put down with The Master than I did. The Master, while often read as a film about Scientology, is at its base a film about masculinity and control and power, which I think is what PTA is alluding to with the title. There is a real homoeroticism between Philip Seymour Hoffman's character and Joaquin Phoenix's character (I haven't seen the film in a hot minute, apologies for not remembering their characters' names), and a kind of Freudian taming of the id with Phoenix's almost animalistic lust and violence being tempered (and channeled) by Hoffman's superegoistic control. The scene where Hoffman essentially does Auditing on Phoenix reminds me a bit of Janov's primal scream therapy, with the idea that you have to completely break someone down to nothing in order to remake them in a stronger image. I also totally agree that PTA does a great job of portraying characters with complex psychologies in a way that neither demonizes nor exonerates them for their behavior, which are both problems that I think a lot of Beatlemovies (particularly focusing on John) fall into.

The thread of John and power/consumption/fatness is also really fascinating to me. The "fat king" archetype obviously seemed to stick in his craw, and I think Maureen Cleave comparing him specifically to Henry VIII really bothered him. Henry VIII was fat, but he was also violent, lascivious, and myopic in his understanding of the world around him. As with a lot of contemporaneous Beatles commentary, I think that John perhaps thought this hit too close to home and decided to course correct but, being John, overcorrected HARD. Like George, I think John had a real interest in asceticism and transcendence. At a point in time, John was probably the most powerful non-political figure in the world, and I think the trauma of that experience led him to desire a place where he could relinquish some of that control. Janov in particular seemed to place a lot of stock on being controlled by your desires (didn't Yoko pitch PST as a way to stop smoking?), and I think we see that fear of desire manifest in the life John built with Yoko in New York (macrobiotic, highly restricted diet; minimalistic decor; rarely leaving the house). I think the AKOM girls did a great job of looping that fear of desire re: Janov's work back to Paul, and I think you alluded to that as well in your original ask, but I think all of that coalesced into John's disordered eating, or pulled on the thought patterns that started this behavior back in the 60s. John wanted to be cared for, but especially in the 70s, I think we can see a distrust that he felt in his own desires, and a longing to be rid of them. George attempted to do that with Krishna, and John attempted to do that with Yoko/Janov/disordered eating/etc., etc.

This answer kind of got away from me, but I do want to say that you're totally right. Yoko was not practicing evil pussy magic; I think she just correctly spotted what John was looking for and stepped in to provide it, even if it was ultimately not good or healthy for either of them.

I need to go rewatch The Master, apparently.

[krispyweiss]

Two-part Documentary to Examine San Francisco, Counterculture

- “San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time” airs Aug. 20 and 27 on MGM+

“In the early ’60s, San Francisco just seemed like a magical place.”

“There was just this nice little nexus of music and strange people.”

So begins the trailer for “San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time,” a new documentary airing Aug. 20 and 27 on MGM+ and spotlighting the city and the musicians who emerged from it, including Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Sly & the Family Stone and Jefferson Airplane among others.

“I would like to go (see the Airplane at the Fillmore) if I could,” a young and smiling Bob Dylan says in an archival clip.

The film, based on contemporaneous footage and new interviews, is directed by Alison Ellwood and Anoosh Tertzakian, who previously worked on “Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time.”

Young Jerry Garcia sums up the ethos as the trailer ends.

“What we’re thinking about is a peaceful planet,” he says. “We’re not thinking about any kind of power, or revolution or war.”

8/7/23