in David Lynch’s autobiography he talks about how before most people had television, every state/region had its own very-specific fashion trends, and how when he was very little and they’d visit relatives in Brooklyn, he’d be entranced by all the ladies around Prospect Park with really big hair. and that as television began creating a more homogenous concept of cool, these trends gradually faded bit by bit until most people kind of just looked the same everywhere.
i think about this a lot in regard to most things, and how the internet is definitely a catalyst for monoculture.
I’ve always had something close to the dominant American accent but my mom’s family is all from Maine so I was frequently blown away by how different they sounded. It was definitely something I made fun of. Oddly enough, my mom’s Mainer accent has softened and she’s picked up a few mid Atlantic ticks. For one, she says “on” with this large, rounded “o” sound.
My father in law grew up in Richmond and he aggressively drowned out his natural accent because he knew people would think he’s stupid. What he’s left with sounds pretty strange. He even has a twin brother who kept the accent and went into a more manual-skilled level of trade.
I miss all the different ways that people used to talk,
just realizing now my grampa had I guess a heavy rural Ohio accent because you mentioned “warsh”. I didn’t really clock it because it’s basically just a rural accent like I grew up around, and because my grandma’s Boston accent also added Rs where they didn’t belong, but neither of those groups say warsh
the “warsh” thing is definitely not just an Ohio thing. i’m not sure where it originates from. i just think of it as a generic rural accent. maybe Appalachia?
event horizon: didn’t finish it, i did like the early part where a character introduces himself as “DJ. Trauma.” and everyone laughs at him. go back to soundcloud etc. movie credited to “paul anderson” so this is before he was demoted to WS i guess.
possession: watched on valentines day and while it wasn’t the couples movie i was expecting i did enjoy this. another sam neill movie! will have to roll over from thinking of him as the guy from jurassic park and switch it to the guy from possession instead. the cold war spy politics touches were a good, surprising, complicating texture and the Creature Effects are very good and uncanny. although my favourite part of the movie was probably Heinrich, the wife’s new-age lover who also knows martial arts, and my favourite scene is the one he spends kind of aimlessly spinning in place and bumping into walls at random while keeping up a continuous stream of placatory dialogue. a real magic of cinema moment.
phantom thread: no sam neill but a different paul anderson, i liked it although kind of felt it was using some of the same easy plays as the likes of The King’s Speech or whatever - some light-touch nods to historical context, some crowd-pleasing parts where upper-crust europeans suddenly say “fuck”, some of the general warm glow that comes from being informed up-front we’re in the presence of important people making history. even if the way the dresses get produced is presented as grotesque i don’t know if there’s a point where we’re encouraged to have similarly mixed feelings about the work itself, or a suggestion that the main guy’s creativity could ever really dry up or go down the wrong path. so that ends up as a kind of grounding, comforting fantasy, no matter what else happens. i liked the ending and the prettiness of different shots, and the committment to being a romance throughout.
A guy raised by monkeys ends up becoming a ship captain and when he’s diving with his girlfriend she gets swallowed by a whale and the whale ends up in a museum in sydney when his girlfriend escapes and the guy who runs the museum refuses to let the girl go so the guy goes back to monkey island and trains them to be an army and declares war on australia to get his girlfriend back. eventually he ends up fighting in some kind of steampunk north vs south war over niagra falls against the protagonist of around the world in 80 days
apparently it’s called the Midland accent and my bit of PA has phased the extra mid-word R out, the main range of the accent is Nebraska south to Oklahoma and east to Ohio
My accent is fucked in very subtle ways. Colorado accent means I have a mild california accent with a tiny bit of twang, living in Seattle for 9 years means I forgot how to open my mouth all the way, and now I say really weird O’s thanks to Minnesota.
The Empty Man was an interesting concept, but goes in like, three different directions and has a terrible title for what it is. It starts out as a Travelers Abroad Uncovering Something Strange movie, and then turns into a Bye Bye/Slender/Whatever Man type movie, and then it turns into cosmic horror but not before dipping into solipsism, nihilism, Scientology, and Buddhism. I was interested for about the first hour, but things started getting convoluted and it started to lose my attention as it shifted gears into a more Ring-esque investigation into what’s happening.
This movie doesn’t look bad or anything, but it it has no personality aesthetically. The whole time I kept hoping for some color – I wanted to see some OG Suspiria-esque lighting but it never came. The director’s background looks to be almost entirely in making movies about the making of other movies, so I’m guessing visual flare isn’t something he’s concerned with.
There’s a modern made western on Netflix called Justice and it’s the first movie I had to turn off halfway through in… ever? Many years at least. Unwatchable garbage on a subcutaneous level
I just watched Paul Schrader’s Affliction. The misery piled on misery reminded me of another movie I saw a few months ago, In the Bedroom (though the stories are not similar).
Although you don’t see much of her, the most tragic character in Affliction has to be the mother of Wade and Rolfe.
I think both of these films are very good, though both are very heavy.
