I loved all the random references to Surrealist painters in Boy and the Heron. Especially the huge de Chirico love. Felt very fitting considering the other world is basically a classically Surrealist dive into the collective unconscious.
3 Likes
Feeling burnt out and Ill means I spend lots of time watching dumb movies and this has allowed me to tell you that guardians of the galaxy 3 is definitely the third guardians of the galaxy movie. Sad that this is what passes for an MCU âwinâ these days. but they were at least correct to make Mantis and Drax more or less the leads of the film, even though itâs ostensibly about rocket heâs in a coma 2/3 of the movie and doesnât really interact with any of the other characters.
2 Likes
Creative freedom means you can devote 15 minutes of your 3 hour IP epic to your little brother, and the audience has to love it.
2 Likes
Thinking about it that movie had a lot of 15 minutes devoted to something or another.
2 Likes
About 11 of them I reckon.
2 Likes
Saw Johnnie Toâs The Heroic Trio. Incredible. Absolutely wrathful that this didnât get a wide US release because it is truly a visionary take on What If The Batman Movies Were Girl. And also What If There Were Three Batmans. The plot is pretty confusing but the ways in which it is confusing end up not mattering by the end because the melodrama justifies itself and these are three of the best HK actresses to ever do it. Michelle Yeoh spends the third act in a scarlet unitard and a giant jacket woven out of huge flat strips of linen or some shit and then she has to fight a bunch of disgusting animatronics that totally ruin her outfit. Itâs constantly swinging between immensely stylish and immensely hideous and even when I predicted what would happen in a scene, the scene just went too far and grossed me out, lmao. Perfect. Anthony Wong eats a whole flock of birds and runs around growling like an animal and doing weird goblin shit. Endless baby endangerment. There is a scene where a train explodes through a wall and then the train also explodes and also a bunch of land mines explodeâlike a fifteen minute sequence where every new macguffin is a new type of bomb. I would have killed to see this when I was fifteen
9 Likes
i think the most insane child endangerment Ive ever seen in a hk movie is that moon lee movie where the villains hold her child out of a car moving at high speed by her hair for an entire car chase and they sure as fuck did that shit to a kid for real
4 Likes
One of the best to ever do it
4 Likes
One huge thing that makes the plot of The Heroic Trio so surprising is theyâre constantly endangering babies (the plot is about 20 babies being kidnapped) and some of the babies legit die! (in the story I mean)
6 Likes
at the end of sex and the city 2 itâs shown that carrie shelves her own books next to sontagâs against interpretation. what could she mean by this?
10 Likes
showed my friend Fury yesterday and she was silent for the last 45 minutes, thatâs how I know I got her ass, then I heard her weeping when they have their last moment in the tank together. i love that movie because itâs one of those i didnât know this guy had it in 'em movies, david ayer of all people made cross of iron: western front, a movie about endless masses of horrendously dirty guys with so little soul left in them all they do is sit around and talk about killing and fucking calling it the best job they ever had, guys who have so thoroughly dedicated themselves to war that their well oiled machine immediately starts to break down the second they accidentally get assigned some typist who still has so much humanity sweating out of them it makes them all sick. bad enough to be reminded of what youâve lost, worse to watch someone else lose it too.
6 Likes
Watched The Story of Yanagawaâs Canals. Wonderful stuff. They should show this to high schoolers. Itâs like a Sesame Street segment for adults. Appreciate that it doesnât only brag about the canals as some kind of obvious collectivist water system, but also shows what a precarious endeavor their caretaking has been both in the 20th century and in ancient history. Wonderful argument that ordinary people can understand and do and share anything they want, if theyâre really committed to it. You can get a town of people to maintain the most complex and community-integrated water system on earth, operate myriads of little sluicegates everywhere, and understand the specific gravity of seawater, and clean the whole damn thing themselves by hand every year, if you get them to care about it enough. This movie says: humans are impossibly difficult, but every ounce of hope you lay on them is worth it. Wish they showed this in high schools, honestly!!!
One thing I wish they would stop reading and showing in high schools is The Lord of the Flies. Watched the 1960s adaptation of that too over the weekend. The story is just absurdly cynical and the movie really points this up by casting too many amateur child actors all in the same scenes together. An extraordinarily flat and dull version of a story I both hate and enjoy, where everyone is stupid and mean for no reason and Piggyâs death is so funny and stupid that I barked out a single HA from the couch (and then went back to glowering). They turn Simon into an almost nothing character and completely omit the entire conversation with the pig head! He just kind of stares flatly at the pig! There is no sense of rising dread or surreality in the movie at all.
As much as I dislike this book and this movie, the book was really important to me as a kid because it was one of the first times I read a story with that kind of tortured miserable surreality in it. I really identified with Simonâs hallucinating because I was also a kid afflicted with numerous health related hallucinations (I had both type 1 diabetes and occasional bouts of Alice in Wonderland syndrome). But in the years since I read the book and watched this movie in class, Iâve come to understand it as a very entrancing and almost soothing depression rant from a guy so traumatized by WW2 that he just blasted out this hideous soulscream in a fit of pain. Now all English teachers ever assign it so that you can learn about Symbolism, and they get so caught up in explaining who is the Id and who is the Superego that they never stop to put it in any kind of historical context. I never learned that it was written as a deliberate slam of a different popular colonialist British childrenâs book until this year! Anyway I hated this adaptation in high school and I hated it again last night!
10 Likes
same
Golding described the relationship between the two books by saying that The Coral Island ârotted to compostâ in his mind, and in the compost âa new myth put down rootsâ
might have to read it again in light of this
2 Likes
Iâve been talking a lot with my friends about LOTF over the last few days because Iâve been watching this, and I also think I have to read it again in order to argue with them correctly, lmao.
Thereâs the obvious issue that he meant some of it as a criticism of his own nationality and class⌠but focusing on that aspect ignores that itâs read and taught most frequently as a universal story. That was certainly how it was taught to me as a child⌠we spent all our time learning that various characters represented the human Id, and zero time learning that Golding had Turbo PTSD WW2 Style Alcoholism Edition, or any facts at all about British public school life and what people thought about it in the 1950s. Plenty of the upper class school stuff comes through in the book and the movie, but IMO itâs a very secondary read. In fact, the movieâs tagline is:
EVIL IS INHERENT IN THE HUMAN MIND, WHATEVER INNOCENCE MAY CLOAK ITâŚ
The nuclear war plot element also balloons the book and the movie out to a universal cynicism. Iâd love to read it again (though I have no idea if I have the patience to read the book itâs based on) and see if I can excavate any more redemption out of my having liked it so much when I was 15 lol
5 Likes
Coming soon from Naughty Dog: Lord of the Flies HD
this is reminding me of the time we read A Separate Peace in school and I was like âThese two characters might be gayâ and my English teacher was like âum, noâ and it didnât occur to me at the time that you could have a separate valid reading of a piece of literature.
9 Likes
I had a very similar experience with lord of the flies specifically as a kid. I did it in 9th grade, switched schools, and did it again in 10th grade at the new school. I updated an essay that had gotten an A the first time around and submitted it again for a practically identical assignment at the new school. My new teacher gave me a B on that one and her notes were basically âNo. This conclusion is wrong.â
5 Likes
Ah yes, the inductive method
2 Likes
I had to argue with my English Teacher in AP English that multiple interpretations were valid and claiming this (what the teacher is saying) is what Emily Bronte meant before she died of sepsis at 19 is reductive.
We didnât get along.
3 Likes
I thought they already greenlit a sequel and a TV series though?