My trip to Canada is now after this game comes out so I’m a happy camper. It’s a short plane ride but I’m also gonna be in a hotel and need something to keep me awake so I can show up to work bleary eyed and slightly hung over, or else it’s not a proper business trip
Have I mentioned that I use my very infrequent business trips as an excuse to get drunk in a hotel room alone? Living the fucken high life
There is legitimately something very special about lonely hotel room nights, I feel you. Last time I was in a hotel I turned on the weather channel and the visualization style they were using looked just like SNES sim city and played vaporwave-esque music, and I just chilled with that for a while.
What if Anomalisa were set in New Donk City
god anomalisa was horrible
like, just the worst self-pitying garbage
charlie kaufman really should’ve left his reputation where it was
I kickstarted that garbage movie and it was a huge disappointment when I finally saw it. Dude was such a great writer up to that point, I don’t know what happened.
I have no problem getting drunk (well, drunk enough, like 3-4 drinks, not drunk drunk) at home but I can’t do it in a hotel room, it’s too bleak. if I’m on a work trip, once I leave the bar, that’s generally it for me
i liked anomalisa
It is bleak but the whole experience is bleak for me. I’m just leaning in.
For reference, I’m going to Penticton, BC which is really nice if you’re a tourist who loves lakes and otherwise garbage. It does have a really good Indian restaurant though, I’m looking forward to that.
want to defend it? I actually shut it off during the hallway scene when he was talking to the two women because it was so unbelievable as a pitiful male fantasy, I’m curious whether it got better
I’d also be interested in your take on it if you feel like it. I did like the animation at least, and the dream sequence was fun. I really just wanted the whole movie to be that dream sequence.
oh, yeah, the interior isn’t so bad. I didn’t grow up here so it doesn’t have much meaning to me, and I’ve never been to penticton, but the couple of times I’ve been through kelowna it’s been pleasant enough. it’s weirdly overdeveloped and not much fun without a car, but that part isn’t too surprising.
Having spent nearly a year having lonely hotel nights every night, it eventually starts to feel like jail.
Savage!
I wouldn’t say it got better per se. If you didn’t like it up to that point, you probably wouldn’t like the rest either. It gets more absurd and surreal and the themes come into clearer focus, but basically the core of the film from my point of view was the extremely well-observed hotel setting and awkward conversations from the first half.
It’s certainly pitiful and the protagonist is not sympathetic, but it didn’t occur to me to process it as a personalized self-pity/fantasy, no more than Kafka’s embattled protagonists are intended to literally represent Kafka himself even when they are named “K”. Kafka and Kaufman are intentionally extracting the worst side of themselves to tell a story about a blinkered asshole who nevertheless resonates with the myopic and selfish aspects within us all. And somehow this is a perfect vehicle for an expansive metaphor for the human condition in capitalism, grounded in the ugly and mundane setting and profoundly alienated relationships.
The theme of the film is about how capitalism turns people and cities into commodities. Cincinnati has ceased to be a rooted place but has been abstracted into a fully interchangeable “modern city” with chain hotels, conference centers, and generic tourist attractions like a zoo. The protagonist has ceased to relate to people as human beings and can only relate to them as customers. His inspirational talk about helping customers is utterly hollow and devoid of meaning, and what’s worse he has projected this attitude onto every other relationship in his life. Lisa too has tragically internalized her own identity as a commodity, her most private form of self-expression is a top 10 song. They are too myopic to understand the trap they’re in and play out their barely understood sadness in a cycle of transient, alienated, self-destructive relationships.
Anyway. Maybe more to the point without going into all this interpretation, it sounds like you hate it because the film is grating, annoying and cringe-inducing in every last detail. Basically, I like it for the same reason.
Interesting. I think it’s definitely fair to say that there’s certain expectations I bring to kaufman that I wouldn’t bring to kafka – i.e. wanting his characters to be redeemed – but I just found it so grotesque, I think, that I couldn’t really get past that.
Adaptation had a lucky schlub but it never ceased to be aware of that and had so much fun with it.
I just wish Kaufman had done a little more research on the local lingo. Nobody calls it “the 71”.
That’s missing the point. Cincinnati is a pure stand-in for “any mid-sized American city, which business travellers perceive as indistinguishable”. The film goes out of its way to avoid imbuing Cincinnati with any personality whatsoever.
It’s just so uncharacteristically misanthropic though
The protagonist’s orientation to the world was actively offensive
There are definitely some weird, awkward, bad bits in Mario 64. Mostly water levels; Wet/Dry World is a particular contender, since it’s more about high-concept water-level management than fun platforming. The game as a whole is really keen on using traps you have to avoid, and which punish you with varieties of reduced control to pile on additional damage. Fire orbs, electric orbs, giant orbs, lava, gusts of wind… I suppose it makes a certain kind of sense that, with a game where simply controlling the character is part of the fun, the penalty for failure should interfere with that control, but that doesn’t really justify the swimming segments, and it doesn’t diminish the fact that playing at a less that perfect level means you’re going to spend a lot of time bouncing helplessly into lava.
Meuxdal’s 1000% right about Yoshi in Sunshine, though. I may prefer that game to 64, but Yoshi is the absolute top of the list where that game’s flaws are concerned.