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Yeah. That makes sense. I thought it was a fairly persuasive character study of someone who, well, doesn't really know her own character outside of her online persona.
<i>Bridgend</i> (Jeppe Ronde, 2015)
In the county of Bridgend, Wales there was - and may well still be - a higher than average number of suicides. That bit is true. As far as I’m aware, the rest of this is made up, so you do sort of wonder why they didn’t make up something more interesting or plausible. Sensibly, the film doesn’t attempt to provide an explanation. It doesn’t need one. Is it the alienation and boredom of living in a rural community? Is it a kind of cult? It floats these ideas and leaves the viewer to decide… but the narrative is still fairly dull and the interactions between characters feel like they were written by someone who hasn’t yet met humans. <b>2/5</b>
<i>Om Dar-B-Dar</i> (Karmal Swaroop, 1988)
A teacher paces up and down a courtyard carrying a massive frog. Inside the classroom, one of his students fails to answer the teacher’s question satisfactorily, so the teacher slaps him remotely with the frog. Just one of the truly extraordinary and baffling scenes in the frog-obsessed Om Dar-B-Dar, a movie I am not going to pretend to have understood. But one that manages to be continuously strange without being at all alienating. I stopped attempting to make sense of it after the first ten minutes or so, and just enjoyed being confused by it. Some wonderful stuff in here - dadaist, I suppose - but your guess is really as good as mine. <b>4/5</b>
<i>Train to Busan</i> (2016), <i>Peninsula</i> (2020) (Both: Yeon Sang-ho)
Somehow I didn’t know anything about Train to Busan, other than it was well-liked. So I went in more or less blind. I’ll confess that my heart sank a bit right at the beginning, with the roadkill scene and all the talk of a virus. ‘Oh, we’re doing this again. I might be tapped-out on these.’ But it quickly won me over, because it’s a very fine example indeed of its genre. Tightly constructed, tense, exciting and even remembers to give you characters to care about. I don’t think he approved of the fast type, but I bet Romero kicked himself that he’d never thought to set one on a train. And an unexpectedly emotional ending too…
… which the sequel, Peninsula, kind of attempts to replicate - and messes up quite badly. The second story is more expansive, but also quite a step down. I see people were thoroughly disappointed by it, and I mostly concur. But I enjoyed it well enough anyway, feeling it was probably on a par with Land of the Dead. Yeon just skipped a few films of steadier decline on the way here. <b>4/5, 3/5</b> respectively.
<i>Sweat</i> (Magnus von Horn, 2020)
The message of this thing may be a bit trite by this stage: Internet fame is a bit hollow and unsatisfying. Anyway, we follow a successful Instagrammer around as that message steadily dawns on her, and other, quite unpleasant stuff happens both to and around her. The ending’s a bit pat, and I hovered between three and four stars because of it - but ultimately decided it was worth a four on the strength of the central performance. Magdalena Kolesnik carries this; it may be what we used to call a ‘star turn’. <b>4/5</b>
<i>Mother</i> (Bong Joon-ho, 2009)
The best movie so far made with the title Mother. And I will fight you. <b>5/5</b>
<i>May’s Child</i> (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1958)
Have you ever seen a film - maybe a Hays Code era film - where the ending jars so roughly with everything that preceded it that you think the director must have balked at the production notes and said ‘Screw it! I’ll make that as unnatural as possible, so the audience knows damn well I don’t believe in it’? I think that’s what happened here. A seventeen year old girl marries an older architect - but no-one cares about the age-gap, because it’s the 1950s. They are, however, completely incompatible. He’s aloof and stuck in his ways. She’s abrupt, rude and jealous. It’s a strength of the film that even though it’s definitely the girl’s story and we understand why he’s a problem, she isn’t an especially sympathetic character. We have a scene towards the end where an unequal 1950s style marriage is compared and contrasted with prostitution, and then… that false note ending. Anyway, it’s quite good if very much a product of its era. <b>3/5</b>
<i>Malaise</i> (Rituparno Ghosh, 1999)
A simple story: a successful actor in Kolkata goes back home because her mother is ill. She and her father await test results. Meantime, some juicy gossip from her dayjob is about to drop in the newspapers. But the characters are properly complex. Her relationship with her father is slightly strained, in a perfectly believable way, but neither of them ever talk about it. Terrific acting and beautifully observed. Not eventful in the least, but I found it absorbing. <b>4/5</b>
<i>Puzzle</i> (Duccio Tessari, 1974)
Perfectly acceptable thriller about an amnesiac, the wife he can’t remember and some sausages filled with drugs. <b>3/5</b>
Hey, hey:
<i>A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies</i> (Martin Scorsese, Michael Henry Wilson, 1995)
Hell of a title, isn’t it? I think all films should have such literal titles. Dorothy Gets Caught Up In A Tornado & Ends Up in a Strange New Place Known By Its Inhabitants as Oz was a stone-cold classic. Anyway: I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as Scorsese’s documentary on Italian cinema, simply because this covers more films in a shorter time - so you don’t quite get the depth. But who doesn’t enjoy Scorsese (already in his avuncular phase by the mid-90s) talking you through his obsessions? <b>4/5</b>
<i>Hitler’s Hollywood</i> (Rutger Suchsland, 2017)
Suchsland’s second documentary on German cinema. His first, Caligari to Hitler, covered the Weimar Republic and bunches of films that many film fans are already pretty familiar with and posits a thesis that you can see the shadow of the upcoming Third Reich in some of them. Which I found a wee bit far-fetched. Hitler’s Hollywood - covering 1933 to 1945 - has no such issues, as you can definitely see the Third Reich in these films. Strange, that. Lots of interesting clips from films no-one watches any more and basically demonstrates that for the most part the products of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda machine were a lot like regular movies, but a bit more Nazi. <b>3/5</b>
<i>Alice in Panchalinadu</i> (Sudhin Vamattam, 2021)
OK. It’s called Alice in Panchalinadu. But our title character doesn’t turn up for 50 minutes and then promptly disappears for another 40. And she was barely necessary to what passes for a plot anyway. That’s the best illustration of the film’s messiness. Although there’s a reasonable attempt at the end to tie things together and give the illusion of structure, it’s far too late by then. This is just stuff happening to characters you don’t know. <b>1/5</b>
OK. Someone says 'He looks like a serial killer.'
What do you think the chances of them being <i>correct</i> are?
So vanishingly small it's not even worth thinking about. Unless, of course, you mean someone watching a person on TV who has been charged with multiple murders: 'Well, he <i>looks</i> like a serial killer!' In which case the chances of being right are probably much higher than they would be for random people you pass in the street.
Point is: we require much more information than just a face, or a facial expression to make accurate assessments of people. And even with much more information, we often still get these things wrong.
Isn't that the same question, slightly rephrased? The answer is still: no. You cannot know a person's character from just looking at their face.
Some people <i>think</i> they can, and they might even claim loudly that they're very good with first impressions - 'a good judge of character' - because they remember the times they got it right and forget the times they got it wrong. It's standard issue confirmation bias.
But nobody has this skill. It isn't a skill that is available to human beings.
No.
Nobody can. Anyone who says they can is an idiot or a liar.
'You think you've seen white? Oh, my sweet summer child, I'll show you white.'
Yup.
Haven't stopped wearing a mask in situations where it's appropriate. And will continue to do so throughout winter, when avoiding 'flu and colds will be an added bonus.
<blockquote>My hope is that physical media sticks around, even if it's expensive and only for the collectors. In that sense it could be like vinyl today or like LaserDisc in the 80s and 90s.</blockquote>
I think that's exactly what'll happen. There's still plenty of people who prefer a physical copy. I certainly don't think physical media is going to go away anytime soon, but it is eventually going to become a niche market.
Ah. We're so different. The quality of streaming is absolutely fine as far as I'm concerned, precisely because I lived through the VHS and DVD eras. I accept, of course, that 4K Blu-Ray is superior to a 4K stream, but the difference isn't substantial enough for me to drop the convenience of streaming.
You're also right - obviously - about ownership versus 'ownership', but I always found with optical discs that I rarely watched a film often enough to feel that it was worthwhile owning. Some folk will watch their favourite films over and over again. I'm not really like that. I'd usually rather watch something new to me or something I haven't seen for years or even decades.
And, furthermore, I never cared about the special features either. I must have listened to about three director commentaries in my life.
So, it's horses for courses, isn't it? And streaming suits me down to the ground.
Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, I think.
I got rid of my (not very extensive) VHS collection the same week I got a DVD player and never looked back. It was replaced by a superior technology. I have no nostalgia for old tech. (I have no nostalgia for anything, if I'm honest.)
And these days, naturally, I'm all about the streaming. No physical media at all.
The worm in the tequila bottle isn't a bug.
At a guess: attempting to tediously troll the Matrix Resurrections board, but the drunken fool has posted in the wrong place.
Ha! Quite.
I've seen about half a dozen. One's tolerance to the MCU template clearly varies. Which is fine.
I say 'probably', because I probably agree with him, but given that there's 20+ of these movies I haven't seen, and given that it's subjective and there's a big audience that would presumably disagree, I can't be <i>certain</i> that he's right.
<blockquote>AGAIN, I didn't say ASIAN FILMS were LESS SOPHISTICATED. </blockquote>
<blockquote>What one suspects is CHINA's TASTE in FILMS may tend to be LESS SOPHISTICATED than that of certain AMERICANS</blockquote>
Oh.
(And that's the version since you edited it for clarity. Not the original version to which I initially responded.)
<blockquote>AGAIN, I didn't say ASIAN FILMS were LESS SOPHISTICATED.</blockquote>
<blockquote>there hasn't been anything produced recently in CHINA to indicate they have SOPHISTICATED TASTES in the films that they chose to view </blockquote>
And that's within the <i>same</i> post. Unbelievable.
Aye. That's kind of what I was getting at with 'pseudo-religious'; that gnostic attitude - 'We alone have the True Knowledge'. It's a product of ignorance, isn't it? Dunning-Kruger, and all that.
<blockquote>You were also ASKED for a TIME FRAME in regards to which ASIAN FILMS you're making reference to, but as usual you IGNORED the QUESTION</blockquote>
I ignored it because it's largely irrelevant. I'm not giving you a list of films to watch, nor am I saying 'Well, Asian cinema had a golden age during <i>these</i> particular years. I'm simply advising you to watch more Asian cinema generally before 'suspecting' it to be less sophisticated.
<blockquote>to have another TANTRUM again</blockquote>
You're projecting an emotional motivation where there is none. I have never had a tantrum with you, joi. You have never encountered me in less than a good mood (as you claim elsewhere). I can assure you that I'm quite forensic and dispassionate.
But even if were you right - and I was sitting here in my office getting worked up, rather than gently rolling my eyes - it wouldn't alter the points being made in the exchanges, would it?
But we're done here for the time being - because once again, you're going round in circles, so the discourse isn't really going anywhere new.