godthedog

so...'spider-man' is as good a movie as 'the godfather'.

yeah, i'd fuck my mom too.

yup. it's at borders for $30-$40.

that's my mom on the left.

i agree.

don't they also play 'strangers with candy' at like 1:30 in the afternoon? i've been meaning to get the UCB DVD for a while, but i haven't gotten around to it. i really need to.

'apocalypse now'. i don't even feel like repeating myself about this one anymore. 'blow-up'. really boring. couldn't even finish it.

wow, in-depth feedback. huzzah. i feel horrible for already giving away the best part of it to you. i got severe distanciation from this scene. the way he chose to show this scene, with the blood dripping down the sword through the bed, seems to me like tarantino had just thought of a really cool way to accent the scene. it's one of those douglas sirk moments that's so over-the-top i can't recognize its referent anymore and have no way to emotionally place myself in the scene. if i remember correctly, o'ren's eye filling with tears is shown in EXTREME close-up (like, you can't see anything but the eye). generally more close-ups mean more identification with a character because you can read more into their face, but from this close, you can't really see her face; with that, you miss all the extra cues that make an audience member sad from watching someone cry on screen (like what they're doing with their mouth, their body language, their face getting red, etc). it feels like an oblique eisenstein kind of thing, that's there mostly for a physical jolt. i get a ton of cues putting me firmly outside of o-ren's place: i find the music very intrusive, the very liberal use of blood that screams to me not to take it seriously, the fact that it's animated when i've been watching real people up to this point, and the genre rules being followed. now...if it had been a pretty straight-up story to this point, the flashback might have very successfully put me in o-ren's position. but the way the film had been coded up to that point (the klingon quote, the spectacle of a house fight with vivica a. fox), i was encouraged to continue reading the film by its genre rules & its style instead of its characters. i'm obviously in the "cheap laugh" camp for that one, but i can see where you're coming from. it certainly doesn't let you forget o-ren's position, but i think it does undercut it. i have no problem with a spectator having to spot the references, i just wish there was more to do with them than just figure out the different genres at play & how they interrelate. the explanation stops there, and i think it should be doing something else for the film if the interplay is there. i'm not familiar with 'shogun assassin', so i had no idea this was going on. but yeah, that does strengthen the film. i recently saw the bergman movie 'through a glass darkly', and when this one character found out his daughter would inevitably relapse into schizophrenia, he admitted being very intrigued by the possibility and wanting to study closely his daughter slowly losing her mind. this seems to me analogous to the kind of interest that you're talking about, and i don't consider it to really be *caring*. i have a hard time caring about something as an object of study. don't have to, no. but i think that movies have the capacity to convey something more, which i find more fulfilling. i think john stuart mill was right in asserting that pushpin was NOT as good as poetry, and the inner workings of watching 'kill bill' are closer to pushpin than poetry. tarantino has every right to MAKE a 3 1/2 game of pushpin, and there's nothing wrong with it, but i think movies can serve better purposes. are you talking about distanciation just in the scene when she's lost her baby, or the effect of the movie as a whole? that scene was the only time i really found myself caring in vol. 1, and the jolt that came from that moment was from the fact that i found myself caring. i haven't seen 'a woman is a woman' in years & barely remember anything about it, but i think in films like 'breathless' & 'alphaville' he IS saying something through the genre-bending that he does. i guess you could possibly argue that for 'kill bill', but i have no idea what that argument would be like because i have no idea what tarantino might have been trying to say. the detachment thing that brecht & godard do is a strange little animal, but i think the reason it works because they tend to use it meaningfully, and do it to say something about the world outside that realm of pure dramatics or pure genre. tarantino's interest seems to be to play with the genres for their own sake. the effect IS achieved, but i don't think it deserves to get creamed over in the way certain critics have done, because a) godard did it better anyway, and b) godard got that "playful with genres" effect while putting something deeper in his films all the while. again, tarantino is playing pushpin, godard is making poetry. that last italicized bit got me thinking about 'unforgiven', where eastwood spends the whole movie questioning the merits of the badass character of his past, only to turn right back into that same badass character by the end. i was trying to think of a way to talk about what 'unforgiven' did to make that meaningful as opposed to vol. 2, but i realized that there wasn't anything it did that vol. 2 didn't. as in 'unforgiven', the characters are who they are, and that's the point, and that's why beatrix didn't stop to think about what might come of killing the father of her child. that was just something i missed completely when i saw the movie, and you did convince me to take a look at that ending again with a different frame of mind.

i PMed agent this morning, asking to get my member name changed to Cancer Marney for the day. i never heard back from him.

hillary does nothing for the ticket. nobody would vote democratic based on HER who wasn't already voting democratic. edwards balances out the ticket, has a ton of charisma, and lets them at least have some chance in the south. imagistically, he'd also be much better for the vp debate, as cheney would look like a a dirty old man who's mad at the world if he was sitting next to him.

funny note: i went to the deathvalleydriver board just now, and when i clicked on their 'real world' thread i saw nevermortal lurking there.

EASILY randy's quote. it's not even close. the way he sets you up with "don't you call me an alcoholic, cause...", he totally makes you think he's gonna go all hard-ass on frankie with something like "cause i will FUCK YOU UP, BITCH!" and the payoff is "cause i will cry and you will feel like an asshole!" don't say bad things about me, because it'll make me cry. that's just the most gloriously bad threat in the english language.

^that IS hilarious, and for all the wrong reasons.

i love how the big thread about marney's departure turned into a discussion of 'the real world' because of some random remark i made. i also love how the thread supposed to be about people watching 'the real world' being gay, has turned into a discussion among people who have watched 'the real world'.

vonnegut generally is a gateway writer. he's by far the easiest to read & most accessible out of all the "high brow" 20th-century novelists, and if i recommend "literary" books to people, it's almost always him. vonnegut was my gateway into joyce, and i still like him more than i like joyce (even though joyce is, strictly speaking, the better writer) because he's such a joy to read. most of the literary dorks in college who read joyce/faulkner/camus/wallace got started reading vonnegut in high school (at least, most of the ones i know). i'll seriously have a conversation with people in college from totally different locations, no connection with whatsoever, and when i mention vonnegut they'll all go "vonnegut, i love him!" he's like the dork's unofficial rite of passage into manhood. another good one for this, whose work performs essentially the same function as vonnegut's: voltaire. intelligent, witty as fuck, and a breeze to read. i read 'candide' in something like 3/4 of a day. have you read 'slapstick'? it's not very good.

that would be better asked here.

i agree with the pynchon guy who's got neutral milk hotel in his avatar. it's all about 'sticky fingers'.

seriously, this is a shame. he's one of the better guys here.

wow. this has been quite the day of drama. but a more dramatic way of handling this would've been: "Okay, I give up. I've put some serious time and real fucking effort into making this forum a worthwhile place, but there's one too many fuck-ups here who seem to exist just to make things hard for me (you know who you are). So, I quit. This place, and these people just are not worth my time and effort anymore. To most of you, I wish you well. To certain parties who shall remain nameless, you can suck my dick. I quit." i demand that some other mod wait until loss's mod powers have been taken away, then go back and edit his post into something less civil and more bitchy. or else i'll leave the board.

says the man who posted here five times in four minutes.

Ha ha. You tricked him! i reverse psychology'ed his reverse psychology. no man can outsmart me. especially not chuck palahniuk.

we're like ja in 'real world san diego'. we keep it real when the drama goes down. i think ja was the only person on that show who never cried. except maybe brad. but brad doesn't count, cause he was a dumbass anyway. ja was the shit. He didn't cry in the racism episode early in the season? He must have come real close then. Poor Jaquese, he never got episodes centered around him much because he didn't stir shit up, yet he was the funniest guy in the house. fuck, i forgot completely about that one. he might have done it then, but since it was a pretty damning call-out DIRECTLY on him, he would've had every right to. i don't think he got quite enough air time, but ja was perfect in small doses. you loved him precisely BECAUSE he was the anti-drama queen who kept his cool. but this doesn't really make for interesting television, especially when you've got footage of so much juicy drama from everybody else in the house. an episode that focused on him and his non-drama would've brought the show down, and it would've made us think less of him because it would just make him a less exciting human being. if there WAS drama stuff with ja going on and they chose not to air it, good for them, because it would've ruined his character and made me stop liking him. EDIT: well fuck, i just totally got soccer mom'd on the "ja not crying" thing. this is the last time i talk about 'the real world'.

we're like ja in 'real world san diego'. we keep it real when the drama goes down. i think ja was the only person on that show who never cried. except maybe brad. but brad doesn't count, cause he was a dumbass anyway. ja was the shit. i'm kind of torn about the issue. marney has been one the poster children of the "get yourself a thicker skin and grow the hell up" philosophy (along with tom), as regards flaming and such. the issue of fucking with one's post and custom title is different, but the changes were so small & incidental that i don't see why anyone should make a big deal out of it, much less she. however, even though she overreacted i think, she was still in the right. she got fucked with by the mods. she asked it to stop, it didn't. which IS kind of annoying and fucked up.

better '67 movie: 'bonnie and clyde' or 'the graduate'?

wow...kotz is right.