Feb 22, 2018

you aint gon no Vahn in your TV set ??

imma pulverize the game in 2018 on god tho

 

Feb 23, 2018

I haven't posted any of my 2018 shorts in here yet, so enjoy.

 

Feb 26, 2018

Link to your writing on A Man Escaped? @FilmAndWhisky

 

Feb 27, 2018

brief thing I threw together years ago
https://aestheticsofthemind.com/2011/07/25/a-man-escaped/

and on all Bresson:
https://aestheticsofthemind.com/category/robert-bresson-2/page/2/

 

Feb 27, 2018

I found that stuff. Your LB review made me think there was more.

Just finished Le Trou. I've got to say I prefer it greatly.

 

Mar 1, 2018

^ Cool I'll check it out

And I've written a bunch on A Man Escaped all over, just never posted on the site really. I taught a class on Sound using it as example as well

 

Mar 4, 2018

My 2017 Film Awards:
http://bit.ly/2CZeA28

See all categories by following the link


Top 17 of '17:

1. Twin Peaks: The Return
2. Song to Song
3. Phantom Thread
4. On the Beach at Night Alone
5. A Ghost Story
6. The Square
7. The Lost City of Z
8. Good Time
9. The Florida Project
10. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
11. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
12. Logan
13. Western
14. Call Me By Your Name
15. Shape of Water
16. Lucky
17. In the Fade

* Hong Sang-soo’s Claire’s Camera does not make the list, as it will be released in 2018.

 

Mar 4, 2018

tfw you're behind on new movies since like 2012

 

Mar 4, 2018

Looks good!

 

Mar 4, 2018

Roger Deakins finally got his Oscar on the 14th nomination. Our national nightmare is over.

 

Mar 5, 2018

Blessed image

 

Mar 6, 2018

 

Mar 9, 2018

ME: Kinda lame how Bresson narrates the most mundane s---.

BRAIN GENIUS: An apparent paradox in Bresson’s style – the over-determination of the everyday world and simple events, perhaps even more to the ear than to the eye (17), which Susan Sontag calls “doubling” (18) – might be more usefully considered as a kind of irony. But it is an inherent irony rather than the common affective irony. Usually we recognise irony as a process in the reader/spectator produced by textual elements working in a common mode. Bresson’s alternation of action and voiceover to represent the same thing (the priest leans against the door, his voiceover says “I had to lean against the door”) uses different modes of telling. Image and word take radically different paths to imagination and empathy. Images showtheir signifieds, words pass through the referential circuits of the spectator’s personal storehouse of signifieds. Affective irony operates two paradigms for the same signifier, thereby bringing the signifier into question; inherent irony operates two signifiers for the same paradigm, bringing the paradigm into question.

 

Mar 12, 2018

I've been thinking lately about Lady Bird's admission of privilege. While Greta does get right the financial realities of lower-middle class, I'm not sure if she legitimizes that anxiety and shame or does it a disservice by writing it off as angst. Earlier in the film, while Kyle rambles on about war, Lady Bird makes the case that there are different types of sadness in the world. As Lady Bird develops, she sheds some this point of view which is written off as woe-is-me self importance. Towards the end of the film, when the titular character has resigned herself to a mature acceptance of her circumstances, there's a shot of a tiny boy in the hospital, his eye bandaged, suffering in silence beside of his mother. The death knell to the thought of the character's suffering being anything other than a childhood phase.

I can't find much on Greta's upbringing, but I do think the way she resolves the financial anxiety of the lower-middle-class as a mindset to be grown out of, as something that can be overcome by incurring significant risk and debt by refinancing a home, probably betrays her exceptional circumstances. The film, much like Jarmusch's Paterson, seems far too content to resolve conflict on a flighty, spiritual level turning it into an aspirational fairy tale writing very real material concerns off as failures of mindset. Even these films of relatively modest budget kind of betray the class of people involved in a capital dense industry like film. The most inspirational revelation they can provide to the working class reads like corporate motivational posters that say "never give up" and "believe it to achieve it" with a picture of a cat hanging off of a cliff.

Thoughts? @Twan @FilmAndWhisky @Vahn @Pinhead

 

Mar 12, 2018

^

 

Mar 12, 2018

Now that's discourse

 

Mar 13, 2018

everybody stay blessed

 

Mar 14, 2018

I think that's a fair point, but Lady Bird doesn't strike me as an especially egregious offender in this regard. In her youthful myopia, I also don't think Lady Bird's teenage angst is primarily rooted in financial anxiety, at least in terms of real-world consequences. Her mother is the one who is really concerned about their precarious financial state, while Lady Bird is simply locked into her dream of going to school in New York, irrespective of the ramifications. This is partly why she goes behind her mother's back in the first place. Lady Bird may lie about where she lives, but that's motivated by the very teenage concern regarding her image at school. On the other hand, she doesn't seem all that worried that her dream could inhibit her mother's ability to support her family.

In the end, we know that a similar decision worked out for Greta Gerwig herself, but Lady Bird concludes before we discover what happens to Lady Bird and her family in the subsequent years (Perhaps they're hit hard by the 2008 crisis...). However, we do know that by the end, Lady Bird at the very least recognizes her mother's sacrifices and potentially the legitimacy of her real-world fears. So yeah, I think you bring up a reasonable concern, but I think Lady Bird is aware of it to an extent.

 

Mar 16, 2018

Wow 5 years since Spring Breakers came out. Was it the first A24??

 

Mar 16, 2018

That it was!