I watched the start of "Up" and it gave me a sad, so I stopped watching.
One could put together a similar montage about the passing of time by examining unfogged thread topics.
Wall-E is tricky to rate, since it's basically two totally different movies one of which is amazing and the other of which is not very good.
I just wasn't that into Monsters Inc. I also like Toy Story 2 more than most people. I think the top tier (in no particular order) is Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and Finding Nemo. Up and Wall-E are more inconsistent than the top tier, but their best sections are the best things Pixar has done.
Those were me.
Watched Leiji Matsumoto's Interstella 5555 last week. Matsumoto's 80s style, but done on request for Daft Punk in the aughts. But even in the brighter shinier more detailed CG work of today, the visual adventurousness and freedom still remain a standard for much anime.
Frederic Jameson quoted Nabokov in a book a couple weeks back:
Humbert:"I violently tore the ice from the refrigerator's beating heart." (or close to this)
Whatever this is, we need to think about putting it onscreen. That's the work of imagination.
Pixar's boring.
If you just unplug the thing, it will defrost with much less effort.
I saw a rat years ago. I tried to hit it with sledge hammer but missed.
9: If only you had known, you would have invited him to cook you dinner.
He probably would have spit in my food. I had just finished crushing what was apparently the roof of his den with the sledgehammer.
That I then tried to kill him with the sledgehammer suggests that Americans hate job creators.
I chronicled my rat infestation here, because I live to serve.
14 - As far as I know. The recent appearance of housecats and my neighbors feeding a huge colony of stray cats = bad times for rats. Though I recently saw from my front porch an (extremely intrepid -- I don't live anywhere near a reasonable place for one to be) coyote. Who was probably there to eat the cats. Now I need something to eat the coyote.
Under communism, one of the safe jobs for people working in culture was children's media. Much more creativity permitted there than in work for adults.
I like Nemo a lot.
George Miller made Happy Feet and Babe Pig in the City, the second I consider a mestrpiece, and I really liked the first.
Mr Hublot is a fantastic animated short. I would really like to be able to browse the work of good animators, ideally at OK resolution.
WHat about the Wallace and Gromit franchise, with the Shaun the Sheep spinoff? I think that the W&G films recapitulate the tragedy of Hollywood for auteur directors-- the commercially driven need to work bigger and more quickly inevitably dilutes an initially brilliant and individual vision with increasing amounts of soulless standard-issue material.
15: Let me know if you get a wolf. My son wants to go see one outside of a zoo.
My cat still lives at my ex's place. Just before I moved out, she caught a baby rabbit (cat not ex). Good huntress for being overweight, but not much of a killer instinct, so she was slow with the adorable victim.
Tired of italicizing
Seen Up, Ratataouile, and Wall-E, and would rank them so. I cried.
Don't want to derail the thread (tho the linked movie up above is fun!), but the point is this:
"Humbert got the ice from the refrigerator."
versus
"I violently tore the ice from the refrigerator's beating heart."
What we still get from most visual art is still the first, pointing the camera at a "reality." I don't remember much in the three Pixar films that violates the rules.
It's hard to discuss what is happening in the second, saying it is an "authorial intrusion" into the narrative feels weird, but after 150 years of modernism, and after abandoning the experimentation of Melies, we ought to be playing a lot harder.
(Prose art fiction freaks me out for containing such stuff, and commercial film/tv freaks me out even more for leaving it out.)
17. There's a wolf sanctuary outside St Louis.
19 last -- Is there a way not to freak out bob?
The drought has really emboldened the rats in SF. I usually walk through a couple of parks on my way home but if it is dusky or far I avoid them these days as the rats are scampering quite aggressively. Even during daylight it gives me the shudders when I see someone walking through the park in flip flops, ewwwwww!
"I violently tore the ice from the refrigerator's beating heart."
That kind of insane level of personification appears a lot in commercials.
22: At first glance I thought it was the rats that were wearing flip flops. But then you would go "awwww" not "ewwww".
Under communism, one of the safe jobs for people working in culture was children's media. Much more creativity permitted there than in work for adults.
A good opportunity to plug:
"Joseph Emmanuel von Dracula, AKA Pepito, is a trumpet player in 1930s Pre-Revolutionary Havana who is unaware that he is really a vampire, and that his uncle, Bernhardt Amadeus von Dracula, the son of Count Dracula, has been using him as a test subject for a formula that negates the usually fatal effects of sunlight."
The whole thing used to be available on Netflix also, not sure if it still is.
I agree about Wall-E. It's overrated because the first half is amazing.
Finding Nemo is very, very good. It's got all of these gorgeous sea creatures to look at and fun performances by Ellen Degeneres and Albert Brooks. Unfortunately my kid probably prefers Cars (because boys).
Recently I was staying with friends in a rural area, and their neighbors were over for dinner. The neighbors explained that they had found a (non-venomous) black snake inside their house twice on that very same day. And that it's happened before. And that the snakes (plural!) live beneath the house and mostly stay down there. And they're beneficial because they eat all the rodents, you see.
I just don't ever see myself being cool co-existing so closely with a bunch of snakes, even non-venomous ones. Maybe if Pixar makes black snakes adorable, I'll be more sympathetic to their plight.
3: True of a lot of Pixar, actually; first act absolutely brilliant, then a drop-off, either to an excellent children's movie, or a fairly average one.
19.realism We who? Audiences basically dislike experiments with framing and subjectivity, especially when these experiments are emotionally intense.
Duck Amok is a counterexample. Hitchcock intruded constantly, and he kept making movies that way. Terry Gilliam for a commercially succesful recent example.
21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck14LKBI9GM
15. Foxes have adapted to the urban environment just fine, so why not coyotes? I expect they mostly eat garbage.
Finding Nemo is my favorite. It's not the most original or clever, but the story works.
Thanks for 25. Apparanetly the combination of IMDB and prime streaming will let me scratch my animation itch. Bill Plympton has made a bunch of stuff that I have never seen, cool.
Top tier: Nemo, Cars, Incredibles, Monsters Inc, Ratatouille.
17, 20 -- Yellowstone is a great place to see them. We have them here, but you don't expect to see them around.
Cars is a work of merchandising genius but the film of itself is sooooo boring (nearly two hours! most of which is dicking around Radiator Springs and Learning Lessons!).
"Humbert got the ice from the refrigerator."
versus
"I violently tore the ice from the refrigerator's beating heart."
What we still get from most visual art is still the first, pointing the camera at a "reality." I don't remember much in the three Pixar films that violates the rules.
I don't think this is quite fair. Figurative language works differently than actual visual images. That sentence in words gets at something that seems evocative to us, even as we usually don't quite unpack its literal meaning and how it relates to the figurative one. Showing us an image of that sentence is going to require the words to be pinned down to a single instantiation of something that has a lot more play as a verbal image. It is also likely to seem a lot more lurid when it is an actual picture.
I can't get into Happy Feet because a penguin with a narrow waist is not attractive, she is dying. Madagascar 3 has much more fun with animal morphology and temperament and the plot is only slightly stupider.
I'd be down with a La Boheme doomed beauty version of Happy Feet, I guess. If I were one of the kids these days I'd make it myself by inter cutting with Black Swan.
I'd definitely rank Cars much lower, and Toy Story 1 a bit higher, but other than that I pretty much agree with that list. I adore Wall-E, even though it's true the first half is much better. But the second half, while less interesting and moving, still has some brilliantly choreographed sequences.
I think that the W&G films recapitulate the tragedy of Hollywood for auteur directors-- the commercially driven need to work bigger and more quickly inevitably dilutes an initially brilliant and individual vision with increasing amounts of soulless standard-issue material.
Really? Apart from Shaun of the Sheep (which I haven't seen in film form), I don't think any of the W&G films are anything like soulless. I really enjoyed the Were-Rabbit movie, even if it lacked the inventiveness (sorry) of the first couple of movies. It was better than Chicken Run, which preceded it.
Under communism, one of the safe jobs for people working in culture was children's media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LuqlmxRjIo (watch without sound)
"I have always eaten the bread of idleness. Thus it is I that will have to die." Thus it was decided to offer the idle pig for the master's birthday feast.
We're going to go see Inside Out this afternoon.
OK not soulless-- less flavored maybe. Mostly I'm griping about A close shave which was still good, but had many more elaborate set pieces and special-effecty gags than the earlier films, I thought a little less personality. Wendolyne was/is a good character. Chicken run also-- heavy on frantic motion and pratfalls.
41/44: yeah, much better without sound, or just go to the source here.
Is it legit? In any case, 41.last may be my new go-to line for puncturing bouts of excessive self-pity.
43: yeah, but there isn't really much before A Close Shave. The Wrong Trousers is without doubt a masterpiece, but A Grand Day Out is slight and forgettable. As for frantic movement etc, that's been there from the beginning - remember the model-railway chase scene in The Wrong Trousers!
45: oh, that works. It didn't when I tried it before.
Yes, pretty sure it's legit.
42: Let me know what you think. The big girls want to see it and I think it would be therapeutic and all that, give us a structure to discuss things. They generally like Brave and the Monsters movies but that's about it for Pixar, at least off the top of my head. Selah is very keen on Cars pull-ups, but I don't think she's seen the movie. Wallace & Gromit is too scary at times, but Shaun the Sheep (the show and even the Timmy Time spinoff; is there a movie?) is unbeatable.
Jurassic World is way too scary for a turning-7-y.o., right? It's at a drive-in right near where we're camping in Indiana next week. We were really hoping for Inside Out, but we're near-missing it across the country.
48: Unsolicited, I loved it. I think the voice actors were great, but then again, they were cast in a way that fits their best-known roles (Lewis Black as Anger), which made it fun for the boyfriend and me. There's a lot about discarding/losing childhood memories that might be kind of disturbing to an older viewer who, for example, would feel very guilty over throwing away a beloved teddy bear from childhood. I don't see many movies, though, and am pretty much an uncritical viewer. I think it might be more fun for adults than kids in some ways, particularly the representations of memory and a lot of the humor (it's a workplace comedy in a lot of ways).
AB & I both found Ratatouille underwhelming. It just felt... trite? Whereas Wall-E was stunning, and I didn't feel let down by the second half (didn't love the fat humans thing, although we debated the exact intent there). In both cases, saw them years after release, and so had absorbed a lot of hype.
I'm not sure I've seen any other Pixar since the original Toy Story. Chunks of Monsters, Inc.
50: I think it will fit well with some of the trauma-toolbox exercises they've done in the past. How you feel is how you feel; what you do with that is the important part. (Why can I never feed myself the same lines I feed them???)
"dicking around Radiator Springs"
I know Lightning spent the night at Sally's motel, but what's the anatomically equivalent car part?
God, the damn Cars pullups- we get economy boxes that have a mix of Cars, Toy Story, and some other thing I can't identify with a pirate and a monkey (does that match anything Pixar or Disney?) Of course she'll only wear the Cars ones and freaks out once those are depleted from the pack.
I did not love WALL-E. It had some implicit message that bothered me a lot that of course I can't remember now.
53: I am told it is Jake and the Neverland pirates. We haven't yet started with the pull-ups but given that he demands Nemo swim diapers I assume I'm screwed.
"Jake and the Neverland"
WTF is that? Is it something they include in multipacks of other licensed merchandise just so they can claim some marketing revenue for a movie no one's ever heard of?
53, 55: Yep, Jake. The girlier version is Doc McStuffins, Sofia the First, and Minnie Mouse, so entirely Disney. Not sure if that means Disney is for girls and Pixar is for boys, but probably something like that.
56: Sorry, "Jake and the Neverland Pirates" is a lousy Disney Channel Peter Pan spinoff, where little skateboarder Jake and two little sidekicks outsmart Cap'n Hook in really stupid and annoying ways. Not one I particularly let Selah watch, but obviously we've tried.
My kid definitely feels that the Toy Story trilogy is "for boys" but likes many of the other ones.
Even my kids won't watch Jake etc. So stupid.
59 -- seriously. I keep want to use a "Daddy used that name for his movie career" joke but it's not really appropriate.
Our bulk viewing was in the ER and there's only so much you can do there, but it's awful.
It is Jake and the Neverland pirates. My kid wants all Maters (Mater being strictly better than Lightning, the nominal star of Cars), will settle for a Buzz Lightyear and pitches a fit when I try to give him a Jake. This causes friction between my wife and I; she wants to take on the Jake pull-up debt and pray that he's potty-trained before the bill comes due, whereas I want to just use the damn diapers as they come out of the pack.
I'm feeling very lucky that the kid hasn't gotten picky about the diapers or pullups, not that we've ever presented him with options.
Speaking of which, when did you start showing movies to kids? Mr. almost-3 might be ready for something longer than Daniel Tiger or YGG.
Show Thomas and the Magic Railroad and the rest of life will be relatively entertaining.
This is my favorite thing about Jake & the Neverland Pirates https://www.deepdotweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/IMAGE81.jpg
68: WTF? What's next? The Hamburglar pays for his burgers?
"I love you. You love me. Let's respect intellectual property."
We started showing him the occasional feature film around 2-1/2, partly because I wanted him to understand on some level that there is an art to cinema that is not fully represented by the PBS Kids lineup. Netflix has The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which is still one of his favorites. (They also have Dumbo and a bunch of the post-60s Disney animation (but not the top tier stuff like Lion King, which makes me wonder how those rights deals work (TRO?)).) Finding Nemo (which isn't on Netflix) probably has the best quality:kid appeal ratio of any movie I've shown him, and the scarier bits haven't seemed to bother him.
"Good pirates" are obviously in a different class from the regular "bad" pirates who thieve on the high seas. Anyway, Neverland is not well-situated vis-a-vis international shipping routes.
From the archives: Batman doesn't hit.
That was from a Letterman Top Ten list of ineffective toilet training books.
After a lifetime of absorbing superhero fiction through my pores, I felt like an idiot when I started showing the kid some Avengers For Kidz trash... "Oh, wait, these are people who solve their problems by punching people in the face." Back to Winnie the Pooh (until, like, next year)...
The Jake and the Neverland Pirates TV show is worth watching for the Captain Bogg and Salty videos at the end of each episode.
Does the Incredibles' ideological hobby-horse rankle anyone else? It's a millennial retread of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron -- "if everyone is special than no one is." It's not as if Brad Bird doesn't know how to make a film in praise of individual talent that doesn't also have a strong anti-equality message. Ratatouille positions its hero against (anti-rat) prejudice, and it's magnificent. But the superheroes in The Incredibles is the idea that the strong are not sufficiently valorized. I don't think Brad Bird is quite the Ayn Rand disciple that people make him out to be, but the movie has a nasty streak. And it's a damn shame, because it's as thrilling and hilarious as you could ask from your propaganda.
Also Toy Story bummed me out a little because I liked to torch my G.I. Joes with hairspray and I felt judged. But I'm still on board with whoever's judgment (A.O. Scott?) that Pixar's run will be held to be as amazing a streak as Preston Sturges's or Howard Hawks's.
Does the Incredibles' ideological hobby-horse rankle anyone else?
Yes. Particularly when you consider that the bad guy is a non-superhero who competes with the supers on their own terms through intelligence and engineering skill.
And WALL-E annoys because WALL-E is totally a Nice Guy w/r/t EVE.
When will Pixar make a soccer flick?
I figure robots needn't have gender, and if WALL*E were female and Eve male it would be... a classic Gothic, with the whole Earth as a decaying mansion.
I liked the assumption that humans raised without want or fear would be naturally curious and helpful.
I will gladly pay you in advance via certified check for a hamburger tomorrow.
78: A little, but I think it's mitigated somewhat because it's about the kids having to try to hide who they are to fit in and feel normal.
78: I like Frank Miller, so I've pretty much given up on the idea of getting pissed off about that sort of thing when it comes to superhero fiction. Fascism and libertarianism are sort of built into the form.
(Watchmen picked up nicely on that, but I still rooted for Rorschach.)
I read an interview with Bird where he denied the strident libertarian preaching in The Incredibles. I also remember an interview with Vonnegut in which he said that people were getting Harrison Bergeron all wrong.
The best you can say about that is that at least they have the decency to be embarrassed about it.
But I loved The Incredibles a lot, and would probably place it in the top 3 (along with Toy Stories 1 and 3) of Pixar movies. And I think one is compelled to admit that Harrison Bergeron succeeded as art in a way that Ayn Rand never did.
Does the Incredibles' ideological hobby-horse rankle anyone else? It's a snake person retread of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron -- "if everyone is special than no one is." It's not as if Brad Bird doesn't know how to make a film in praise of individual talent that doesn't also have a strong anti-equality message. Ratatouille positions its hero against (anti-rat) prejudice, and it's magnificent. But the superheroes in The Incredibles is the idea that the strong are not sufficiently valorized.
Yes. Yuck.
Thorn, we had a great time. Ace's first movie in a theater, we realized, and she followed the basic plot construct way better than I expected. (Ie anger would take over the controls and she'd say "Riley is angry" and that sort of thing.) I wasn't sitting near the HPs but they give any impression about it being too scary. I'm a sucker for all the naming-your-emotions and recognizing that both happy and sad feels have their place in life and that sort of thing.
53: OMG, yes. And those pull ups suck too. The Pampers pull ups (all Thomas the Tank Engline it seems) are so much better. I have opinions about this. Sigh.
Harmonic convergence of kid's movies- my kid won a Minion in a claw game this weekend on his first try (after I told him several times how they're rigged and a recent report showed that 9 times out of 10 it's impossible to win because they set the pressure on the claw too low to pick up a prize regardless of how perfectly you position it.)
There were about a dozen different claw games at this place-squishy balls, minions, characters from Frozen, superheros, other junk- but ironically no Toy Story aliens.
One kind always let the mega-shit burst out at the edges. Fortunately, I can't remember which.
I get whatever Costco has which is that brand- we reuse them until they either wear out or she pees in it, she'd dry overnight about 80% of the time. So we've only bought 1 box, plus finished off a partial one left over from previous kid.
Newcastle Brown tastes better than Labatts, because Canada has issues.
91: Pull-ups are not for kids who still mega-shit their pants.
Right. I was thinking of the earlier phases. One brand didn't work.
So, I read the abstract and tables of the article I'm supposed to review. In a bar, as is required. It's kind of meh.
The one thing I learned is that in Europe, I would be obese. In America I'm only overweight.
I'm writing a meh grant proposal and drinking a beer at my desk, so at least you have other people around.
99: Instructions on how to find the train station in Geneva: Follow the fat people.
It's amazing how much four beers hurts my ability to math despite leaving me as eloquent as ever.
I am probably watching with the wrong set of eyes (or brain) but save for most of the Toy Storys (the first of which really was a revelation) and some early parts of Wall-E, I have been singularly unimpressed with the Pixar stuff. The ones which I actively hated were Incredibles and Up. And the rat one is the only one I've not seen that I will believe is any good.
WALL-E is the great lesbian romance.
WALL*E of loneliness
I hated Wall-E by the end, mostly liked Ratatouille, and I guess Brave was fine. Not sure I've seen other Pixar.
I just had dinner across the street from Pixar. They have a cartoon seagull from Finding Nemo looking over the edge of the roof of one of their buildings.
I suppose "cartoon" in that sentence is kinda redundant.
80: the same thought occurred to me but sort of collapsed on further thought. Having an unrequited crush and being sort of clueless are necessary but not sufficient to be a Nice Guy, right?
And the typical advice to Nice Guys is stop acting like you deserve affection and try to engage with other people as actual human beings, which is what WALL-E ends up doing, sort of.
||
I wonder how many of the people burning Black churches this week consider themselves devout Southern Baptists?
||>
So, I was walking home when somebody in a car threw an egg at me. I chased them, but without daytime traffic, I couldn't catch them. I don't even get a plate. The weird thing is they made no sound. Not even a shout after they hit Mr.
Probably listening to the Beastie Boys on those goddamn earbuds the young people are ruining their hearing with these days.
I think I could have caught them at a light if it weren't for my ankle. Or forced them to run the light. I should get physical therapy.
There should be a funny noir comic book detective named "Frank Bacon"
Can we really be in "post" modernity or "late" capitalism when such a large plurality of the world population is still either peasants or recently-displaced-peasants-who-work-in-a-sweatshop?
How bad would it have to get here before people rose up again like in 1934?
If I ran everything, I'd make several of the more widely spoken Indigenous languages official languages for all government activity.
My potato parody of "Owl Creek" was pretty fun to write. I need to figure out some way to write more for fun like that.
Does Cthulu have enough dexterity in His tentacle-like appendages to play the piano with them? If not, does the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Remember the bit in Mad Max where the other cop is freaking out about blasphemers? Interesting how we're almost back around to that again in Fury Road. Sorta Canticle for Leibowitz-like in that way.
Damn, heebie, Ace was good through the nightmare in Inside Out? We had to take our silently weeping almost-4-year-old home mid-show. It seemed... fine. The conceit was strained and they never quite seemed to formally decide if they were representing a normal or a pathological process. It has led to well-received and fun bedtime stories.
I may be prejudiced against children or something but the comparison with Preston Sturges seems pretty bonkers.
We started showing clips slightly before age 3 and worked our way up to full-length movies. Picture book versions of Disney movies conveyed the whole story between the clips. Our compromise on screen time is one I don't recommend, where you show some movies but also talk incessantly about and process everything in them verbally, for months and months. Then again, I can't imagine the mother-child relationship without this ongoing literary seminar component, so I guess it's okay. At least I'm not scratching the itch by writing a Critique of Frozen for adult audiences.
(Incidentally, alls I mean is that after we watch movies the kid asks ten million questions, just like most kids. I am using a turgid style to highlight the absurdity of parenting, and because I can't write normally.)
"Good pirates" are obviously in a different class from the regular "bad" pirates who thieve on the high seas.
It is my duty, as a pirate, to tell you that you are too tender-hearted. For instance, you make a point of never attacking a weaker party than yourselves, and when you attack a stronger party you invariably get thrashed.
How bad would it have to get here before people rose up again like in 1934?
Do you mean 1933?
xelA has been watching full movies for ages. He's 2 and 3 months now, but I think he's probably been watching entire films for 9 months or more. I suspect we are bad parents.
He only watches Czech films, though. Mostly classic fairy tales from the 1950s - 1970s. Although he will sit through an entire 2 hour film, pretty much rapt, and while at one time I'm not sure he was really getting it, now he yells at the people on the screen in the exciting bits, and can tell me what is happening if asked.
Damn, heebie, Ace was good through the nightmare in Inside Out? We had to take our silently weeping almost-4-year-old home mid-show. It seemed... fine.
Actually she did come sit in my lap in that scene.
I did have to turn off Mrazik [aka Morozko, in Russian] because it got too scary. Specifically the bit where Ivan's head gets turned into a bear's head, and he scares Nastenka.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOdXsaWfzkk#t=23m58s
after we watch movies the kid asks ten million questions, just like most kids
Hold on there. My kids have watched their fair share of movies, and never asked a single question. Conclusion: at least one of us is raising weird children.
128: '34 was the big year for general strikes and such here in the US.
133: My reaction was the same as ajay's. When people really get fed up in the U.S., 1934 isn't as likely as 1933.
Does Cthulu have enough dexterity in His tentacle-like appendages to play the piano with them? If not, does the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Cthulhu has hands. Tentacles not necessary (except possibly for turning the pages).
...also this is a very strange question.
132: I told the story before, I think, but I mentioned offhand that I'd seen a scary movie as a kid and my daughter instantly locked in and demanded to know every detail of the movie including where people were standing in certain scenes. So she's the weird one. But it's hard for us to be casual about visual media in general. There's basically no TV or film in my life or lourdes' as adults, so if we want to show a movie someone has to go find a free laptop, plug in the DVD player, and put it on a stool in front of the couch. I did actually, when the kid was a baby, ask a local parenting listserv how much we should go out of our way to give her a "normal" experience of TV and videos given that we never watch them, and the answers were interesting (with a few condescending hippies, because it was Berkeley). We've definitely succeeded in making movies the most interesting thing in the entire world for her, assuming we had a role in shaping that preference, and I think it's really fine until she turns 12 and wants to act.
134: You think outbreaks of dance routines are likely?
I have just realised I've never seen a Pixar movie. The fact Toy Story 4 is in development suggests I probably won't either.
You think outbreaks of dance routines are likely?
The Toy Story movies are easily the most consistently excellent trilogy put to screen.
140: Obviously Eggplant hasn't seen The Apu Trilogy or the Atlas Shrugged trilogy.
141 There's your sublime and ridiculous right there.
142: I try to have both of those in each of my comments, but it turns out I'm a lot better at one than the other.
I'm not sure if this is more or less embarrassing than his other campaign.
|>
The first 20 seconds are bad, but non-humiliating. Then he starts awkwardly and imprecisely recounting a scene between Lisa and Homer, like it's elementary school recess. WTF?!
The second movie in the Apu Trilogy is not good at all, so we might have to give this one to Pixar.
I guess it's called the "Dollars" trilogy.
The second Apu movie is magnificent, maybe the most important, just really horrible. A woman dies terribly and fairly meaninglessly in each movie...or maybe it up to the survivor to give the deaths meaning.
Other good trilogies are Kobayashi's Human Condition, and Kielowski's Colors.
Now I'm depressed, thinking bout Apu.
The dates are a little off, but Mother India 1957 is a great movie to put the Apu Trilogy in context.
Almost all Japanese directors would have made the Apu Trilogy about the self-sacrifice of women. Mizoguchi was obsessed with admiring it, while crying about it. Ozu and Naruse largely were in opposition to it. Kurosawa didn't give a fuck about women.
That isn't what Ray gives us, except maybe a little in the third, and probably not. She is pretty damn happy to marry away from her family.
What Ray may give us is the actual sacrifice of women by men, against their will. I don't much like Apu, down to the last smiling scene with his boy. But I don't second guess him.
134: But even in Germany, what you see in '33 is much more the fruition of everything that the Nazis had been working towards since the Beer Hall Putsch. It wasn't as though the '33 election was some kind of storming-of-the-Bastille moment -- lots of people put a huge amount of organized political activism in, over the course of a decade, towards making that happen. And a lot of what followed was specifically due to the incompetence and corruption of the center right and center left, respectively.
152: And after all that work, Ernst Röhm still got himself shot.
The moral of the story is never try very hard.
I thought it was more "Get Himmler before he gets you"
Or, less succinctly: "If you find yourself in the upper echelon of a political party run by murderous, intolerant, psychopathic criminals, maybe it would be a good idea to post a few more guards outside the rathskellar while you're boning some fit young Aryan godlets and getting drunk til six in the morning."
I've seen fewer of the Pixar movies than I had expected: Toy Story, Up, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, Cars, and I'd still like to see Brave and Ratatouille. Of those, Up, Nemo, and Monsters were my favorites.
Despicable Me was worth the price of the ticket just to see Agnes's rapturous joy upon winning the unicorn.
150 Gotta agree with Bob here about Satyajit Ray's Aparajito. It is magnificent. Also seconding Kieslowski's Three Colors Trilogy and Kobayashi's Human Condition Trilogy. (I was sorry to have missed the lattter when it screened recently in 35mm as part of this great Masaki Kobayashi retro but that was the weekend I left the states (I was tempted though). The lead, Tatsuya Nakadai, was there in person for the first part.
151.3 Gotta disagree with Bob here about Mizoguchi who was unique in his sympathetic portrayal of women without being a sentimentalist about it.
A:The Japanese have enough experience to have two different words for "empathy for women" and "likes to watch women suffer and die so he can feel safely guilty yet vaguely superior".
B: Think of Love Story
C: It is a standard not trope, but fucking genre in Japan, going back to Murasaki and Genji Monogatari (oppose to Pillow Book) all the way through dozens of "terminal disease of the week movies" to an anime series last season Plastic Memories about well, shortest from reddit:
"better than a loli robot waifu (wife) is a loli robot waifu that dies"
Mizoguchi is a genius who did portray one aspect of women's existence very well, with empathy and sensitivity and a few brilliant actresses...but his women never, and I mean never in 30-50 movies all of which are about women, never triumph, never escape, never even survive...they suffer and die. For men.
Some say has to do with Mizoguchi's sister being sold to a brothel, later being the mistress of a nobleman, supporting Mizo on his way up. This history never stopped Mizo from spending his free time with geisha (famously getting stabbed by one) and screwing his starlets.
but his women never, and I mean never in 30-50 movies all of which are about women, never triumph, never escape, never even survive...they suffer and die. For men.
Often, yes, even mostly, but not never. The ending of A Geisha immediately springs to mind (which may be why it's one of my favorite endings in all of Mizoguchi). The geisha and her apprentice (her best friend's daughter) going out for the night, walking together (arm in arm? that's how I picture it) down one street, now down another, and the clack clack clack of their clogs echoing through the night. A triumph of survival in difficult straits through the women's affection and solidarity.
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Quarterly anime report! All available for streaming from Crunchyroll, Funimation, Anime Network, etc with excellent subs.
"Arslan Senki" and "Assassination Classroom"
competent, watchable, uninteresting = C+
"Kekkai Sensen" and "Punchline"
Original, visually adventurous,plotting kinda meh = B
Punchline has a main character that is transgender, male in female body, shows bindings, treated very sympathetically although avoiding any difficult situations. The bad news is that he gets his superpowers when he sees women's panties. Sigh.
"Plastic Memories"
Above, I didn't say it was bad, did I? Maybe evil but very very cute/pretty, directed well with gorgeous backgrounds, and expert at grabbing the feels with smart writing. Otaku worldwide cried like babies. B
"Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches"
Yeah, they are mostly high-school shows. Yeah, they mostly have pretty people. Not my choice.
Yamada-kun is very charming, clever, and sweet with a large class of both young men and women. It's a little rushed, but fits a long manga in twelve episodes well enough. A ton of fun. B+
Next: anime of season
163.last better phrasing would be "through the women's mutual affection and solidarity" or something.
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Hibike! Euphonium is a masterpiece, some say the best work Kyoto Animation (the best studio) has done in years, some say best ever.
1) HE is about a HS concert brass band training for a national competition, and the relationships among the musicians, overwhelmingly female. Bechdel dies here.
2) The director was male. All the rest of the staff, writers and animators, were women. They had a big budget because "Yamaha" is in every scene, but still, time constraints of a tv series, yet easily movie quality. I think tv series are better, with less at stake, they take more chances.
2) The art and animation are beyond astonishing. A lot you won't notice, the reflective surfaces and intricate shapes of brass instruments are famously difficult to animate in motion. The backgrounds are "doctored" photographs of Uji and a school outside Kyoto, and if you google "2d 3d Hibike Euphonium" you can see what they did with them (I won't link because the banner ads are despicable.) Enhanced candified if you will. Expressionism is essential to counter realism.
Faces and body language, direction, a multitude of differentiated band members with personalities...they did so fucking good. So many "fucking wow" scenes.
3) Characters:The lead character, euphonist Kumiko, is very smart, disaffected and emotionally distant, doesn't give a fuck about anything or anybody...but hides it perfectly and is very popular. She of course, grows, as does everybody else.
The second lead, Reina is a justifiably arrogant trumpeter. The relationship between Kumiko and Reina partially drives the series, and made the anime very popular with lesbians. It's "yuri-baiting" probably, but this is a friendship that flows to a level that enables heavy flirting as mere quasi-sexual play. Been there myself just a couple times. The subtlety of communication is gorgeous.
Many, like 6 bigs and 2 dozen+ minor characters, with individual stories and moments to shine
4) Music. Not that much, but this is about practice and work, and only performance at the end. What is good is the skill at playing badly => better => good as the show progresses, and even a lack of perfection at the end. Everybody who played in a band was astonished at the music, and accurate way the band was
portrayed.
Enough. This why I watch anime. A+
To return to 162 and 163 I also disagree with they suffer and die. For men.
Because of men, yes, I'd say that's an accurate read, but not "for men".
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Hibike! Euphonium sounds great. I need to make a list of good anime I haven't seen for when I finally have enough energy to start binge watching TV again. (Usually I fall asleep when I get back from work and then just read the rest of the night. Not having enough energy to watch TV is kind of weird and a new experience for me. When I do watch I usually just put on some old Archer DVDs).
A lot of fun. It started a half hour late (Arrakis time, you know?). it was part of this "Garangao" children's festival that's a lot like Halloween (as I think I wrote in the other thread) so it was filled with hundreds and hundreds of kids all dressed up in their Ramadan finest.
Before the film there were traditional storytellers (in very clear classical Arabic), a muppety looking puppet show and a (kind of lame) magician. It took place in this very large enclosed field that was open to the sky and air-conditioned! They had food stalls and lots of cozy cushiony places to sit around and hang out. I ate some koshari and bought some date butter and some kind of traditional coffee.
For the film itself we sat on the ground on one of the many rugs they had splayed out over the astroturf field. They also had rows and rows of very comfortable looking cushioned bench seats but those were all taken early. It wasn't anything like my NYC art house cinema going experiences but very much a lot of fun all the same. And Ponyo was great, of course. Would go again next year if they show a good film.
I forgot one, but I have been behind on it. It's really good though or I like it, or it is my style.
First, to repeat something said above:Expressionism, or projected or enunciated subjectivity, is a moral imperative in these times. Okay then.
Ore Monogatari is a romcom about three 16 year olds. The male in the couple is 16, 6'5" like 250 lbs of pure muscle with coarse features, but manly perfect in every way. Bluebirds and chipmunks perch on his shoulders...literally...it is a comedy. Important to remember is that big muscled men are repulsive to many or most Japanese women, and that is a theme of the show. His girlfriend is considered weird by her friends for being turned on by muscles. She is small, cute otherwise normal.
Lastly is his best friend, the perfect pretty boy (bishonen) who is chased by girls but prefers books.
(Suspicion is that friend is gay, and we have a triangle coming.)
The romance is declared early, they are bf-gf in episode three, so "plot" is driven by situations like first time seeing each other in swimsuits, etc.
Very sweet comedy, no drama so far.
Why I like it other than the obvious: even though the dude is point of view, there are extreme comedy and extreme shojo expressionistic gracenotes:hearts and sparkles and slo-mo and fantasy perspectives and visual punctuation of all kinds. Extra-diagetic additions to scenes are nearly constant, or rather, added measuredly for emotional intensification.
Confessions for style, though pretty tame here.
Went to Inside Out with Bonsaisue, Noser, Rilee, Grandma Jacobian, Wee Sister Jacobian, Niece Jacobian, and nearly all the Nephews Jacobian*.
The kids ranged from 5 to 10, and all liked it well. So did all the adults. Brother Jacobian and wife couldn't make it. Nor could Eld Sister Jacobian. Father Jacobian stayed home to nap.
