Alcofribas

I’ve gone back and watched a few other Garland movies again and watched Devs over the weekend. I think he’s an entirely shallow director, definitely at least a bit of a hack. His films remind me a lot of what makes certain B movies bad except he has big budgets to make them look very presentable for “serious” consumption. But for the most part this is just veneer and I get big doofus vibes from him.

i've been thinking about this little curtis convo for a few months now but haven't taken the time to really organize my thoughts. i don't intend to dive deep here but i do want to say that i think the "loose with the facts" criticism is quite overblown. i think there is a tendency to privilege a notion of an academic relationship to facts because his movies are "documentaries" which are popularly believed to be a kind of objective, historical medium. i see curtis' project differently. he is using the medium to tell stories, taking this massive archive of bbc footage to tell quite different versions of "reality" than that footage was ever meant to tell. naturally, he has to maintain a certain minimum friendliness to the bbc to be allowed to do this, which i think is reflected in his overall project in certain ways. my own feeling about his work is that he manages to diagnose and incriminate the power structures of the 20th century without ever making them feel like the only reality. the overall feeling at the end of one of his films is not helplessness, cynicism, or the feeling that power is unchangeable. he is able to lay out the massive corruption at the heart of power and the consistent failure of resistance while somehow also creating this mood where you somehow feel that nevertheless, these things actually aren't inescapable conditions of reality and that we can change this. i don't quite know how to describe how he does this. i think part of it is that he has this tendency (for which he is often criticized) of repeating these themes and examples of certain things that he will just leave open-ended. i think part of it is the way he uses musical motifs which create these eery moods over which he speaks in a frank and friendly way. i think part of this is also that he is using these objects of facts (archival footage) in a new way, creating something new from them. all this has an interesting psychological effect imo. i want to be clear i think he has a lot of the facts absolutely right and a lot of the criticisms i've encountered seem overstated and inappropriately academic. he is a popular filmmaker using the bbc to tell what for many viewers are radical stories about global power. to me, it's very cool stuff. the left needs more shit like this, without question. too much leftist art is either liberalism with radical feathers or dull, sanctimonious school lessons. a lot more people are going to become interested in radical thinking, or just possibly look beyond corporate propaganda, if they see movies like this than if they are given das kapital or whatever. i personally quite like his movies, they're thought-provoking, sincere (no idea what was meant by "stolen political posturing" itt), and really pack a lot of interesting history and ideas into an enjoyable, flowing narrative. i also think he's a funny guy. for several years now he's talked about how the age of individualism is an error, how collective movements have been corrupted by it, how the most "radical" thing you could do today is experience and do things without telling the world...and this mofo is out there making 8 hour films where he just riffs his ideas about society and culture. gotta love it

one more thing i have to add about civil war that stuck with me

not so. you can read what he initially said about this here where he claimed he's focused on screenwriting and stepping back from directing "for the foreseeable future" bc it's stressful ("This is the deep sense of responsibility to cast and crew that “literally keeps me awake at night”. He is less burdened by the controversies that have been swirling around Civil War"). here he again clarified he's taking a break and "stressed that his comments have nothing to do with his feelings about how “Civil War” [...] played out." anyway, i thought this movie was a very visceral and engrossing film (some truly excellent action scenes) with almost no substance whatsoever. like many of the trendy movies of our era, we are shown some problematic stuff without any analysis. this is the perfect movie of our time: a film about american civil war with zero politics, a total absence of anything but the most superficial points. there is no explanation, everything just is. i could of course be interested in such an ambivalent movie if it was interesting but i'm afraid this is kind of just a walking dead episode but...politics. in interviews with garland he's said he "wanted to put the press as heroes" of the film, yet the journalist heroes of the film are anything but. we're shown that they want to get to dc "first" to get an exclusive interview with the president (the president has not done an interview in 14 months and their plan is to go to dc and...? just go to the white house? or?). they spend the entire movie driving around, occasionally taking photos (two of the journalists actually don't do any journalism whatsoever, they're just driving around and looking at stuff? journalism must be to witness, privately), and basically doing nothing (dunst almost finishes uploading...something...to...where?). the clips we see of their journalism are just horrifying shots of conflict and death. there's no context for any of this other than "civil war" and there is no justification for why these journalists are special or heroic in any way. they are basically thrill-seeking cynics who are portrayed as having no impact on the situation of the war in any way. they follow fighters, snap a few pics, drive to next location. bc the war is in full effect from the start of the movie, we cannot even know what role the media is playing in the conflict. two random disparaging comments about the new york times and embedded journalism. if anything, i'd think the film is an indictment of journalists as totally aloof and uninvolved, with no sense of their responsibility other than to take photos of war. which is fine i guess but what is the point of this? in the end we are treated to a series of contextless violence with no attempt to analyze how we got here or what we can do to get out of it. so maybe garland is being ironic when he says he wants to make the press heroes bc this contextless barrage of conflict images is everything wrong with the media. we are never told why anything happens, we are never given history, we are never allowed to see who is really responsible, we are presented with a version of reality that is meant to feel inescapable. this is true of both the media and garland's film.

I totally get you, brother. I was just laughing at the degeneracy of decimating urban areas and being like “I’M veGaN” Too few have the courage to condemn Hamas for using feline shields

Don’t even have to talk about “dehumanizing” in this instance bc indiscriminate bombing obviously kills animals. In past conflict the IDF have even targeted zoos. Pathetic!

lmao

Gantz Gramps

lol

the Persistence of Vision thread is archived so i'll just put this here: i was watching some movies today and came across this source for "Camera Eyes" at 13:30

“Siri, increase fuckery of the beats” ”pads must be more emotional, send command”

Perfect Days 10/10

dude he was mad for so long

i couldn't get through a single track. legit bad imo