that ain't what we called it when I was a kid, but cool

Laibach did the soundtrack for these terrible films!

was so confused when that didn't link to this

Apparently End Game now has brought in the largest nominal dollar amount, a figure meaning very little. And one purposefully instigated by Disney rereleasing the film with no additional content, and fans buying extra tickets to increase the film's revenue (yes, many claimed to have done this). Why anyone thinks non-adjusted gross for a film matters is beyond me. Why people donate their money to a decent but uninspired super hero popcorn flick is beyond me. There's something about this cultural hellscape that should feel worse than it does.

In fact, the post on Reddit was 'gilded', so I guess that means someone paid money to Reddit, to show their appreciation that people paid money to Disney for making a crapton of the same alright film. This is a fact but I don't know what it means.

https://www.cnet.com/news/fan-has-seen-avengers-endgame-more-than-110-times-and-is-still-going/

What is wrong with our culture that produces such people? This is where I'm definitely a hardnosed conservative. You goddamn kids.

iron sky?

I was wondering since I heard about this a few weeks ago but your post inspired me to look it up. As I suspected Gone with the Wind is still the highest grossing film. The list is full of Star Wars films. Interestingly, the good Lion King is on the list. Unfortunately Avatar is still on the list. I really love the spectacle of Avatar but Cameron is really starting to annoy me. Didn't see a marvel film on the list.

Man, Stalker is such a beautiful film. Why don't more people produce films in ruined industrial zones? They're some of the most visually interesting places. Though allegedly many people got sick, some say people died as a result of exposure to toxic chemicals.. so maybe one ought to only do such things with appropriate protective gear. But still.

Might be some kind of mental illness. He has nothing on this guy. https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/disney-vacations/man-rides-disney-ride-10000-times

Holy **** I have only read film crit stuff about Stalker but apparently the word is Tarkovsky himself died from cancer related to the shoot. How fitting.

I want to shoot something in an area like that, but for all of these reasons I think I may be more interested in making cartoons in settings like this.

Yeah, it probably may be. I just find it interesting that there seems to be a kind of encouragement of this sort of behavior in culture today.. a kind of infantilization, where you're allowed to be a kid forever so long as you're consuming Disney IP. Like I said, this is where I'm kind of conservative.. eventually you should grow up a bit and treat these things like an adult, and if not there's something wrong.



Yeah, it's a risky place to shoot, for sure. There's just something about abandoned places though which carry with them a historical density. An abandoned power plant carries with it past governments, individual workers who worked to make the plant a beehive of activity.. and then the return of such places to nature. It's far more appealing than yet another film set in modern day LA.

Especially with their switch to white LEDs away from sodium orange. Who wants that?

Recently saw a post on Reddit of a 'death trooper'.. apparently some kind of edgy stormtrooper b.s. in the extended universe.

For some reason the whole concept kind of punched me in the gut. Maybe it's because I've spent time over this summer absorbed into WWII history but.. the more I think about it, the more Star Wars, especially the sequels, don't relate to their WWII origin with the gravity they should. Calling something a death trooper, when your fictional army is most obviously inspired by the Wehrmacht, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And this is compounded by the opening scene of TFA, where the First Order commits war crimes as reprisal against civilians for helping a hostile army. Despite this, no real mention is made.. it's played more for spectacle, and the bad guy in charge of them is treated really as a sympathetic character without relation to his crimes. It's really rather crude when you think about it..

The longer Star Wars goes on without taking its Nazi origins seriously, the worse this becomes IMO. You don't get to continue using fascist iconography and aesthetics and market those to children long before it's a real problem.

Well in that regard I guess it's a good thing nobody buys Star Wars toys anymore.

The name was originally used in the EU, but now the canon "Death Trooper" is the black troopers in Rogue One that accompanied Krennic and Tarkin.

Normal soldiers don't really have anything to do with death, so they had to specify. Can't wait 'til the next Star Wars Story which will heavily feature Kill Troopers and Dark Rogue Sith.

Because stormtroopers can't hit anything or..?

I was actually just about to post this:



It's interviews with men who were conscripts in the Wehrmacht and who had video cameras.. you get to see footage of the war and hear them answer questions. One says the soldiers were not innocent but 'accomplices', another discusses the killing of Russian civilians as reprisal and all but directly says he was a participant in the killings himself. Paints a pretty grim picture of your average Wehrmacht soldier and confirms the 'Wehrmacht was an intrinsically criminal enterprise' claim. They may not have been the primary perpetrators of the holocaust but, yeah.. history has whitewashed the war to a pretty strong degree.



Why use that name though?

It's kinda cool. Plus I wouldn't be surprised if they were only happy to piss on the EU just that tiny bit more.

When we were more confident in our civic morality it was easier to disassociate the ways that Star Wars draws on the Nazi aesthetic and not see it as some kind of implicit endorsement or even just as something that somehow counter-productively promulgated Nazism just by alluding to it. (Presumably because the threat of “actual Nazis” didn’t seem as pressing.) Maybe the franchise will have to reckon with how it conjures Nazi imagery at some point in the future, but ultimately what’s more problematic is how we’ve come to relate to Nazi imagery more recently, I think.

I don’t know if the Nazi imagery is anymore troubling than the desensitizing violence of Die Hard or Rambo or whatever action franchise. One (good, from your perspective?) thing about making Nazis bad guys in action movies is that it’s unproblematic to kill them in large numbers, because it’s uncomplicated to associate them with evil. I don’t know if that would’ve been seen as some morality-play style confirmation that “see, Nazis are bad!” or as just another example of dehumanizing faceless masses of soldiers in American movies up until fairly recently (in part because it didn’t need to be said).

It seems like mainstream American society gives fascistic politics less power when it can unselfconsciously uses Nazi imagery in fiction than when uses Star Wars movies as occasions to take swipes at fascists and to reinforce that they’re are bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7_qI6_mIXc

The Terminator is free on Youtube, full length, legally. Only available to us in Burgerland or who have a VPN. Kind of neat.

What's it about?

It's about fools gettin' Terminated, Wookie!

So, The Irishman's release is nearing. Today is the festival premiere at New York Film Festival. November 1 sees a limited theatrical release (which I think unfortunately means that it's not coming to theaters here in Finland), and it'll be on Netflix toward the end of November.

This is my most anticipated movie in a very long time. Scorsese, De Niro, Pacino, Pesci, Keitel...one last big hurrah between these guys? It's adapted from a book by Steven Zaillian, who has written excellent screenplays in the past. I see no way for this movie not to be amazing, but I guess anything is possible.

I will 100% see it, being a Scorsese fan myself. Probably one of the few films I'm in anticipation of.

This scene and this movie never grow old.

I mean, if a movie is just the sum of its parts, I guess...

TBH, the prospect of seeing all these old legends together onscreen in one last big gangster hurrah doesn't quicken my pulse. I get how it would for a lot of people, though! I hope it's a good movie, LMK if you see it and how it is.

I saw Ad Astra last weekend, and it was not so great.

Unless you're into excruciatingly ponderous indulgent voiceovers and like it when stories start with lots of intrigue and worldbuilding that goes literally nowhere, steer clear.

Anyone seen the new Tarantino film?

Yeah. I thought it was real confusing on a structural level for the first two hours. I couldn't tell where the movie was going or what kind of arc we were on. It just kinda floats between moments w/ no real development. It just depicts various things happening. Luckily, these things are all pleasant, or interesting, or kinda funny, or entertaining enough in some way that I didn't check out or anything. And then it all goes **** up at the end, of course.

I had a pretty good time watching it, but I can't see myself returning to it anytime soon.

Did you see it?

I didn't think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was as good as a lot of people are saying. It was pretty good, I enjoyed it, but I got that same sense of disjointedness, and as I had recently seen Inglorious Basterds for the first time ever, the ending felt too similar to me.

I was a bit bedazzled during the movie. I didn't really get the point. I got most confused when a voice-over started getting mixed in (the "Italy" era).

Still somehow, I walked away having liked the experience. But nothing really unforgettable.

Joker time.

I think someone in the marketing team for Warner is getting a big ass bonus check for successfully stirring up a media ****storm about the film. Apparently weirdos think someone's going to kill people because of it (probably not), so at least at my theater there were county sheriffs walking around. Yikes.

The film itself borrows heavily from Taxi Driver, but I think it a worse film than Taxi Driver overall. However, it's not a bad film. Well, at least, when you expect the typical DC standard of quality (RT: 54% fresh), it comes across really coherent and good. At least, I was engaged the entire time by the movie and there was nothing I hated about it. It's also not yet another attempt to copy the Marvel formula awkwardly, though it has strange humor at a few moments.

I have complaints but I always do, and if anyone who has seen the movie wants to read them I can compile them later. Try not to get shot, or more accurately try not to get slapped in the face by the media trying to stir up a ****storm over a nothing burger. Oh, and don't bring kids to see it. Anyway, it's one of the best films of this year so yeah I guess I have to give it a recommendation.

Literally the first relatively positive review of Joker I've seen.

So far consensus from people I know has been "Joaquin Phoenix is great but the actual film is bollocks."

I might see it if I'm bored.

Huh, that's surprising. Most opinions I've heard were positive.

Maybe it's an expectation thing. When you go in not expecting much, and it's decently okay, you're satisfied.

SUCK ON THAT, SABSIE!

Just kidding. Looks to be at least as great as I expected.

What's a metacritic?

It's a thing we shouldn't base our judgment of anything on before we experience the actual thing for ourselves.

But then what's a Krokodile? hooooooooo