HoChiMaxh [he/him]

Yeah ok. I’d say in general most people don’t watch that many movies made more than 20 years before they were born. I watch a lot of movies, old and new foreign and domestic but realistically I don’t watch more than maybe one a year made in that time frame as applied to me.

IDK right or wrong I think it’s pretty important to contextualize these numbers rather than going the “kids these days” route.

Also Netflix sucks. If you have a library card you probably have free access to stream films on Kanopy which has a ton of great older films.

the number of people who write off all “old movies” (roughly before 1985) is concerning.

Is this even a thing among adults

I think Skinamarink is the scariest flick I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever. I think the the sense of worsening dread as the plot develops and savagery and hopelessness ratchet up is pretty unique.

I think you’re right about the depressing :doomjak: feeling too, it stuck around with me for a few days. The fact that they’re so young, and thus haven’t fully developed a consistent set of rules for how the world definitely should be, means they begin adjusting their sense of normal to this heinous scenario that the audience understands to be completely demonic.

Really great, no notes I thought it was perfect. The Hammer and Podcast fellas did a review on it last weekend (these are the guys that used to do film reviews with Breht on Rev Left Radio Back in the day.) Taylor has an interesting interpretation of the spirits as an embodiment of ideology itself - while I wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that, I do think that line of thinking is what made it stand out to me.

If you’re going to try watching it, go to a theatre, don’t watch it on your laptop while scrolling Hexbear, it is made with the expectation you pay attention and allow the horror to sink into you

In prison Ocalan became a theory head, and he synthesized a kind of hodge-podge anarcho-feminist revolutionary theory that Rojava is ostensibly based on. I’m not familiar with the specific quote but in context this is likely about challenging the assumed role of men in society to uplift women’s position.

You can stream it for free from Kanopy if you have a library card

#1 has to be Z (1969) by Costa-Gavras, about the fascist coup in Greece in the 60s. Comrade made, you can just feel the anger of all the people involved. People talk about old movies feeling slow, this movie fucking pops. You can watch the whole thing for free in good quality here, honestly if you’re not all in after the first 5 minutes, or really after the title card that says “any similarity to real person or events is not coincidental; it is intentional” followed by the speech at the fash gathering in a smoke filled room, then you won’t like it.

If you like that, his State of Siege (1972) is also a classic, about when the Tupamaro urban guerrillas in Uruguay abducted US torture specialist Dan Mitrione. Just total :based-department: stuff. Filmed in Allende’s Chile.

I’ll second the people who mentioned Casablanca and The Bicycle Thief.

Bridge Over the River Kwai (1957) and Wages of Fear (1953) are also cool.

I don’t think that’s the entire story comrade but ok

Hot take: it’s a white saviour narrative.

The other criticism is they cast non-indigenous actors as Na’Vi, which is like fine obviously gulag white people but is kind of a weird criticism I think. Like the Na’Vi aren’t actually indigenous characters, but :shrug-outta-hecks:

They do mention in the article that an activist made a post on indigenous-made sci-fi flicks which is cool, even though several aren’t sci-fi flicks comrades should check the list out anyways there’s some good stuff in there.

Andor episode 12 be like

Dogs don’t piss on my vegetables

Comrades uncritical support for picking your neighbour’s fungi, but that close to the sidewalk you know they have dog pee on them

it’s a joke about the Ramanujan summation which argues the top one adds to infinity but the bottom adds to -1/12

Yeah I’ve been rewatching, I’ve been pretty impressed. Felix put it well when he said it was a show that knows that we live in a world where the deep state won.

Obviously the main story arc eps are cool, but I mentioned this in a mega recently it’s been cool just how many monster-of-the-week episodes are fantastic imaginings of the consequences of real programs the US government did and they talk about them. Stuff like MKULTRA, testing bioweapons on civilians, giving soldiers drugs in Vietnam. Like as goofy as the show is it’s also a legitimate 👁 show about the deep state under thin metaphor.

Really cool, way better than it deserves to be.

And yeah Scully is fire holy guacamole

I know he’s not supposed to be a depiction of a principled war resistor, but he is supposed to be a depiction of a GI that blew away his commanding officer. I’m just saying it’s an ahistorical representation of the type of person who actually did that.

I never thought about it before but Full Metal Jacket is kind of retrograde the way it portrays the guy who blasted his CO as a sobbing incompetent moron. In reality there was a lot of resistance and direct murder of COs by GIs during the Vietnam War, but it wasn’t done by antisocial mouth-breathing idiots but principled resistors.

Sir, No Sir is a great documentary about GI anti-war resistance whose thesis is that it was actually the internal resistance to continuing the war at all levels from infantry to intelligence that forced US withdrawal.

What would fighting back have entailed in this case?

How did Obama give up an appointment?