sign you are watching a good movie

[nomadthethird]

She's a really good writer and really lovely person too, very very funny. Face to face she can reduce me to tears in seconds.

Oh god talking about being reduced to tears this scene in bad just kills me

Haha. I'm pretty sure I know exactly which block that is where the kid lands, on the Upper East Side. If everyone on the UES had done that in the early 50s, we may never have seen Wall Street melt down.

But seriously, it's fine to have kids, and I admire people who have the strength to bear it really, but I can't fucking stand those straight people who think they did the world a tremendous favor by pushing out their brats, and everyone should bow down and thank them. Not only that, but everyone should go about childproofing their very existence to ensure that those children never have to hear a single naughty word or see a nipple on TV. It's so fucking stupid and annoying.

Besides, you're not so special. Even plankton reproduce. Even one-celled organisms do. I'd be more impressed if you kept it in your pants and spared the rest of us, especially given the fact that the world is severely overpopulated as it is.

 

[mistersloane]

Haha. I'm pretty sure I know exactly which block that is where the kid lands, on the Upper East Side. If everyone on the UES had done that in the early 50s, we may never have seen Wall Street melt down.

But seriously, it's fine to have kids, and I admire people who have the strength to bear it really, but I can't fucking stand those straight people who think they did the world a tremendous favor by pushing out their brats, and everyone should bow down and thank them. Not only that, but everyone should go about childproofing their very existence to ensure that those children never have to hear a single naughty word or see a nipple on TV. It's so fucking stupid and annoying.

Besides, you're not so special. Even plankton reproduce. Even one-celled organisms do. I'd be more impressed if you kept it in your pants and spared the rest of us, especially given the fact that the world is severely overpopulated as it is.

HAHAHAHA.

The sign I'm watching a good movie is getting turned on.

And I really, really like scenes with babies. That one in the John Waters film with the baby in the fridge is amazing too.

I know I'm watching a good film when you're with a mate and you're laughing so much that you're holding onto each other for dear life.

 

[nomadthethird]

I know I'm watching a good film when you're with a mate and you're laughing so much that you're holding onto each other for dear life.

I wanna see one of these!!

It's been a while.

That Mandy Moore film was quite good. The one about saving your virginity for your one true love till marriage. And turning bad boys good with your prudishness, like in a Phil Spector song. A Walk To Remember, that was it.

 

[mistersloane]

I wanna see one of these!!

It's been a while.

That Mandy Moore film was quite good. The one about saving your virginity for your one true love till marriage. And turning bad boys good with your prudishness, like in a Phil Spector song. A Walk To Remember, that was it.

Don't know that one hafta check it out.

I like a film where I don't understand what's happening as well. Even if it's just that the script is really bad. In fact I'd like to see more unformed feature films, I remember this gobstopping film with a filmmaker once who was explaining to me what was happening on the screen, and it bore no resemblance at all to the film he'd made, and I just thought it was the most genius thing.

 

[nomadthethird]

Don't know that one hafta check it out.

I like a film where I don't understand what's happening as well. Even if it's just that the script is really bad. In fact I'd like to see more unformed feature films, I remember this gobstopping film with a filmmaker once who was explaining to me what was happening on the screen, and it bore no resemblance at all to the film he'd made, and I just thought it was the most genius thing.

There's this really bad show on TV right now like this, called Leverage. I got into when my boyfriend was visiting a few weeks ago and the premier was on. The premise makes no sense whatsoever:

A group of five rogue criminals (all with a different expertise) lend their talents to people who have problems that can't be solved through standard legal channels--working out of a regular office building. (? ???) I suppose it's supposed to be an updated A-Team concept, but the scenes never match up with the settings, the characters are always deducing things with no clues. It just never makes any kind of sense, and I know that the person who wrote it thought it was really slick when in fact it's the hottest mess of bad dialogue, shitty characters, and lack of plot development that I've ever seen. And I can't look away!

Now we watch it over the phone and do voice overs.

 

[swears]

Swears, you really are the best at this game.

I didn't get the net until I was about 18, so I spent most most of my free time up to that point watching the garbage 80s films they'd show on UK telly in the late 90s on my little Goldstar in my room, haha. That, or reading sci-fi novels.

 

[swears]

Oh god talking about being reduced to tears this scene in bad just kills me

That is funny, I like the way the woman is a terrible actress as well, adds to the overall feel that she doesn't give a fuck.

 

[Mr. Tea]

But seriously, it's fine to have kids, and I admire people who have the strength to bear it really, but I can't fucking stand those straight people who think they did the world a tremendous favor by pushing out their brats, and everyone should bow down and thank them. Not only that, but everyone should go about childproofing their very existence to ensure that those children never have to hear a single naughty word or see a nipple on TV. It's so fucking stupid and annoying.

Besides, you're not so special. Even plankton reproduce. Even one-celled organisms do. I'd be more impressed if you kept it in your pants and spared the rest of us, especially given the fact that the world is severely overpopulated as it is.

Agreed. I'm reminded of Bill Hicks: "If childbirth is a miracle, then so's eating a hamburger and having a turd come out of your ass".

 

[luka]

I didn't get the net until I was about 18, so I spent most most of my free time up to that point watching the garbage 80s films they'd show on UK telly in the late 90s on my little Goldstar in my room, haha. That, or reading sci-fi novels.

thats sort of what i assumed....
a youth well spent

 

[Tentative Andy]

Hollywood takes basically any opportunity it can to remind us that a feminist is just an icequeen who hasn't found the right man yet to warm her up and turn on her ladyparts and make them work properly so she will turn into a baby-making/nesting/monogamy machine (a "real woman") who gives up on having her own identity outside of a relationship and is instead contented and fulfilled by being number two to her husband's number one.

Biology is destiny, after all. If women are able to bear children, that means women are made only to be mothers. The reason why women now want to go against nature and have careers and act like men, you see, is because men don't act manly enough (give high speed car chase and wield AK47s on crowded streets in hot pursuit of Bad Guys) anymore. There's no one to turn on their baby-making instincts for them. Plus, Anne Coulter told me feminists have hijacked the media and they're turning women against motherhood.

Oh god, Anne Coulter, they had here on briefly here as a studio pundit for the election coverage, she is just utterly despicable.
Post is OTM, couldn't agree more really. I do think there is a case to be made that the Bond films, esp the early ones, display all the movie-establishment anti-feminist cliches in such a blatant way that they unwittingly offer it up for ridicule, and are therefore preferrable to the confused half-attempts to make the films more politically correct from the Brosnan era onwards. (A friend of mine once brilliantly summed up the structure of Tomorrow Never Dies as 'The point is that now she doesn't need him... except in the end she does... sort of'). But that's probably just a round-about of way saying that I unabashedly love the Connery Bonds, in the face of any ideological objections I might have.
Love your line about 'the right man yet to warm her up and turn on her ladyparts and make them work properly' btw, it's funny/tragic 'cause it's true (in the film-wrold).

 

[nomadthethird]

You know you gotta take your rightful place in the "natural order" otherwise the universe might explode.

It's funny because I always thought of those really self-righteous child bearing types as being more of an American phenomenon (they're the same type of people who campaign to get creationism taught in school and who are absolutely terrified that if the public school system teaches their children how to properly use condoms, somehow billions of years of evolution will be magically undone and they will either be a) turned gay, or b) decide never to have kids and rob them of grandchildren.) But I guess they're everywhere.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Herzog + Kinski + new age-y krautrock band + something crazy (raftfuls of monkeys, steamships, vampires, etc.)

Anything where Clint Eastwood squints at someone.

Dolph Lundgren, the poor man's Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Hollywood remakes of a classic non-American films. Always works out well.

A stockbroker/banker yuppie type who, through some wacky set of circumstances, finds himself coaching a set of misfit, wisecracking, loveable kids to the championship, learning a valuable life lesson in the process.

Hardworking/drinking, cynical cops who are forced to break the law in order to get true justice.

 

[don_quixote]

why is the call of all fuckers to claim their personal opposition have taken over the media?

 

[nomadthethird]

I just saw Revolutionary Road...It's an altogether different movie than I thought it was going to be, and it's not as amazing as Showgirls, but it's actually quite good.

The trailer gives the impression that it's going to be your standard cheesy "romantic girl meets suburban boy, they get big ideas, change their little town for the better" type of film but it isn't at all. It's more Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets the life of Sylvia Plath, done in Hollywood middlebrow that suits the subject matter pretty well even if it's dumbed down. There are some great lines.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I just saw Revolutionary Road...It's an altogether different movie than I thought it was going to be, and it's not as amazing as Showgirls, but it's actually quite good.

The trailer gives the impression that it's going to be your standard cheesy "romantic girl meets suburban boy, they get big ideas, change their little town for the better" type of film but it isn't at all. It's more Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets the life of Sylvia Plath, done in Hollywood middlebrow that suits the subject matter pretty well even if it's dumbed down. There are some great lines.

I thought it was meant to be more musing, about the vapidity & soullessness of life in the American suburbs in the vein of American Beauty, The Ice Storm, etc. and especially John Cheever who was a contemporary of Richard Yates. A scathing expose of the bourgoeis hollowness inside a shell of well-kept lawns & luxury goods and so on. Leavittown, ennui, blah blah blah. All mostly true but very very very tedious, with the added displeasure of the sneering contempt of writers like Cheever & Yates for their peers.

Though I've only read the novel, not seen the film, which could be great. Kate Winslet is always fantastic as well.

 

[nomadthethird]

I thought it was meant to be more musing, about the vapidity & soullessness of life in the American suburbs in the vein of American Beauty, The Ice Storm, etc. and especially John Cheever who was a contemporary of Richard Yates. A scathing expose of the bourgoeis hollowness inside a shell of well-kept lawns & luxury goods and so on. Leavittown, ennui, blah blah blah. All mostly true but very very very tedious, with the added displeasure of the sneering contempt of writers like Cheever & Yates for their peers.

Though I've only read the novel, not seen the film, which could be great. Kate Winslet is always fantastic as well.

Didn't know there was a book, though that makes sense, since it had a literary air about it.

I don't know, it wasn't anything like Cheever, nothing like the Ice Storm. It was a lot more like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Lots of really raw fighting and bitterly calculated affairs, and even a certifiably "insane" character on furlough from the asylum thrown in for good measure. It may as well have been a Sylvia Plath biopic-- that's what I ended up thinking about it, not knowing it was originally a book. It was ultimately about how repressed/stifled women were more than anything, I thought, back then, and how it screwed up the whole heterosexual system even for men, more than it was just about repression/ennui general in the 50s.

Bonus points for the briefest, most lifeless and unexciting in-car sex scene of all time, too. I looked at the person I'd gone with and said "that was quick" afterward, a little more loudly than I really meant to, which got some laughs from the people in front of me.

 

[nomadthethird]

I mean, there's no clear, pound you over the head "feminist" perspective, but that's almost what's amazing about it. It's very fair about the difficulties both men and women faced under a repressive and tyrannical version of suburban "happiness" that deviated not in the slightest from the nuclear family, 2.5 kids, a couple of cars, wife at home, etc.

But it's very clear in the film that Mrs. Wheeler's lack of erotic/libidinal fulfillment is the real problem that's central to the rest. Mr. Wheeler isn't unhappy, Mrs. Wheeler is. He doesn't want to leave for Paris to "find himself", she does. It's all pretty transparent to anyone with a brain but there is enough subtlety to be entertained. The director does a great job of making Mr. Wheeler look like a complete control freak/tool/jerk when he suggests Mrs. Wheeler needs a shrink because she wants an abortion, because no "normal woman" would ever have one. The huge burden that is sex for straight women when reproductive health/rights are not legal and accessible is a main theme in the film and I like that.

I really do like the "insane" guy's performance. And the shit he stirs up in the relationship.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I mean, there's no clear, pound you over the head "feminist" perspective, but that's almost what's amazing about it. It's very fair about the difficulties both men and women faced under a repressive and tyrannical version of suburban "happiness" that deviated not in the slightest from the nuclear family, 2.5 kids, a couple of cars, wife at home, etc.

...The huge burden that is sex for straight women when reproductive health/rights are not legal and accessible is a main theme in the film and I like that.

Yeah, fair play to those points, esp. the one about the implications of sex for heterosexual women, esp. married women, w/out proper access to birth control & legal abortion. I think the comparison to all the -inner paucity of suburban life (& by extension the post-WWII American Dream) stuff- still holds though.

Certainly it's not as bad some stuff in that vein b/c it seems like Yates sympathized with his characters. His contempt was focused more on the suburbs than the suburbanites themselves and as a result it doesn't come across quite as obnoxiously.

Either way that you enjoyed the film is of course what really matters.

 

[nomadthethird]

Yeah, fair play to those points, esp. the one about the implications of sex for heterosexual women, esp. married women, w/out proper access to birth control & legal abortion. I think the comparison to all the -inner paucity of suburban life (& by extension the post-WWII American Dream) stuff- still holds though.

Certainly it's not as bad some stuff in that vein b/c it seems like Yates sympathized with his characters. His contempt was focused more on the suburbs than the suburbanites themselves and as a result it doesn't come across quite as obnoxiously.

Either way that you enjoyed the film is of course what really matters.

If you see it, let me know what you think of it. You obviously have a good grasp on the literature of the period and the book itself so let me know if they match up at all...

 

[IdleRich]

"Didn't know there was a book, though that makes sense, since it had a literary air about it"

http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=7072&highlight=revolutionary+road