Kolya on 22/10/2020 at 14:43
I found this a while ago and then lost it and went on a search for it for 2 days, because this video changes lives. I know it changed mine.
[video=youtube;YMAYA2zbATo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMAYA2zbATo[/video]
Kolya on 25/10/2020 at 23:20
I re-watched Vanishing Point [1971] in honor of fett's drive through the country. A favorite of Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg Vanishing Point achieves all its goals, by not aiming too high and leaving the thinking mostly up to the viewer.
I finally watched Drive [2011] which I found disappointing, mainly due to Ryan Gosling being being completely implausible as a tough guy with hyper-violent streaks. I wouldn't even believe him to wear that jacket.
Unfortunately that was a repetition of the feeling I had with Blade Runner 2049. I really like Gosling in his funnier roles but the vacant stare he puts on to look broody just throws me out. You just know he's more likely to order a double-latte and play with his iPhone than beating anyone up.
Today I watched The Reader [2008]. I felt that Michael takes revenge on Hanna by not revealing her illiteracy during the trial. He could have saved her but he doesn't because she left him. And while her reasons may have been incomprehensible to him during the time of their affair, he's old enough to understand by the time of the trial. This is notwithstanding the question whether she should be saved.
The mixing of personal guilt and societal guilt here seems highly questionable. It tries to illustrate the alienation of the '68 generation from their Nazi parents, by framing it as a sexual power imbalance. But I felt it's more obscured by this personal story.
rachel on 27/10/2020 at 08:22
I had the same reaction to Drive, very underwhelming. I have nothing against Gosling though, it was the overall meandering atmosphere that didn't work for me. Good soundtrack though, I agree.
I finally got to watch The Hateful Eight and boy, I was pleasantly surprised. I'm not a fan of the latest QT, I didn't like Inglorious Basterds that much, and not at all Django Unchained, they were too over the top for my taste (Peak QT remains, to me, Jackie Brown). Anyway, so I had skipped H8 when it came out for being in the same vein... which it is, but I found it much more restrained and under control. It's like a reverse Reservoir Dogs set in 19th century Wyoming, it's got the classic Quentin's posse of talents, it's filmed (gorgeously) in 70mm, and yeah, I kinda liked it. I regret a bit not giving it a chance when it was in theaters.
demagogue on 27/10/2020 at 09:06
There's a Netflix short series called The Queen's Gambit that more or less replays a Bobby Fischer-like story, except it's a girl and instead of an antisemitic & lonely crackpot we get an overburdened & lonely substance abuser. Despite the character flaws though, the lead character is mesmerizing. There's something really charismatic about girls that are completely fearless, especially in that time and place, the 1960s suburban heartland, and that's before you even get to the refined world of international chess. I liked the way she herself didn't care much about how radical her position was, that kind of purity of motivation.
I don't think you need to know much about chess to appreciate it, since it's focused so much on the human side of the story, ambitions and relationships, but if you do know and like chess, the show will cater to that. I recommend.
Fingernail on 27/10/2020 at 09:34
Quote Posted by henke
I’m thinking of ending things
Yeah, that was good. I felt it. And I’m sure ttlg is full of just-past-their-prime sad fuckers who might feel this movie strongly as well. Pour yourself a drink and watch it, it’ll be worth the time.
See I enjoyed (if that's the right word) this, found it interesting and had a lot of striking images and atmospheres that have stayed with me. I thought it was a bit over-long and could have been edited down a bit. But I suggested it to a film club I'm part of (we watch a film every 2 weeks and then meet on Zoom to discuss) and they pretty much all hated it. Found the fact most of the characters weren't "real" to ruin any stakes and made them not interested. Which I can understand, but I mean, what characters in any fiction are "real" anyway?
Fingernail on 27/10/2020 at 09:41
Quote Posted by Renzatic
I tried to get into the Haunting of Bly Manor, especially since I loved Hill House so much, but...damn, I couldn't do it.
It is not as good, and not the same as Hill House, but it's still kind of compelling. My only previous connection with Turn of the Screw is having seen the opera of it by Benjamin Britten (which I would also recommend, it's an accessible opera as they go, about the length of a film and the creepy atmosphere is reflected well in the music). Much criticism has been made of the accents in Bly Manor, but it didn't bother me that much, until Garth Marenghi showed up as the brother and just sounds like he's from a completely different background to the (very posh) Henry Wingrave. Also featuring the most posh policeman ever.
Wouldn't be a big deal, but since part of the plot kind of leans on class prejudice and servants/masters etc. it seems not so careful.
Kolya on 28/10/2020 at 01:09
Quote Posted by Kolya
Today I watched
The Reader [2008]. I felt that Michael takes revenge on Hanna by not revealing her illiteracy during the trial. He could have saved her but he doesn't because she left him. And while her reasons may have been incomprehensible to him during the time of their affair, he's old enough to understand by the time of the trial. This is notwithstanding the question whether she should be saved.
The mixing of personal guilt and societal guilt here seems highly questionable. It tries to illustrate the alienation of the '68 generation from their Nazi parents, by framing it as a sexual power imbalance. But I felt it's more obscured by this personal story.
I read the book now. It's main motif is guilt in many facets. Mainly the feeling of guilt of the '68 generation (the first political generation after the reign of the Nazis in Germany) who felt trapped in their parents' guilt, because those had supported, abetted or been part of the Nazi atrocities. Their children felt guilty, because they had loved their parents, had enjoyed the prosperity they provided and by that felt enmeshed in the crimes of their parents. That's the basic background of the story. Another facet is how this new generation self-righteously sentenced their parents to silent shame, regardless of their actual involvement and what personal life stories led to it. This is also a power-grab. By discrediting their parents wholesale, they were able to take over.
Schlink concentrates this feeling of collective guilt into a personal love story about a woman who takes in a boy and starts a sexual relationship with him that lasts a summer before she suddenly vanishes. In a trial years later she is found to have been a guard in Auschwitz, where the degree of her personal guilt is in question. He witnesses the trial and eventually understands her secret, which if revealed would significantly exculpate her. But he never reveals it and she is sentenced for life.
The way I'm writing this down it may seem obvious: He self-righteously sentences her regardless of her actual crimes. So their personal story reflects the story of his generation and condenses it. More so his feelings of guilt revolve around the fact that she suddenly vanished and he thought he did something to repel her (which isn't the case). And she never realizes how much he loved her and how their relationship screwed up his future relationships. None of them truly grasps what they are guilty of having done to each other, to the full extent of it.
Especially that last part I found hard to deal with when reading it. I thought Schlink would eventually have to address his first-person narrator's own guilt. But that's left up to the reader.
demagogue on 28/10/2020 at 02:26
I like you putting that movie more in context for me. When I saw it, I was watching it more like a lawyer. My memory isn't great about what I was thinking, but it wasn't about that larger story going on.
I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent here, and sorry to all that it got long. But it's an important discussion & part of what I'm going through IRL, so worth it, I think. Anyway, the discussion is very timely for me because these days I'm teaching war crimes & transitional justice in my class, and the Nuremberg & Tokyo trials are a big part of it. Long story short, my Japanese law students -- how to sum this up? -- I don't think Japan ever went through that generational break like Germany did, and I think that's part of the reason, 75 years later, S. Korea & China still have a deep distrust of Japan and you can still have the prime minister visiting Yasakuni shrine and honoring the war dead that include actual convicted war criminals enshrined, which always makes S. Korea & China flip out and upsets some people in Japan, like they might write a strongly-worded (by Japanese standards) letter to the editor in a newspaper. But it's not like Germany where I couldn't even imagine, well not just just "a" memorial, but the central national memorial enshrining convicted Nazi war criminals, much less the chancellor having a memorial service to them! It'd be inconceivable (wouldn't it?)
My students really don't know the history of the war or occupation period very well, not the details of the war crimes at least. (It doesn't help that the US botched the occupation transition period of both Germany & Japan, in terms of helping the actual transition to democracy. In these kinds of discussions, I find it helpful to point out the failings of one's own nation, so it's not like I'm talking down to them. This is our shared history & we need to have a shared understanding to learn & prevent its mistakes from happening again.) The major difference I felt was, well I can't speak for Germany's case, but in Japan, there hasn't been that shift where kids today talk about their great grandparents as if they were a different people like I've read happened in Germany (and your story supports). Like I imagine people talked about the "new Germany", we're not our Nazi grandparents. But in Japan, well there was talk of a "new Japan", especially in terms of focusing energy on economic growth, they were fully "embracing defeat" (there's a famous book with that title), but not really accepting guilt, and honoring that generation still runs pretty deeply. (There were some shadows of a generational break in the 1960s. The story of Yukio Mishima's attempted coup to restore Japan's honor, the total rejection of him by Japan's new military, & his suicide in 1970 is a fascinating look into it. But that's still not accepting or feeling guilt in the same way.)
Full disclosure again, I come from the US South. I'm very self-conscious of the fact that the Nuremberg laws were actually modeled after US Southern Jim Crow laws, and actually the Jim Crow laws were even more severe. E.g., they had a one-drop-of-blood definition of blackness that even the Nazis watered down down for Jews as too inflexible for their brand of race hate. My people did that, my grandparents & great grandparents & their generation, not some strangers. And sometimes you hear talk of "the new South", like it's post-racist. But if nothing else the Trump era is showing that those words are pretty hollow, and I don't think the South has really absorbed the guilt for the crimes of racism & made such a radical break.
Anyway, one of the major articles we look at for my class gives a "forgiveness model" of transitional justice. Basically, while people always talk about re-identification, the new Germany, the new Japan, the new US South, the new South Africa, the new Argentina & Chile, the new Rwanda, the new Serbia/Bosnia, the new Russia, the new Cambodia, the new Myanmar ... any country that's gone through an authoritarian or abusive period (probably most if not all of them) can have that discussion. But according to this article, the former victims can never really trust the group of their former abusers unless the former abusers collectively admit & take ownership over the fact the crimes really happened (in the full horror that they happened), accept that it was their people that did that, have real punishment of the perpetrators (the Nazi trials were a lot more widespread than in Japan, where it was only a handful of people convicted), and so the next generation is so repulsed that they make a radical break and try to completely alienate themselves from that generation. That is, whether there's reconciliation, in the end, turns on whether the former abuser group takes real ownership of the crimes or not, and their re-identification and call for a new relationship isn't just words, but some kind of real change in their beliefs & attitudes.
So what's interesting about this movie is that it's showing how in Germany they went too far down that road where people that actually didn't participate in serious crimes were still getting trampled by this stampede of historical inertia, since this generation had a point to prove that was bigger than any individual's actual case. But then Japan is the situation where the whole thing ends in that shamed silence of the Boomer generation, so when you get to the current generation, they're completely oblivious and grandpa is just grandpa, not a former soldier that committed unspeakable acts, much less think they should make some radical break from grandpa and admit that their people could be capable of such acts. The major topic this issue plays out today in Japan is Comfort Women, the way the Japanese military coerced Korean, Chinese, & other women into basically sex slavery. Today a lot of younger Japanese people want to argue they were just normal prostitutes, and the military didn't do anything any other military in the world didn't do. It's hard to change that perception now because the details of the crimes aren't taught, and no one was really punished for it.
Anyway, it's interesting to compare Germany & Japan's situations on this, the connection between memory, guilt, & identity. They both show problems in going too far and not going far enough, respectively. It seems like there's a real dilemma in both directions. But in the end, I think Germany still had the better transition and real reconciliation, which hasn't happened in Japan. That doesn't justify what this movie is portraying, only that it came out the other end better than Japan did. I think in another way the movie shows what is important, which is in Germany, they're having a kind of public discussion about it through movies like this. And that's what's really missing in Japan. You don't see movies like this here or people having discussions like this. Even if it's a dilemma and the issues are difficult to talk about and dredge up strong emotions, it's still important to talk about them.
rachel on 28/10/2020 at 07:23
There's an interesting parallel here in Spain with Franco's legacy, where the democratic process after its death chose to transition without really addressing the crimes. Now, forty years later, we're seeing the system reach the limits as all the tensions and resentments that have been simmering all along finally boil to the surface...
Starker on 28/10/2020 at 09:07
Quote Posted by demagogue
But then Japan is the situation where the whole thing ends in that shamed silence of the Boomer generation, so when you get to the current generation, they're completely oblivious and grandpa is just grandpa, not a former soldier that committed unspeakable acts, much less think they should make some radical break from grandpa and admit that their people could be capable of such acts.
I think you're still kind of underselling the extent to which the situation is screwed up. For example, Shinzo Abe's own grandfather, the Monster of Manchuria, was a "suspected" class A war criminal and held in the infamous Sugamo Prison, yet led a very successful (and extremely corrupt) political career after the war. But he was kind of sort of pro-US, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯