ABigGuy4U
15hr ago
The entire LA quartet is good. Skip the Black Dahlia, it’s the weakest and doesn’t have too much to do with the other three. Start with the Big Nowhere. The Underworld USA trilogy is also good, but it runs out of steam a bit by Blood’s a Rover. Perfida sucks, avoid. The editors ruined that entire second trilogy by cutting out its creepy emotional center.
LA Confidential is such a weird book. It’s like noir-horror Lord of the Rings. I wish there were more Ellroy readers around here. I wish there were more Ellroy readers at all.
None of them really capture Bond’s attitude to violence right. Maybe Brosnan, but his Bond is very guarded and opaque so it’s hard to tell. Physically, Timothy Dalton, he’s the spitting image of the portrait Fleming commissioned of Bond. In terms of his complicated relationship with women being closest to the books, your best bets are Casino Royale, or On Her Majesty’s Secret Secret Service. Many here will say From Russia With Love but I’ve never liked it for some reason. Ironically, I think the movie Bonds do really nail how book Bond would have interacted with a female superior: cold professionalism shot through with a hurt little boy looking for his mother.
ABigGuy4U
18hr ago
Giving someone a billion dollars will turn them into a demonic asshole a lot quicker than any dark magic.
ABigGuy4U
18hr ago
Given that Nikki’s body is covered head to toe in bizarre inscriptions and sigils by the end, I’m not sure how people don’t pick up on the fact there is a literal aspect to the movie in addition to the metaphorical one.
The James Bond from the books was a lot sadder. The violent and sexual wish fulfillment is still there, but Fleming was a lot more realistic about the consequences. He understands how sad Bond’s life and failure to connect with women are. In the books, the girl doesn’t just conveniently disappear at the beginning of the next movie. Fleming actually goes into exactly why the relationship ended up failing, usually because Bond is an emotional cripple. Sometimes because a hunky American Marine stole her heart, the wanker. The fact that he has no wife or children at 40 weighs on him.
And book Bond is just as effective a killer as his movie counterpart, but he takes a lot less pleasure in it. One of the books opens with ten pages of Bond brooding over a cartel sicario he had just had to stab. This man was trying to gut him like a pig, but taking his life still really bothers Bond.
Maybe this is because the books were written by a real womanizing killer.
ABigGuy4U
18hr ago
Nikki loved Bear more than anyone else in the world. Bear did not love Nikki that much. That’s what caused the problems. You see how the first few months when she thinks he does are fine.
Like the Illiad before it (Troy 2004), Odyssey 2026 is really mostly about the GWOT and 20 years of playing in the sandbox. Yet again, Burgerland had to destroy the village in order to save it, and consequently is now Le Sad. Regarding the supernatural elements, I thought he handled the gods pretty well. I especially liked how well Best Girl’s character worked on both a supernatural and a prosaic level. Where he really flopped was the creatures and the monsters. Nolan has zero sense of wonder, that’s what really hobbled the last act of Oppenheimer. The nuclear bomb is about as close to the overt presence of the supernatural as you can get in the 21st century, and he went and made it a lame ejaculation joke.
I won’t go into detail on this topic lest I get banned, but you completely missed the extremely obvious ^^^propoganda throughline^^^ of Ayy’s Gambit OH SORRY I mean Queen’s Gambit, we don’t use racial slurs on the Motte, no sir.
the Motte is absolutely ridden with TDS. They’ll never admit Dune (2020) is a modern masterpiece.
ABigGuy4U
20hr ago
I think we sometimes read to much into occasional invocations of lifeboat ethics (like the Inuit ice floe retirement home) or stone-age incidents of war crimes. There are Paleolithic graves that archeologists have found of obviously disabled people who were clearly cared for their whole lives.
ABigGuy4U
20hr ago
It is already the case that half of all people are not net tax payers.
But those people still have value. They might be a net negative to you but they still have value. They use EBT funds to buy products that circulate the economy. They buy crack and fentanyl that funds the CIA. They can be whipped up by demagogues to riot in support of current thing. In extremis, you can draft them and use them as meat waves on the European steppe. Two percent of the entire male population of America is in prison, Burgerland would have penal battalions coming out their asses.
That’s a totally different scenario to them literally having no economic or military or political value at all.
ABigGuy4U
22hr ago
To be fair, Plauche’s own statements characterize it entirely as an emotional reaction of a wronged father, and he never tried to make the argument that it was about the insufficiency of the justice system.
ABigGuy4U
9d ago
Do you really need a jet engine for loitering munition? At that point it’s just a cruise missile.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
But why not after? In fact, right at the height of the Atheism vs. Faith flame wars, the left was busy trying to insinuate that the FBI had Lennon killed.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
Why did the left never make any serious attempt to characterize the assassination of John Lennon as an act of evangelical Christian terrorism? It kind of seems like it would have been a pretty easy propaganda win.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
incredibly racist in favor of anyone who's dark skinned or from a different culture/religion, or against them, as you say.
As in they implicitly assume third worlders to be subhumans who aren’t responsible for their own behavior.
ABigGuy4U
20d ago
It’s a palliative to ease old man boomer’s passing and convince him to hate his children while malevolent forces clean out the till. The younger generations then get the opposite message about how they should do nothing and just seethe in impotent rage at old man boomer because it’s all his fault (it isn’t).
ABigGuy4U
21d ago
The boilermaker is the perfect cocktail. It cracks the meta of alcohol usage. It rapidly spikes your blood alcohol in a way that feels good, but one or two aren’t going to keep you from going to work in the morning. Perfect for the two-hour evening drinking session of the working man.
I saw Young Washington (2026) recently. To be honest I didn’t have high expectations going in and was expecting a rather dreary after-school special. I was pleasantly surprised. It’s actually a pretty tight action thriller/family drama anchored by good performances from the whole cast. Would recommend to anyone who liked The Revenant (2015), The Patriot (2000), Barry Lyndon (1975) or Boats (2003).
Nobody wants an un-sentimental look at the Holocaust because it would be ugly and horrible and difficult to score political points off of. It’s the same dynamic for war movies, right down to the ill-recieved A24 release.
ABigGuy4U
24d ago
Yes but that sounds more like a “@Skulldrinker’s boorish friend problem” and less of a “me problem”.
You see how everyone reacted to The Zone of Interest trying to portray the Holocaust as actual murder. No one liked it. Murder is pretty disrespectful and dehumanizing to the victim, no matter how gingerly it’s portrayed. And all murders are at bottom the same, which offends people, because they don’t like that this particular murder reminded them other murders that they like better. It reminds me of a quote from Raymond Chandler:
“If the mystery novel is at all realistic (which it very seldom is) it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise nobody but a psychopath would want to write it or read it.”
So must be the same with Holocaust narratives.
Butterface
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