FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
6d ago
Watched Les Diaboliques from 1955, having heard it described as a psychological horror.
If it was made today, it would be called a psychological thriller, not a psychological horror. Well shot, well acted, well edited, but alas I called the twist ending in every detail about an hour in, meaning the remaining ~forty-five minutes were just an exercise in killing time. Check it out if you're less genre savvy than I am.
FtttG
6d ago
Interesting, I've never heard someone refer to it as their favourite of his films before. For me, there are definitely parts of it that work, while other parts felt like a slog.
FtttG
7d ago
Hanania has a response in which he argues that, while female-dominated institutions may not be sufficiently devoted to truth and consistency, neither are male-dominated ones.
Last night I rewatched Lost Highway, having not seen it for years and having recently heard it described as a psychological horror movie (which is certainly not how I remembered it). Having watched it a second (third?) time, my thoughts on it are largely unchanged and pretty much the same as everyone else's:
- The first forty minutes or so, before Balthazar Getty's character is introduced, are as atmospheric and chilling as anything else in Lynch's filmography (especially the first scene with Robert Blake), to the point that they overshadow the rest of the movie. This section is the only part of the movie that can be described as "horror": everything after that is a noir pastiche or a psychological thriller.
- Robert Loggia steals every scene he's in. They should show the tailgating scene in driver's ed, it would get a great laugh.
- Lynch was attempting something big and ambitious here, and didn't quite pull it off. He attempted something similar in his follow-up Mulholland Drive and had more luck there (I might even put that movie in my top ten). It's hard to put my finger on why Mulholland Drive is so much more effective than Lost Highway. It might be because all of the silly slapstick scenes in Mulholland Drive are near the beginning, whereas in Lost Highway they're in the middle, after forty minutes of steadily escalating tension and paranoia, which is tonally jarring. Both films involve
characters transforming into other people , but in Mulholland Drive Naomi Watts is the leading woman throughout: havingBill Pullman suddenly become Balthazar Getty without explanation robs us of the sense of psychological continuity we'd have if it had beentwo characters portrayed by one actor. And four years later, Lynch had learned that the only thing worse than using a Rammstein song at the dramatic climax of the movie is using the same Rammstein song twice.
My main takeaway from this movie is that, in her youth, Patricia Arquette was fucking gorgeous. She has several nude scenes in this movie, but even just in close-ups of her talking while fully dressed, I was utterly transfixed. Normally when a movie introduces a female character that we're supposed to find beautiful by lingering on them in slomo, I'm underwhelmed (particularly if they're played by, like, Drew Barrymore). In this case I had no trouble understanding why Getty's character would risk it all for her, even knowing that she's a violent gangster's moll.
FtttG
7d ago
I saw this silly meme (/images/17607111449663641.webp) attributing lyrics to Taylor Swift that she didn't write.
By coincidence, my brother sent me the actual song the lyrics came from and it's even worse than "Y'All Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack".
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the authorities just didn't want to get involved because, as the old saying goes, "just put all of them in a sack and randomly swing a bat at it, you'll always hit the right one". Not to mean that they all really did what was alleged, but that the extreme level of dysfunction in the general community made the accusations so plausible that most just didn't want to get involved in the mess.
When writing Chinatown, Robert Towne said he was partly inspired by a conversation he'd had with a Hungarian vice cop, who claimed that there were so many competing ethnic groups and dialects in Chinatown that the police had no way of knowing whether their interventions were helping or hurting the exploited — so their policy was to do "as little as possible".
Interestingly in real life, the trans woman who was murdered (in the film exclusively referred to by their "deadname" Barry) had previously been in a sexual relationship with one of their killers. They shot a scene for the film making this explicit, but it was cut.
It's now Spooky Season, for which I will be using these threads as an opportunity to write about scary movies I've (re)-watched over the next two weeks. If you've watched some good (or bad) horror movies lately, feel free to reply to this comment with your thoughts.
Last night I watched Snowtown, a dramatisation of a series of vicious murders which took place in Salisbury North (a suburb in the greater Adelaide area in South Australia) between 1992-9. Going in I was expecting a horror film: what I got instead was a social realist crime drama in the vein of Shane Meadows, which is more interested in kitchen-sink scenes of people smoking in grotty tract housing than the mechanics of murder and body disposal. The violence, on the rare occasions it's shown onscreen, is excruciating, but like Meadows, most of the film's copious discomfort comes from the implied threat of violence, when the ringleader John Bunting seems superficially friendly and yet there's a constant lurking sensation that he might blow his top at the slightest provocation.
Recently, notorious child rapist and former rock frontman Ian Watkins was murdered in prison. I'm not unhappy he was killed, and yet some of the crowing over his death and how he got what was coming to him makes me uncomfortable for some reason I found it hard to put my finger on. Perhaps the most provocative scenes in Snowtown depict John Bunting and his neighbours sitting around a kitchen table discussing their frustration with the authorities' refusal to properly deal with sex offenders and child molesters in the area, and how they ought to take the law into their own hands. And indeed, many of Bunting and co.'s victims were people he claimed were paedophiles and child molesters (also homosexuals and at least one trans woman, though the film doesn't dwell on this quite as much), often on the basis of extremely flimsy evidence or baseless hearsay. The obvious implication is that Bunting had extremely violent urges which he rationalised away by claiming that he was channelling them into pro-social ends, but that when the demand for "paedos" exceeded the supply, he simply invented new ones. Paedophiles, homosexuals, trans people and junkies were seen as deserving targets in the social milieu in which he lived, so he targeted them: raised in another environment, he would've targeted communists, apostates, witches, whatever.
The less obvious implication (and I have no idea whether the historical record would bear this out) is that one reason Bunting and his gang evaded capture for so long is not because they managed to intimidate anyone aware of their crimes into silence, but because they managed to persuade them that all of their murders were really vigilantism, meting out "justice" to those deserving.
I've long had a soft spot for Rockstar Games' controversial stealth/survival horror title Manhunt from 2003. The premise of the game sounds like it was tailor-made to get Jack Thompson's knickers in a twist (to the point that even some of Rockstar's own staff found it objectionable1). You play as an inmate on death row called James Earl Cash who has his execution faked by a mysterious benefactor, who then forces Cash through a gauntlet of urban environments patrolled by violent gangs actively hunting for him. Cash is hopelessly outnumbered, so must resort to the game's core mechanic of "executions": he can sneak up behind gang members and stealth-kill them with a melee weapon, whereupon the camera shifts to a grainy pseudo-VHS perspective. For, you see, Cash's benefactor directs snuff films (for which purpose he's installed CCTV cameras all around the city), and wants Cash to be his "leading man". And these films aren't just a way of making ends meet, but very much a "passion project" for the director: if Cash murders a gang member in a particularly gruesome fashion, he will commend Cash in his earpiece, or even moan orgasmically. (The fact that the director is portrayed by the wonderful Brian Cox lends him a great deal of seedy charisma.) And in spite of the PS2-era graphics, many of these executions remain positively revolting to watch, aided by the game's impeccable sound design.
It's a tremendously fun game that makes you feel tense and anxious while playing it, then dirty and ashamed afterwards, aided by the game's meta, self-referential qualities (the player character is being "controlled" by an overweight creep sitting in the dark in front of a computer monitor, who orders him to viciously murder people for no better reason than his own sick amusement — no prizes for guessing who he's meant to represent). I've played it several times before, but always on the normal (or "Fetish") difficulty, for which the UI includes a circular "radar" which shows the position of gang members in your vicinity, which way they're facing and how alert they are. I'd read that this radar is disabled on hard ("Hardcore") mode, which I assumed would make the game practically impossible (even "Fetish" is plenty challenging). I recently completed my first playthrough on "Hardcore" mode, and I quickly realised that it's the purest way to play the game. It's not a "deconstruction" of stealth-based games, but it's clearly aiming for a more grounded, down-to-earth approach to the genre than is typical (and it still feels refreshing to play a survival horror game with no fantastical or speculative elements whatsoever). Cash isn't a Sam Fisher or Solid Snake with an array of hi-tech gizmos at his disposal: he's just an ordinary guy thrust into a situation beyond his understanding, with nothing to guide him but his wits and whatever weapons he can get his hands on (you kill your first enemy by smothering him with a plastic bag, and even in the late game shards of broken glass are invaluable tools). Without the radar, you have to proceed cautiously and play close attention to the direction the enemy chatter is coming from, just as Cash would. It's a very effective means of putting the player in his shoes, and makes an already tense and stressful game positively nerve-wracking. Highly recommended if you've never played it before, and a suitable game for spooky season. But if you're trying to persuade your loved ones that video games are more than disgusting exploitative "murder simulators" — well, maybe don't show them this one.
1 "It may sound surprising, but there was almost a mutiny at the company over that game. It was Rockstar North's [the Scottish branch of the company] pet project — most of us at Rockstar Games wanted no part of it. We'd already weathered plenty of controversy over GTA3 and Vice City — we were no strangers to it — but Manhunt felt different. With GTA, we always had the excuse that the gameplay was untethered — you never had to hurt anybody that wasn't a "bad guy" in one of the missions. You could play completely ethically if you wanted, and the game was parody anyway, so lighten up," Williams writes.
"Manhunt, though, just made us all feel icky. It was all about the violence, and it was realistic violence. We all knew there was no way we could explain away that game. There was no way to rationalize it. We were crossing a line."
FtttG
8d ago
I had heard of it before, but using "watermelon" in reference to pro-Palestine types seems overwhelmingly more likely.
Actually, you appear to have misinterpreted me
No, I know what you meant. But I think the way you phrased it was telling in a way you perhaps didn't consciously intend.
Are you going to sit here and claim that Israel has never committed any war crimes prior to October 7th?
No, of course not.
The USA has also committed lots of war crimes. If, the morning after 9/11, a bunch of people staged protests against the US, it wouldn't be untrue for them to defend the decision to do so on the grounds that, while the US may have been the victim of a horrendous terror attack the day before, that doesn't negate the fact that they have committed war crimes in the past. And yet, I can't help but feel that the kinds of people who would protest against a country the morning after it has suffered a terrorist attack are motivated more by hatred of that country (and support for the people committing terror attacks against it) than by a desire to raise awareness of war crimes.
If this particular analogy doesn't achieve the desired effect - supposing the morning after the tsunami in Japan in 2011 in which thousands of Japanese people were killed, I immediately staged a protest against Japan in which I made repeated calls to "globalise the anti-Japan resistance". Somebody points out to me that this is a bit tasteless considering that this country has suffered a horrendous tragedy literally the day before. I defend myself by pointing out that Japan has committed war crimes in the past. This is unassailably true (Nanjing, Unit 731). And yet, wouldn't the timing rather suggest to you that I'm motivated more by hatred of Japanese people than by an innocent desire to raise awareness of Japanese atrocities?
There are a fair few people who protest against the fact that Israel exists at all, but those are usually the ultra orthodox jews who believe that the creation of the Israeli state is in violation of the Torah.
I don't believe that the majority of people opposed to the very existence of Israel are Orthodox Jews. Moreover, I don't believe that you believe it either.
For example, an outright majority of young Britons think Israel should not exist. A different poll of the same age group found twenty-one percent say it does not have the right to exist. A majority of young Americans believe that Israel should be "ended" and given to the Palestinians. Combining half of young Britons and half of young Americans gives you 18 million people, which is already significantly more than the total population of Jews in the entire world (never mind the subset of those who are Orthodox). And that's just the young people in two countries. Do you really think that if I surveyed literally any Arab country "does Israel have a right to exist?", a majority of respondents would say yes?
If you're as committed an anti-Zionist as you say and you've been to as many of these protests as you claim, I'm extremely confident that you're familiar with the saying "Israel does not have a right to exist", or descriptions of Israel as an illegitimate "made-up" state and so on. I'm equally confident that when you heard people making such proclamations, 100% of the people who did so were not Orthodox Jews. I don't believe that you believe what you're claiming.
I'd make sure that whatever I did, there wouldn't be gigantic protest movements against my country all over the world.
Your phrasing is very telling. Whatever I did. Because I really do get the distinct impression that whatever Israel does, people will be condemning it.
The gigantic protest movements against the country in question had begun in earnest less than a week after October 7th, well before Israel even had the opportunity to commit any war crimes. In New York, there were protests and calls to "globalise the intifada" literally the day after. (The less said about the people at these protests chanting "Allahu akbar" and "gas the Jews", the better.)
Call me crazy, but it kind of seems like at least a significant proportion of these protests have nothing to do with how Israel's military conducts itself, and more to do with the fact that Israel exists at all.
I'd honestly love to be proven wrong and learn that the Hind Rajab and Mohamaed Bhar stories were just a bad dream
The fact that individual civilians were killed in a conflict does not prove that said conflict was a genocide. Even the fact that individual soldiers committed war crimes during a conflict doesn't prove that said conflict was a genocide. Pro-Palestine activists think they're helping their case by claiming that every civilian death is evidence of genocidal intent on Israel's part. But because civilian deaths are a feature of every war (especially wars in densely populated urban centres; especially especially wars in densely populated urban centres in which belligerents deliberately hide among the civilian populace), all you're doing is collapsing the distinction between "genocide" and "urban conflict" by carelessly conflating the two. Twenty years ago, the word "racist" was a potent one indeed and people would react to the accusation with indignation: after a generation of woke people abusing it to refer to any behaviour they don't like (no matter how innocuous), there are now plenty of people who react to the word "racist" as if you'd called them a meany doo-doo head. Do you really think it's a sensible idea to do the same thing to the word "genocide"? Because that's the way it's headed. Do you want more genocide? Because that's how you get more genocide.
But all that's almost beside the point. I don't think you looked at the facts on the ground of the current conflict and dispassionately concluded that Israel is conducting a genocide. I strongly suspect that if I'd asked you the same question on October 6th 2023, I would've got much the same answer. You're citing examples of Israel killing civilians in the current conflict, not because they support your argument, but simply because of the availability heuristic. Israel was being accused of "genocide" from the morning of October 8th, 2023, before the war had even begun in earnest; a bunch of Hollywood celebrities signed an open letter condemning Israel's military action in Gaza as genocide in 2014; I'm sure I can go back to the 2000s, the 1990s, even further and see the same accusation lobbed against them time and time again. (The first sentence of the Wikipedia article on the topic bluntly states that Israel has faced this accusation without reprieve literally from the day of its founding.) You explicitly compared Israel to the Nazis and demanded the state be "denazified", but the difference is that the Holocaust actually saw a meaningful (and steep) decline in the global Jewish populace. Strange, isn't it, how the Israelis have been accused of genociding the Palestinians for the better part of a century, and yet the Palestinian population only ever increases over time? It's the Shepard tone of genocides — which is to say, not a genocide at all. How many genocides can you name in which the genocidaires came to a dead stop as soon as the people they were genociding agreed to release hostages?
You apparently expect me to simultaneously believe that the vastly technologically superior, limitlessly bloodthirsty and nuke-equipped Israel isn't pulling its punches and is in fact doing everything in its power to exterminate every last Palestinian from the face of the earth — and yet are somehow so incompetent that they've failed to wipe out a technologically inferior opponent who almost entirely reside right on its doorstep? I'm sorry, but I cannot believe both of these things. It is beyond me.
They've blown up the civilian infrastructure and all the hospitals
If you don't want your hospitals and civilian infrastructure blown up, don't use them as weapons caches in flagrant violation of the Geneva convention. I really don't see what's so complicated about this.
You claimed that Israel was being restrained and fighting with one arm behind their back.
When did I say that?
But when I look at what's left of Gaza now the idea that this is Israel being restrained just makes me believe that they need to be stopped or denazified before they get the chance to do this to anyone else.
How do you think Israel ought to have prosecuted a war against a combatant like Hamas? What would you have done differently?
I disagree. I suspect most of the people loudly chanting "defund the police" in the summer of 2020 would be very embarrassed if you pointed that out to them five years later. And as for the people actually calling to abolish the police, forget it.
Data points: in June 2020, 34% of Americans supported defunding the police. Nine months later, that figure had fallen to 18%. By October 2021, only 15% of Americans wanted police departments defunded at all, of which 9% only wanted them defunded "a little" (Ctrl-F "a little").
In other words, at most one-sixth (probably more like one-twentieth) of the US are progressive diehards, and a further sixth (or perhaps a quarter) will pretend to be progressive diehards so long as they think it's socially advantageous to do so.
If by "change their minds on the underlying subject" you mean "most BLM people think it's bad when the police kill unarmed black people who are not resisting arrest" — that was never the part of the movement that was under dispute. Even MAGA types agreed that this was bad. Even Bill O'Reilly was horrified by the Eric Garner case.
see the story about the IDF soldier who killed himself because he couldn't live with being the driver
"Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
They deployed more explosive power relative to the size of their target than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
... which they deployed over the course of two entire years, as opposed to all of that explosive power being released in one go. And the death toll in that period was between a quarter* and three-fifths** of the death toll of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, making it abundantly clear that the primary function of all this explosive ordnance was not the taking of human life for its own sake, but the destruction of Hamas's tunnel network.
I'm baffled as to how you expect me to be horrified by this metric.
*Assuming a death toll of 246k in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a death toll of 63k in Gaza.
**Assuming a death toll of 150k in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a death toll of 90k in Gaza
FtttG
10d ago
You're just never going to drop the "Israel is committing genocide" thing, are you?
Well, for my money the Current Thing at the moment is the hot war in Gaza. So assuming that specific war ends and stops being the Current Thing, my question is what will be the next Current Thing other than the hot war in Gaza.
Personally, I am sceptical that "the relationship between the US and Israel" will become the thing that everyone in the Anglosphere is talking about in the way that e.g. the conflict in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, BLM and Covid were. Even if a majority of Americans want something (such as AIPAC being brought to heel), that doesn't mean it'll be the thing that everyone is talking about (indeed, per the toxoplasma criterion, controversial things get discussed more than things about which there is widespread agreement).
none of the normies who supported Palestine because it was the Current Thing are going to forget what they saw Zionists and those funded by them do
I think you greatly overestimate the staying power of Current Things and the degree of emotional investment normies hold in them. I think that, by Christmas, an absolute majority of normies will have completely forgotten about the "genocide" they spent two years performatively condemning. In the US, Google searches for "Black Lives Matter" peaked in June 2020 and had fallen to 6% of the peak by December. Of the people who posted a black square on their Instagrams in the summer of 2020, what proportion of them do you think could name an unarmed black person killed by a police officer since George Floyd? Of the people calling for others to mask up and calling the unvaccinated "plague rats", I suspect that a majority of them believe that literally no one has died of Covid since the lockdowns ended. Out of sight, out of mind.
Think about how much the average American (even the average Democratic-voting American) cared about the Palestinian cause before October 7th, 2023. By January, I think they'll have regressed to the historical mean. Expecting anything else is almost certainly the product of wishful thinking.
FtttG
11d ago
Firing tank shells into Churches
From what I can gather it was a fragment of a single tank shell which struck a single church by mistake. Your hyperbolic condemnation of every single thing Israel does is counterproductive.
It might be a local Current Thing in the US for some time to come, but it didn't seem to get much traction in the wider Anglosphere. In Ireland, people had already stopped talking about it by the following week.
In the UK, according to Google Trends, searches for his name peaked the day he was killed and had fallen to one-fifth of their peak by September 13th. Numbers for Ireland, Canada and Australia are practically identical.
FtttG
11d ago
You're absolutely right, I didn't mean "the most important issue facing the world right now". I simply meant "the issue that everyone is talking about", regardless of its importance.
FtttG
11d ago
I can definitely envision nationwide anti-ICE protests in the same ballpark as 2020 BLM next year.
I may have exaggerated slightly. Prior to Covid, the gay marriage referendum was the thing everyone in Ireland was talking about for the first half of 2015 and several months prior. The campaign to legalise abortion via constitutional amendment was likewise a really big deal for several years prior to its successful legalisation in 2018, occupying discussions almost as much as Brexit and Orange Man Bad (Irish people would put "Repeal the 8th" in their Instagram or Tinder bios, and plain black sweaters with the word "REPEAL" emblazoned on them in all caps sold in their tens of thousands). One sometimes gets the impression that progressive politicians and activists in Ireland were victims of their own success: after both gay marriage and abortion were legalised with massive public mandates, they found themselves at a bit of a loss for what to do next, hence their eagerness to lend their support for foreign causes like Ukraine and Gaza. Neither nebulously-defined "trans rights", nor farcical efforts to portray Black Lives Matter as a movement which has the slightest relevance to Irish politics, scratch quite the same itch. The campaign to amend the Irish constitution to remove any reference to "marriage" or "mothers" was a resounding failure, being rejected even by many who consider themselves progressive. Likewise the so-called "hate speech bill", which was never put to a public vote but which was so controversial that it was shelved.
Other than those two, in the linked post, I listed some domestic Irish issues which were the Current Thing in Ireland — but, as a rule, only for the duration of a single news cycle. For a few weeks in January 2022, everyone was talking about the murder of Ashling Murphy, then promptly forgot about it as soon as her killer was arrested, and immediately started talking obsessively about Ukraine for the next twenty months.
Looking back over the past two years, I sincerely cannot think of any domestic Irish event or issue which captured the public's imagination (or had nearly as much staying power) as much as the conflict in Gaza has. There have been literally hundreds of protests against Israel across the country; both our prime minister and President have weighed in on the conflict several times, as has virtually every recently-minted Irish celebrity (and some less recently minted); our government are considering passing a bill which would make it a criminal offense to do business with certain Israeli firms and so on and so forth. The only domestic issues which even came close to this level of omnipresence were a) the ongoing debate about immigration, and by extension the anti-immigration riots in Dublin in November 2023; and b) the civil rape trial against Conor McGregor, which everyone was talking about from the tail end of last year and early this year.
Working much better today.
Thank you for all your tireless work Zorba, you really are the unsung hero of this space.
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