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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4056 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 17, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Good list, but missing some big ones, especially from comedy. His Girl Friday, Some Like it Hot, Dr. Strangelove, Die Hard, Tootsie, Network, Star Wars IV, Airplane!, Rambo, Gone with the Wind, and I’d throw in some Marx bros. and James Bond.

I tried to stick to movies that depict the actual times of the 20th Century, so no Star Wars or Gone With the Wind. And I tried to avoid -- with the exception of the first movie, which is a bit of a thematic gag to start it off -- obvious fantasy elements. My object was to pick movies that reflect mostly real-ish events and lifestyles. In that vein, Le Carre is a more apt type of spy storyteller than Fleming. I think I did a poor job of outlining parameters. But it's interesting to see how others interpret the prompt.

‘Realism’ is an aesthetic as artificial as absurdism in many (most?) cases IMO. Le Carre seems more ‘real’ because of his tragic tone but his MI6 was just as fantastical as the shark tanks Bond swings over using his wrist-watch grapplehook. But jokes and fantasies are often better than serious drama to grok the spirit of a time. Contemporary films about the past always carry with them modern concerns, no matter their fidelity in set dressing, so we can’t come to a true meeting of minds across time. But stuff like this or this can let us peek across that chasm, if only to realize how big that gap is.

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