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Robert Denby posted:"Lost Highway" ends with Bill Pullman's character convulsing and apparently having some kind of seizure while a blue flashing light surrounds him. Earlier in the film, Robert Blake's Mystery Man character tells him of how in "the east, the far east", executioners would lie in wait, and not warn prisoners before suddenly shooting them in the back of the head. Could that last scene be Pullman in the electric chair, but so deep in his mind that he can't actually register that's what's actually happening to him? I've had that thought too, but remember, you see the same thing happen when he transforms into Balthazar Getty. So it could be like... his inevitable death in the electric chair is the boundary of his existence; he can live out the alternate fantasy life, or lives, maybe forever, but he'll inevitably crash against that barrier.
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May 31, 2012 00:48
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Atticus Bongman posted:Just one more in a long line of Chekhov's Machine Things RZA's movie The Man With the Iron Fists does a clever version of this. As narrator, RZA makes a big deal of the fact that the approaching government troops have a gatling gun. Then the climactic action scene ends with the gun being stopped just before it begins firing. It never actually fires at any point in the movie. I thought it was clever, at least
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Dec 8, 2012 23:28
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Here's the thing though: nobody is going to throw away their lives to avoid eating a loving strudel. Sometimes a film does stuff independent of any character in it choosing to do that thing as part of their grand plan, you know? Especially in a film that calls attention to itself as metafilmic.
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Mar 19, 2013 04:43
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RyuujinBlueZ posted:The problem is, Kubrick is well known for being more or less that exact level of batshit insane. So while some of it might be reaching too far or seeing things that really aren't there, there's a legitimate chance that the majority of it is true. Even the tiny, stupid poo poo that literally no sane individual would ever notice. Nah. It's not a matter of whether the interpretation is "true" or not (do you think there's a secret film can moldering in someone's basement with "The Real Shining" inside?), that's some TV Tropes poo poo, but rather of whether it's interesting, whether it's consistent, whether it has a point. But the other thing is, you can do that sort of analysis with literally any movie. There'll always be weird stuff around the edges, blurring of symbolism with reality, possible implications that can never be followed up on, confusion of cause and effect etc because it's loving fiction. It bears the hallmarks of having been constructed according to some weird unseen but hinted-at logic because it was.
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Jun 20, 2013 00:20
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A cool subtle thing in Watchmen was how the camera leered in slow motion at the rape and violence like a horny dork whose sense of reality is so filtered through garbage culture that the horror of mortality no longer registers in his mind except as a comfortingly familiar plot mover. That was awesome.
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Aug 26, 2013 21:39
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A saber is a single-edged sword. Lightsabers are single-edged too, it's just that the edge covers the entire blade.Pook Good Mook posted:Well it does kind of stick out when you realize the blade of the lightsaber has no mass so you really shouldn't swing it around like you need to get momentum, short stabs and the like would probably be thousands of times more effective. Kinetic energy definitely transfers when the blades hit each other though 
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Apr 7, 2014 22:46
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The Master, the one where Philip Seymour Hoffman plays an L Ron Hubbard-type guru, has some good ones. 1) The Master's idea of "processing"-- he's convinced himself there's something mystical about the process of repeating something over and over until it sounds like nonsense. You can totally see how this works in the scene where he has Joaquin Phoenix repeating the action of walking from one wall to the other until he breaks down and starts to say weird-sounding poo poo, and the one where he has him repeat the name of the girlfriend he bailed on over and over; hey, he's able to say her name with no affect except ridiculousness now, so we must have processed the trauma away. In general, whenever the veil of obscurantism over The Master's actual beliefs is lifted, they come off as trivial to the point of stupidity 2) He keeps slipping his own sci fi terminology into serious conversations, e.g. "YOU'VE BEEN IMPLANTED WITH A PUSH-PULL MECHANISM" 3) He was planning to have a free love fuckfest at the super-credulous lady's mansion, the one where there's a party and Phoenix imagines all the women naked. This is obviously what his wife is talking about while she jerks him off into the sink, but I missed it the first time because I thought it was an allusion to a plot point we'd see later. 4) Everything he tells Phoenix about their shared "past life" is factoids that would be way more accesible to someone who read about that battle in an encyclopedia than someone who was there
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Sep 26, 2014 19:18
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Wiggles Von Huggins posted:A cool video in which Bjork almost kills herself by touching the components inside of a television. Bjork reveals that she was afraid to watch TV for years because someone made a confused attempt to explain scanlines to her
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Mar 18, 2015 21:03
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KozmoNaut posted:I don't give a poo poo, I think Björk's totally adorable (including her accent). No I agree. A minute before she reveals this she's talking about how the parts inside the TV look like a tiny city. She's cool
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Mar 19, 2015 04:54
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Rev. Bleech_ posted:Why did it take people so long to figure out Frank Miller has been basically writing the same grumpy old man story for 30 years anyway? i think it has something to do with Watchmen. Everyone in the industry read it and was like "why can't our poo poo be that good? Who can we hire that can do this?" But the mega-unsubtle point of Watchmen is that if you put them in a more realistic world, superheroes are a fascist fantasy of suppressing society's problems with violence forever. If you accept that but you still want to put out Batman comics where Batman does basically the same stuff and is still the hero, you need someone who can and will write stories where Batman has no choice but to sweep out those ghettos in his tank car. ("Rubber bullets. Honest") And if you don't care about the politics of it, it all seems equivalent, it's all just gritty badass stuff source: Alan Moore said some of this and i accepted it uncritically because it makes sense to me, also even at 17 i was reading Sin City and thinking it was hosed up
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May 6, 2017 17:48
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This isn't that subtle but I didn't get it as a kid: in Blazing Saddles, the running joke isn't just that Bart is black, it's that he's a black hipster from the 70s transplanted into a Western. He's smarter and more sophisticated than all the racist white people around him, but it doesn't even register on them. They don't know who Cole Porter is, they don't get wordplay, they just know he's black and therefore less-than. That's low key a pretty good critique of racism.
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Jun 11, 2017 20:27
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Krispy Kareem posted:Except that everyone in Blazing Saddles is playing actors in an 1970's studio backlot. its layered ok
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Jun 12, 2017 23:11
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