The Rehearsal AND Paul T Goldman AND The Curse AND Green Queen Discussion

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MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

fez_machine posted:

At the very least, it's got a few similarities to a course of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for social anxiety I did. Where you map out what you expect and then measure how close the actual experience was to your expectations, and usually, like in the show, the reality is people don't react very strongly and there's very little social consequences for the things you think are shameful, unusual, or will inspire a bad reaction.

I was just coming here to post this. It�s funny that this show is both lower stakes than NFY, because someone�s livelihood isn�t involved, and higher stakes, because it�s their personal relationships instead.

At first it made me feel a bit queasier about the setup, but it was fascinating to see how Nathan�s approach was actually a sort of funhouse approximation of some types of therapy, and in particular cognitive behavioral therapy.

The scene where they simulate the worst case scenario and the entire crowd comments on him not having a masters felt bad at first, but then you realize that it�s actually a safe way to experience your nightmare and come out the other side better prepared to overcome your own mental challenges.

Also I laughed harder than I have in a long time at the escalating trivia knowledge setups culminating in the cop, especially the gratuitous �he shot someone on the head on the way in.�

# ¿ Jul 18, 2022 08:05

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 17:22

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

As someone who loved NFY and read up a bunch about how they filmed it, I don't get this discussion at all. I can guarantee that Nathan planned from the very beginning to tie the plotline up with the rehearsed actor confession/real cop-out confession juxtaposition, because he and his writers are ultimately trying to produce a cohesive comedic meta-narrative at the end of the day. The confession with the fake Kor could just as easily have been filmed before or after -- they're equally plausible, and equally narratively inconsequential.

What we see in the episode is the tip of the iceberg in terms of filming and production and the result of extremely selective and manipulated editing. Nathan is literally telling us that in the premise of the show itself.

This is like watching the new Top Gun and then complaining that people are gushing about how they actually filmed the air combat in fighter jets even though the actors weren't actually piloting the planes or doing any of the maneuvering.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2022 11:06

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Genuine question, Tycho:

Do you feel the same way about people who end up featured in some of Derren Brown's elaborate scenarios? Why or why not? Did they not sign up to feature in programs that clearly set out to manipulate them in order to make them and the audience experience specific emotions?

# ¿ Jul 19, 2022 11:58

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Ginette Reno posted:

That Richard Brody review on the New Yorker is so bad. How you could watch this show and so thoroughly miss the point I have no idea

I actually don't mind Brody's takes most of the time, since he's at least usually sincere in his takes and not just a pretentious contrarian, but this quote stood out as a massive :goofy:

quote:

Fielder can�t relinquish control; his obsession with details, with predicted outcomes, suggests his very failure as a filmmaker�the failure to find a dramatic form for the full range of the series�s implications and experiences. If the series is meant to be comedy, so much the worse, for making light of problems that matter to the participants�and for making even lighter of the deceptions to which he subjects them.

Also that he states he likes and approves of Borat movies because they�re political satire, whereas this is just narcissistic deception.

MeinPanzer fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Aug 1, 2022

# ¿ Aug 1, 2022 06:42

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Let�s not kid ourselves�there obviously is judgment involved, especially when the show highlights negative features of people (like Patrick�s antisemitic comments). It�s just often presented in the bone dry manner of all of Nathan�s stuff, so it seems more neutrally documentarian. But as we�ve established, these people have all signed up to be on TV wanting to get something out of that experience (even if it�s just 15 minutes of fame) knowing full well that artifice will be involved.

The thing about Brody is that he doesn�t seem to recognize that what Nathan is doing here, and even more so in NFY, is so obviously satire of media culture, and is thus political. The running theme of the show so far is how you can create true human experiences using deception�in a time when criticisms of truth in media are rampant. He might criticize the show for being cruel, which I get to a certain extent�though a lot of more straightforward documentaries are, too�but arguing that it�s not satire is just bizarre.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2022 08:05

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Here's the full thing for anyone who can't access it:

quote:

Nathan Fielder is a master of the look, or, rather, of the Look. That capital-letter stare is the visual center of Fielder�s new series, �The Rehearsal,� on HBO Max. It�s the stare in which parents hold children, teachers hold students, judges hold the accused. It's the look of mastery itself�the optical grip that makes subjects squirm. It�s the look of power. But Fielder�s subjects are volunteers, and they submit to his power in anticipation that he will do them some good. In �The Rehearsal,� Fielder�s idea is that behavior is predictable and that he himself is good at predicting it. His volunteers come to him with a problem; his plan is that, when these real people rehearse, with the help of actors, the scenarios involved in these troubles, they�ll be able to anticipate possible outcomes and thus bring about their desired one. But his idea of rehearsal is no mere verbal joust around a table. He is obsessed with the influence of physical setting on behavior, and on tiny fillips of behavior on large-scale results; he re-creates, as enormous and intricate sets, the subjects� relevant environments.

Take the first subject, in Episode 1�a Brooklyn man of about fifty, a teacher named Kor Skeete. A longtime member of a trivia team, Kor wants to come clean about a lie: he has claimed to have a master�s degree when he has only a bachelor�s. Arriving in Kor�s apartment to plan the rehearsals, breaking the ice with small talk, Fielder�rather, let�s call his onscreen character Nathan�confesses to Kor that this very interaction was the product of Nathan�s own rehearsal. Fielder (the director, working behind the scenes) had dispatched a faux crew to Kor�s apartment to investigate a nonexistent gas leak; the crew actually photographed and mapped the apartment; a film crew built a life-size replica of Kor�s apartment in a studio; Fielder recruited an actor to play Kor, and planned the small talk down to the detail�including this confession. In Nathan�s rehearsal of this confession, the actor responds, �Wow.� To Nathan�s actual confession, Kor also responds, �Wow.� In that cut from the actor to the subject, Fielder is manifestly impressed with his own methods and his own acumen.

At that moment, barely five minutes into the first episode, I wanted to throw my laptop across the room or just to throw Nathan Fielder out of it. Not only is the gas-crew deception itself a reckless betrayal, but the gaze of superiority and dominance that he casts upon Kor struck me as arrogant, cruel, and, above all, indifferent. What I hoped for, more than anything, was for Kor to tell Nathan to get out of his apartment and his life�to cut his losses. What I craved was, at least, to hear Nathan ask Kor what that place-filler �Wow� means�to ask him for emotional specifics�and to hear Kor speak of his own feelings about being tricked. No such luck: Kor continues to play along, and Nathan shows no interest in what Kor thinks of being deceived by the man to whom (as Nathan says in voice-over) he has entrusted his life.

The show breezes by key questions, such as what Fielder�who sought his volunteers by placing a Craigslist post�promised the subjects, what was required of them, what they expected of the process, and what involvement, if any, in the ultimate broadcast product they�d have. Fielder doesn�t address these matters at all in subsequent episodes.

Deception prevails throughout. Fielder sets up a fake Web site in order to lure a woman named Tricia, to whom Kor is planning to make his confession, into the project unawares (and the deception goes far, even to a faux job for her); we never find out when she learned what she�d been roped into. When Nathan takes Kor on a skeet-shooting trip to upstate New York, he arranges for the rifles to shoot blanks; when they go swimming, Nathan arranges for a third man to interrupt a moment of mutual confession; ahead of a trivia contest, Nathan arranges an elaborate series of seemingly accidental encounters that feed the answers to the unwitting Kor. The latter, especially, Nathan recognizes as a betrayal (Kor refers to the group�s trivia contests as �sacrosanct�), and he frets about it; he shows a rehearsal of himself confessing it to an actor playing Kor and getting a bitterly angry response. As a result, Nathan never lets on whether he confessed to Kor. (The show also leaves it unclear whether he ever let Tricia know what she was being tricked into.) We have no idea how or when Kor found out about the trick, or how he took it when he did.

Classics of docu-fiction provide instructive comparisons. In Jean Rouch�s �The Human Pyramid,� from 1961, students who have improvised dramas based on their own lives also view the footage and comment on it. William Greaves�s �Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One,� from 1968, features the crew filming themselves and criticizing the director�who includes that footage in the movie. Fielder�s crew members remain nonentities, mere onscreen emblems of planning and labor, even as, throughout, I wished that his cast and crew had symbio-ed him�had spoken their minds on camera about their work with him. It isn�t a matter of time but of care. By contrast, �The Rehearsal� plays like a multipart embodiment of the joke (whether Jack Handey�s or Steve Martin�s), �Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.�

The second episode introduces a forty-four-year-old woman named Angela, who would like to have a child but has no man in her life, and is wondering whether she should become a single mother. To help her figure it out, Fielder plants her in a large house in a small Oregon town, fills the house with surveillance cameras, and hires child actors�from babies to teen-agers�to portray Angela�s potential child. (Fielder is more explicit about the practical complications of working with child actors�the time limits, the negotiation of parental consent�than about his main participants� personal reactions, expectations, or involvement.) Nathan also tries to help her find a partner with whom to rear the faux-child, whom she names Adam�and, when that doesn�t work out, Nathan himself volunteers to function as Adam�s co-parent. (His participation in the fictitious family life shifts the tenor of the series without changing his approach to the subjects.) Angela presents herself as a devout Christian; she displays an obsession with the dangers of satanic cults and gives voice to some remarkable conspiracy theories regarding the power of the Devil in daily life, yet his gimlet-eyed dubiousness about these ideas remains retentive and incurious, without any probing of causes and sources and without the scathing political satire of �Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.�

The terms and conditions of Angela�s participation in �The Rehearsal��her sense of who Fielder is and what he does and of the practices that inhere in the production�would be all the more interesting to hear, given her briefly voiced skepticism regarding mainstream-media life. They�d be even more meaningful as glimmers of her discomfort�and her own motives, even her own deceptions�turn up. Similarly, a third participant, an Oregon man named Patrick, submits himself to Fielder�s methods in order to confront his brother, the executor of their grandfather�s estate, who is denying him his inheritance. In order to put Patrick in the right mind-set, Nathan pulls an elaborate prank involving a rehearsal actor and his ostensible real life (which is actually staged); here, too, Patrick�s response to an apparent absurdity, let alone a deception, goes unvoiced. In voice-over, Nathan expresses an odd bewilderment about his power to �create feelings for other people�s rehearsals� but not for himself. It�s a bewilderment that reflects the intellectual and emotional blankness at the center of �The Rehearsal.� First, Fielder can�t prank himself; he is pulling the strings. Second, his participants�Kor, Angela, and Patrick�have come to him with problems that he�s supposed to help them solve, whereas Fielder, whatever personal problems he may be working out in the course of the series, has one overriding problem that gets in the way of them all: his very authority.

As a filmmaker, Fielder displays interest not in any physical process unfolding over time but in his own intellectual process�in the authentic ingenuity of the working out of his conceit, which the onscreen events merely exemplify, like data points rather than experiences. He revels in his own thoughts as he tailors the conditions of his subjects� lives to fit his storytelling, largely through his own voice-over. Fielder�s main real-life stake is the one onscreen: making the show a success. The vanity and the ambition of �The Rehearsal� are its driving forces. Fielder can�t relinquish control; his obsession with details, with predicted outcomes, suggests his very failure as a filmmaker�the failure to find a dramatic form for the full range of the series�s implications and experiences. If the series is meant to be comedy, so much the worse, for making light of problems that matter to the participants�and for making even lighter of the deceptions to which he subjects them. And, if �The Rehearsal� were revealed to be not documentary at all but a mockumentary�a throughgoing fiction, pranking us all, in which no real-life subjects have volunteered�it would be only a wet squib of disingenuous self-deprecation that exhausts itself in the first minutes of the first episode. Fielder goes in to confirm results, the prime one being his own powers of mastery, of anticipation, and, above all, of entertainment. As the series goes on (tiny spoiler), Fielder amps up the complexity of his rehearsals, creating an ever-deeper spiral of preparations and impersonations. His cleverness masks the hollowness of his schemes. No digression, no incidentals, no loose ends can intrude on Fielder�s taut, compact, self-contained sketches. He looks the Look at the people he films, but doesn�t seem to see them.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2022 11:59

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Enjoyed the episode on a conceptual level, but I can't help but feel that the charm of the show is a bit diminished now for two reasons:

1. I was really hoping we would get one more relatively straightforward rehearsal before the show went full Synecdoche New York. The Patrick one was great while it lasted but it didn't include the catharsis of the full experience with the real encounter we got with Kor. Maybe we'll still get another proper rehearsal next episode, but I doubt it at this point.

2. As weird as it may sound, now that the anticipated layers of Inception-style artifice are in full swing and it's relatively clear what direction the show is going, some of the beats feel a bit... rote? Like the moment he mentioned that he was gone for longer than he'd anticipated I assumed that the kid would be in his teens and that they would make the scenario uncomfortable. I can't fault the show for following through with its own logic, but it's a bit less fun than episodes 2-3 where it really felt like things could go anywhere.

I'm ready to be surprised and delighted by the conclusion to the whole season, but I do wish it was 1-2 episodes longer just to give us a bit more time to settle into and enjoy the craziness.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2022 08:53

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

I watched the most recent episode yesterday and after being woken up by a loud thunder storm in the middle of the night I got to thinking about why I'm finding the most recent episodes funny but not really that interesting.

I think basically The Rehearsal is two shows jammed into one. The Kor and Patrick rehearsals are a deeper, more profound NFY. The rest of the episodes are a more heavily scripted drama about "Nathan's" search for meaning.

I find the former to be incredibly entertaining and interesting because it presents us with a giddy sense of true unpredictability. After watching the first episode, I could never have guessed that they would have proceeded to some guy who has to convince his brother that his (apparently incredibly racist) girlfriend isn't a gold digger, and then have him actually search in the woods for gold with someone's fake grandpa.

I find the latter to be entertaining, but a lot less interesting, because it's been predictably unpredictable. Once the premise of the family rehearsal was explained, I and many others in this thread basically anticipated what kind of narrative turns the story would take, with an Inception-style dive into rehearsals-for-rehearsals, having an actor replace Nathan in some scenarios, etc. There were individual parts, like Nathan living in that one actor's apartment in LA, that were really funny, but the show lost that spark for me once it transitioned to focusing on Angela and the child actors, with the thrill of setting up new wacky scenarios receding into the background. None of the more recent episodes rival the pure concentrated craziness of first meeting Angela and Robbin in episode 2, either; you kind of get diminishing returns from continuing to hear Angela talk about satanic rituals or whatever.

I'm reserving final judgment until I see the final episode, and I hope they pull some truly crazy finale off that changes my opinion the whole family storyline, but I have to say that at the moment I really wish they had compressed the Angela stuff into two episodes and included another actual rehearsal.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2022 10:12

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Also Angela is 100% pastel Q and I can guarantee that she could tell you in detail about Wayfair's sex trafficking ring.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2022 10:14

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Alan Smithee posted:

that was the last episode? gently caress

No there�s gonna be one more.

quote:

I want to see him go back to lower stakes cases like a private dick for people who overthink poo poo

That�s why I really was hoping for at least one more actual rehearsal. The crazy situational comedy of NFY combined with the emotional depth of this show is really satisfying, and it�s a shame we didn�t get more of it.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2022 12:20

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

The Zionist shpiel and Nathan's discomfort with it is extra funny considering that Nathan and Seth Rogen went to high school and started out in comedy together and Seth got into a little bit of trouble over pretty mildly anti-Zionist comments a couple of years back.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2022 17:24

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Tagichatn posted:

It's pretty wild to see the speculation that Angela is actually a horrible q anon person based on almost nothing. I don't think they'd leave the kids with her if that was the case, they obviously ran Robin off before he would be around a non-robot child.

She�s an evangelical Christian who seriously believes in pervasive satanic cabals and who obviously spends a lot of time on the internet. The chance of her not being into QAnon is infinitesimal.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2022 21:28

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

After watching the final episode and ruminating on it for a bit I think I've come to terms with the fact that this wasn't what I wanted out of a NFY sequel, but I appreciate everything Nathan was doing with it. I'm happy that he didn't go for some Inception-style extra layer of rehearsal as a final twist, and I think the way he treated the situation with Remy in the end was a genuinely great way of reflecting on a number of the critiques that've been levelled at both NFY and the first episodes of this show (especially the argument that he's just exploiting and embarrassing people for his own benefit without reflecting on how it affects them).

I will say, though, that upon reflection the season feels a bit... insubstantial? The show went from 0 to 100 right out of the gate and seemed to be promising insane antics, and by comparison the latter half of the season just felt like a bit of a let down.

Really glad it got renewed, and I hope that for S2 they at least devote a more substantial chunk of runtime to exploring the original premise.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2022 21:55

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Just binged Paul T. Goldman after having it on my to-watch list for a while. I'm a huge fan of Nathan For You and The Rehearsal as well as all kinds of documentaries and meta-documentaries. I found much of it entertaining and was captivated through the course of the series by the anticipation of some big revelations and/or genre-bending developments, but after a bit of reflection it just doesn't sit right with me. I think this show crosses over the ethical line when it comes to using real subjects for entertainment and is ultimately cruel and exploitative.

The fundamental issue for me is that the entire show is built on Paul's obvious (though undiagnosed?) mental illness. People repeatedly describe him as naive, gullible, and childlike throughout. Now in something like The Rehearsal, we get some people who are similarly probably mentally ill (like Robin, the numerology guy), but they tend to be bit players who are involved for maybe a few days or weeks at most. Here Paul's whims are indulged and he is strung along for more than a decade in a production that was obviously designed from the outset to mock him. Whereas Fielder's shows are explicitly reality TV shows, this also takes things to the next level by ostensibly being an opportunity for Paul to film dramatic movies, but only using that as a pretext to set up lots of his awkward on-set interactions as comedic fodder. It feels particularly bad that his defining characteristic is being unable to recognize when exploitative people are using him, and yet here Woliner does exactly that until the rug is pulled out from under him at the screening at the end.

I don't want to minimize Paul's agency, and this doesn't excuse any of his obviously abhorrent behavior, but imagine for a moment that he was bipolar but undiagnosed--would that change the ethics of the show?

Regardless, this would make one hell of a disconcerting double feature with The Act of Killing.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2023 11:43

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

I guess everyone makes this distinction in a different way, but to me Paul's gullibility, lack of interpersonal skills, self-destructive obsessive drive, and delusional thinking all read as symptoms of mental illness, and go well beyond just "being a schlemiel." He also seems to be incredibly isolated, with his only major contacts an emotionally distant father and a son who left him the moment he could to live on the other side of the country (and it's not insignificant that he left right at the beginning of the filming process). Furthermore, it's clear that the divorce settlements, PI wages, and psychic consultations have all drained away much of his money. Again, without dismissing Paul's abhorrent behavior, he appears to be a vulnerable person. Do I think he shouldn't suffer the consequences of his actions? No, he absolutely should, and should probably be issued with a few restraining orders and sued for libel by a number of people. But I also don't think he deserves to be made the subject of a decade-long inside joke to which he is oblivious that deliberately plays into his delusions until it publicly pulls the rug out from under him.

I maybe would have thought about this differently when I was younger, but my experience over the years of seeing "eccentric" friends and family who engaged in comparably irrational and occasionally harmful behavior improving significantly after getting a mental health diagnosis and the help and support they needed makes me hesitate to see Paul as simply a comic character.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2023 19:42

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

We need Werner Herzog to intervene on Woliner�s behalf like the Johnnie Cochran of documentary filmmaking.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2023 13:01

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Just finished The Curse after watching it over the span of a week. I couldn't stop thinking about each episode after I watched it. While I didn't like the finale at first, it's grown on me since.

Comrade Fakename posted:

Seriously though, I wonder how much of this is autobiographical? One of the only things we know about Nathan is that he got divorced recently - I don�t think it�s a stretch to imagine that Asher and Whitney�s relationship is an exaggerated version of Nathan and his ex-wife�s. Both Nathan and Asher produce and star in what, from a production standpoint, are both essentially reality TV shows. Maybe the anti-gravity is an interpretation of Nathan feeling like he was literally yeeted from the marriage.

The last two episodes, when considered from the perspective that the whole show was written by Fielder and Safdie, made clear to me that the whole show is a protracted Freudian fantasy-turned-nightmare produced from a very specific white, heterosexual, male, upper middle class perspective.

Everyone in the show is basically a foil for Asher and his anxieties. But what at first appears to be a liberal comedy of manners employing the medium of reality TV to skewer petit bourgeois sensibilities instead becomes an exploration of Asher's ultimate anxiety: losing Whit. Asher both fears and is sexually excited by the thought of being subordinate to Whit, whether it's through being overshadowed by her in career terms, her ending their relationship, or him being cuckolded by her. This produces a tension between his attempts to present himself in traditional masculine terms and his desire to maintain a relationship with Whit. Will he take his father-in-law's advice and "play the clown," submitting to this perceived humiliation, or will he try to assert himself through expressions of masculinity? The show basically explores this as the situation progresses and the anxiety builds in classic Safdie fashion.

The end of episode 9 makes clear that Asher has embraced his submissive role, and in the beginning of episode 10 it seems that this has produced the desired result. The ultimate proof to the wider world that he is traditionally masculine is Whit's pregnancy, which is why he is so hyperfocused on her menstrual cycle earlier in the show. But this has unwittingly introduced a new psychosexual threat: the potential that a new male, his son, will supersede him as the focus of Whit's attention. Literally the last thing that Asher tells Whit before he ends up on the ceiling, when he's singing to her belly, is "there's a little me inside you."

From this perspective, it makes sense that the arrival of this "little me" literally tears Asher away from Whit. No matter how much he submits himself to her, no matter how much he plays the clown and rolls with the punches, he isn't able to be with his wife. I also don't think it's a coincidence that the doula who takes Whit to the hospital and guides her is another man--a Jewish man no less--thus symbolically cuckolding Asher once again. And the last sequence in which we see Whit and Asher's situations juxtaposed show the former smiling and looking up as the baby is born, while we see the later dying in the upper atmosphere. This is the ultimate anxiety, and Asher's true curse: that Whit will end up with a new Asher who makes her happy but entirely replaces him.

Anyway the show was cool.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2024 16:40

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

I honestly think a lot more of Fielder�s work has been autobiographical than might first appear to be the case. Pretty big chunks of Nathan For You also reflected aspects of his life in different ways.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2024 23:23

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Just watched The Zone of Interest, an amazing movie that's gotten stuck in my head the last couple of days. Then someone commented in the CD thread about the movie that it weirdly echoes The Curse and now I can't stop thinking about the parallels. Both unflinching, unnerving portrayals of middle class striving and complicity with worldly evils as embodied in real estate.

Thankfully, Asher has thrown his weighty business acumen behind educating the world about the Holocaust.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2024 11:11

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 17:22

MeinPanzer: Dec 20, 2004; anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Can't wait till someone replaces the footage of modern janitors cleaning the ovens and piles of shoes at the Auschwitz museum at the end of The Zone of Interest with a clip from the NFY Summit Ice episode.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2024 14:07

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