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Contentious C

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    NFL 2023-24 - DIVISIONAL ROUND

    in FOOTBALL

    Posted

    Is it just me, or does Jared Goff look just a little like Ryan Gosling, especially when he's in the game with the helmet on? It's the beadiness of the eyes.

    I'm calling him Lion Goffling from now on. You do what you want.

    • Like 1

    Stuff. Not good. Not bad. Just...stuff.

    in LAND OF CONFUSION

    Posted

    I think my neighbors might share one brain cell among the 10-12 of them on this end of the hall.

    I've had to deal with one brain donor slamming his doors over and over again, because evidently it's impossible to hire a professional to fix the problem.  My door has a door closer on it.  That's...literally all you need to keep it from slamming if you set the tension correctly.  This dipshit?  Well, he's been out in the hall fucking with the door for the last 90 minutes, and has managed to slam it about 30+ times in that time frame while being a fuck-up.  Thanks, dude.

    And that's the "good" neighbor, not the drug-dealing wannabe-thug fuckface, or the dumb asshole who lets her child scream like a pig in an abbatoir every time she sets foot in the hallway, or the 'argues at 1 AM through the bedroom wall and slams doors to pout' fuckface.

    2023-24 NBA SEASON: 1st Half

    in BASKETBALL

    Posted

    It almost seems like Kobe's last bit of 20th-dimensional chess to fuck over the Celtics.  "Yeah, if I work with this kid for the summer, he'll think he's a straight killer, but I know he isn't, and Boston isn't going to give up on him because he's too good, but just not good enough...yeah, this'll get us to 18 before them as he keeps killing their hopes and dreams."

    The more I think about it, the less insane it sounds.  I hate my life.

    • Haha 1

    DVD/BR Collector Thread for the Physical Media Enthusiasts

    in MOVIES & TV

    Posted · Edited by Contentious C

    Picnic is indeed a 4K re-release.  It's been in the catalog a while.

    If I did a top 10, it could just about only be Kurosawa, and you could look at it and go, "Yeah, good list."  I don't know if it's unfair or lucky that one person did that much quality work.  And although I have the Bergman set, I literally have not opened it and haven't watched a second of anything inside in 10 years.  I think I watched Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring ages ago and didn't really appreciate either of them (not that there's a lot to 'appreciate' about the latter). 

    But, you said, "Who's doing a list?" so here's your fucking list, 5 dead obvious picks off my shelf and 5 "I wish more people went to bat for them" picks...

    1. Ikiru (duh)
    2. 8 1/2 (double duh)
    3. The Piano
    4. In the Mood for Love (my first ever Criterion, picked a doozy)
    5. Late Spring
    6. Videodrome
    7. Insomnia
    8. Diabolique
    9. Repo Man
    10. 45 Years

    And, aside from the aforementioned Bergman, here's my top 10 Backlog of Shame discs sitting on my shelf (because evidently I'd rather watch shitty movies; no particular order):

    • McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    • Nashville
    • Eraserhead
    • Topsy-Turvy
    • Paris, Texas
    • Au Hasard Balthazar
    • Throne of Blood
    • Stalker
    • The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice
    • The Human Condition

    Obviously I hate myself.

    • Like 1

    The All Purpose Comics Industry News Thread

    in READING & WRITING

    Posted · Edited by Contentious C

    I don't know how many of you give a crap, and I generally am not an industry head by any means, but one guy on Youtube has been around for about a year and has released some of the most well-researched and compelling comics video essays I've seen.  Hell, just some of the best video essays period.  Here's his latest. 

    If you haven't seen some of his stuff before, have fun losing the rest of the afternoon.  He seems to put out maybe one a month and they're all interesting stories, spending as much time digging into long past artists as modern things.  And unlike some jackholes on YT, he actually credits his sources.

    • Like 1

    2024 MOVIES DISCUSSION THREAD

    in MOVIES & TV

    Posted · Edited by Contentious C

    Yeah.

    El Dorado - Hey, some laughs, some snappy banter, some misunderstandings and gunfights, a little bit of proto-buddy-cop drama, and it works - at least until it had to hit its racism quota for a Western of the period. Thanks for that winning decision as a capper.  But, this is generally pretty good, even if it's evidently a retread of Rio Bravo and would be retread again for Rio Lobo.  In that sense, it's a little weird that this passes for one of the films that Assault on Precinct 13 was copying, since Carpenter managed to copy the form of the film without even the slightest hint of what made this work: the characters and the dialogue.

    School Ties - Yet another "saw a million commercials but never watched it" special.  Oddest detail here is that it was written by DICK WOLF, yes, that Dick Wolf of L&O fame (not the bad internet meme one).  I guess if you wanted to switch from very young James Caan being a racist to very young Matt Damon being a racist, you could watch these two movies back-to-back, too.  Turns out, the guy who cheated on the history exam *did* still get into Harvard, majored in history, and then portrayed the guy who could blithely read dry history textbooks and ruminate about how many Harvard grad students worshipped Gordon Wood as deftly as he could throw hands.  But the movie is just OK, another Wal-mart brand Dead Poet's Society.

    Teaching Mrs. Tingle - Guy famous for boring Katie Holmes TV vehicles writes and directs boring Katie Holmes film. 

    OK, look: Helen Mirren has never seemed shy about sexualized roles. She's done some smutty stuff, and I'm not saying this movie needed to be particularly smutty (certainly not above and beyond what would keep it PG-13). But, how do you have her play a buttoned-up, sexually repressed character named Mrs. TINGLE, who spends most of the movie *tied to a bed* and who claims to have been married to a man named DICK TINGLE, and yet the sexiest thing she gets to do the whole time is get snuggled by a passed-out Jeffrey Tambor? The jokes should have written themselves! Yeesh. What a waste.

    3 stars for Marisa Coughlan, especially the Exorcist scene; subtract one for everything else, especially the dumbass ending, and certainly for our society's weird goddamn fetish for Katie Holmes in the late 90s. So undeserving of her level of fame.

    Minari - Maybe Lee Isaac Chung just bounces off me.  Granted, his other movie is like taking a Toad the Wet Sprocket song and stretching it into a 90 minute movie, so almost anything would be an improvement over that.  I suppose it doesn't help I watched this on Hoopla, which, for whatever reason, made this look far grainier than it should have for a digital film made in 2020.  But even then, really? That's the message? Trust in water dowsing? Ugh. Also, the parents were just selfish pricks who hadn't realized they were each married to a selfish prick until the prickery started stabbing one another. Sort of wanted them both to fail, just not at the expense of a friggin' stroke victim who shouldn't have been left alone.  If I'm going to watch Steven Yeun be a smug asshole, I'll just watch Burning again.

    It's pretty, though, I guess.  Just don't expect me to buy into movies about 'having faith' that things will work out.  Look around you; they really don't, and if they did for you, it's probably dumb luck, the choices you made, or both.

    Natural Born Killers - A lot of people took a stab at the same message about the same time: Wild at Heart, Man Bites Dog, True Romance to a lesser extent, but this might be the best of those films because it's the most committed to its style. There's nothing straight about this: not the story, not the presentation, not the camera angles, not the dialogue, not the performances, and certainly not the path it takes. The crazy little funhouse-mirror warpings of faces here and there aren't distortions, set against that background; they're the only moments where we see something like a true reality stepping forward.

    I think it's a bit simplistic to say this film merely wants to talk about how violent media propagates violence in broader society. I think it's more to do with the role media plays in shaping *all* appetites, sharpening far too many little urges and momentary impulses to razor's edges that leave us to suffer not a death by a thousand cuts, but a life shredded, rendered less-than by them. In that respect, the film this most resembles is none of its contemporaries, but instead (fittingly enough) Putney Swope.

    Tarantino may have a wheelbarrow full of complaints about how this was handled, but, frankly, Oliver Stone was working on a whole other level with the idea. Tarantino may have made a better film that year when he made Pulp Fiction, but I doubt he could have made a movie this good from his material.  And I'm not sure Tommy Lee Jones had any business winning Best Supporting Actor for The Fugitive in 1993, but goddamn if he didn't nearly deserve it here (that's the award Martin Landau won instead of Sam Jackson, for anyone else keeping score).

    • Like 1

    Stuff. Not good. Not bad. Just...stuff.

    in LAND OF CONFUSION

    Posted

    Just now, zendragon said:

    well Jonas Sulk could have gotten wealthy off of the polio vaccine but was like "fuck it, its free"

    But yhea don't go to celebs for commentary on stuff just cause their fame gives them a platform

    Even worse than that, the guy who discovered insulin and how to produce it sold the patent for $1, thinking that doing so would increase its access. 

    100 years, Eli Lilly, Sanofi Aventis, and Novo Nordisk later, a box of pens costs $1000 (thus all the price cap chatter).

    • Sad 2

    2024 MOVIES DISCUSSION THREAD

    in MOVIES & TV

    Posted

    I think there are multiples of all 3 anyway.  Or at least, Terminator had releases prior to Harlan Ellison suing Cameron due to ripping him off.  I don't actually know what differences there are/were with Alien anyway, but my guess is they are minor (a Google search just talks about tracking and sequence length, so that's basically nil). 

    I have the Alien Anthology Blu-rays, so it turns out that has both cuts anyway.

    2024 MOVIES DISCUSSION THREAD

    in MOVIES & TV

    Posted

    Well, it's not really a "belief" - it's what some of us have mentioned about the unicorn dream sequence.  That wasn't in the original versions, and Scott added it back later to riff on the unicorn figurine that Gaff leaves at Deckard's door step at the end.  It's supposed to be, in Ridley's eyes, a 100% guarantee that he is a replicant, but you can tell how I feel about that from the post I wrote earlier.

    Of course, almost none of that matters, because given the plot details of 2049, he almost certainly is one and that's a critical component of why K's search matters.  Niander Wallace wouldn't give a fuck if replicants could breed with humans, because it isn't necessarily self-sustaining.

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