algroth

Welcome @Shyla!

Ginger Baker

Got tickets to King Crimson this Wednesday as a birthday present, very much looking forward to the concert!

I feel I'd be more interested in that film if I wasn't aware of Clint Eastwood's very vocal stance on "PC culture" and the likes in this more recent era ("we see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist", says someone whose formative years were the 30s and 40s). Already the trailer feels very patronising and I wouldn't be surprised for him to be establishing a direct link between this case and the people who are rather correctly outed for hate speech, sexual misconduct and so on. Which is not to say I'm against decrying social media's tendency to condemn people before they have a chance to defend themselves against allegations, or for misinterpreting one's words and so on (see Jon Ronson's excellent TED talk How One Tweet Can Ruin Your Life for example), but the way he's approached this subject in interviews, statements and so on is one that tells me his position on the matter is no more insightful, informed or empathetic than that of any regular Trump supporter crying oppression when criticized for the use of slurs and the likes. I'll check it out if I hear differently once reviews and early word is out, but right now I can't say I'm looking forward to it.

This immediately makes me think of the Lindsay Ellis video I posted earlier, what with the flurry of "girl boss" statements and so on. But, for what it's worth, it looks better than Suicide Squad for certain.

They certainly know how to target mature audiences at least.

Not "news" per se, but a nice vid all the same!

"O Fortuna!", from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana

Not sure if this has been shared yet, but here's a pretty thorough and well-curated test of longbow vs. armour.

Adam Sandler seems to have taken the pointers Al Pacino gave him in the set of Jack and Jill to heart.

I doubt it, but considering the awards were technical and, I'll add, entirely justified, and Ad Astra does match on a number of areas quite well, I do expect and hope it'll be getting some attention in this regard too. That said, let's talk Ad Astra... The best way the film can be described as is Apocalypse Now meets Interstellar, and despite that rather interesting premise and plenty of excellent individual sequences that recall both films' best qualities, the result is a bit uneven and perhaps somewhat disappointing if nevertheless enjoyable on a whole. The other film it recalls on my end is the theatrical cut of Blade Runner, and in a way suffers essentially the same problems, mainly the voiceover and the somewhat incongruent shift to a positive outcome in an otherwise rather satisfyingly bleak experience. It feels to me that this Heart of Darkness narrative is strongly dependent on the ultimate destination as much as the journey itself, and what it ultimately reveals of the human condition and so on so forth - but the issue with this film is that a ridiculous episode with a stranded ship aside this is clearly the flimsiest and least interesting moment in the entire film. It sort of undoes a lot of the excellent tonal work leading to that point and ultimately trivializes the journey through a fortune-cookie message that could basically be boiled down to "no man is an island and all we have is each other". The voiceover itself does a lot to enforce this and remove subtlety and ambiguity in the themes/discourse. I also feel that no part suffers this issue more than Brad Pitt's wonderfully subtle and restrained performance: channelling a Tony Leung cold, level-headed, emotionally enclosed coolness, a lot can be inferred through the infinitesimal shifts in expression and body pose, in the nervous twitching of an eyelid or the tensing of his jaw (he really does have the most expressive jaw in Hollywood, at that). His performance helps convey a character who is dependant on his despondence and yet is always on the edge of becoming emotionally attatched... Or it would at least, if the voiceover weren't constantly outlining what the character thinks and feels at every turn. Like Blade Runner I'd love to see a version of this film without the voice-over, merely letting the performance speak for itself instead. This aside, the film is an audiovisual wonder regardless, and Hoyte van Hoytema continues to establish himself as the finest cinematographer in the business. The sequences in Mars and beyond are especially eye-popping, and the use of textured lighting and back projections recalls also the very oneiric effect filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky or Polish new wavers like Wojciech Has or Krzysztof Kieslowski would generate with their use of the same techniques (think the opening sequence with the bird projections in The Hour-Glass Sanatorium or the use of water to give texture to lighting in several Tarkovsky films for example). As an experience parts of this are an absolute wonder to behold, aided by Max Richter's excellent score. It's a shame that the film as a whole doesn't quite have the meat to match the experience.

So this makes two unannounced projects being worked at Obsidian?

2019 internet culture in a nutshell.

A proper stomper.

As if The Outer Worlds weren't enough, SWANS have just announced that their new album will be coming out on Oct 25th. Rejoice!!