Damn, and I misspelled your user name in the title. *Jazzaloha.
—DiB
LOL! I love it! and I’m honored that you would do this. I sort of feel like Michael Jackson when Weird Al made the “Fat” video. :)
(I’ll have some comments later.)
Hahahahaha!! I never knew that Polaris was just a big ol’ troll!
The reviews are spot-on, though!
Got a hearty laugh out of this. If I didn’t know better I’d say Jazz wrote these reviews himself!
I now suspect that DiB and Jazz are in fact the same person!!!
C’mon, Matt. There are few tell-tale signs that DiB missed—e.g.,
>"Off the top of my head, here are my thoughts and questions…"
>The use of the bullet point format (as I’m using now :)
>No mention of intersubjectivity! C’mon, that’s the easiest one.
“Because I’m fat, I’m fat, I’m really fat…”
Always could improve, hmmm… I’ll try again, once the ‘last film’ I watched isn’t Beasts of the Southern Wild which inspired this thread in the first place.
Once, an IRL friend and I traded LiveJournal accounts for a week. The brilliant part is that it took a couple of days for our respective friends to notice. Not that long, but a couple. The next brilliant part is that she took the opportunity to write a quite brilliant wall’o’text defending the Twilight books (which she hates, but actually read) in my voice.
—PolarisDiB
Walker
I don’t know if I liked this movie or not. I get that Alex Cox was being purposefully anachronistic (or at least I think he was) but I’m not sure if it really worked for me; at least I’m confused as to what the purpose may be. The ending seemed to make it all about how Walker’s style of intervention in Nicaragua would be repeated in American action toward foreign affairs but I’m not sure the movie as a whole sold me on that concept so much. For one thing I’m not sure Ed Harris’ character worked for me. He never seemed to get injured or notice the brutality going on around him though I think that was part of the point IMO.
A few questions:
>When Walker is President and the beatings take place outside his hotel, is that supposed to be something he ordered or something he doesn’t even notice? It sort of plays as if he isn’t even aware of it, like the audience is supposed to be aware while he always seems to be reacting to something else.
>The role of his deaf fiancee. Was her death supposed to represent the transition into his poor treatment of people or was he supposed to be like that from the start? On the one hand the beginning sequence shows he’s already almost completely detached from his surroundings. On the other hand he doesn’t choose to go to Nicaragua until after she’s dead; however that is mixed because he was already told he’d do so. Also it seems like near the end when he takes slavery as a solution shows his final detachment from what his fiancee believed, imo.
>What was the purpose of the Sam Peckinpah sign during the horseride into Granada?
—PolarisDiB
I think it was a sign of intersubjective meaning.
But I’m not sure.
This is good; hopefully it starts a series of threads by Dib— next installment: Forum posts as if you were RWPB.
The Four Times
Before I tell you what I thought about this movie, can you help me understand the appeal? It seems like four unrelated vignettes that gradually tell a story of humans’ increasing detachment from and domination of nature, but the four parts don’t tell a consistent unified story. This could get anywhere from a 50 to about an 80 from me, but before I assign a rating, please convince me that it’s a better movie than I thought it was.
Blade Runner
WALL OF ANALYTICAL TEXT
My reply: yea so like Deckard was a replicant right?
fondly…:)
Margaret
A solid post 9/11 drama, I really liked the way Lonergan kept the focus on the actors faces. I love this in movies but I’m not sure it worked for me here. For example I could not always tell what Ramon was thinking. Why does Lisa have such a deep response to the poem Margaret? Is that supposed to be a turning point in how she’s feeling, because she seems to quickly revert back so it was either in the wrong place in the film or not powerful enough to work for me as a signpost….yet, the film takes its name from the poem, so I guess it’s supposed to be significant. What did others think about the name of the film? Was that scene significant enough to justify using a name from the poem as the title of the film? It felt a bit hokey to me, tbh.
OK, I know some of the responses are probably facetious for the most part, but I think some of them would be really good OPs. I would say this means you guys are doing a good job. ;) (Note: had I seen any of those films, I would be really enthusiastic about responding.)
@Mogambo
Heh.
But the “wall of analytic text” is a DiB thing.
Ha! I read through your Terms of Endearment OP and wondered if you’d hired someone from this thread to write it for you.
I’ve been wanting to try this, but I’m afraid if I did jazz would respond as me, and that would be more cognitive dissonance than I could handle. Anyway, Polaris seemed to come close to really nailing it on his last try, it just needed a touch more positivity before the questions IMO.
“This is good; hopefully it starts a series of threads by Dib— next installment: Forum posts as if you were RWPB”
Naw. next up let’s go all in on postmodernity and reflexivity and simulacra and such—I want to see DiB review a film as if he were himself.
But the “wall of analytic text” is a DiB thing.
true. he’s sneaky about it too. i’ll be rolling along, enjoying a thread, then boom DiB brings it with the camera shots/angles and other such subtleties. totally ruins the fun and makes me think.
I killed a thread with lots of potential.
@Dib
Do you know what your IQ is, and if so what is it?
PolarisDiB
With love, honestly. ;-P
Attack the Block
I don’t know if I liked this movie or not. I think the idea of the block was interesting as a space but I’m not sure the characters really sparked all that interest to me (though I liked their accents, though I couldn’t understand some of what they were saying. Maybe that’s the problem). The alien designs came off a little cheap IMO. I think the movie had something to say about class structure in the block but I don’t see how the aliens fit into it. 42/100
Black Hawk Down
I don’t know if I liked this movie or not. I think it’s a very interesting story but I think there is more to it than what Ridley Scott chose to present. What was going on from the Somalians side that they would continue to lose so many people and still attack? I don’t think the movie really explained their cause well IMO. Also the imagery and editing to me seemed kind of unexceptional. I don’t know, it was like an action movie but in places it seemed stylized. 33/100
Another Earth
I don’t know if I liked this movie or not. I’m a little confused about the Earth 2, I feel like it was meant to be symbolic but I don’t really know how that symbolism ties into the theme of regret…
Etc. And yes Jazz, you can participate too!
—PolarisDiB