Thank you NEH, for this thread! I’m relatively new to TheAuteurs and was about to post this topic myself until I found this. I’m glad to see that some of the films that other people posted are already up. yay…
Charlie Chaplin: Modern Times (1936), Limelight (1952)
Buster Keaton: Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), Our Hospitality (1923), The Playhouse (1921)
Jan Svankmajer: Alice (Něco z Alenky) (1988), Conspirators of Pleasure (Spiklenci slasti) (1996), Dimensions of Dialogue (Možnosti dialogu) (1982), Down to the Cellar (Do pivnice) (1983), Darkness/Light/Darkness (Tma, světlo, tma) (1989), The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (Konec stalinismu v Čechách) (1990)
Seijun Suzuki: Pistol Opera (2001)
Nelson Pereira dos Santos: Vidas Secas (Barren Lives) (1963), Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman) (1971)
Glauber Rocha: Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil) (1964)
Guy Debord: La Société du spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) (1973), Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time) (1959), In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (We Turn in the Night, Consumed by Fire) (1978)
Claude Berri: Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources (1986), Germinal (1993)
John Waters: Mondo Trasho (1969), Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), Polyester (1981)
‘This cult favorite documentary is centered on the unique worldview and personality of New York City bus tour guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch, who later had brief appearances in Waking Life and School of Rock.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cruise_(documentary)
We often acknowledge that we’re all (probably?) spending ridiculous amounts of time on this website because we generally love to watch, think, talk, and write about films/film makers etc.
We also know that the glorious and infinite world of the internet also has many different film related resources to offer; from blogs to digital video players to film-makers manifestos to information about underground film-screenings and beyond. So why not offer some links to other sites that our fellow cinephiles and auteurs would find useful?
I’d like to start out with two of my favorite websites that one of my film professors turned me on to:
www.ubu.com – an amazing resource and great if you’re looking to watch avant-garde and underground short films! : “UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission; we rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos.”
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com – An Australian based online journal for critique on the state and art of cinema : “Senses of Cinema is primarily concerned with ideas about particular films or bodies of work, but also with the regimes (ideological, economic and so forth) under which films are produced and viewed, and with the more abstract theoretical and philosophical issues raised by film study. As well, we believe that a cinephilic understanding of the moving image provides the necessary basis for a radical critique of other media and of the global “image culture”.”
Please post a link to your film-related blog or a film class being offered in your city! Anything goes!
I can only whole heartedly concur with this whole thread (with my fist in the air, saying “yes! the library! damn right!”) without really adding that much new …except the fact that I enjoyed having netflix at one point because their were no late fees, and my library imposes wicked, draconian late fees for their dvds and videos – so much more than the late fees for books! So not fair.
Being the absent minded, creative, head-in-the-clouds type, I completely forgot that I had the library’s copy of some billy wilder movie in my room for like a week and then I owed the library like 25+ bucks, I could have bought the damn dvd at that point!
Don’t forget to bring the movies back for christ sake! or the library fine monster will get you….
But I must add – that the nice things about large libraries and school libraries (such as my University library in Brooklyn) is that they often have tv’s and/or screening rooms where you can often hunker down in a relatively comfy seat and watch films there as well.
(and, ssshhh, this is kind of a secret, but did you know that the Museum of Modern Art in NYC has an amazingly vast film/art documentary collection and will let you screen any of these films for “research” in one of their private movie theater style screening rooms? It’s pretty fucking amazing, no joke)
oh man, I’m incapable of articulating how exciting the prospect of a new Svankmajer work is for me. I know this was posted a while ago, but thank you for the info.
HYSTERICAL – love Patton Oswalt…
Reminded me of how Kaufman’s character in ‘Adaptation’ has to compete against his brothers crap formulaic horror film script called ’The Three" …painfully funny
These links would have been great for my forum post “Got any supplemental film websites for fellow cinephiles on theauteurs?” ….no hard feelings NEH, I’m just sayin’…
Thanks for these in any case. great links.
To echo your sentiments out of my own neck of the woods, Queens to Crooklyn Represent!
I’m really new to Auteurs and I’m not really in the know in terms of exactly what the parameters of joining/participating in Garage is either. Although, as a student in New York who has been studying film for a good while – I share the impulse to support a community of fellow cinephiles/artists with any particular resources and ideas I can offer. Especially such an apparently articulate and constructive group of people like the ones that take part in the Garage.
I go to school at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and I help out with the Pratt Film Society; an organization run by one of my film professors (a wonderful New York based resource as a film maker in his own right). We screen free films as the main feature of the Film Society, as well as occasionally hosting the film makers themselves in short talks about their films, and run a class that’s linked to the series.
The free screenings are open to the public and are shown in the remarkably huge and slick movie theater style auditorium that was only recently built in the architecture building at Pratt. The first screening of the semester is this coming Tuesday at 5:30-ish pm – we’re showing “The Rules of The Game” by Jean Renoir. If you or anyone else wants some more details about this let me know, it really is like getting into a movie theater for free every week. I would also be happy to talk about helping anyone utilize Pratt in general as someone who has access to their facilities and the great faculty. Considering the absurd amount of money I pay for the tuition and the fact that the majority of the Pratt population are self-absorbed and take their institutional advantages and fellow students for granted most of the time, I always strive to exploit what Pratt has to offer in the most constructive way possible.
I also like to watch movies alone in order to have a better chance at developing my own opinion – the same way I enjoy going to museums alone and one reads a book alone. I also really enjoy watching a film when I have no idea what to expect, as in whether or not I have seen too many previews or heard too much hype.
Even though getting back the moment when you’re seeing something remarkable for the first time is impossible, and I try to always remember how a film made me feel after the first time I’ve seen it because I think that this tells you a great amount about your gut feelings and first impressions. I also think that this is a rule that is made to be broken and we’ve got to remember that because we are constantly changing as human beings that many films can be completely different every single time we see it. You may only like a film on a somewhat superficial or clinical level when you’re younger, for example, and really connect with it more deeply when you’re a little bit older. Films also change for me after a good discussion about them with other people, and that’s invaluable as well – which I guess is a big reason that we write on this forum in the first place, right??
That doesn’t really answer your question, Howard, but I suppose personal, instantaneous, gut feelings are always hard to explain the reasoning behind – it is something that we do almost without thinking. We also shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves in terms of changing one’s opinion about a film that everyone else may seem to love or hate, because that’s what makes things more interesting. As Maude said in ‘Harold & Maude’ : “Consistency isn’t REALLY a human trait.”
I’m currently reading Gilles Deleuze’s “Cinema 1: The Movement-Image” and “Cinema 2: The Time-image”
Admittedly they are VERY VERY dense and hard to get through if you’re not a big philosophy/theory reader – hard enough even if you are. But I was also given the book “Deleuze on Cinema” by Ronald Bogue and it really is like having a ledger or key to unlocking Deleuze’s writing – it makes the effort completely worth it because Deleuze is someone that will COMPLETELY change the way you can look at film.
I second Mladen’s suggestion for Sergei Eistenstein and I also suggest reading some interviews with Andrei Tarkovsky, many of which can be found online. If you wanna try him in book form, I recommend reading “Sculpting in Time: Tarkovsky The Great Russian Filmaker Discusses His Art” or Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews (Conversations With Filmmakers Series) by John Gianvito
I strongly second that Deleuze quote – I feel as though I’ve read it before. What is it from?
Jordan H: I mmmay be wrong, but isn’t living, in a very general social sense, is ideally about finding out just what those ‘secrets’ are? discovering what others perceive in us, internalizing those realizations (or not), while these realizations continuously fade and reemerge; a layering of conciousness if you will. Life tends to be pretty goddamn boring if that’s not happening… at least in my experience.
But saying that this is what comprises our “complete being” is also reductive. There are things outside immediate human interaction that “shape” our identities I suppose. You could call these things history, or politics, or nature/biology… Edgar Allan Poe said something like "Art is the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through veils of the soul. But the mere imitation of what is IN nature, doesn’t entitle one to be called an “Artist”. I’m sure that quote isn’t completely accurate – but its close.
NEH: Does gravity operate through a medium to effect matter exactly? I’m ignorant of most things that at all concern the subject of physics, but the accepted theory is that gravity is a FUNCTION OF the presence of matter right? Matter somehow warps the space around it and this distortion causes pull, weight, and all other lovely types of gravitational attraction…like the tides :)
But this all begs the question: what the hell is SPACE anyway? and why/how does it become distorted by matter?
And speaking of Deleuze, he sees space as indefinable without the dimension of time, and movement only becomes possible through time in space, respectively. I don’t know how scientific this is, but it does raise many more questions about theories of the physical and metaphysical universe alike.
thank you – yes, it’s a theme that seems to run through a lot of his work. I’ve only read Anti-Oedipus and Cinema One and Two. A used copy of Capitalism and Schizophrenia has been sitting on my bookshelf, only partially read, for far too long. I’m going to look for that essay.
it definitely relates to Jordan’s question – the state of becoming a function of what Deleuze called the plane of immanence…
Au Hasard Balthazar – anything portraying brutality to animals personified as characters really gets to me
Night and Fog – Alain Resnais, the best and most disturbing Holocaust film I’ve seen, which I don’t think I will need to watch more than once.
Graveyard of the Fireflies
Vidas Secas – Nelson Pereira dos Santos – again, involving the suffering of animals and children, stuck in the desert the whole time no less – my worst nightmare.
Bicycle Thieves
Pan’s Labyrinth – I hated the ending so much that it depressed me at how overrated and mediocre the whole thing was. not to mention the little girl is shot dead.
Fox & His Friends, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant ….and yeah anything by Fassbinder pretty much – but I also find that his films instigate a sort of masochistic fetish of how beautiful and poetic really depressing, tragic, things can be – so I still watch them.
The Intruder ( L’intrus) by Claire Denis – If the film is as disturbing as this one, as well as being intermittently incomprehensible, I find myself being somewhat depressed that I wasn’t clever enough to really get it – something I would probably have to watch again before I got over this feeling.
There are many more…. I think most would agree that the experience of watching an entire piece of crap movie, that you thought might be good, is really depressing enough on its own; even if its just a trashy comedy. Its time that you’ll never get back and it sucks.
Film quotes you love over 3 years ago
“Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you. You took no notice.” – Madeleine, Vertigo
“Well now Johnny-O, was it a ghost? Was it fun?” – Midge, Vertigo
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Movies Not On Criterion (& therefore, not on TheAuteurs) over 3 years ago
Thank you NEH, for this thread! I’m relatively new to TheAuteurs and was about to post this topic myself until I found this. I’m glad to see that some of the films that other people posted are already up. yay…
Charlie Chaplin: Modern Times (1936), Limelight (1952)
Buster Keaton: Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), Our Hospitality (1923), The Playhouse (1921)
Jan Svankmajer: Alice (Něco z Alenky) (1988), Conspirators of Pleasure (Spiklenci slasti) (1996), Dimensions of Dialogue (Možnosti dialogu) (1982), Down to the Cellar (Do pivnice) (1983), Darkness/Light/Darkness (Tma, světlo, tma) (1989), The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (Konec stalinismu v Čechách) (1990)
Seijun Suzuki: Pistol Opera (2001)
Nelson Pereira dos Santos: Vidas Secas (Barren Lives) (1963), Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman) (1971)
Glauber Rocha: Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil) (1964)
Guy Debord: La Société du spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) (1973), Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time) (1959), In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (We Turn in the Night, Consumed by Fire) (1978)
Claude Berri: Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources (1986), Germinal (1993)
John Waters: Mondo Trasho (1969), Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), Polyester (1981)
Alfonso Cuarón: Children of Men (2006)
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Movies Not On Criterion (& therefore, not on TheAuteurs) over 3 years ago
Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975)
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Movies Not On Criterion (& therefore, not on TheAuteurs) over 3 years ago
Bennett Miller: The Cruise (1998)
‘This cult favorite documentary is centered on the unique worldview and personality of New York City bus tour guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch, who later had brief appearances in Waking Life and School of Rock.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cruise_(documentary)
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Got any supplemental websites for fellow cinephiles at TheAuteurs? over 3 years ago
We often acknowledge that we’re all (probably?) spending ridiculous amounts of time on this website because we generally love to watch, think, talk, and write about films/film makers etc.
We also know that the glorious and infinite world of the internet also has many different film related resources to offer; from blogs to digital video players to film-makers manifestos to information about underground film-screenings and beyond. So why not offer some links to other sites that our fellow cinephiles and auteurs would find useful?
I’d like to start out with two of my favorite websites that one of my film professors turned me on to:
www.ubu.com – an amazing resource and great if you’re looking to watch avant-garde and underground short films! : “UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission; we rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos.”
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com – An Australian based online journal for critique on the state and art of cinema : “Senses of Cinema is primarily concerned with ideas about particular films or bodies of work, but also with the regimes (ideological, economic and so forth) under which films are produced and viewed, and with the more abstract theoretical and philosophical issues raised by film study. As well, we believe that a cinephilic understanding of the moving image provides the necessary basis for a radical critique of other media and of the global “image culture”.”
Please post a link to your film-related blog or a film class being offered in your city! Anything goes!
Go to Comment
GO TO YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY over 3 years ago
I can only whole heartedly concur with this whole thread (with my fist in the air, saying “yes! the library! damn right!”) without really adding that much new …except the fact that I enjoyed having netflix at one point because their were no late fees, and my library imposes wicked, draconian late fees for their dvds and videos – so much more than the late fees for books! So not fair.
Being the absent minded, creative, head-in-the-clouds type, I completely forgot that I had the library’s copy of some billy wilder movie in my room for like a week and then I owed the library like 25+ bucks, I could have bought the damn dvd at that point!
Don’t forget to bring the movies back for christ sake! or the library fine monster will get you….
Go to Comment
GO TO YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY over 3 years ago
But I must add – that the nice things about large libraries and school libraries (such as my University library in Brooklyn) is that they often have tv’s and/or screening rooms where you can often hunker down in a relatively comfy seat and watch films there as well.
(and, ssshhh, this is kind of a secret, but did you know that the Museum of Modern Art in NYC has an amazingly vast film/art documentary collection and will let you screen any of these films for “research” in one of their private movie theater style screening rooms? It’s pretty fucking amazing, no joke)
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Got any supplemental websites for fellow cinephiles at TheAuteurs? over 3 years ago
thanks to bob and richard, for the input – all great sources…
but…is that all people?
PS. Bob: I don’t know any literature forums off hand, but if I think of something I’ll post it – good thing to know though!
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Surviving Life over 3 years ago
oh man, I’m incapable of articulating how exciting the prospect of a new Svankmajer work is for me. I know this was posted a while ago, but thank you for the info.
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Patton Oswalt & the Death Bed over 3 years ago
HYSTERICAL – love Patton Oswalt…
Reminded me of how Kaufman’s character in ‘Adaptation’ has to compete against his brothers crap formulaic horror film script called ’The Three" …painfully funny
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FREE Movies Online over 3 years ago
These links would have been great for my forum post “Got any supplemental film websites for fellow cinephiles on theauteurs?” ….no hard feelings NEH, I’m just sayin’…
Thanks for these in any case. great links.
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New York City over 3 years ago
Benham and Tobias:
To echo your sentiments out of my own neck of the woods, Queens to Crooklyn Represent!
I’m really new to Auteurs and I’m not really in the know in terms of exactly what the parameters of joining/participating in Garage is either. Although, as a student in New York who has been studying film for a good while – I share the impulse to support a community of fellow cinephiles/artists with any particular resources and ideas I can offer. Especially such an apparently articulate and constructive group of people like the ones that take part in the Garage.
I go to school at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and I help out with the Pratt Film Society; an organization run by one of my film professors (a wonderful New York based resource as a film maker in his own right). We screen free films as the main feature of the Film Society, as well as occasionally hosting the film makers themselves in short talks about their films, and run a class that’s linked to the series.
The free screenings are open to the public and are shown in the remarkably huge and slick movie theater style auditorium that was only recently built in the architecture building at Pratt. The first screening of the semester is this coming Tuesday at 5:30-ish pm – we’re showing “The Rules of The Game” by Jean Renoir. If you or anyone else wants some more details about this let me know, it really is like getting into a movie theater for free every week. I would also be happy to talk about helping anyone utilize Pratt in general as someone who has access to their facilities and the great faculty. Considering the absurd amount of money I pay for the tuition and the fact that the majority of the Pratt population are self-absorbed and take their institutional advantages and fellow students for granted most of the time, I always strive to exploit what Pratt has to offer in the most constructive way possible.
Go to Comment
Are you able to make up your own mind without being influenced by outside opinion? over 3 years ago
I also like to watch movies alone in order to have a better chance at developing my own opinion – the same way I enjoy going to museums alone and one reads a book alone. I also really enjoy watching a film when I have no idea what to expect, as in whether or not I have seen too many previews or heard too much hype.
Even though getting back the moment when you’re seeing something remarkable for the first time is impossible, and I try to always remember how a film made me feel after the first time I’ve seen it because I think that this tells you a great amount about your gut feelings and first impressions. I also think that this is a rule that is made to be broken and we’ve got to remember that because we are constantly changing as human beings that many films can be completely different every single time we see it. You may only like a film on a somewhat superficial or clinical level when you’re younger, for example, and really connect with it more deeply when you’re a little bit older. Films also change for me after a good discussion about them with other people, and that’s invaluable as well – which I guess is a big reason that we write on this forum in the first place, right??
That doesn’t really answer your question, Howard, but I suppose personal, instantaneous, gut feelings are always hard to explain the reasoning behind – it is something that we do almost without thinking. We also shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves in terms of changing one’s opinion about a film that everyone else may seem to love or hate, because that’s what makes things more interesting. As Maude said in ‘Harold & Maude’ : “Consistency isn’t REALLY a human trait.”
Go to Comment
Film Theory Books over 3 years ago
I’m currently reading Gilles Deleuze’s “Cinema 1: The Movement-Image” and “Cinema 2: The Time-image”
Admittedly they are VERY VERY dense and hard to get through if you’re not a big philosophy/theory reader – hard enough even if you are. But I was also given the book “Deleuze on Cinema” by Ronald Bogue and it really is like having a ledger or key to unlocking Deleuze’s writing – it makes the effort completely worth it because Deleuze is someone that will COMPLETELY change the way you can look at film.
I second Mladen’s suggestion for Sergei Eistenstein and I also suggest reading some interviews with Andrei Tarkovsky, many of which can be found online. If you wanna try him in book form, I recommend reading “Sculpting in Time: Tarkovsky The Great Russian Filmaker Discusses His Art” or Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews (Conversations With Filmmakers Series) by John Gianvito
Go to Comment
MEANINGFUL THREAD (EMBRISM) almost 3 years ago
I strongly second that Deleuze quote – I feel as though I’ve read it before. What is it from?
Jordan H: I mmmay be wrong, but isn’t living, in a very general social sense, is ideally about finding out just what those ‘secrets’ are? discovering what others perceive in us, internalizing those realizations (or not), while these realizations continuously fade and reemerge; a layering of conciousness if you will. Life tends to be pretty goddamn boring if that’s not happening… at least in my experience.
But saying that this is what comprises our “complete being” is also reductive. There are things outside immediate human interaction that “shape” our identities I suppose. You could call these things history, or politics, or nature/biology… Edgar Allan Poe said something like "Art is the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through veils of the soul. But the mere imitation of what is IN nature, doesn’t entitle one to be called an “Artist”. I’m sure that quote isn’t completely accurate – but its close.
Go to Comment
MEANINGFUL THREAD (EMBRISM) almost 3 years ago
NEH: Does gravity operate through a medium to effect matter exactly? I’m ignorant of most things that at all concern the subject of physics, but the accepted theory is that gravity is a FUNCTION OF the presence of matter right? Matter somehow warps the space around it and this distortion causes pull, weight, and all other lovely types of gravitational attraction…like the tides :)
But this all begs the question: what the hell is SPACE anyway? and why/how does it become distorted by matter?
And speaking of Deleuze, he sees space as indefinable without the dimension of time, and movement only becomes possible through time in space, respectively. I don’t know how scientific this is, but it does raise many more questions about theories of the physical and metaphysical universe alike.
Go to Comment
MEANINGFUL THREAD (EMBRISM) almost 3 years ago
thank you – yes, it’s a theme that seems to run through a lot of his work. I’ve only read Anti-Oedipus and Cinema One and Two. A used copy of Capitalism and Schizophrenia has been sitting on my bookshelf, only partially read, for far too long. I’m going to look for that essay.
it definitely relates to Jordan’s question – the state of becoming a function of what Deleuze called the plane of immanence…
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Most depressing film you have ever seen? almost 3 years ago
I’m only agreeing with many here but:
Au Hasard Balthazar – anything portraying brutality to animals personified as characters really gets to me
Night and Fog – Alain Resnais, the best and most disturbing Holocaust film I’ve seen, which I don’t think I will need to watch more than once.
Graveyard of the Fireflies
Vidas Secas – Nelson Pereira dos Santos – again, involving the suffering of animals and children, stuck in the desert the whole time no less – my worst nightmare.
Bicycle Thieves
Pan’s Labyrinth – I hated the ending so much that it depressed me at how overrated and mediocre the whole thing was. not to mention the little girl is shot dead.
Fox & His Friends, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant ….and yeah anything by Fassbinder pretty much – but I also find that his films instigate a sort of masochistic fetish of how beautiful and poetic really depressing, tragic, things can be – so I still watch them.
The Intruder ( L’intrus) by Claire Denis – If the film is as disturbing as this one, as well as being intermittently incomprehensible, I find myself being somewhat depressed that I wasn’t clever enough to really get it – something I would probably have to watch again before I got over this feeling.
There are many more…. I think most would agree that the experience of watching an entire piece of crap movie, that you thought might be good, is really depressing enough on its own; even if its just a trashy comedy. Its time that you’ll never get back and it sucks.
Go to Comment