Does it have something to do with the rise of smartphones and no one typing on real keyboards? (Maybe why blogs died.)

Is it a consequence of voting, which blogs didn’t have?

What happens to your thoughts? Do you turn them all in the form of a question? Do you tear them down into a Mastodon one-liner and hope a popular person notices it?

If Lemmy had more of ourselves in this way, maybe it would be a healthier place.

Being idle until the media put out an article on something for us to talk about gives them too much power over us.

There’s an actual_discussion community, which isn’t exactly lively. There’s a casualconversation community, and even that’s all in the form of a question.

By “old”, I mean they were probably in college in the 1950s or earlier. Generally in the USA.

I went to college in what today they would call the late 1900s, and I definitely did not have that. What I experienced was a heavy workload, an interesting computer to mess around with, this new thing called the internet, and what I saw around for those who weren’t coping well was heavy drinking to get drunk and addictions to MUDs. No intellectualism.

Maybe what happened was that, in those biographies, they were probably generally culturally Jewish, from New York, scientists, writers, from a certain milieu. And the GI Bill happened in the 1940s and the flavor of college may have changed in the wake of that.

They may have been raised hearing the grown-ups talk over issues, increasingly participating as they grew up, whereas we were raised staring dumbly at sitcoms (“Hey, remember the time on Three’s Company when someone overheard something and there was a misunderstanding?”).

Not for deep interests, but you know like that old song about someone’s favorite things where the examples are all like copper kettles. Where you might write a few sentences about the little thing you like.

By Robert Bresson. I know I saw Diary of a Country Priest, and I think I saw Mouchette, but both years ago. I suspect I liked them better than this one, and that they may have been less talky.

I wouldn’t normally be opposed to talkiness, but Bresson would use non-actors and, according to Wikipedia, would try to get them to be as blank and stiff as possible. Maybe that could have even been an interesting style if at least the dialog were more realistic. If something rang true in any of this. I was watching with English subtitles, but I doubt it was misrepresenting the French greatly.

Maybe he should have tried his hand at cartooning, or at least done a Chris Marker.

I was in sympathy with some of what he was trying to express with the film.

I’ve seen very few Hollywood films from before the late sixties because they’re almost always so unrealistic that I can’t get into them. But I just watched this because I see it mentioned at times and I can never remember whether The Night of the Hunter or The Night of the Iguana is the one I’ve seen. And now that I’ve seen both, I’ll remember which is which.

Did it boil down to “I don’t really buy any of this”? Yes.

Although it’s interesting in a way to see the stage where one era is starting to become another era. Where there’s some “hey, whatever gets you through the night” and a little bit of language—Sue Lyon saying bitch a couple of times, but the copy I saw went silent where Ava Gardner said ass—and the villain accused of being motivated by lesbianism (Were there hints of it in her behavior? I didn’t notice.)—but all totally drenched in Christianity so they could get into the American theaters of 1964.

Ava Gardner, her Wikipedia page images with an inch of makeup on make me think of someone playing a schoolteacher of the 1940s. Having seen her in a film now, what I couldn’t stop noticing 100% of the time was the smoker voice. She died from smoking. She…looks her age. Deborah Kerr was older but looked like she was holding up better. Although Kerr’s Wikipedia page primary photo is of her at 52ish where 52 is what she looks.

I skimmed a couple of reviews before watching this, and I think one said something about Gardner holding her chin up the whole time to avoid appearing jowly. So then I did notice her with her chin up all the time.

There was a fight in the middle that wasn’t intended to be realistic in the slightest, and so it just stuck out oddly.

I know nothing about acting, but I could see how Skip Ward would look wrong even in a still frame. I don’t know whether he didn’t know what angle to be at with respect to the camera or didn’t have the right kind of expressive face or body language or what. Beyond not being adept at delivering the questionable dialog of the era.

It’s hard to buy the idea that getting fired from a bus tour would be that horrifying of a development for Richard Burton. That he’d just get another job, and that if he was at the end of his rope, it wouldn’t necessarily be now because of this.

He has had terrible problems with getting chased by 16-year-old girls, but now he is like 40, so that particular problem can’t continue much longer unless his character becomes a movie star or rock star.

And it was undercut some by Ava Gardner saying he comes here twice a year when he’s in distress. But if he did have a history of showing up there, he wouldn’t have needed to be told initially that they’re closed because she’s always closed in August or whenever it was.

The theme of the nobility of keeping going is a bit undercut when, decades later, you can look at Wikipedia and see how lives turned out, chaos and woe, and what was it all for.

At least they only very occasionally brought in music to tell us what to feel. But if they could go 99% of the time without telling us what to feel, why didn’t they have the guts for that last percent?

At one point it was a commercial for smoking, and at the end it was a commercial for cola.

There was a bit with shaving. I swear every black-and-white movie has a guy shaving. Was it slightly intimate for the women watching, by the standards of the time, or was it always a razor commercial of sorts? I guess the former because who had beards then?

Oh, the walking on broken glass and acting as if he didn’t feel it, even if he had been drinking. As if.

If I had a background in literature or any sort of storytelling, it would be interesting to play “What would really happen?” I kind of think even a bunch of 1960s church biddies would be physical enough to get that distributor head back from Richard Burton. All of them and Skip Ward. Just get that bus going and be gone. Plus Burton would try harder to protest the reality of how Sue Lyon was chasing him, even if it might not have accomplished much to do so.

Did we get any good reason really for why Deborah Kerr was that much of a spinster?

It’s about monster movies, and some teens interested in each other, with the Cuban missile crisis as a backdrop.

Most reviews seemed to love it, but I didn’t. And I mean contemporary reviews, where they surely don’t remember 1962 any more than I do, so it’s not nostalgia for the stuff of childhood.

Some mention that the movie-within-a-movie is the best part, and I absolutely agree, although to be fair putting together an entertaining 10–15 minutes is easier than an entertaining hour and a half.

What bothered me the most was the relationships. They weren’t played satirically that I could see, other than that there was a criminal-slash-beat-poet type as the older bad boy villain. Kellie Martin’s still into the villain and he’s still into her, but for whatever reason she also takes on Omri Katz, who’s not playing a type that she’d want. His character is kind of nervous with the novelty of her. And the central character gets involved with a girl who might be as close in height to his much younger brother as to him. She just looks so young like maybe she is old enough to have a crush on a boy, but would he be interested back?

And the villain threatening and attacking Omri Katz reminds me of being bullied growing up.

I kind of liked Cathy Moriarty. I’ve never seen anything else she was in.

Yes, John Goodman is watchable, but I don’t find that character all that hugely appealing.

Oh, and the music behind it all. So Hollywood awful. Reminded me of Spielberg movies when I was a kid.

I did see something mention that the ending shot could be a suggestion of how Vietnam was just over the horizon for these kids. That’s interestingly dark.

Was it fascinating? Did it feel like the amazing future? Were you all too aware of the mounting cost relative to what you were actually doing?

Tom Schiller film with a strong SNL connection. Never really properly released. Today known as a more or less lost film that has Bill Murray. I was curious about it because it was obscure and because I had been looking for the Schiller shorts from the early SNL days that had Belushi, Radner, etc.

Zach Galligan plays it so blankly; maybe he was told to.

It’s all a love letter to the golden era of Hollywood, but I don’t like the golden era at all, so this was a real slog for me. It’s odd, but not nearly as interestingly odd as Guy Maddin.

From reading articles online, I began to get the feeling that the whole film was just a studio trying to get out of a contract they’d made with Lorne Michaels as cheaply as possible.

I’ve meant to see this for a few years. The English Wikipedia article says “anti-melodramatic” and “unsensationalistic”, which is very appealing.

I didn’t think it would matter that I know only a few very basic facts about Van Gogh, but in seeing it, it seemed there was a lot you were supposed to recognize. And with events, not knowing whether they happened or whether Pialat was inventing, often left me not knowing what to think about them.

Thoughts, in order

• It must be a pain in the ass to get all that period stuff for a film set in like 1870 or whenever.
• Everyone at this new place is integrating him into things (whether he wants it or not). Is France 150 years ago a warmer place than anywhere I’ve known?
• Why is this girl so into this old guy? Life doesn’t seem that slow and boring for her that I would buy this. Was this in particular a real event at all, or was Pialat just liking the idea that of course pretty young girls want old guys in the arts? I did see one other Pialat movie some years ago, which was about a girl and her dalliances and how she didn’t really love anyone except her daddy, who so-coincidentally was played by Pialat himself.
• The man playing Van Gogh was rather still compared to everyone else, in the way that a non-actor would be. Apparently this guy did some acting but was mostly a singer.
• The girl was a bit inexperienced compared to the rest, and this came out in emotional scenes where there wasn’t quite enough body language sometimes.
• Around the two-hour mark, they and Theo hang out way too long in a brothel. I suppose you’re supposed to be engrossed by the polygon of Van Gogh and Theo and the girl and the prostitute Van Gogh has long had a thing with. The girl trying to not care, etc. But you are two hours in at this point.
• I did like that, in the last minutes, life was resuming for everyone else. Because that is what happens. Even though it is hard to believe that the world will continue without our selves.

I’m not being very positive in this, I know, but I still appreciate the existence of anything anti-melodramatic and unsensationalistic.

One of the flop Saturday Night Live movies based on one-note characters stretched out to feature length.

When it was trying to be serious about psychological health, it was relatively all right, but every bit of “comedy” fell so absolutely flat. Al Franken must have wanted to say something genuinely helpful but was limited by the shape of the opportunity at hand. Both needing to be a comedy in general and needing to keep his character as somewhat ridiculous.

Stuart had a family of stereotypical screw-ups. His brother’s role was too broad where he had to be both a beer-drinking football-fan kind of idiot at times and insightful at other times.

Stuart was obviously gay, but they couldn’t really touch the issue in 1995, so he had this female friend who was unrealistically around at all times when you need another person to observe or smile at whatever is happening. Although it mentioned that she was his sponsor in some self-help group, and maybe being a sponsor requires being around all the time.

I made it through an hour before starting to fast forward.

Set in New York City in live television of the 1950s, a show like Sid Caesar’s, an aging alcoholic movie star like Errol Flynn.

In reviews, everyone loves it so much. Maybe they all remembered the fifties. One commented that it would look questionable to today’s audience that the viewpoint character chases an uninterested woman, wears her down, and she finally gives in and then likes him. Yes, it did indeed.

Overall, I suppose it was okay. It did feel like wacky events were presented a little too straight in some way so they would come across to me as unrealistic rather than comedic.

It tries to be touching about the movie star being brave and reconnecting with his daughter, but it didn’t get enough screen time.