ABigGuy4U
4hr ago
I saw Alejandro Innauruatu’s new film, Digger. I think it’s one of the better movies I’ve seen in a while. Maybe in this decade. It’s overtly political in multiple ways, enough to talk about it here rather than the Friday Fun Thread.
The movie is about Digger Rockwell, an eccentric third generation oil company executive who cuts a rather Trumpian figure. Digger is a friend of the president, and a close enough one to make him effectively an unofficial member of the cabinet.
When one of Digger’s drilling rigs in Greenland explodes, it send a massive ice shelf (named Judy) heading towards Europe. It’s loosely based on the Thwaites glacier nightmare scenario that keeps climate scientists up at night. Digger, the President, and Digger’s reluctant head of environmental safety must try to avert the crisis. The whole thing has a tone somewhere between Dr. Stranglove and your average Wes Anderson movie. Digger and his pals unfortunately fail to stop the iceberg, and the planet is rendered semi-uninhabitable. Millions perish.
The “twist” is revealed early, about 20 minutes in. We are not watching the “real” Digger, or President Compson. We are watching a satirical stage play based on the real events, called Fossil Fools. The play premiered off-broadway five to ten years after the real events, and the big budget revival we’re seeing is about twenty years after that. Tom Cruise is Curtis Markson, a well respected stage and screen actor portraying Digger Rockwell. Markson is becoming concerned that the truth of the real man’s complicated character and legacy is getting sanded off in favor of cheap sneers.
It’s an interesting movie. On the one hand it is very much about global warming and the climate crisis. And its opinions on climate change are nuanced and deep, and wouldn’t be out place in an effort-post here. But it’s more about how people pass from living breathing people into historical heroes and villains in the pages of history books.
It also gives Cruise the chance to do performance that is simultaneously huge and very subtle. And it’s beautifully shot movie, worth seeing in theaters or IMAX. I would have liked to have worked on this post more, but it’s rapidly falling out of theaters and I’m trying to get the word out.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
Someday someone will be able to accelerate or set on fire EV remotely. And probably soon.
There are widespread rumors that intelligence agencies have had the ability to remotely hijack cars since the early 1990s.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
It’s not a gotcha, but Trump is intentionally using the Arabic phrasing because in the American mind it sounds a lot harder.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
Why do you prefer hanging, for the spectacle?
Because hanging is the traditional punishment for crimes of disloyalty.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
This makes us no better than Al Qaeda!
I am concerned that the Trump administration will, yet again, find some way to botch the aesthetics of the occasion, reveling in low-class pandering and/or ostentatious cruelty.
That’s literally the whole point. This is supposed to be the American version of a beheading video mailed to Al Jazeera. It’s like how Trump ends his most particularly angry tweets with “Praise be to Allah”.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
It’s a pretty obscure book, but I notice that there’s this unfortunate tendency for analysts to just kind of assume that China is eventually going to try and gobble up Russia, and it makes them overlook the numerous things driving Russia and China together.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
That book broke the brains of both Reddit and the entire national security establishment, and it’s why they threw out Kissinger’s dire prophecy in favor of video game logic.
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
Unless it’s a false flag to justify using nuclear weapons, the FSB angle is going to be minimizing the extent and threat of the outbreak. I don’t necessarily believe the lab leak story but I think it probably is something weaponized or at least serious, because that’s that the confirmed pattern of hospital quarantines (not lockdowns, quarantines) seems to match.
It’s a gain-of-function enhanced bioweapon version of pneumatic plague. The stock version naturally has a 90% fatality rate. 77% if you can get them on antibiotics less than a day after infection. This one has probably been bred or engineered to be resistant to most major antibiotics. There’s also some indications it’s been modified to have a longer-non-symptomatic carrying period to compensate for the high fatality rate.
ABigGuy4U
12d ago
Anyone else think Florence Pugh is pretty badly mis-cast as Cathy in East of Eden? And I say this someone who thinks she’s a good actor. I guess I shouldn’t expect much from the butchers at Netflix anyway.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
It seems like he was intent on crashing that plane, with no survivors. But I have to wonder: was getting caught part of his plan?
ABigGuy4U
15d ago
From the photos I’ve seen they seem too dark and curly haired to be either Persian or Israeli.
In one of his stings, Chris Hanson busted a man named Vince D’Ambrosio. D’Ambrosio, for some reason, decided to show up to his “date” in a full western duster and Lee Van Cleef style cowboy hat (black, of course).
Ever since then, 4chan had a running gag where they would post screencaps of the episode, with various and captions like it was a western.
Unfortunately, there are no longer enough people here from 4chan to get the joke. Perhaps there never were. That’s also why everyone thinks I’m a lunatic for ranting about Anya Taylor Joy like a dumbass.
ABigGuy4U
16d ago
Yes but that’s the way I prefer to do it, and myself and the body politic will not be talked out of our right to shop in store.
ABigGuy4U
16d ago
Yes but also how are you going to evaluate the weight of the phone, how it fits in your pocket, the brightness of the screen, how well the camera works, etc etc?
ABigGuy4U
17d ago
A pretty big plot to attack American strategic bombers based in England has just been foiled by the UK authorities. It looks like it’s was going to be a van-based drone attack, similar to the one in Russia.
ABigGuy4U
17d ago
Phones are like groceries or clothes, it’s the kind of physical object you really want to look at in person and hold before buying.
I just got back from the theater where I saw A24’s Primetime
I am not exaggerating when I say that this movie is, quite possibly, the best Western since Unforgiven.
The vistas of plains and deserts are starkly beautiful. The whole movie was shot on film, and it shows.
The plot follows the structure you’d expect, charting Chris Hanson’s career as a deputy Marshall and legendary gunfighter. As we all expected from the trailers, it culminates with Hanson’s famous one-against-ten shootout with the D’Ambrosio gang at the QT Corral.
Pattinson’s performance is electric. No trace of the English dandy accent, just hard as nails frontier drawl. The way he roars at Lucky Vince D’Ambrosio, “Come out and fight, you cunny-rustling varmint! I mean to kill you in one minute, or take you to Carson City to see you HANG!” gave me chills.
As usual, some bleeding heart liberals will take issue with the scene where Hanson drags the corrupt Justice of the Peace into the town square and hangs him, but they whine about everything anyway. Marshall Hanson was a good man.
10/10 see it in theaters if at all possible.
ABigGuy4U
18d ago
Yes, but I know what the old bastard’s cum smells like, so it’s a little tough to sit there and let him act like he’s my father, and not a human animal. And my mother knew back then and didn’t do jack shit, and she keeps trying to get me to interact with him and I hate her for it. I know she’s probably just getting up in the years and isn’t all there, but how am I supposed to get over that?
ABigGuy4U
19d ago
The police state works and is aimed in one direction.
It does now but that’s only after it spent 80 years castrating the left, until all that’s left is the garbage fire described in OP’s post. If you had an actual viable, non-co-opted left, I assure the FBI would be going after them too.
After the Hezbollah pager detonation, can you really say that it won’t? I highly doubt the Mossad is the first intelligence agency in the world to ever sneak things into the supply chain for various reasons. There were rumors Intel was putting secret spying hardware in at the chip level in the late 90s.
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