HereAndGone
10hr ago
spend half the movie looking at her phone
That's absolutely a problem with audiences today, and part of the reason our attention spans and focus are so frayed. And yeah, the writers have to compensate for "if we don't keep the action moving, we won't keep eyeballs on the screen".
HereAndGone
10hr ago
I certainly get that impression from him, and I also (where I may well be doing him a disservice since I know Sweet Fanny Adams about his background) get the impression that he's on a lower rung of the ladder, aspiring to a higher rung, and resenting the hell out of the fact that he may be confused with the low-lifes one rung below him.
That's the reason I made the Hyacinth Bucket comparison: Hyacinth plainly comes from a background that is working class/teetering on the edge of lower middle class. She made it firmly into lower middle class territory, then clawed her way by sheer force of will into middle middle class land (and is dragging Richard along with her) and aspires, rather pathetically, to the upper middle class reaches that will always be barred to her. She's terrified of her lower middle class roots being discovered and held against her, in the company she now aspires to, or even worse - to be identified by them as such after all her work to climb out of that level.
HereAndGone
10hr ago
The Sting
Redford and Newman, couldn't go wrong with that combo at that time. That's characters + plot meshing well.
HereAndGone
10hr ago
The only thing better than Darwin and Jussie Smollett was Impassionata betting the house on Trump going to jail, for sure, this time, definitely, just we all wait and see, by this time next week he'd be locked up for real.
How many years ago was that, does anyone remember? Ah, good times, good times!
HereAndGone
10hr ago
Problem is, if you were one of the people who engaged regularly with Darwin, you soon got to know his tricks (and yes, he did engage in tricks). As Amadan said, he was very, very good at riding the line between what would be just that step over it to get a ban, and provoking his interlocutor into taking that one step.
It's more of a "whole body of work" thing rather than "this specific post here, this one, this one" because ain't nobody got the time to make a list and checking it twice over arguments from years back (I know, somebody will pop up with just such a list). It's like somebody new coming in to a pub and hearing about Billy 'BabyEater' McGee getting barred, and asking why, and going on about how "but all you're telling me is that he got into a fight, and the other guy was the one who threw the first punch anyway!"
Yeah, that was the last straw which gave the ostensible reason for barring him, how do you think he got the name "BabyEater" in the first place?
HereAndGone
10hr ago
At this point, I'm starting to lean towards you being either Impassionata (hi, guy!) or even Darwin himself. You're doing the same darn thing of repeating the same point over and over ("Darwin had AAQCs!") and ignoring every other point being presented.
AAQCs mean nothing. I've gotten some myself, and I certainly never put any effort into the ones that got recommended. I've also gotten some bans, and I have to admit I did flounce off once myself, and those are more meaningful.
HereAndGone
11hr ago
he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.
Ah, come on. He was able to finesse the rules within an inch of their lives so that the people responding to him ate bans while he just slid on by with clean hands. Eventually it all caught up to him, but he wasn't the one on the receiving end of the rules enforcement.
HereAndGone
11hr ago
I'd forgotten how entertaining the Smollett thread was. Darwin lecturing de haut en bas about empirical reality in regards to one of the stupidest (but admittedly hilarious) fake hate crimes ever was just perfection.
If Smollett had just stuck to "I got jumped and beaten up by two white guys yelling slurs", he probably would have gotten away with it. Even the MAGA thing would have worked if he said one or both was wearing a MAGA hat. But he had to plan it out like a TV episode with the bleach and noose and on-the-nose dialogue, and it all fell apart.
HereAndGone
11hr ago
Nah, Darwin drove me nuts because he explicitly stated that sometimes he just posted something that he didn't believe simply in order to start a row (and as Amadan pointed out, that often got people banned for responding). How do you have any kind of productive discussion if the other party is "ha ha, you honestly thought I was serious about that? man, what a maroon!"
HereAndGone
12hr ago
I think his problem is that he doesn't and won't come out and say explicitly what the hell it is that he really believes, his own 95 Theses if you will. This makes it very difficult to argue with him, since anything he may have posted that you want to dig into, he comes back with "that's not what I think so you're wrong".
I don't mind a bit of the ould sneering contempt, I can dish that out myself, but I do want to know what precisely the sneering is about.
HereAndGone
12hr ago
Whatever makes The Motte appealing to most of the people here doesn't seem to exist to the left of the motte.
I think it's the arguing! When you have a site that is all "so we do all agree that purple is better than brown" on some topic, then there's not much left to discuss about purple and brown, so there's not much point in hanging around for the fiftieth post on how great purple is. I think TheSchism was a charitable project and even a good idea, but I also think it was mostly Trace's pet project and now that he seems to be busier elsewhere then there's not as much input and not as much drive to get people engaged and recruited.
HereAndGone
12hr ago
That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned
To be fair, I don't think Alexander is particularly left or right (I think he's probably somewhere in the spectrum of liberal to centre-right). What he is, is extremely hung up on class and status. He's obsessed with what he deems to be low-class/underclass behaviour (especially around women's sexuality as baby mamas) and hence why he always brings it back to abortion as the social climbing panacea (keep the underclass from breeding more underclass, keep aspirant working class to lower middle class types from falling back down the ladder by not letting them become single teen moms). He wants marriage and family and the rest of it, but on the proper timeline of "get educated, get a job, get married and have the appropriate number of kids, avoid sleeping around as a teen, avoid sleeping around like a ho in general, and if you do get pregnant without planning it, get an abortion so you don't ruin your life and more importantly your social status as nascent middle class". Thus his grudge with the pro-life right, because we want the sluts to keep their bastards who will then leech off the state for life (putting words into his mouth there, but that's the impression I strongly get of how he feels about it). If we were truly responsible right-wingers holding conservative values, we'd be all for discreet abortion to maintain decorum and enforce social conformity around correct behaviour.
Yeah, the 5th century context is a little muddled. It's hard to know exactly how peaceful versus imposed the Christianisation of Ireland was, but it was pretty much peaceful and was heavily "local guys converted then converted their neighbours" and less "outsiders came in and imposed their foreign alien faith on the natives". Take St Patrick - he came to Ireland as a captive taken in a slave raid and eventually comes to identify with the Irish (see the Letter to Coroticus):
Surely it was not without God, or simply out of human motives, that I came to Ireland! Who was it who drove me to it? I am so bound by the Spirit that I no longer see my own kindred. Is it just from myself that comes the holy mercy in how I act towards that people who at one time took me captive and slaughtered the men and women servants in my father's home? In my human nature I was born free, in that I was born of a decurion father. But I sold out my noble state for the sake of others – and I am not ashamed of that, nor do I repent of it. Now, in Christ, I am a slave of a foreign people, for the sake of the indescribable glory of eternal life which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
...That is why I will cry aloud with sadness and grief: O my fairest and most loving brothers and sisters whom I begot without number in Christ, what am I to do for you? I am not worthy to come to the aid either of God or of human beings. The evil of evil people has prevailed over us. We have been made as if we were complete outsiders. Can it be they do not believe that we have received one and the same Baptism, or that we have one and the same God as father. For them, it is a disgrace that we are from Ireland. Remember what Scripture says: ‘Do you not have the one God? Then why have you each abandoned your neighbour?’
Then there is the 11th century anecdote from Gerald of Wales, the Anglo-Norman apologist for the Norman invasion of Ireland:
Chapter XXXII: A sarcastic reply of the Archbishop of Cashel.
I once made objections of this kind to Maurice, archbishop of Cashel, a discreet and learned man, in the presence of Gerald, a clerk of the Roman church, who formerly came as legate into those parts, and throwing the blame of the enormous delinquencies of this country principally on the prelates, I drew a powerful argument from the fact that no one in that kingdom had ever obtained the crown of martyrdom for the church of God. Upon this the archbishop replied sarcastically, avoiding the point of my proposition, and answering it by a home-thrust: “It is true,” he said, “that although our nation may seem barbarous, uncivilized, and cruel, they have always shewn great honour and reverence to their ecclesiastics, and never on any occasion raised their hands against God’s saints. But there is now come into our land a people who know how to make martyrs, and have frequently done it. Henceforth Ireland will have its martyrs, as well as other countries.”
Now, it could be plausible that Remmick is complaining about "in the 5th century the king gave a parcel of land to the local monastery when he converted to Christianity and that was land my father occupied" but that is as far as you could stretch it - the land would have been the king's in the first place. There really weren't Christian conquerors marching around taking land off the locals the way this scene seems to be trying to evoke.
EDIT: Well, not unless you count miraculous cloaks as "marching around taking land off the locals":
[St Bridget] approached the King of Leinster requesting the land on which to build her monastery. The place she selected in Kildare was ideal. It was near a lake where water was available, in a forest where there was firewood and near a fertile plain on which to grow crops. The King refused her request. Brigid was not put off by his refusal. Rather, she and her sisters prayed that the King’s heart would soften. She made her request again but this time she asked, “Give me as much land as my cloak will cover.”
Seeing her small cloak, he laughed and then granted this request. However, Brigid had instructed her four helpers each to take a corner of the cloak and walk in opposite directions – north, south, east and west. As they did this the cloak began to grow and spread across many acres. She now had sufficient land on which to build her monastery. The King and his entire household were dismayed and amazed. They realised that this woman was truly blessed by God. The King became a patron of Brigid’s monastery, assisting her with money, food and gifts. Later he converted to Christianity. It was on this land in Kildare that she built her dual monastery c.470.
HereAndGone
1d ago
But it's really hard to keep things on track when there are so many people making decisions, some of whom care about aesthetics, and others care a lot about casting disabled angels, stuffing even more queerness into already very queer friendly franchises, getting more screen time for their boyfriend (WoT specific?), and all sorts of other things.
Yeah, I've been reading the complaints that the reason "Elio" failed for Pixar was because of all the changes the studio made (apparently in a panic after the first test screening where people allegedly liked the movie but nobody wanted to pay to watch it in a cinema). That sounds reasonable - too many cooks spoil the broth, after all - but the complaints go on about how they reduced the queerness and cut out its queer heart and dropped all the hints that Elio is gay.
The 11 year old lead character has to be explicitly gay, or else the movie fails? I think it failed because of the damn eye patch in the marketing (what little there was of it, I hadn't a clue there was a new Pixar movie out until I started seeing all the pieces about how it bombed) - you stick an eye patch on a kid character, you make it look like your movie is going to be A Moral Lesson And Lecture About The Differently Abled And Inclusion, not a fun sci-fi romp for the kids.
That, and the bean mouth style.
HereAndGone
1d ago
We're all griping here, but I suppose we have to remember that Hollywood is a business, and what the people who run the studios want is a successful formula. "X movie made a killing, quick, we must produce our own X movie!" and everyone flogs it to death (see the decline of the MCU) until the next Big Thing comes along, then everyone copies that.
Disney making live-action remakes of the hit animated movies is just more of that, we forget that the hits like "Aladdin" etc. got plenty of straight-to-video sequels (and some pretty good cartoon series). Think of the "Disney on Ice" versions or how they squeezed as much juice as they could out of the original "The Little Mermaid" before the 2023 remake with the race-swapped casting (and if that had been more successful, we'd be up to our knees in sequels, prequels, animated series, etc. etc. etc.)
Making movies is about money, not art, at least on the scale of Hollywood and Disney et al., and they run on P.T. Barnum's adage of "give the people what they want" until the people are sick and tired of it.
HereAndGone
1d ago
The failure mode for plot-driven media is when the writer(s) are too in love with their own genius and spend so much time adding on baroque twirls (Christopher Nolan seems to be the exemplar of this, by what reviews I've read) that they disappear up their own spirals and leave the audience with an unsatisfactory experience. "The Usual Suspects" is a great movie, but once you know the twist at the end, there's not much more to it. Sure, you can rewatch it to pick up all the clues you missed the first time round, but that's more like doing a crossword puzzle ("aha, there is the cup!" type of watching out for clues).
Juggling all three elements successfully is very difficult, pulling off two of them is probably more achievable, and it probably is easier to get characters + action to work than a combination like characters + plot or plot + action. I think this is why Hitchcock was so well-regarded as a director, he didn't pull it off every time, but he could manage to pull off plot + characters + action.
(1) Our attention spans have been shot by media; we're accustomed to everything from video (old fashioned tape) to videos (e.g. Youtube) to streaming where we can fast-forward to The Good Bits and skip all the boring talky parts
(2) Because of that, modern scripts have to be full of The Good Bits to hold our goldfish-attention spans, that's why when you watch the trailers now you more or less have seen the movie because they put a lot of The Good Bits into the trailers to grab our attention and make us want to see the movie
(3) Also, modern script writers are just bad. I know I've banged on here about "The Rings of Power" before, but you can tell that Payne and McKay are movie writers not TV writers. They treat every episode like a mini-movie, so there's little development of plot and characters flowing on from one episode to the next (and that gives us things like 'in this episode Galadriel is threatening to commit war crimes in her pursuit of revenge, in the following episode she is preaching about revenge bad') and plenty of pointless activity (what did Isildur wandering around actually achieve? nothing, but hey we got a Cool Fight* with a bog monster)
- It was not a Cool Fight, it was embarrassing for all concerned, including the bog monster
HereAndGone
1d ago
Just that in the week where there's new stories about the young girls drowned in the Texas floods, a statement about "a certain amount of violent deaths of children happens and we shouldn't get our knickers in a twist over that" sounds a little tone-deaf.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Part of the entire mindset, though; doing this thing isn't really a crime, it's... [fill in the blanks] and only the sheeple keep the dumb rules.
HereAndGone
1d ago
(1) Re: the overrunning of the vampire population if everyone killed is turned, yes you are absolutely correct and this has been a problem that vampire fiction has had to deal with (hence why they take the scene from the novel of Dracula about Dracula forcing Mina to drink his blood as "yeah but just dying of vampire bite doesn't turn you, you need to drink vampire blood too" which directly contradicts the folklore and the novel).
(2) "Remmick is a pre-Christian Irishman (They steal his fathers lands and forcibly convert him apparently)" That doesn't exactly work with the history of how Ireland became Christian, unless Remmick is talking about when the Normans invaded - but Ireland was already Christian by then and after a bit of pillaging and dispossessing the Normans settled down to assimilate into the native society, hence "more Irish than the Irish themselves"; it fits better with a later historical period, say the Tudor era or later, especially the 17th century when land was taken and efforts to anglicise the Irish were very pronounced. A bit of a mixed bag there, unless Coogler is trying to indicate that all along there were pagan Irish surviving down the centuries but that's not really so.
Anyway, expecting high levels of historical accuracy from a vampire movie is missing the mark! But damn it, the clips I've seen are making me interested in this movie - the scene where Remmick is reciting the "Our Father" along with Sammie is a reverse or perverse baptism scene (they're both standing in the river, they both pray, and then Remmick keeps pushing Sammie's head under the water then pulling him back up as he tries to 'convert' Sammie to joining him and becoming a vampire and what is his statement of faith about universal belonging).
I don't want to be thinking thinky-thoughts about a dumb vampire movie!
HereAndGone
1d ago
Possibly the same sources as the Wikipedia article:
Epstein allegedly showed inappropriate behavior toward underage female students at the time, paying them constant attention, and even showing up at a party where young people were drinking, according to a former student. Other former students also often saw him flirting with female students.
But at the same time, this doesn't say how old the underage girls were, and if the kids were holding drinking parties then they must have been around 17. This was the 70s in a progressive school, he was being the cool hip young teacher who was more like a friend than an authority figure. Yes, still creepy, but he isn't the first or the last teacher to be too attentive to certain pupils. See Don't Stand So Close To Me by The Police.
HereAndGone
1d ago
a private school teacher who seduced his students and blackmailing their dads by threatening to reveal their daughter was no longer a virgin
The only way that works is "your 14 or 15 year old daughter is no longer a virgin" and then the parents get him for having sex with minors. Besides, I thought he got his real start in the whole "getting accepted as part of the social circle of extremely wealthy people, not just the hired staff managing their money" by being a very good friend of a rich gay guy? (Not stated outright that he's gay but he didn't get married until he was in his mid-fifties and handing over everything to a young man seems a little too trusting for a guy who made his money, not inherited it:
The only publicly known billionaire client of Epstein was Leslie Wexner, chairman and CEO of L Brands (formerly The Limited, Inc.) and Victoria's Secret. In 1986, Epstein met Wexner through their mutual acquaintances, insurance executive Robert Meister and his wife, in Palm Beach. A year later, Epstein became Wexner's financial adviser and served as his right-hand man. Within the year, Epstein had sorted out Wexner's entangled finances. In July 1991, Wexner granted Epstein full power of attorney over his affairs. The power of attorney allowed Epstein to hire people, sign checks, buy and sell properties, borrow money, and do anything else of a legally binding nature on Wexner's behalf. Epstein managed Wexner's wealth and various projects such as the building of his yacht, the Limitless.
By 1995, Epstein was a director of the Wexner Foundation and Wexner Heritage Foundation. He was also the president of Wexner's Property, which developed part of the town of New Albany outside Columbus, Ohio, where Wexner lived. Epstein made millions in fees by managing Wexner's financial affairs. Although never employed by L Brands, he frequently corresponded with the company executives. Epstein often attended Victoria's Secret fashion shows, and hosted the models at his New York City home, as well as helping aspiring models get work with the company.
Epstein was a creep, no doubt about it, but he was probably more of a "guy in the same social circles who throws lavish parties where pretty young women are very attentive to important men" than "yeah he'll fill your order for three fifteen year old blondes".
HereAndGone
2d ago
Feck it, I'm starting to get interested in this dumb movie now. I've seen some clips of scenes on Youtube (the end fight) and the way Remmick is going after Sammie makes me think this is about cultural appropriation and exploitation; taking the products of black culture (songs, stories) and absorbing that into mainstream/white culture. Remmick literally tells Sammie he wants his songs and stories, and it seems that the memories of the thralls become part of Remmick's memories as well, so it really is "black culture being absorbed into white mainstream society and being altered and taken over as belonging there". White culture is vampiric on the culture of the minorities (black, Hispanic, what have you) and depends on 'fresh blood' to rejuvenate and perpetuate itself.
But why an Irish vampire, specifically? I really do want to know now what the hell the director and/or writer was getting at. You can be a victim yourself and still victimise others? He was frightened at a young age by Michael Flatley? Remmick's Southern accent is a commentary on how the Irish assimilated into American society by imitating those around them and becoming racist and prejudiced in their turn? An ancestor of his was beaten by some Mick in a dance-off and now he's getting revenge?
American jig dancing was a creole form. The word jig refers to a competitive dance in 6/8 time with Irish origins, but in early America “jig dancing” and “Negro dancing” were synonymous terms, used interchangeably to describe the dance step, a style of dancing, the “set dance” format (which combines several different tune changes and steps), and competitive dancing (regardless of the tune or step being performed). Black people who performed jigs, reels, and hornpipes in an African style were called “Negro dancers and musicians” as were white people who adopted the African-American style (or performed their jigs in blackface). The Negro dancer I’m researching is an Irish American named John Diamond, who is known for a series of challenges he danced in the 1840s against an African American jig dancer called Master Juba. These rivals danced the same dance to the same tunes.
HereAndGone
2d ago
I get the strong impression this is not a movie made for black people, it's a movie made for white people who like to think about racism and all the rest of that stuff. Which is fair enough, I think specifically black movies for a black audience would be way different and have much less broad appeal, which means they'd do poorly at the box office (I think Moonlight, for instance, was absolutely a 'black movie made for white liberals').
The vampire element could be fascinating if done well; vampirism as a metaphor for conversion is one of the readings on the topic. Here comes an outside entity totally different to everything you know that takes over your life and changes you completely by force and without your will, and if you are willing that is in fact even worse. Applying that to "white vampires against black descendants of slaves" is going to dig up a lot of interpretation.
But I don't know if they do that, or if the movie can handle that. I haven't seen it, I'm only going by reviews, and it does seem to be a bit too pick'n'mix about the Oppressed Minorities on one side and the - well, the who? The KKK? The vampires? - on the other side. The Chinese couple and Choctaw vampire hunters? That's taking the BIPOC acronym a little too literally.
And why Irish? I don't know enough about this Remmick to know what flavour of Irish he is meant to be (the Scots-Irish of the South, who I presume would be the whites living beside and racist to the black population? Southern Irish as per "the rocky road to Dublin"? Protestant? Catholic? Neither?) Something odd going on there. Why Irish, as against the Anglo-philic culture of the plantation owners? Or is it meant to be a subtle reference to "Gone With the Wind" (the O'Haras and "Tara" being southern Irish by descent) - a sort of 'this is how the glamorous figures in Southern-set movies really are' notion?
Oh yeah - make this a pirate movie, it'll work. Even a space pirate movie. But that doesn't seem to be what it is. People judge by the marketing, so seeing something with a kid with an eyepatch, that looks to be "moral lecture about disability". I was going "why the hell is he wearing an eyepatch?" when looking at the posters etc. instead of going "oh this looks like fun kid's SF cartoon and maybe smart as well!"
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