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Notes -
Movies
I recently saw a bunch of movies and recommend every single one of them. I will start off with the Oslo trilogy by Joachim Trier. It consists of three excellent movies, all set in Oslo. Triers movies are Norwegian, the dailouges are terse, heavy emphasis on visuals, everyday slice of life action. All the movies show depth of emotions, even in the little things that we feel. I recommend watching all of them IMO, even better if you watch them with a girl you like.
The worst person in the world (2021)
This is a movie girls would like quite a bit since it is the only that has a female protagonist. Becoming 30, not having a fixed career path, and feeling unsure about yourself, the themes here are very well laid out.
This is the most emotionally taxing movie that I have seen in recent times. Set in the duration just one day, this movie breaks your heart, it broke my heart because I am currently in a downward spiral myself, not as bad as drugs like the protagonist but still pretty bad. Watch it, if you only watch one movie from the list, watch this one.
Trainspotting but with literature instead of drugs but set in norway. My favorite in terms of the joy I got out of it. It is a great slice of life coming of age movie. I love transporting, I saw it on the final day of my 10th grade exams, march 10th, 2016, that was the last time I was truly worry-free since hardcore cram schools begin in 11th. I loved the movie a lot and Reprise is similar as in its themes revolve around male friendships.
fun watch, ensemble cast, Tom Cruise is amazing in there though like everyone else in the world, they make pickup artists look like caricatures but otoh, most pickup artists and most people who watch them especially back then were not cool people to be around. The themes in it are far more varied, the casting is brilliant.
The only World War 2 movie I would consider rewatching. It depicts the events of just one day, set about the extraction of soldiers stuck in Dunkirk France. Chris Nolan is an amazing director, this is his only war movie. I was surprised when Quentin Tarantino rated it so highly since I had not seen it, I get what he meant now.
This is based on a novel of the same name, the novel was recommend by Todd Valentine, one of the worlds best dating coach, someone who played soccer, poker, chess at decently high levels. Cool watch, first black and white I have ever seen.
Sequel to The Hustler, with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise now being the hotheaded pool prodigy who is hustling people. It is directed very well and gives a decent send off to the arc that began in The Hustler.
All movies cannot be good after, a movie that you have to be 18 to watch, 15 if you wanna enjoy it and 30 if you want ti understand all the pop culture references, can skip if you want to in all honesty. I liked the cameos somewhat, so Chris Evans as the Human Torch with this thick Boston accent or Channing Tatum as Gambit with this over-the-top Cajun accent.
I will halt my movie-watching spree now since I know way too many people who just watch movies all day. After a while the sloth sets in, it happened to me too so I will try to watch less. Ideally, I will keep reading and meditating more alongside taking actions. Still here are some movies I want to watch or rewatch
Once upon a time in Hollywood - Brad Pitts body language is something I want to embody, that is the main reason for rewatching it, I saw in theatres 5 years ago, great movie
Boogie Nights, Fight Club and maybe a few more, I have not seen boogie nights so yeah.
Piggybacking for some of my recent watches.
American Fiction - A victim of its maketing. It is 95% upper class dramedy with 5% race farce, but the race farce was all that was advertised. I really enjoyed it, but I quite enjoy Jeffrey Wright’s understated acting style generally. I barely recognized Adam Brody. I initially thought Issa Rae was meant to be the foil, but they both made her more relatable and a blatantly worse human as the story progressed. I enjoyed it, but it is slow and frustrating often. Qualified recommendation.
Promising Young Woman - Bo Burnham steals the show and Carey Mulligan is excellent, but this is MeToo passion play scripting. All men are monsters and anything done to them is justified.The finale has her fraudulently gaining access to a private party via blackmail, chaining a man to a bed and preparing to mutilate him with a scalpel. The movie ends with him being arrested after killing her, but the movie’s internal logic would suggest that he will get away with it because it was a clear case of self defense. Dumb pretending to be smart. Do not recommend.
Boy Kills World - needed a tighter script. The gimmick of using H Jon Benjamin to provide the protagonist’s internal dialogue wears out quickly, and the action was pretty uninspired. Do not recommend.
Haywire - Gina Carano playing Jason Bourne, but not a wimp. The action scenes are well done - Gina’s time fighting MMA clearly shows and it looks like she could hold her own against her male opponents. The story is pretty weak and Carano doesn’t have a lot of range other than glowering. Wild to me that Steven Soderbergh directed this - it feels so sterile and devoid of human characters for one of his movies. Qualified recommendation.
Confirming on American Fiction. The race farce kinda drives the plot, but the point of the movie is not that, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to.
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I, too, liked American fiction.
Promising young Woman was an interesting watch for me. It was recommended by a tattooed, arts major stripper in Montreal. She told me that I looked like Bo Burnham in broken english, and gave me her number, presumably to discuss it afterwards.
I smoked weed and watched the movie and like it until I entered a paranoid spiral: had this woman suggested the film as a 4-D chess, long range insult? Did she believe I was the same type of person as Bo's character? Maybe.
But yeah great movie.
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Have you seen Saving Private Ryan? When I watched Dunkirk all I could think was that it was Nolan directing a PG-13 Ryan knockoff.
TBH there are only like three good scenes in the whole movie. The D-Day scene gives the impression that the film is going to be a gritty, morally-grey story about how war is a pointless, hellish slaughter. However, it quickly pivots to an all-too-typical morality play of good guys vs. faceless evil Germans. The only part of the film that humanizes the Germans in any way - the arc with Steamboat Willie - ends up being a story of how treating a Nazi mercifully was a blunder with horrible consequences.
I think the film squanders an opportunity to tell a genuinely interesting story about how the war was a ghoulishly unnecessary waste of millions of the best young men that the West had to offer. However, that is clearly not the story Spielberg wanted to tell; nor, frankly, is it a story America would have wanted to hear, so I can’t blame Spielberg any more than I would have blamed any other director.
Everyone says "the first half-hour is incredible, then it becomes corny patriotic schlock". I disagree: I think the film does an admirable job of sustaining the intensity of its opening throughout the subsequent battle scenes, which are almost as gripping and jarring as those in the opening, and which set the tone for how action films would look, sound and feel for decades afterwards.
On the contrary, I think the film did tell this story. Consider the conversation between Miller and Horvath in the church, in which Miller says that throughout his military career, he was able to rationally justify all the lives lost under his command with the reasoning that more lives have been saved as a result. But for this particular mission, he cannot employ that reasoning: many men must die to save the life of one, and the only way the sacrifice will be worth it is if Ryan "invent[s] a longer-lasting lightbulb or something". Ryan's closing dialogue indicates that he's spent more or less his entire adult life burdened with the knowledge that he's only alive because several men gave their lives to save his, as a public relations mission, and wondering if he has done enough with his time on earth to warrant the sacrifice. Spielberg himself openly stated that Miller's mission cannot be justified on moral grounds. If that doesn't say something about the absurdity and arbitrariness of war, I don't know what does. It may not be Joseph Heller but it's a far more disquieting and confrontational message than the movie is generally credited with. (Not to mention the fact that the film's viewpoint character for the back half is a coward who allows his squadmate to die because he's paralysed by terror, and who is clearly intended to represent how the typical audience member would behave in such a situation.)
Yes, Spielberg acknowledges that at least some of the American lives lost during the war were thrown away for cynical and arbitrary reasons, and that this is unspeakably tragic.
What he is unwilling to acknowledge is that the deaths of those German boys were also equally tragic and unnecessary.
I’m not willing to call the film “corny patriotic schlock”. It is an incredibly masterful film, and I agree with you that the battle scenes are thrillingly intense. However, you’re also correct that the film influenced battle scenes that came after it, and I don’t think this influence is wholly positive. Throughout the film, the Germans are almost universally treated as faceless foes, who die bloodlessly and instantaneously when shot. In contrast, American casualties writhe in pain, spurt blood everywhere, and cry for their mothers. It’s very affecting and humanizing, but it’s never applied to the Germans. There’s a YouTuber who does great analysis of this aspect of the film. The Germans can be mowed down without inspiring sympathy, because they are just villainous mooks.
This is not an anti-war film, and certainly not an anti-WWII film. It’s just an acknowledgement of how utterly horrible the sacrifices were that American soldiers needed to make in order to save the world from an unambiguously evil force of insane, feral monsters vaguely resembling human beings. It doesn’t ask you to stop and wonder whether the German soldiers felt the same way, let alone whether they would be correct in thinking so.
I just don't think the film is anywhere near as one-sided or morally black-and-white as you're making out. The German sniper in the clock tower has the opportunity to shoot Caparzo, but refrains from doing so until Caparzo returns the little French girl to her parents, presumably for fear of her getting hit in the crossfire. After killing Mellish in a vicious hand-to-hand mêlée, the unnamed German soldier can't bring himself to kill the cowering, snivelling Upham who clearly poses no threat. Perhaps we aren't strictly invited to sympathise with Steamboat Willie when he's pathetically sobbing and begging for his life, but I think we are at least invited to understand Upham's reluctance to kill a POW in cold blood. If Miller's squad had executed him, it would have been just one of several war crimes the Rangers are depicted committing: I don't think the audience is expected to cheer at their decision to shoot surrendering Czech conscripts at Omaha, or needlessly prolonging the deaths of several German soldiers by allowing them to burn to death rather than quickly finishing them off.
Of course the American soldiers are our viewpoint characters and we are intended to sympathise with them (because, duh, the Allies just were more sympathetic than the Germans), but I don't think the film can honestly be said to depict the German soldiers as a formless mass of interchangeable faceless monsters, nor the American soldiers as stalwart, wholly morally upstanding heroes who never put a foot wrong.
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I have, in saving private ryan, the cinematic scenes are in the beginning whereas in this one, they are spread throughout. For me that makes this more rewatachable, that too is a great movie, worth rewatching so good point.
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