It's the End of the World (And I Feel Fine) !!!

[Sounder]

Thanks thrulookingglass, very cool.

and thanks RocketMan.

[Harvey]

@RocketMan

I enjoyed spending time with you today, as it were, I'm on part three now. Good to meet you.

[RocketMan]

@RocketMan

I enjoyed spending time with you today, as it were, I'm on part three now. Good to meet you.

Wow, I'm very honoured! Thank you.

It's good to see discussion has continued here apace. It's a very necessary nook of the internet, I hope it stays that way.

[Harvey]

I'm glad you paid so much attention to the reviews, these are almost perfect examples of how narratives are maintained, borders policed, neglect ensured and of how excruciatingly cringe full this intellectual dishonesty has become in the age of information.

- - - - - -

Here's another great example. First a review of Under the Silver Lake by David Robert Mitchell from our esteemed fellow, Mr Horsley, an interesting meditation on the subject and themes from a justifiably sceptical position. The review nevertheless leads the audience to want to see it, which I did, and found it to be a very rewarding experience, indeed it boasts at least one of the most entertaining scenes in cinema history.

Analysis. (Spoiler alert)

Following that here's a review of the same film by, supposedly, one of Britain's most foremost film critics. By contrast, Mark Kermode describes the film in such bizarre and hyperbolic terms that it was unrecognisable to me, while he very noticeably fails to engage with the content or the subject of the film on any level. It's quite an extraordinary ad hominem rant from, supposedly, the premier film critic at the BBC and which appears at first glance to reflect only the sheltered life of Mark Kermode rather than the organised sneering we suspect (whether via Chomsky's 'filters' or otherwise.) Perhaps Kermode will be the last to learn that increasing numbers among his audience tune in only to find out which films provoke this kind of reaction from him.



The NYT is equally sniffy while avoiding the subject matter:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/movies/under-the-silver-lake-review.html

Sam feels oppressed by an older generation of guys who lay claim to all the credit, the money, the art and the women, while he is left with a literal and spiritual pile of junk that may not mean what he hoped it would. The movie turns his resentment into a cosmic joke.

Look, I’ve been there. But I can’t say I sympathize, because there’s no basis for sympathy. “Under the Silver Lake” is less a cinematic folly than a category mistake, taking the sterility of its own imaginative conceits for a metaphysical condition. It isn’t a critique of aesthetic or romantic ennui, but an example of intellectual timidity.

Although, as we see, the sense of organised sneering becomes more evident the further one travels:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/17/under-the-silver-lake-review

According to its dictionary definition, satire is supposed to use “humour, irony, exaggeration and ridicule” to “expose and criticise people’s stupidity or vices”. The third feature from David Robert Mitchell, ​about a hipster nerd who tries to solve a murder mystery using cryptic clues lifted from cereal packets and zines, could be read as an exposé of “incel” culture, a winking send-up of mouth-breathing man-children unhealthily obsessed with pop culture, unable to hold down jobs or relationships because they’re too busy playing vintage video games and masturbating over comic books.

and

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/16/under-the-silver-lake-review-david-robert-mitchell-andrew-garfield-cannes

But now he has been upgraded to a competition slot with latest film Under the Silver Lake: a catastrophically boring, callow and indulgent LA mystery noir.

This shit works, almost certainly. And perhaps it was ever thus.

[Grizzly]

For your amusement, edification or indifference...
http://metanoia-films.org/psywar/#watch

[0_0]

I enjoyed 'Under the Silver Lake' a lot, but yeah a movie like Paddington 2 is more up Kermode's alley:

[JackRiddler]

Here's another great example. First a review of Under the Silver Lake by David Robert Mitchell from our esteemed fellow, Mr Horsley, an interesting meditation on the subject and themes from a justifiably sceptical position. The review nevertheless leads the audience to want to see it, which I did, and found it to be a very rewarding experience, indeed it boasts at least one of the most entertaining scenes in cinema history.

You made me want to see it, so I did. Just now. The reviews are malpractice, but what else is new? Much one could say, and many comparisons one could make -- compulsively -- given that film history is in some sense its plot. Lynch, Kubrick, They Live, all noir, every movie that ever had LA in it, of course Hitchcock including his grave, Repo Man, 23 (German version please), Rebel Without a Cause, and some direct lifting from another fifty or so. (What the fuck kind of royalty waivers were they able to get, production looked like 9 million before salaries and lunches, but every other note on the piano alone might have been 50K.) Also, throw in the religions, the monarchs, capitalism and the dollar, everything that is the human mind on Internet, and a strong prefiguring (in 2019, remember that?) of the function and imminent demise of pre-Covid consumerism. Managed to fit a lot. But, so meta that where are we left? Isn't this just the new con, here for a moment and on to the next? Isn't this more fragmentation, to the point of never knowing nothing again? Isn't this demanding we sit and decipher the movie, just like Peter Parker, aging detective, deciphers pop-cult fragments throughout? I liked it. I liked that he had been Spider-Man, and acted like him, suddenly springing and running and climbing and jumping and punching people when you aren't expecting it, but didn't he always seem to beat people up brutally, in unfair fights? And these movies, why they always gotta be so suddenly uber-bloody? Do I need to see a toilet bowl of shit? (Why do I usually like that fine in real life, before the flush, and not on film, before the cut?) The way you got me was the above paragraph, last clause. I needed to know. By this "most entertaining" scene you mean the one in which we meet the songwriter, our songwriter, yes? Or...?

.

This certainly announced itself as the thematic line: "Your art, your writing, your culture, is the shell of other men's ambitions, ambitions beyond what you will ever understand."

No.

I jump to Mulholland Drive, the far greater film.

Why? Emotion. Depths. Effortless, because already there. Everything unknown is there, left unknown, because unknown.

(as opposed to ___________.)

.

[Harvey]

Yes, it was the songwriter scene. I haven't laughed so hard for a long time.

Edit: I concur with your ranking of Mulholland Drive without hesitation, but demur in relating the two films quite so directly. I refer you to your own reference to Heraclitus in one of our recent discussions somewhere, it's a different river, even the though the terrain is almost exactly the same.