TheLastBaron

I'm taking that example way to literally, but if you took Baby and replaced him with Wallace from The Wire the movie would be completely different for me. They both play a good-hearted kid that falls on hard times and gets mixed up in some bad shit, but the difference is that for me Baby doesn't (and isn't meant to) fulfill the role of being a real person. Baby for me was basically just like the cars in the film, he was there to get the movie from point A to point B and keep it engaging in-between. He was somewhere between a very thin character and a vehicle, but he wasn't there as a human being. Having him be a shy awkward kid who spends all his time in his room making beats worked for that better for me than if he were more interesting or outgoing. I didn't love the film though so I could be totally wrong!

Man this sums up my experience watching this movie. I had a good time watching it, can't imagine I'll watch it again anytime soon. A year or two back I was listening to a podcast as it was coming out, Goodfellas Minute, where the hosts and their guests talk about Goodfellas one minute at a time, so an each episode is 10-15 minutes of people talking about a single minute of the film in order. It works because there's so much going on between the actual film and the history of Henry Hill and the background and all the little details that come from someone like Scorsese. Even the first minute which was just a black screen with the white titles scrolling by made for an interesting listen because they talked about the font and how Scorsese really liked the opening to Vertigo so he ended up just getting the same guy who did the Vertigo title sequence to do Goodfellas. Listening to all 145 minutes of that podcast made me really appreciate how few movies there are that have so much going on that every individual minute of the film is interesting in it's own way. Baby Driver is definitely a movie that you could dissect a minute at a time, easily.

So I just found out there's a show of Fargo now. That just sounds like such a dumb idea. Fargo is for sure in my top 5 movies so I'll probably hate this, but I'll watch it. I hate Billy Bob Thornton though.

So I watched Paterson the other night and I liked it, but some things in it didn't work for me personally. Basically all of it boils down to "I wanted this movie to be more of something that it wasn't trying to be in the first place". Basically I really liked the premise and a lot of what the movie did (and for the record I'm a big Jarmusch fan), but I think I wanted more grounded-vignette-of-a-normal-dude's-life and less quirky-indie-movie (half-way through the movie I stopped and thought to myself about how much I felt like I was just watching 500 Days of Summer or something). Like the parts where he encounters the little girl or the Japanese man on the bench were just so serendipitous that it made things feel a little saccharine to me. It was like having a normal like life where you do the same thing every day wasn't good enough so Paterson has to have all these special encounters to make his life worthwhile which didn't really work for me. The scene with Method Man did work for me though, I guess because the encounter happened as the result of Paterson hearing his verses and going out of his way to listen and that made the whole shared moment something that came from within the characters and not just the script. One thing I'm not totally sure about is the daily interactions with his co-worker where he talks about what's going on with his life. I like the whole thing, it does a good job of portraying the sort of conversations you have where you're asking what's new to get a sense that things are changing despite the fact that every day things are essentially still the same, but also at the same time you're just kind of going through the motions out of routine. What I'm not 100% sure how I feel about is how on the last day his co-worker just figures Paterson doesn't care and leaves. Is this supposed to be like a whole relationship arc for them over one week? Presumably before the movie starts they've been doing this for years and is this the one week where the guy just decides to stop? For me I can relate to the scenes a lot, and I've been the co-worker where I know someone doesn't really care all that much about what's going outside of work, but I'll rant for my own sake as much as theirs just so I can get it off my chest and I'm glad to have a sympathetic ear even if it's an unresponsive one. Maybe this isn't the end of some sort of relationship between those two characters, I could totally see the other guy coming by again come Monday and rambling on to Paterson again and the cycle continues. Regarding his girlfriend once again I'm conflicted, but I think I might have misheard a line that changed how I framed everything. When she decides she wants to get a guitar so she can fulfill her dream of being a country singer I thought Paterson mumbled "You wanted a dog..." meaning first she wanted their bulldog and now she wants a guitar and in a week she might want something else and it would totally make sense that between these things and her art and her aspirations of stardom we're being shown how she's feeling unfulfilled and looking for some sort of outlet, and from Paterson's point of view he loves her and wants to make her happy, but obviously money is tight. If this is the case part of me wishes the film had had to address the end result of this sort of thing, which is getting to a point where you're forced to say "I want more than anything for you to be happy, but there just isn't any more money". Then again the movie does present a picture where I would totally just buy a "Well, money's tight, but we'll find a way to make it work..." sort of thing, and to undercut this whole paragraph the more I think about it the more I think I just misheard Adam Driver mumbling and he didn't mention the dog at all and rather than the scene being about spending money you can't afford in the hopes of wish-fulfillment it's actually the opposite and about finding ways to be happy and fulfilled even in lean times and how special it is to have someone who supports you. To talk about something positive, I liked the bar scenes a lot. Seeing Paterson leave with his dog every night always got me excited. I also really like resulting scene, probably my favorite in the movie, where Paterson passes the actor-boyfriend (I'm really bad at names, if Paterson wasn't the most used word in the film I would be calling Adam Driver Adam Driver) on the sidewalk after the incident the night before. The way they just sort of approach each-other and there's some awkwardness, but then it ends with a good character moment where they both ask each other how they're doing and they both say they're doing fine despite having both just lost something big to them and there's the line exchanged about there always being another day capped off with "see you around" and it does a great job of showing how all the little things don't really matter it's the big picture that's important. Lots of movies are based around some big event happening, but in Paterson the big event is just life so one thing that happened one night isn't really that important, you get over it and move on and grow. This isn't totally fitting, but it made me think of the Richard Linklater quote about high school, "The stakes were really low. To get Aerosmith tickets or not? That’s a big thing. It was really rare when the star-crossed lovers from the opposite side of the tracks and the girl gets pregnant and there’s a car crash and somebody dies. That didn’t really happen much. But riding around and trying to look for something to do with the music cranked up, now that happened a lot!". I definitely ended up writing more than than I expected, so that's probably a good indication that it's a good movie. I guess I didn't state it at all earlier, but I am also a career-minimum-wage-worker so I definitely appreciated a lot of what the film went for. Definitely something I'll have to watch again sometime.

I remember seeing it and going in really cynical and halfway through being really surprised in a good way because it was pretty good and engaging and yes McAvoy is fantastic in it. Then by the end I was kind of not that big of a fan anymore. I already don't remember a lot of the specifics about the movie, but I think essentially I thought the movie might have been trying to say something interesting about trauma and abuse and judging people and that just never really happened. Also I just thought the ending was really stupid.

I'm curious what you're referring to here as for me the problems I have with the prequels aren't in A New Hope. There's lots of problems, but for me above everything else the primary flaw with the prequel movies is just that they're really fucking boring. I've always attributed a lot of this as to being due to Lucas getting older and being drawn to different things (for example a guy in his late 50's might be really into trade routes and tax disputes in a way that a guy in his early 30's wasn't and less interested in other things).

Are you the Frenden? If so I'm a huge fan of you blog and YouTube channel! Your tablet reviews were incredibly helpful to me and I love your art!

I saw them in 2004 I think at a festival as one of the three headliners (The Killers were the top billing, then Modest Mouse, and then before them was Arcade Fire). I had never even heard of them before but they were incredible. I remember the first thing that stood out, aside from just them being good, was they did some sort of weird performance thing where members of the band were fighting each other, like actually on the floor rolling around hitting one another during the song. Then I remember they played a cover of State Trooper (Bruce Springsteen is my favorite artist in any medium ever) and I was totally sold. It was one of the best arena performances I've seen from a band and while I'm sure their shows are totally different over a decade later I'd love to see them again.

So after a couple months of not watching any X-Files I picked it up again and man, Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose is a fantastic episode.

...and is Danny McBride. I'm not hating on him at all, but knowing it's Danny McBride and he wears a cowboy hat is literally all you need to know to know everything about the character.

Oh absolutely, it was very much another Prometheus for me. For whatever it's worth, one of the people I saw Alien: Covenant with is actually a fan of Prometheus and he did not care for Covenant at all.

Yeah I should also clarify I was just talking about the character, I don't mind Jared Leto, in fact I'm actually a hige MY So Called Life fan. I just found his character in the trailer completely put me off this film.

For me my problem with Covenant was just that it was really dumb and boring. It's definitely an action thriller and not a sci-fi film, but it doesn't doesn't get into slasher territory so instead of having a lot of tension and suspense its just dull. The characters are all incredibly stupid and the movie does nothing to make the audience care about them. The entire movie is just a series of people saying "this is a bad idea" and then people still doing the bad idea and bad things happening. The level of incompetence was just frustrating to watch. Also for what it's worth I didn't watch the prologue, which I guess does flesh out the characters more, but I don't want James Franco fleshed out in a movie that allows me to blink and forget he exists. The film is also incredibly predictable to the point that I wouldn't even say the plot-twists are obvious, I'd say there aren't any. One last thing, the movie felt like it had been edited to death, which I'm sure it was.

I hadn't seen anything before going to see Alien last night and I saw the trailer. Before seeing the trailer I didn't know Jared Leto was in it, but even without that the trailer looked so bad that I have no plans to see it unless I hear it's incredible when it comes out.

Yes. Yes it is.

Does anyone have much experience buying photography books (as in books/monographs by photographers, not books about the art of photography)? I know basically nothing about photography, but in the past couple years I've started picking up books by photographers I like and I don't really know printing books really works. The answer to this could very well just be "it depends", but basically what I'm trying to figure out is are most books of modern photographers only printed once? A lot of the time I'll find a photographer I like and try and get something they've put out, but even if it was just a year or two prior they're almost always sold out (I'm assuming everything is done in fairly small quantities so that totally makes sense) and in my brief experience it kind of seems like for the most part things don't get reprinted and that's sort of it so now if I want something that was in 2014 a 35 euro monograph my only option at this point is paying $250+ to get it used or hoping some of the same material will be reprinted in some sort of compilation (which is what I did with Todd Hido because as much as I love his stuff I'm not trying to spend $300-600 on a 56 page monograph, used.) Is this just the way the game is played?

I tried reading American Gods years ago and stopped half-way through because I wasn't into it at all. Then I read Anansi Boys and absolutely loved it. After that I went back and read American Gods and still didn't like it. If any of the Anansi Boys stuff ends up in the show I might check it out, otherwise I'm passing for now.

Within a month of when I bought my 3ds I dropped it and the 3ds slider broke off so I've never been able to use 3d on it (technically I can if I get a staple or a small paper clip and jimmy it around) and I've never once been bothered by not having 3d. If I didn't already have a 3ds this would be exactly what I'd want. I've never tried the 3d on the new 3ds though so maybe that would change my mind.

Yeah, whenever I see something where it's "[...] and you'll never guess what happens next!" and "what happens next" is what most people would assume happens next, that's what I consider clickbait.

I've already posted in this thread about it and extensively in the comics slack channel about it, but The Flintstones continues to be amazing. In slack I talked a lot this week about the issue that came out on Wednesday (#10 of 12) so I'll probably give it a break after this post, but the more I think about the issue the stronger I feel that it's something super special and I'd go so far as to say that this particular issue is easily one of the best single issue of any comic I've ever read, for sure the best I've read in many years.

I have nothing to add to Harry Potter, but I had to comment because this is exactly how I felt about Nightvale. I tried for so long to get into it because the idea seemed too good (I've listened to A Prairie Home Companion basically my entire life and Nightvale is essentially News From Lake Woebegone, but weird). I listened to maybe 30 episodes hoping it would get better, but eventually I just accepted that I could not get over how much I hated the narration. Actually regarding Harry Potter I'll say this: I enjoyed the books as a kid, I enjoyed the movies as a kid up until 5 at which point I decided I was done and haven't seen the last three. I watched Chamber of Secrets a few weeks ago with my sister who is currently re-reading all the books and watching the movies after each book she reads. The best I can say is that of the movies I watched with her that weekend (Chamber of Secrets, the live action Tarzan movie with Christoph Waltz, and Beginners) I liked Harry Potter the most. Also I do (did) genuinely enjoy the third movie which is definitely my favorite book as well, and it also has the honor of being the last movie I saw at the late great Century 21 dome (which closed a decade after Prisoner of Azkaban came out).

I've seen so many people say this since Stranger Things came out and feel obligated every time to point out that her comeback was actually in Show Me A Hero the year before which is incredibly good. Also for what it's worth she was in Black Swan.

New Mastodon album, it's good! (except for one song which might be the single for the album which is fucking awful and sounds like early 2000's Hot Topic alt-rock)

Yeah, Caché is fantastic. I really like White Ribbon, and should really get around to seeing Armour.