TheLastBaron

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by TheLastBaron


  1. Excellent list, this basically came up yesterday when I was having a conversation with someone and they brought up Crash and I went along with it, but pretended I thought they were talking about the Cronenberg Crash with James Spader and Holly Hunter.


  2. 8 hours ago, Trip Hazard said:

     

    I've never heard of Lucinda Williams before, but there's some of her stuff on spotify. Are her albums worth hearing? Very jealous of you seeing Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. What was the composition of the crowd? I often wonder if this music appeals more to liberals or conservatives, religious folks or satan worshippers like myself. Or, more likely, a hodgepodge of all types.

     

     

    I'm in the Bay Area and II can't speak for other people, but I have always been under the impression that Nitty Gritty Dirt Band appealed more to liberals.  They could very well appeal to everyone, but being from California and having 60's hippy vibes to them makes me think their fanbase leans left.  The crowd was mostly old white people, but they were playing at a winery so that kind of goes with the territory.  They talked a lot about the time they spent in Humboldt in the 70's and the audience seemed really into it, so there's that (for context if you google Humboldt California you get pictures of fields of marijuana plants).

     

    I'd say Lucinda Williams is worth checking out, but I have no idea if you'll like her music.  Here are some of her songs that I like:

     

     

     

     

    Also if you haven't listened to them already you should probably check out The Band, and also watch The Last Waltz.

     

     


  3. While we're talking about annoying shortening of words, I'm just going to go out and say that I can't stand seeing the word "ninty" instead of Nintendo.  I don't know how long people have been doing it, I'd never noticed it in my life until pretty recently, but it's probably been a thing for a while and I just live in a bubble.  To me it comes off as a cross between trying to make Nintendo sound like Sony and also giving Nintendo an affectionate pet name because you're such close pals.  It also always makes me think someone misspelled "ninety". 


  4. 42 minutes ago, Badfinger said:

    Here's some true pedantry!

     

    I really, really detest how the English call Resident Evil "resi". For years I thought they were saying Res E, which is fine. It's the same reason that calling your Ultimate in a LOMA an "ulti" is bad.

     

    The reason is this - it's a shit job of abbreviating and it offends me as a genteel and sophisticated human being.

    What about saying "ult"? Is it specifically the" i"? 


  5. I just watched Celebrity and I have no fucking idea what that was.  I haven't even rated it on Letterboxd because I literally don't even know what to think.  On one hand I think it might be bad, but my gut is telling me it's good.  On the other hand I think it also might be good, but I want to say it's bad?  It's probably somewhere in the middle.  I liked Judy Davis.  I also liked Leo asking Branagh if he wanted to be in a foursome.


  6. 7 hours ago, Trip Hazard said:

    Recently, I've been on a bit of a country music kick.  For the longest time, the only country music I ever heard was about rednecks swilling cheap beer and disrespecting women, or modern(ish) country pop stuff like Shania Twain and, more recently, Taylor Swift, whom it is impossible to avoid without going to live in a cave on Mars.

     

    But, I knew that good stuff was out there, I just had to look for it. Here are some of my favourite things I found, and, yes, they are mostly traditional country songs with an emphasis on authenticity in the music and the lyrics. Most of them have a religious bent. I don't like the mass-produced stuff cos I'm a big snob.

     

     

    There's this from O Brother, Where Art Thou? 

     

     

    And this by Willie Nelson, recently featured very prominently in "Preacher"

     

     

    I actually saw Nitty Gritty Dirt Band live last year and they were really good.  I've seen Alison Krauss/ Union Station live probably 4 or 5 times and they are also super good.  I also saw Lucinda Williams live last year and she was terrible, like I've seen her live before a while ago and she was good, but this time she seemed super out of it and was incoherent a lot of the time and didn't seem to even know where she was at points.  It was pretty sad.


  7. 4 minutes ago, Patrick R said:

    So I just watched Nocturnal Animals and holy shit, this is an awful awful movie. Tom Ford does not know how to direct. My recommendation is to avoid it at all costs.

     

    I'm generally curious of anything Michael Shannon is in and I liked A Single Man so I was very slightly interested in Nocturnal Animals, but I guess I'll pass.  It's not like there's a shortage of other movies with Michael Shannon in 2016 anyways.


  8. 1 hour ago, gavku said:

    Oh wow I had no idea that pull list were so influential.

     

    also just caught up on Deadly Class, so dam good!!!

     

    Next thing I want to check out is A Land Called Tarot. Looks fantastic.

     

    I keep forgetting that there's new Deadly Class issues, I need to catch up.

     

    Re: pull lists and such, I listen to the iFanboy podcast and one of the hosts, Ron Richards, was the director of business development at Image for a while and since coming back to the cast (he wasn't a host the years he worked at Image) he's dropped a lot of insider info that's been pretty eye-opening for me.  For example I sort of was under the impression that digital sales were getting pretty big and probably made up a sizable chunk of sales.  They don't, everything is still revolving around sales of floppies (and specifically around preorders of them).  Even sales of tpb's aren't that much of a factor, if you aren't moving single issues you're not looking good even if you end up selling well in collected editions.  Also this probably shouldn't have been that much of a surprise to me as the numbers are out there, but I sort of thought Image was starting to become a competitor to Marvel in DC. In terms of issues sold Marvel and DC are still 70%+ of the market and Image is less than 10%.


  9. I'm https://letterboxd.com/souldriver/

     

    I don't use this as a social media site whatsoever I basically only started using it to log films after at the end of 2015 someone asked me what my favorite movies of the year were and I didn't even remember what I had seen.  

     

    I never actually write reviews and I I probably should because looking back at just my ratings they don't even make sense to me.  Like I gave Terms of Endearment and Atlantic City both 4/5 and I like those both way more than 4/5, whatever that even means/ was supposed to mean.  


  10. Yeah looking at it that wasn't the best example, I was trying to think of something that I have a very specific and very strong reaction to, but Ghost World actually would have been a much better.

     

    I actually didn't realize just how well Superbad did, I guess in my mind it was popular, but compared to Knocked Up it seemed way less successful. Also I guess then American Graffiti wouldn't really be a cult film, though now I'm conflicted about Easy Rider which was super successful, but I think of as being a cult film.  

     

    Edit: Now I'm thinking about where Rocky Horror fits into all of this and am even more conflicted. 

     


  11. For me I've pretty much thought of cult movies as movies where for whatever reason are very good at conveying something that will only resonate with a narrow group of people.  For example, Superbad is one of my favorite movies of all time.  The reason is that when it came out I was a senior in high school and the movie is pretty much an entirely accurate depiction of what my life was like at the time.  For people who weren't in high school around the same years (basically post-internet, post-social media, pre-smartphones) and in the same sort of setting (white Californian suburbs) I would assume the movie wouldn't really be that enjoyable and probably just seem like a much worse American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused (also cult films for the same reason), which it probably is. 

     


  12. I just watched it (not for the first time) last month and concur that it is indeed pretty great!  The Stanford Theater which focuses on old/classic films and is also involved in a lot of film preservation projects had a double feature of Casablanca and To Be or Not to Be and it was super fun.


  13. On 2/8/2017 at 1:10 PM, Patrick R said:

    The line it straddles between real heartbreak and fairy tale whimsy is very impressive.

    This is a really good point, there's a element of levity that is so incredible in the film.  Without it the film could have easily ended up being something like The Panic in Needle Park as far as being a somber but human character piece depicting ordinary people's lives intersecting amidst a backdrop of filth. The fact that the characters in Atlantic City are aiming for something more than just getting by makes the movie actually entertaining.  Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon are so good.  Like you say, it's definitely not the older (or rather earlier) Lancaster from things like From Here to Eternity or Elmer Gantry, but he's still so compelling.  I think the first time I saw Atlantic City I immediately went and watched Local Hero because I wanted more old Burt.  The film is super fun, but without coming at the expense of also being very real and honest.

     

    For the record I really like The Panic in Needle Park, but I would have a really hard time calling it entertaining or enjoyable.  It's very hard to watch which Atlantic City is absolutely not.


  14. For a long time I've really wanted John C Reilly to star in a biopic on Richard Simmons.  And not as a joke, like a serious movie that I think could actually be really good.  If you read any articles about Richard Simmons these days they're pretty sad and dark and I think John C Reilly could do it really well.


  15. That reminds me of the Bruce Springsteen song Shut Out the Light which is about a Vietnam vet coming home and dealing with those issues and trying to fit back into his previous life.  It's already a pretty fucking harrowing song if you listen to the released version, but it originally had two more verses that were cut, one about him and the heroin addiction he picked up (reminiscent of Sam Stone by John Prine) and one at the end of the song where the the protagonist kills himself.

     

    The original:

     

    The version released:

     


  16. I don't think Lucasfilm or Disney have ever gone after anyone over the despecialized editions, I know for sure they've never gone after Harmy, so they either don't care or don't want to acknowledge that there's a market for the theatrical versions.  I got them from the private tracker they were officially uploaded (which is one that focuses on fan edits and restorations rather than piracy), but I'm sure you can find it on any big public tracker.


  17. I don't have anything substantial to add to this thread, but the Atlantic City bluray made everything really fucking blue and it's awful. I know there's plenty of other movies that are recolored  pushing the blue and teal, but I really like Atlantic City so this bothered me. At least I have the DVD. Also this is not really on topic with this thread, but anyone who likes Star Wars should definitely be watching the Harmy Despecialized editions of the original trilogy if you aren't already. 


  18. It's come up in slack a few times recently so I figured it might be a good way to revive this thread by begging everyone else to check out the Flintstones comic DC is putting out. It's very biting political satire and social commentary and I have no idea what made DC/Warner Brothers to decide to publish a book this subversive, but I'm so happy they are. This is one of less than a handful of books that I actually buy in single issues, it's just so good. For people that don't buy floppies, which is probably most people, the first collection comes out end of March by the looks of it (and if you just want to check it out and see what I'm talking you can read it online with very little effort by just Google searching it). 


  19. 1 hour ago, Zeusthecat said:

    It really just made me want to go watch Cast Away again.

    Yeah I think I went into The Martian wanting Cast Away too much so I was disappointed when when I ended up getting was a super jokey Hollywood space adventure.  Actually I probably would have been disappointed no matter what just because I wasn't super into what the movie was, for a lot of the same reason you mentioned.


  20. Yeah I definitely think he thought he was being super slick in the movie.  I mean, the movie opens with Woody Allen getting the hot secretary to go on a date just by being Woody and then later on Charlize Theron is coming onto him something fierce without any sort of hypnosis thing.