Patrick R

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Posts posted by Patrick R

  1. Posted

    5 hours ago, Kyir said:

    I don't experience the same primal fear that the Thumbs do when it comes to potentially dangerous scientific advances and it's a very odd thing to experience second-hand.

     

    Also pertaining to that, waiting for whatever genetic modification nonsense is being proposed as a way to cure cancer (probably incredibly speculatively) may not be necessary by then. Immunotherapy has proven effective in treating metastatic skin cancer via the body's immune system where conventional treatments likely would have failed. To the extent of my knowledge, there are no inherent restrictions to it that would prevent similar treatments being used on other varieties of cancer in the future. The only problem right now is that it makes a small number of patients' brains rupture.

     

    The two bolded statements book-ending this post made me laugh a lot.

  2. Posted

    I hate the experience of reading things on Waypoint and trying to sluggishly scroll through the site, so it is a testament to how good this oral history of the Halo series is that I stuck through the whole thing. My verdict: Video Games Are Dumb and It's A Miracle Anything Exists.

     

    Also really, what is it about Waypoint's design that makes everything feel so slow and unresponsive? I've literally never been able to read a Waypoint article on my phone without it reloading or getting stuck at least once. Do I not have a sick enough gaming rig for articles about people who mod Civilization 3 in 2017?

  3. Posted

    23 minutes ago, marginalgloss said:

    It's one of the rare movies to remind me of that menacing quality often found in David Lynch's work - quite apart from that which is often wrongly called 'Lynchian' as shorthand for surreal. I mean something like the relentless quality of those scenes in Blue Velvet with Dennis Hopper, where it seems impossible that the raging menace of this threat could ever end. In that movie it did, just about; Wake in Fright offers no such catharsis. Highly recommended. 

     

     

    This is dead on. I think the first time I watched Wake In Fright I spent way too much time waiting for the horror to kick in, but once I began to settle into what it was actually doing I was hooked. Part of what makes it such an intense experience is that, in addition to being a psychological film, it's physically exhausting to watch. It's so hot and uncomfortable and so much beer is consumed, it starts to feel like a cinematic hangover, I just felt ill watching it.

     

    Fair warning to people who want to watch Wake In Fright, there is an actual kangaroo death onscreen.

  4. Posted

    Staying Vertical is a sort of nightmarish comedy (think along the tonal lines of The Lobster) about responsibility from the director of the gay thriller Stranger By The Lake. This shares that film's explicit sexuality, so fair warning, but Staying Vertical is a really dark and funny movie and it features what is surely the greatest jump cut in history.

     

    I think it's the best movie I've seen this year and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes unusual films. The trailer doesn't quite capture the playfulness of the film, but it captures it's tone pretty well.

     

     

  5. Posted

    What I'm Doing: Me and my partner Tessa Racked can offer up voice acting. They are a better actor than I (you can hear them perform in Uwaki Hittoman) but we both have acting experience and a good microphone set-up. My voice is more masculine, their voice is more feminine/androgynous.

    Contact Info: PM via forum

    Time Zone: CST

  6. Posted

    :tmeh: South and West is a new book from Joan Didion that collects her notes and observations from a trip she made through the American south in 1970 with the intent to write a piece that was ultimately never completed. It's certainly unpolished and incomplete feeling, but even as a catalog of sights and overheard conversations it's peppered with really fascinating details, particularly regarding race and the South's insular nature.

     

    Hard to give it a firm recommendation when it does feel so thinly sketched, but it's short (easily read in a couple of hours) and I didn't regret my time with it.

     

    EDIT: Oh yeah, it also collects her notes on a piece on Patty Hearst that she never ended up writing, but that feels even thinner and less vital.

  8. Posted

    This is a good episode.

     

    I had seen the episode description several days before actually listening and was convinced that "Is the Law & Order theme song actually a dog?" was referring to to the clanging jail door sfx sounding like a dog barking and I was all "Yeah, totally, that clanging jail door sound sfx sounds like a big dog barking, what a good observation" and then I actually listened to the episode and it wasn't about that at all and then went back and listened to the clanging door sound and of course it doesn't really sound much like a dog.

     

     

     

     

  9. Posted

    I recently spent two work days (I work at a video store) "watching" the Resident Evil series because there is a strain of cinephile who views these movies as highly progressive and experimental provocations in space, artificiality, and action staging and I was curious as to what there was to that.

     

    I can't stand these movies. I can't imagine a less appealing aesthetic, personally, and the action scenes bore me to tears. Granted, I had them on at work so I couldn't actually sit down and watch them start to finish, but I saw enough to be completely put off. Which is too bad, because the idea of Paul WS Anderson hijacking a video game adaptation series to be about how badass and awesome his wife (Milla Jovovich) is is very weird and appealing.

  10. Posted

    :tup: The Haunting of Hill House is an absolutely extraordinary horror novel from Shirley Jackson, probably best known for it and her short story "The Lottery". The entire book (except for the opening and closing) is written from the perspective of a maladjusted young woman Eleanor who's just gone through a personal tragedy and is called upon for an extended stay in a notoriously haunted mansion. Because we see the story from her perspective, and because whatever spirits or ghosts occupy Hill House never come out and show themselves, the entire book is about the ambiguous space between Eleanor's sanity, Hill House's malevolent presence, and the awkward forced jovial relationships she has with the other people there, who come to rely on friendship and sarcasm to combat their fear of the mansion.

     

    It's a really amazing book that marries supernatural horror with social anxiety and, because of how it uses it's third person limited perspective, Jackson's prose constantly finds fresh ways to describe horrors in plain sight while still existing in a maddeningly ambiguous space. Really cool book. 

  11. Posted

    3 hours ago, Gormongous said:

     

    I'm not much for "kung fu" movies, but my cinephile friend and I discovered The Boxer's Omen four or five years ago and it remains one of the most interesting things I've watched with him. It just has such an extremely meticulous and intensely absurd sense of reality, it's impossible not to get sucked in a little. The Shaw Brothers are so hit and miss for me, but when they hit do they hit.

     

    It really is the meticulousness that makes Boxer's Omen. To contrast, I recently saw Happiness of the Katakuris for the first time and while that is also a crazy and unpredictable cult movie, it feels a lot less focused and a lot more impersonal than The Boxer's Omen. There is a very specific vision of good and evil in The Boxer's Omen that is very refined and carefully constructed, even if it is also ridiculous and has a sense of humor about itself.

  12. Posted

    The Boxer's Omen is a 1983 Shaw Brothers kung-fu/horror/black magic movie and one of the most wonderfully ludicrous things I've ever seen. The intensity with which it surprised me at every turn, while still being a completely earnest and well-constructed film about religious piety and good vs. evil, was absolutely baffling. It's pretty gross (it comes with the sub-genre of black magic movies), with a lot of bugs and maggots and goop and organs and bodily mutilation, but it all happens on a surreal operatic level that makes it much easier to take.

     

    This clip highlights the film's stream of consciousness structure and also it's amazing special effects bugfuckery. I could not recommend The Boxer's Omen more strongly to anyone who has an interest in cult or strange films.

     

     

     

  13. Posted

    Top of the Pops Send-ups

     

    Top of the Pops is the long-running pop music show in England and they have a mime/lip-syncing policy for their performances, which some artists have opposed and mocked. I was first exposed to this phenomenon by Nirvana's legendarily bad performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit, but when I went on Top of the Pops' wikipedia page I learned it had a long tradition.

     

    This performance by Orbital, where they clearly don't have their keyboards plugged in are mostly just leaning in to touch random buttons every five seconds, is amazing. The audience doesn't really know what to do, so they just clap as a TotP dancer, the only performer in the room, raves out onstage.

     

     

     

     

    EDIT: I am also a huge fan of this clean version of "Sandwitches" that Odd Future did on BBC radio. "Mess with me and I'll scratch your cat!"

  14. Posted

    Not to be the guy who says Bicycle Thieves (or The Bicycle Thief, sometimes, for a bizarre reason) is a great movie like that's something that needs to be said, but if you haven't seen it it's a completely staggering work. It's basically an entire season of The Wire's worth of urban observation and pathos crammed into 89 minutes through a very simple and emotionally absorbing story. Worth it just for all the location shooting in a remarkable city (Rome) during a remarkable period of time (just after WW2).

  15. Posted

    Pitfall (1962) is a really funny and really bleak black comedy about capitalism, in which a migrant worker gets murdered for no reason and, as a ghost, goes back and uncovers why it happened and how the entire system was always set against him. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara is best known for Woman In The Dunes (1964), which is more surreal and esoteric but equally angry and anti-capitalist. This doesn't reach the nightmarish heights of Woman In The Dunes, but it does feel like a better entry point to Teshigahara's style, which is equal parts gorgeous, aggressive, experimental and satirical. 

     

    Pitfall sometimes feels somewhere between Steinbeck and The Coen Brothers, and is definitely worth seeing.

     

    This trailer makes it seem way more avant-garde than it actually is, but gives a good idea of some of the strange experimental flourishes.

     

     

  17. Posted

    I don't know how you can go from Justin, Travis and Griffin McElroy to THE INTERNET'S OWN MCELROYS without it affecting you in some way.  Most stand-up comedians have an arc in their career where their peak is before they have a fanbase and then after they're a big name their jokes slowly get less and less refined because everywhere they go they get laughs and applause anyway, so it's hard to chisel down into the perfect joke the way they used to have to. Late period George Carlin mostly alternates between him preaching to the choir and basking in applause (basically no laughs, just applause).

     

    Podcasting isn't the same thing (you aren't dealing with direct audience feedback the same way) but it wouldn't surprise me if a similar arc happened. I feel like early MBMBAM the tone was along the lines of "Why would anyone listen to this?" and now that's a disingenuous question, so the instinct to reign in the weird indulgences is probably a lot weaker.

     

    But I also basically consume zero McElroy #content outside of Car Boys, so what do I know.

  19. Posted

     

    Haven't finished it, but my understanding is that the first season ends with all the Reasons Kids™ getting subpoenaed to talk about their involvement in her death. Would make for a very different second season, but it could still happen? Pretty dumb.

  20. Posted

    :tup:  Steven Spielberg and Duel: The Making of a Film Career is a really great and thorough book about the making of Spielberg's first feature film, the excellent TV movie Duel, that makes a pretty convincing case for it being one of Spielberg's most impressive achievements. It's a combination of history and criticism that, while spending a little too much time recapping plot points for my taste, tells the amazing story of how Spielberg did pre-production, shot and edited one of his best films over the course 2 months. Also, the story of how Federico Fellini became the world's first Spielberg fanboy.

     

    It's a pretty quick read and a worthy companion to Carl Gottlieb's seminal book on the making of Jaws, The Jaws Log.

  21. Posted

    It played a very limited run in America and is coming to video June 6th. Apparently the story didn't translate too well, and basically features no voice-over which, while usually a thing I applaud in book adaptations, removes one of the most defining aspects of the novel. I personally have trouble imagining how the story even plays without the subjective point of view, and fear that it'll mostly just be alternating between the flashbacks of the first part and the present tense of the second part. Maybe that could work anyway, but it'd have to be a very different thing, I think.

     

    My video store is getting it and I'll definitely be checking it out, if only because I think Jim Broadbent as Tony is really great casting.

     

    EDIT: Got the DVD release date wrong. Fixed it.

  23. Posted

    My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea is an absolute treat of a movie, a completely beautiful and pleasurable experience that mixes the sensibilities of Don Hertzfeldt, Wes Anderson, and Bob's Burgers (among other things) into a hilarious doodle of an animated film. Really really tight balance between earnest high school emotions and bizarre sarcastic humor, with a highly rudimentary sketchy animation style opening it up to be endlessly expressive and weird. Can't recommend this one enough.

     

     

  24. Posted

    I don't know if this makes it better or worse, but I think the green M&M character is a direct reference to the once popular urban legend that the dye in the green M&M's were an aphrodisiac.

     

    I heard that but the more popular urban legend at my middle school was that yellow Starburst shrunk your penis/testicles, which I think was a bastardization of the "yellow dye #5 lowers sperm count" thing.