Erkki

Has the press in the US and the world become incompetent and almost useless, or has it always been like this in one way or another? Headlines portraying the election race as tightening, but that isn't really happening is it now? The Princeton site now predicts 100% chance for Clinton. Press freedom is being wasted on sensationalism all around the world I guess.

My understanding so far was that it will have the whole criterion collection eventually... maybe I misunderstood. I currently can't watch any movies on it without VPN (which I don't use).

That viewpoint makes it seem like you think the US is or should be in total control of everything strategic that happens in the world. It's easy to connect some dots in hindsight, everything that happened before seems like a cause for what happened later.

Some days I think that it would be good for the west to start World War III and get it over with. How many decades can this soft response to continuing Russian aggression and disregard for humanist values last? On the other hand... maybe there really is a (relatively) peaceful solution, just letting their economy slowly bleed so they would be less and less capable of exercising their military power.

Today saw Beauty and the Beast (1946), Summer Interlude and The Warped Ones. One of the best movie days lately, Beauty and the Beast is a real gem. I wonder if it's worth watching again with the alternative, opera soundtrack.

Yeah, after sleeping over it (reduced rating to 4.5/5 when I woke up this morning), I see your point. It does seem a bit shallow after some sinking in -- (partially by jumping all over the place instead of focusing on something specific --, but the initial impression was still WOW and I still think it's a really impressive movie! And maybe some of that jumping all over the place was even justified to show how much out of control the main character was.

Just saw Holy Motors. I think it's probably a movie not everyone is going to love or even like, but man, I was totally taken by it. I didn't even get all the references, some of which I had explained by a YouTube video after watching, but it seems like it could be one of the best films about cinema (I've yet to see a lot of those).

haha, that's great!

I volunteered to shoot at PÖFF, the local film festival. Also have some anxiety that I won't be able to perform as well as expected. Luckily there will be 10 or so other volunteer photographers covering it.

Don't forget The Big Sleep & The Big Lebowski

Cool! I think it was a good idea to upgrade. What is the weird flag in the header of a post? Keeps getting highlighted and unhighlighted

Herzog's Nosferatu was occasionally better than the original, especially the first half where the pace was good. Unfortunately it fell apart by the end somewhat, with pointless scenes that just ruined the pace. And to add to the ruination, over 10000 rats were harmed to make this picture.

This day and age, we shouldn't still accept blatantly sexist or racist movies as honored classics. I refuse to give a free pass (and a good rating) to The Searchers or It Happened One Night (which I saw today) just because they have some great cinematography and/or other things going for them. There are enough classics and great movies that haven't quite reached a classic status even from the early days of film that tell genuinely interesting human stories without resorting to bigotry that is somehow justified in some movies just by being from a bygone era. Nope, a bigoted piece of work should not become a classic for all time. That doesn't mean we shouldn't study these works for historical or whatever reasons, but it means we shouldn't accept them as part of a corpus of great and important works of art somehow despite their inner bigotry.

Killing for food is not the same as torture before killing. Werner Herzog is one sick fuck.Although, yes, today we can't say that the meat we eat didn't live in torturous conditions

I think the second map (more so than the first) of Far Cry 2 with its mix of roads and rivers is pretty brilliant. I wonder if any other game has something similar? Far Cry 3 goes to bigger extremes with it's world, but I think in the end it was kind of designed so that you mostly go through each wild area only once, and I didn't really get the effect of knowing the map by heart except for some main roads. Haven't played Far Cry 4.

When you need to be violent, do it to cake! #dogwoodweek6 #dogwood52

On a related topic, pretty disappointed in Werner Herzog now after seeing the animal cruelty in Even Dwarfs Started Small. It was otherwise a good movie, but the undoubtedly real cruelty left a really bad taste in my mouth.

I think you make some pretty valid points, I may have to think my attitude over a bit. I still have the opinion that e.g. that critic on rogerebert.com and others are just ignoring/forgiving pretty obvious sexism, whatever the reason is (maybe somewhat because of the movie's oscar winning records and influences on future cinema and featuring beloved stars of the era), and by proxy helping sexist attitudes live on.

Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to pin any single thing on anyone personally, I'm just saying that as a society as a whole, we are still giving some "classics" more leeway than new work just because of their esteemed history (which IMHO can be questioned just as well as anything current).

"rotten to the core" wasn't the best phrase to use, I had already typed a lot and didn't come with anything better. I'm not a perfect wordsmith and English is not my native language so please don't hang on to that phrase too much. What I meant by that was a movie where the director shows something that is bigoted through and through and then seems to confirm that it's ok and the bigots are still the heroes of the story. I admit that not everyone interprets the stories the same way and it's somewhat subjective, and yes, my argument relies on being able to distinguish whether the director made the movie to support the bigotry that is being shown or to view it from a distance with a critical eye... and yeah, maybe it isn't easy to make that distinction some times... and I'm not sure I can always tell which is which. But I still think that sometimes there is still going on glossing over the sometimes hugely problematic aspects of these stories because they are already considered as classics, because of other values they have. So what if John Ford confronted his own racism in The Searchers? Should we applaud him for that while he still made a racist movie, where the racist main character ended up being a hero anyway, despite being somewhat of an outsider by the end? I think we shouldn't and that many are still putting that film on a pedestal where it doesn't belong. And I'm thinking this way because to me, being racist at the core actually inherently decreases the value of a work, so it's not like a concept of "best movie ever, but racist" exists for me. To me, a racist movie just can't be "best movie ever" because it's lacking something important. On the matter of movies where the racism is present more in a way of erasure, I don't feel the same way about them, maybe somewhat thanks to my privilege as a white male. I think that is more something that can't be helped - the director used the environment that was available to them to tell the story - the environment may have been more racist than today, but at least they didn't make the story itself racist. I admit that erasure is a big deal, but I find it hard to blame any individual work, especially from the past, on that, without blaming the whole culture. PS. Actually I checked the movie again and the spanking in It Happened One Night was kind of playful and I remembered one thing wrong - the father was the one who slapped her in the beginning of the movie, not the man she met on the bus. But I still stand by that there's a lot of sexism at the core of that story.

I hope my post did not make it seem that I think there should be someone in charge for curating canon and defining what is classic. No more do I think that than I think there should be a sexism police to stop the press from printing misogyny. Canon doesn't define itself, people define it. Including critics who keep lifting some works above others. And these critics are influenced by the other critics that came before them. I do not accept that movie critics somehow make purer decisions than the greater society, and their influence on defining classics is completely free of the racism and sexism that is present around them. From rogerebert.com about "It Happened One Night" (written by Michał Oleszczyk): Man, this story is filled to the brim with it so much that it can not even be separated from chauvinism at all... Here's a brief summary of the movie I admit though, that I could be wrong about old movies in general not being more racist or sexist. I have mostly been watching the cream of the crop of old movies (mostly from 50s and 60s), so the ratios could be different, compared to a wider coverage of different quality modern movies I've seen. And I haven't exactly been taking notes, so it's all rather speculative. But what exactly do you "disagree super hard with", as I just described my personal experience. Do you mean the part where I imply that some movies aren't necessarily sexist themselves if they portray a more sexist society? (I do believe in that in some cases as long as it can be seen that the director has distanced themself from the portrayed sexism - but I admit this may appear very subjective).

Patrick & Tycho, your words are saying that things are more nuanced and complicated, but actually you are the ones simplifying what has been said (e.g. by me). I'm saying is the society should stop putting these FEW (I personally only feel this way about the 2 movies I mentioned, having been watching mostly old movies for more than a year) obviously very problematic and IMHO rotten to the core movies on par with the best classic works out there without even acknowledging the problems (e.g. as a disclaimer in a review). I especially feel this about The Searchers as its at the top of nearly every list of best movies of all time. Is it ok for people to love that movie - YES. Is it really such an irreplaceable part of "best movies ever" canon - NO. The avoidance to judge those works as what they are because existing "classic" status is IMHO something similar that helps rape culture & racism spread. [edit] Perhaps I left something unsaid - that IMHO, the large corpus of "classics" that I've seen so far is no different regarding sexism or racism than todays films, except that some of them portray times that were more sexist or racist. In fact, I've been pleasantly surprised, that a vast majority of old movies I've seen seem to show humanist tendencies or at least not the opposite. It could be that I'm taking a too simplistic view of these movies, and they are more sexist/racist than I think, but... I'm talking about recognizing movies that are OBVIOUSLY sexist/racist as such. Yes, I acknowledge that obviousness may be subjective and that makes things maybe more complicated than what I've presented...

I can't help but feel some sort of relief that a part of this circus is now over and didn't drag on until the very last days. But hey, Trump is still at the center of news today and I imagine that will continue for a while despite the fact that it's over. And I wish it had ended a long long time ago. Now everyone can move on to the creepy clown epidemic.

Pretty much agree with Cordeos, plus a classic should have a certain amount of respect from critics and the public. And yes, the main thing I want to distinguish is films important for historic purposes and classics that should still be watched by a large number of people because they are still good and relevant... And even if an old important film is rotten in some aspect, it can still be admired for cinematography and innovations, as long as it's all knowingly (and maybe with disclaimer). The innovations themselves are not enough to make a classic. I really like the cinematographic storytelling in Soy Cuba and for that I love the film, but I don't for a second forget that it's at least 1/3 soviet propaganda. Similarly, I really like some of the set designs in It Happened One Night, but I still think the movie as a whole, even if somewhat a product of its times, is kind of disgusting. PS. I definitely want to watch Triumph of the Will now, and Birth of a Nation is on my watchlist as well.

It's one thing to have some sexism in a movie - this happens all the time even today. C'mon, even Fury Road, called "feminist propaganda" by MRAs, still has some sexist elements. Another thing is to make a movie that is so inherently sexist or racist that it can't be separated from what the movie is, and at the same time not make any effort by the author(s) to distance themselves from the inherent bigotry - as is the case with my two examples, I believe, although it's possible to argue that the author does view John Wayne's character in The Searchers as kind of an outcast or remnant. These movies are IMHO, not that irreplaceably important to the history of film that they should actually be lauded as some of the best movies ever despite their obvious problems.