Cultural archeology, mostly movies
Joined September 2012
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19 Oct 2024
Intriguing comment on a traumatized national psyche, reflected in movies:
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19 Oct 2024
youtube.com/watch?v=3SUmUnLM…
Here's the full clip. (The Italian horror film often cited as the worst of the "Video Nasties" is an extreme example of accepting evil in this sense. It explicitly tried to justify its existence and its cruelty on the fact that Vietnam happened.)
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12 Oct 2024
Until the 60s, Hollywood ghost stories tended to be light, though occasionally macabre, comedies like Blithe Spirit, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, The Time of Their Lives, and I Married a Witch.
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13 Oct 2024
Echoing The House of Seven Gables, the foundation of the house is often cursed by some misdealing. You wouldn't recommend it as a haunted house movie, but Parasite is arguably one of the best, falling squarely into this pattern of a curse brought on by injustice.
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13 Oct 2024
Before the 70s, ghostly justice was mainly seen in Japanese films based on traditional Kaidan. Gordon Lightfoot's "old time movie about a ghost from a wishing well" is meant as poetry, but I'm not sure if any movies in english as-of '69 had this scenario, other than A&Costello.
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8 Oct 2024
This was the most chilling and memorable local ghost story growing up. "Crazy" wasn't the word that was handed down, but modern perspective suggests a ton of revision.
I like how the owner of the house tears up over the portrait he tracked down.. as a Mother's Day present.
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8 Oct 2024
At five or so, my mom let me watch the beginning of this and the bullied kid falling on the pumpkin was already a little traumatic, and I had seen enough.😂 Recently I had the same experience as Kael, that Halloween, "keeps you nervous and jumpy rather than pleasurably excited."
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8 Oct 2024
Reminds me of this study from a few years ago: nerdist.com/article/scariest… I enjoyed Sinister but it definitely operated more in terms of stress than frisson.
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30 Aug 2024
If becoming a more ideological version of Citizen Kane sounds cool, Frank Capra is here to argue for a more civilized way to spend money. (While talking about Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in '82)
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30 Aug 2024
Many years ago, I naively thought there might be a hedging bias to high tax candidates in betting markets. No no no. Instead, something adjacent to yellow journalism and paying a little to paint the tape seems like a more-than-marginal behavior.
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27 Aug 2024
Amazing that social media hasn't mustered more analysis of what happened here. The episode was less scary than the opening of HR Pufnstuf. Parents seemed bothered by other elements, and at least one letter mentioned how merely *changing* stories supposedly disturbed the children.
27 Aug 2024
This is from the banned 1976 Sesame Street episode that only aired once, where Margaret Hamilton played the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz.
She doesn't Play it for laughs, she plays it scary and little kids were terrified!
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26 Aug 2024
For all the speculation on The Movie Critic and its inspirations, I can't escape the simple idea of Forrest Gump in reverse, a Waldo Lydecker-type, from Laura:
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26 Aug 2024
That sounds dry, but I'd picture it playing out like The Bad Lieutenant, an escalating, overstimulated crisis, brought on by something like giving Star Wars a bad review.
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20 Aug 2024
Eh, it's less about versions of the old "how can man live in a world without god?" and more about a spiral of rotten institutions and expectations. On the level of snobbishness appropriate to talking about cultural ruin, wouldn't Hemingway personify decline?
19 Aug 2024
100 years ago, Hemingway predicted the West’s cultural ruin
His peers believed a world without morals would free them, but Hemingway knew it would lead them to doom
Here’s what he predicted in his 1926 novel…
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20 Aug 2024
That seems like the more natural take, unless the idea of culture is essentially more Cavalier than Roundhead. Do we want institutions reflecting long, careful, multi-clause sentences or capricious , clipped, manly intuitions?
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