At least that Phoenix guy has a pretty decent Altman thread going.

I was under the impression that Phoenix was one of the RT refugees, one of those under the radar ones that changes their name on every forum so you can't quite remember who they are.  Like 'John Constatine' was 'Bob Harris' at one point.  I don't even remember who 'John Dumbear' was, but he's clearly ex-RT.  (Maybe they're both Red Lectroids, who knows?)  And didn't Torgo go by a different name at RT too?  Anyway, maybe it's the relative quality of Phoenix that led me to make that assumption.

Torgo was MaxRenn on RT. I don't think Phoenix was ex-RT (IIRC he's Australian or something, and I don't think we had any Australians in that last group of people who came over to the Corrie).

As for lack of discussion, I'll be honest in that I'm bad at having actual discussions. You'll notice I just hammer out my thoughts in review form and cast them out into the world. If anyone actually tries to engage with part of that review, I can barely muster a sentence or two in response.

crumbsroom wrote:

my eyesight having recently gone to shit

Oh damn.  I wouldn't recommend straining on a phone either.  Do you have any other screens available?

crumbsroom wrote:

And as for my piano recordings, lol. They fluctuate between the eloquence of a caveman, and the nauseating earnestness of some wanna be fancy bar pianoman, who can't play or sing.

What?  Is this supposed to deter my interest?

crumbsroom wrote:

Then there is the matter of my godawful instagram that you mentioned a while back but I forgot about. It's basically just a suppository for all those 'guess the movie' images I was doing back at the Corrie. And while they have meaning to me, they are mostly now just nonsense bombs I try and use to disrupt the flow of nauseating narcicism on that site. But, as dumb as they appear at a glance, it is one of the few artistic projects I have been consistently amused by doing. That I think has consistently been of value to whatever my standards are.

Well, you can post of few of these over here.  As you remember, I kinda sucked at your game, but at least I won't try to body-shame you.

Rock wrote:

🤧🐕

lol

The importance of Pollock's paintings was in their physicality. It wasn't so much the dribbling, but the thrusting and slashing and murdering of that paint onto the canvas. They conjure images of the man himself, attacking his work. It is why they feel like an explosion of emotion. Because it is literally what they are. A barely controlled manifestation of what was inside Jackson Pollock into the outside world of the art gallery. Where everyone stares in hushed reverence. And simply by standing quietly and looking at his work, nearly prove the point that they might not understand it.

As a result, the physicality of Ed Harris' performance is what the film is all about. Harris clearly was a quick study at learning the techniques of this artist he is paying homage to, or somehow is simply channeling the spirit of Pollock in the way he moves about the floor of his gallery, flicking his paint bristles. Giving us a physical representation of the man who we normally can only envision as some noisy ghost while looking at his work. And, it is simply through watching him, hunched over, lost in his work, attempting to find a voice inside of the chaos he is unleashing with his paints, we can find a solution to the question so many people have towards the nature of creation: Why are so many artists such fuck ups?

The answer is inside of Harris. A mostly inarticulate man, who due to some awful storm brewing inside of him, had no choice but to devote his entire being to the splashing of paint in the pursuit of finding himself. A self obsession so profound that there can seemingly be no relief, even as he finds success. He slaves and drinks and smokes and worries and hates himself, and in the end, maybe he has some paintings which say something about that struggle. That might get hung on someone's wall. That might not be understood.

Giving support to his talent, his wife Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harding) is the one who seems to recognize his genius before even he does. She also has the ability to articulate the mystifying things he is doing into words, employing her deep understanding of the history of art and its many different movements in illustrating why he is great. But as obviously necessary her help is in keeping him on his feet and painting, her constant analysis of his work also brings with it the pain that, even as his biggest supporter, she seems only to understand him through specific artistic techniques she has learned through reading books. She doesn't so much see the man himself in his paintings as she does an elemental force to decode.

It's the tragedy of the uncompromising artist. The goal is ultimately to get oneself in the work, so that maybe whatever is inside them, coiled up and impossible to put into words, can finally be seen. But that when finally successful, there is still no direct contact with the audience. They still have to reach for their reference books to try and understand what is simply there and staring them in the face. There is always an intellectual interference that gets in the way of ever being understood. As so as much as Pollock devotes his entire life to his work, the art world is designed to never really offer any relief to the artist. Just the constant spectre of future failures, or more successes which aren't any more satisfying.

Pollock is one of the purest examples in film of the hopelessness of artistic achievement. It is a grim and unhappy thing, capturing the meteoric rise of one of the 20th centuries great creative geniuses, and how even that can't help but feel like a cosmic loss.


 

Jinnistan wrote:

The Drippy Cowboy, starring Alan Arkin

Ten points!
 

The great thing about making over a 100 films in your career, is to do this you've got to take the brakes completely off. Not over think anything. Just let the movie pour out of you. And Yakuza Apocalypse is the perfect end result of taking your hands off the handlebars and scream 'look ma, no cognitive awareness'.

Characters are invented and inserted into the film, seemingly at whim. Arriving as they might in a dream. A great compliment to the chaos of the films action and the anarchy of its humor. No minute of it feels settled. It's, unlike those cocksucking Marvel movies, actually alive on the screen. By being completely dumb and nonsensical, it opens the door for all sorts of different emotion.

Apparently for some coherence is a virtue. Those people are dumb. Yakuza Apocalypse is a knockout and about as much fun as something this deliberately strange can be. It makes having fun not a crime.