Plato Shrimp

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2/07/2023 11:15 am  #521


Re: Recently Seen

Rampop II wrote:

Economics. Publications have been going belly–up for the past 15 years. Writers get paid shit, so they brainlessly speed–write for hours on end to get paid. Just as the television and movie industry discovered through reality TV and remakes how far they could get without any writers at all, what’s the point of online magazines paying qualified critics, when millions of film enthusiasts like us provide thoughtful, detailed reviews for free? And not just on cinephile sites; I’ve seen Amazon reviews that surpassed the level of high art. What’s left to attract readers to an online publication’s little critic’s corner? Seems they’ve got nothing left to sell but the critics themselves. They are selling personality. Flair. Gimmick. ‘Tude. 

Supply and demand.

That doesn’t have to stop us from calling them out for the useless whores that they are. “Aspiring cultural gatekeepers" (that's a link to a wonderful article btw). I’m dying to post a thread lambasting these parasites one by one. Starting with that little fucker Jordan Mintzer. That’s right, Jordy, your ass is grass. I’m whittlin’ up a nice fat rhetorical chopping block with your name on it, you little butt plug.

In the meantime, let us all marvel at this quote from IndieWire’s TV critic Ben Travers, on the question of subtitles vs overdubs:

“Maybe you’re doing dishes or baking a soufflé and you need something in the background to enjoy, but it’s only getting half your attention. As a professional TV critic, I often have to stay up to date on TV this way, and I imagine obsessive fans do, as well. Heck, maybe that’s just your favorite way to spend your alone time: guilty pleasure TV + another activity. Then you need to be able to listen, since you can’t always be watching the screen.”

Indeed. 

Well, that quote kind of gets right to the problem, doesn't it. We see what the intent of the critic is, as well as what he assumes the needs of his audience are. It's a symbiotic relationship where they are both just trying to fit a piece of art into their working lives and he's giving some lame life hacks on how to watch a tv show without actually watching it.

Now, I don't think this stuff has zero value. Not everyone has to give a fuck about art. They should, but they definitely shouldn't feel obligated to. So this kind of pointless crap may serve a need for those who actually couldn't care less about all the other things a piece of art can be valuable for beyond a diversion to wash the dishes along with. And the assumption has continually become that this is all art is for the vast majority of people. And it's possible it is. But you are kind of herding everyone towards this general 'who gives a fuck attitude' if this is also what the attitude of the critics is.

People haven't necessarily become stupider or blase about all the things art can possibly elevate in them. But they have definitely become more ignorant because we don't have any discourse out there in the public domain. You have to dig for it. You have to find weird blips in the internet ether who show some semblance of love for the forms they are talking about. But nearly everything in popular print, or on television, or streaming, reinforces the idea these days that all you need to care about is that fucking souflee you MIGHT be baking. And as long as you can hear who got voted out of the latest reality show from the other room, that is all you really needed to know anyway.

 

 

2/07/2023 11:16 am  #522


Re: Recently Seen

Jinnistan wrote:

Google needs to have its ad-revenue monopoly broken apart, and online publications paid for the people visiting those pages.  After all, people go to websites to read content, not look at the ads.  The ads have no value without desirable material.

And I think it's pretty clear that the only people who can make a living (souffle $$$) as an online critic or writer are those people who are living off their families or trust funds.  You can't pay those city rents from $15 an article.  That insures a certain cultural class of gatekeeper.
 

exactly
 

 

2/07/2023 3:31 pm  #523


Re: Recently Seen

Rock wrote:

After watching Running Scared, that damn Michael McDonald song is stuck in my head.

That malted golden throat isn't the worst earworm to suffer.


     Thread Starter
 

2/07/2023 4:42 pm  #524


Re: Recently Seen

crumbsroom wrote:

I don't know jack about ChatGPT. I'm assuming some kind of computer/AI based writing that would ultimately be based on algorhythms about what people like, instead of actual analysis or personal feelings?

It's kind of blown up in recent months as it's been made available to the public to use for free.  (Although I just tried to go over there for a demonstration - ask it "what is the purpose and value of Plato Shrimp?" - and all I got was a "ChatGPT is currently at capacity", because, let me tell you, people are running trains on this whore at the moment.  You may have seen where Buzzfeed just laid off a huge chunk of their writers, and are pretty open about the fact that they intend to rely on these kinds of AI software for content-generation.  And there's supposed to be an even more powerful version of ChatGPT, some 4.0, that has everyone excited.  Now you could say that at least this particular beast is free to the public, provided by a company called OpenAI, but commercial versions by Google, Microsoft and Apple are also in the works.

I do think this is part of a larger trend in our post-industrial, post-literate society where the cartel corporations (the 3 or 4 companies that run each of every major sector of commerce) have determined that Americans are really more useful as consumers than workers, and so there is an effort to sedate and infantilize society into being passive mouths of indiscriminate consumption.  I used to call this my Teletubby Theory, that the Teletubbies was actually a prophecy of an American future where we're pampered by anonymous nanny-bots, amused with vapid images and exercises, homogenized into plump fructose-enhanced bodies, culturally stultified into a babbling new proto-lingua of squeaks and squeals, and submitted to a new religion that worships the Divine Child in the sun.  This is what happens when a grown man watches a couple of Teletubbies episodes at 5am while high on mushrooms and ephedrine.  And for most of the last 25 years, I've taken this theory as a fun piece of creative dystopian fiction, but, especially over the past decade of social media immersion and surveillance entertainment systems, I find myself with the clarity that this is an all-too-possible future for an increasingly infantilized, technologically subservient populace with their fingers in their ass.




crumbsroom wrote:

And I'm still going to harp on the idea of his many years of arguing his Christian faith on the RT boards. I don't believe this is an irrelevant ingredient. Here is a guy who seems to be operating on some kind of burden of everything needing a rational explanation. He needs absolute proof that a sunrise is actually beautiful and not some kind of trick the light is playing on us. He discourses things into such a level of irrelevance that he brushes against almost complete nihilism. And yet, he has complete faith in a very specific God. This does not need to go through the same metrics as everything else does.

Now maybe he feels this sort of belief without facts should only be applied to God. That he feels it is heretical to place faith in anything that isn't religously based. And I guess I could understand that (as much as I could ever understand such an old school God fearing take as this). Or maybe his tactic against art on all of these movie forums is to berate others for their 'faith' in believing in little more than flickering images because he believes he has been berated for his belief. A kind of revenge against the creatives and intellectuals who look down their nose at his evangelism. He wants to prove that we all build our world views up around an unprovable gut instinct, but his happens to be better, because he has God.

A slight clarification: Yarn is a devout Catholic; evangelism is a Protestant branch.  The difference is formal, because they're both fundamentalist and tend to be politicized.  It's like the difference between a Sunni extremist (Wahhabi) and a Shia extremist (Zaidiyyah), which is very little difference when it comes down to what matters, like hating bitches and Jews.

The thing about religious people, especially zealots, is that they don't often actively engage with their faith intellectually.  Their faith becomes more of a tribal emblem, an in-group to be protected.  Criticizing someone's religion becomes the equivalent of calling your mother a whore.  So people with certain fascistic tendencies don't really care a lot about theological integrity.  For them, theology is only useful as a weapon, as a way of aggrandizing their religious pretentions into something more noble than competing religions.  Yarn smacks of this kind of game theory zero-sum application of his faith, because fascists don't tend to play well with others.  It's all or nothing, and anything in-between is a fatal threat of weakness.

The problem with religious extremists of all stripes is precisely that they, privately and quietly, distrust their faith.  Like how a narcissist paradoxically is internally crippled with self-doubt and self-hate.  This internal insecurity in their faith is what motivates them to externally impose their faith onto others, to dominate diversity and to persecute dissent.  This is all compensation for their private dark unspoken fear that their mother was wrong and maybe it's all bullshit.  Only the ubiquity of total conquest can quell these nagging doubts.

Note Samuel Alito, fellow devout Catholic and closer in spirit to Yarn's worldview, when after his Dobbs decision, he gave a speech in Rome (natch) where he lamented our "increasingly secular society" which is, in his mind, an existential threat to "religious liberty".  I put that last part in quotes because it's clear that Alito has zero concern for the general liberty of religious expression.  He means the liberty of Christians to dominate and impose itself onto the rest of society.  This is why his speech was in the context of his defending the religious liberty of Christians to prohibit a non-religious woman's acces to birth control and abortion.  "More Christians are killed for their faith in our time than in the bloody days of the Roman Empire."  Abject horseshit.  But this reveals Alito's, and people like Yarn and Flipper and those who lament the decline of the cultural dominance of the Christian West, deeply insecure need to maintain their dominance as a way of ascertaining their faith.  Alito needs to fabricate this modern Christian genocide as propaganda to justify his insecurity at what he imagines is an existential threat to his faith.  Because his faith is not personal and esoteric, because he cannot truly glimpse divinity while praying alone in his pantry, he needs the secular authority of dominance, he needs the validation of others' compliance to his norms.  He has no cheek to turn.

crumbsroom wrote:

I think there has to be something else central to his identity that is guiding him here (or he's just got a legit personality disorder, and this is just an outgrowth of some kind of narcissism or OCD or Asperger's or some other blip in his brain that makes him unable to properly relate to other humans)

I think there's definitely some control-freak issues involved, a tyrannical tendency to imagine himself as some kind of 4D chessmaster and master manipulator.  He's a good fit for movieforums because there are a lot fewer people there with the fortitude of an Ergill or an Izzy or a Chorizo who can pull the curtain on his pretentions of profundity and reveal him as a rhetorical hustler.


     Thread Starter
 

2/07/2023 9:24 pm  #525


Re: Recently Seen

Jinnistan wrote:

Rock wrote:

After watching Running Scared, that damn Michael McDonald song is stuck in my head.

That malted golden throat isn't the worst earworm to suffer.

It is not the finely aged dulcetone of Mr. McDonald itself that is the problem. It's the fact that I kept thinking about the vacation montage from the movie, which just emphasized how I'd much rather be on vacation, or doing literally anything else, than being at work. (Buddy cop movies might be the only genre where the characters bristle at the thought of taking their vacation.)

For real though, the L Train chase and the State of Illinois Center shootout. Big hell yeah to both.


I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
 

2/07/2023 9:33 pm  #526


Re: Recently Seen

Jinnistan wrote:

I do think this is part of a larger trend in our post-industrial, post-literate society where the cartel corporations (the 3 or 4 companies that run each of every major sector of commerce) have determined that Americans are really more useful as consumers than workers, and so there is an effort to sedate and infantilize society into being passive mouths of indiscriminate consumption.  I used to call this my Teletubby Theory, that the Teletubbies was actually a prophecy of an American future where we're pampered by anonymous nanny-bots, amused with vapid images and exercises, homogenized into plump fructose-enhanced bodies, culturally stultified into a babbling new proto-lingua of squeaks and squeals, and submitted to a new religion that worships the Divine Child in the sun.  This is what happens when a grown man watches a couple of Teletubbies episodes at 5am while high on mushrooms and ephedrine.  And for most of the last 25 years, I've taken this theory as a fun piece of creative dystopian fiction, but, especially over the past decade of social media immersion and surveillance entertainment systems, I find myself with the clarity that this is an all-too-possible future for an increasingly infantilized, technologically subservient populace with their fingers in their ass.


"That is poetry."

 

2/07/2023 11:13 pm  #527


Re: Recently Seen

"Nitwits in zohmbieland"


     Thread Starter
 

2/12/2023 11:00 pm  #528


Re: Recently Seen


I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
 

2/13/2023 12:00 pm  #529


Re: Recently Seen

Is House on Bare Mountain on Rock's radar?
It might be more boobs than movie
 

 

2/13/2023 12:06 pm  #530


Re: Recently Seen

Man, you guys are watching all the Rock movies before I am. Unbelievable.

Okay, so apparently I added it to my watchlist at some point but I have no recollection of doing so.

That being said, the one thing I’ve seen from director Lee Frost is Love Camp 7, which is totally worthless outside of its place in its genre (Nazisploitation), so I probably won’t rush to see this one.


I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
 

2/13/2023 12:07 pm  #531


Re: Recently Seen

See, I have standards.


I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
 

2/13/2023 12:12 pm  #532


Re: Recently Seen

Rock wrote:

See, I have standards.

It's not particularly good. It's mostly interesting as a cultural artifact and oddity

 

2/13/2023 12:45 pm  #533


Re: Recently Seen

It seems to be on Internet Archive, hmmmmmmm….


I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
 

2/13/2023 3:03 pm  #534


Re: Recently Seen

Rock wrote:

Tar

There it is. 


     Thread Starter
 

2/13/2023 7:17 pm  #535


Re: Recently Seen

Jinnistan wrote:

Rock wrote:

Tar

There it is. 

Rock, I wanted to remind you of this article and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it.  (You can use the spoiler thread if you need to.)

https://slate.com/culture/2022/12/tar-cate-blanchett-movie-ending-explained-analyzed.html


     Thread Starter
 

2/13/2023 7:30 pm  #536


Re: Recently Seen

Is Tar being streamed online anywhere?

 

2/13/2023 7:38 pm  #537


Re: Recently Seen

crumbsroom wrote:

Is Tar being streamed online anywhere?

Maybe I can hook you up.


     Thread Starter
 

2/13/2023 7:38 pm  #538


Re: Recently Seen

I think it’s available to rent on YouTube and Prime. Not sure if it’s hit any other services.

If you can make the trip to downtown Toronto, I caught it at the Carlton.


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2/13/2023 7:43 pm  #539


Re: Recently Seen

Well, we don't want to do anything illegal, do we?
 


     Thread Starter
 

2/13/2023 7:58 pm  #540


Re: Recently Seen

I think Cate Blanchett’s icy cheekbones and immaculate bone structure would benefit from being seen on a moderately sized screen.


I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
 

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