Rock wrote:

I like Charlie Sheen in Wall Street, but I think Stone gets good mileage out of his impressionable qualities and especially his real life relationship with Martin Sheen. I don't know how good an actor he is (never watched his sitcom aside from the odd episode, liked him enough in Major League AKA he people's Bull Durham), but I think Stone knows how to use him well.

As for Miles Teller, I liked him enough in Top Gun: Maverick, although the movie cheats to make him likable by having Glen Powell play an even bigger douchebag. He seems closer to a young Sean Penn than how Anthony Edwards played his father in the original.

Major League is probably as good as I've seen Sheen. Which probably isn't a great compliment.

crumbsroom wrote:

Rock wrote:

You people and your drugs..

They aren't for everybody. And I also suspect, with your edible story, you might be like my friend anyways, who will sit at the end of the couch complaining that the mushrooms aren't working while he has his sweater tied around his face.

As for myself, psychedelics are the only thing that probably could have ever allowed me to connect all of the thoughts I have drifting through my head like a mist of fruit flies. Before them I was a stuttering, incomprehensible fool who couldn't string a sentence together. Then, after about two dozen horrendously awful trips, all sorts of sneaky and weird ways to connect completely disparate trains of thought suddenly came to me. There is just something about them that allows one to embrace the absurdity of the human condition, and the complete waste of time it is to try to make sense of everything, that unlocks avenues of communication for people willing to embrace their beautiful, freakish irrelevance and just let themselves spill out whatever is in their head. If you can just stop thinking long enough, some kind of point will be hidden in their. Somewhere. Sometimes.

I appreciate your thoughtful response to my grumblings.

Yeah, I dunno if it's just that the PSAs worked too well on me, or because I don't even like to drink all that much (I only drink socially, and even then, only do it occasionally), or that the most adventurous drug users I've known have been deeply annoying, but I've conceded that drugs are very much Not For Me.

Jinnistan wrote:

Rock wrote:

The Verdict

And Paul Newman is the Paul Newman of All Time.

*thumb*

Also, if we're gonna talk about how hot we found certain people, that pep talk that Rampling gives Newman...hoo-wee.

crumbsroom wrote:

I think it is his heavy handedness that has pushed Stone away from me as I've gotten older. I don't disagree that his movies can pack a wallop, and I think maybe my distancing has as much to do with me trying to get away from the heavy handed teenage soul that admired him. A good example would be The Doors, which was great for a brain that at the time was a rookie when it came to experimentalism, drugs, subversion, poetry and hippy stink. Few movies capture teenage idol worship better than it. Almost so perfectly that one can now only cringe in revisiting it with adult eyes and seeing it holds all the embarrassments of youth. It's a really bad movie and it seems only to understand everything it explores in the dumbest of ways (which, is also, kind of The Doors in a nutshell, as well as Val Kilmer)

The only part of The Doors that stands up as inspired is Crispen Glover's Warhol.

crumbsroom wrote:

It almost dated itself immediately, as I already saw it as a self parody within a year or two of coming out.

I saw it as self-parody around the time the Coca-Cola Polar Bears showed up.

crumbsroom wrote:

Now I just got to get around to watchin The Hand one of these days. It still contains one of the formative images of all cinema for me, which I glimpsed at through the backwindow of my mothers car as we sat in a drive in watching History of the World. The screen behind us was playing (The Hand, as long as Happy Birthday to Me) and I kept peeking for updates. Not even Mel Brooks could keep my attention away from second (or third) rate horror at such a young age.

The Hand has one scene (involving a cat and a window) that made me laugh harder than anything in History of the World.

crumbsroom wrote:

Major League is probably as good as I've seen Sheen. Which probably isn't a great compliment.

Hot Shots made good use of his stubborn, vacuous jaw.

Rock wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

Rock wrote:

You people and your drugs..

They aren't for everybody. And I also suspect, with your edible story, you might be like my friend anyways, who will sit at the end of the couch complaining that the mushrooms aren't working while he has his sweater tied around his face.

As for myself, psychedelics are the only thing that probably could have ever allowed me to connect all of the thoughts I have drifting through my head like a mist of fruit flies. Before them I was a stuttering, incomprehensible fool who couldn't string a sentence together. Then, after about two dozen horrendously awful trips, all sorts of sneaky and weird ways to connect completely disparate trains of thought suddenly came to me. There is just something about them that allows one to embrace the absurdity of the human condition, and the complete waste of time it is to try to make sense of everything, that unlocks avenues of communication for people willing to embrace their beautiful, freakish irrelevance and just let themselves spill out whatever is in their head. If you can just stop thinking long enough, some kind of point will be hidden in their. Somewhere. Sometimes.

I appreciate your thoughtful response to my grumblings.

Yeah, I dunno if it's just that the PSAs worked too well on me, or because I don't even like to drink all that much (I only drink socially, and even then, only do it occasionally), or that the most adventurous drug users I've known have been deeply annoying, but I've conceded that drugs are very much Not For Me.

Just like when you know when you need a hammer, you know if a narcotic fog is calling to you. So if you don't have that psychic nail that needs a-hitting, why bother involving yourself with a drug culture that, yes, is mostly just as annoying as any other subculture. It's why I was fairly straight edge for most of my adolescence. There was nothing about it that appealed to me (at least until I started reading about LSD, which I immediately realized would have to happen to my brain at some point).

What's more important anyways isn't the drugs but the idea of pulling out the plugs and resetting from time to time. Willfully resisting  a life that is lived by nothing but reflex. Psychotropic drugs are a real easy way to go as far out from this as you possibly can, but this can be done just as well with anything from spirituality and meditation and philosophy, to grindhouse cinema and heavy metal and free jazz. Anything that disassembles preconceptions or orthodoxy is what is important. Because fuck that tasteless carrot the modern world keeps dangling in front of us to keep moving.

Jinnistan wrote:

Rock wrote:

As for Miles Teller, I liked him enough in Top Gun: Maverick, although the movie cheats to make him likable by having Glen Powell play an even bigger douchebag. He seems closer to a young Sean Penn than how Anthony Edwards played his father in the original.

None of this is promising.

Lol

Just watch it for the flight sequences, JJ.

Rock wrote:

I do think there's something to the left wing critiques of the impotency of establishment liberals. But I also see a lot of "(neo)liberal" used as an insult, and I have to wonder if these people even know what those words mean.

A lot of the time, it doesn't seem like they understand what a liberal means, but in my case I strongly support civil liberties, the arts, the labor movement, a progressive tax and robust public investment in community services.  A "neoliberal" is hostile to labor unions and public investment and wants to liberalize (less taxes and regulations) private corporate investment in its place.  I wouldn't consider many of the impotent establishment Dems as liberals, they're just inheriting that legacy title from previous New Deal/Great Society eras of their party.  Many of them are pay-for-play hustlers.

Rock wrote:

I always found it interesting the divide between Sanders and Warren supporters, even before the primaries. From what I've seen, there isn't actually much daylight between their positions, but I've brands themselves as a socialist and the other does not, so she is the enemy.

Another one of my peeves against the left is their antagonism to pragmatism.  So Warren realizes that she cannot simply win the presidency, snap her fingers and create a Medicare-4-All system, so she laid out a pragmatic plan to incrementally transition to a more inclusive health care system that would necessarily be implemented by Congress.  So, she's a sell-out, she's compromised, she's an imposter, *snake-emojis*.  This is the way ideologues think.  Not that Bernie could have done any better had he won, or would be doing much better than Biden currently had he won given all of the factors beyond his control (and I'm sure that the press would be exponentially more hostile).  And also there's the consideration that maybe it's a net positive that our system doesn't allow a president to effect major changes with the snap of his finger.

I know this is the wrong thread for all of this so.....Bulworth!!!

Evil Dead Trap
Babyface 2

Also, I don't have too much interesting to say about it, but Personal Best is great. Honestly a bit shocked that Patrice Donelly wasn't an actor. As far as performances by non-actors go, I don't know if it quite matches the raw power of Haing S. Ngor in The Killing Fields or Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives, but her performance seems so assured and polished. If you told me she'd been acting for years, I'd believe it.
 

Bruce Lee in New Guinea

Rampop II wrote:

Oh yeah, I also finally watched Duck Soup.

You're a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you're out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we'll be in be in here thinking what a sucker you are.