R.CAllen

I've never really understood what Susan Sontag was saying on the subject. I have sometimes suspected she didn't understand what she was saying on the subject. Having your opinions about the nature of a work of art or your opinions about the intentions of the artist dictated entirely by how other audience members besides yourself react to it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me.

What is camp? What isn't? Is Star Trek ('66-'69) camp? Is Batman ('66-'68) camp? Are any of these questions actually answerable without peeking over someone else's shoulder to see what they came up with? I don't get it. I've never been to a bookstore or a Blockbuster Video ® or any other commercially accessible point of sale for any medium of art where there was a camp section; I don't think it counts as an actual genre to any one but a handful of enthusiasts.

None of these people can even agree on what is or isn't camp. Throw these people in a room and ask them to settle for themselves which of the following is camp and which isn't :

• the original Dan DeCarlo strips for Josie and the Pussycats

• the Hanna-Barbera animated show Josie and the Pussycats ('70-'71)

• the vinyl album of music from the selfsame show

• the movie from 2001

• the currently ongoing television show Riverdale ('17-'39)

• the stage show parody Roberto Aguirre-Sasca got sued for putting on in the early oughts

• the comic book Afterlife with Archie where they're all zombies and witches and whatever

And some of the people who believe in camp will insist all of these are, or none of 'em are, or have elaborately worked out schema why some are or some aren't. But they won't agree. There won't even be fuzzy boundaries to the category.

Which episodes of Star Trek ('66-'69) are camp? Which ones are the campiest? Don't talk to me in broad generalities, don't even talk to me about individual characters or scenes, line up all the episodes of the show in order of campiness. Which episode was the least camp? Where's the scampi?

tldr = Anything that provokes a certain kind of laughter from a certain kind of person counts as 'camp' to someone or other, as near as I can tell. So the decision about whether or not something is camp is ultimately just a judgment at a distance about what another member of the audience feels rather than how you yourself react to it.

34/M/Toronto.

Things about where I call home that I like and dislike? I try not to make those sorts of judgments about where I live, man. Every day is a gift! That's why they call 'em days! Right now I'm just scared because the numbers of people w/the plague keeps going up and up. I understand this is far from merely being a local problem but it's still plenty disturbing!!!!1!

Welp! This may be the end of Nightly Movie Club if no one but the person who suggests the movie is going to, y'know, watch the movie! Certainly the end of my participation in it from now on. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the 200+ views and the 'like' from Jacen123 (did one hundred and twenty two other Jacens register before you back in '99?), no question, they are a comfort to me. They are a balm to my spirit. I feel like Frodo on the rock in Mordor surrounded by lava at the start of the many many endings of Peter Jackson's adaptation of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I feel like those views and that 'like' are my Samwise Gamgee, here with me in that moment. I'm glad to be with you, 200+ views and Jacen123's 'like', here at the end of all things.

[addendum : omigosh, Jacen! Your reply in this thread indicating your plans to see the film in one of the next few days is, uh, like the three (3) eagles at the end of that movie! This last minute rescue really made my day! I hope you enjoy the film!]

I did watch the movie over the weekend and wrote up a little of what I thought about it. Here you go! Not going to pick anyone else to do the next week of Nightly Movie Club. Going to go into the West and diminish, instead!

·         Any picture which includes an exclamation of "Jumpin' Jehoshaphat!" is well worth the price of admission.

·         I do wonder about whether or not this picture would be so beloved if it hadn't gone out of copyright. Or if all other pictures went out of copyright in a sensible fashion, too. Do you think alternate timelines enjoy it and It's A Wonderful Life (1946) and Night of the Living Dead (1968) in the same way? Please go ask the people or intelligent crab-men (and WOMEN!) living in the alternate timelines what pictures they enjoy and in what way they enjoy them. I suppose much of it depends on whether or not they have television over there.

·         I think this might be my fourth time seeing this picture. I saw it once or twice as a little kid, again in summer '10, recently to make sure it would still hold up so I could pick it for the movie club w/a clear conscience (fat lot of good that did me!), and now again. So four or five times, minimum.

·         I don't think it counts as a noir, obviously. It's so funny! It ends happily! But it IS a black and white picture set in a contemporary city featuring plenty of gunplay released in the correct time period w/an appropriately cynical attitude towards the pillars of society. It's one long sneer against domesticity, against government, against the free press, against the whole world, just an unending tirade of the motor-mouthed against the slow-witted.

·         There's a repeated conversational refrain — "Can that girl write an interview?" / "She'll do until something else comes along." & "She ain't no albino." / "She'll do until one comes along." —  that may have resurfaced with the Coen Bros. in No Country for Old Men (2007), the line they put in Tommy Lee Jones' mouth in reply to Garret Dillahunt saying "This is turnin' into a hell of a mess, ain't it, Sheriff?". It might have been in the book for all I know but I think they've also used it once or twice in their other stuff. And it may also have been a commonplace bit of banter, may not even come from this particular picture at all. Still, I like to think there's a connection.

·         I don't know. We're going into another official lockdown up here and the weather's taken a turn for the worse. I'm in a pretty sour mood! I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that way, of course. And yet there's something magical about this movie. It's just scene after scene after scene of long take after long take. None of them ever quite call attention to themselves but in retrospect it seems impossible to imagine they ever managed to get it right once, let alone again and again. Cary Grant shaking Ralph Bellamy's umbrella instead of his hand! How wonderful it is to be to be able to witness such seemingly effortless acts of craftsmanship, doled out and eaten up by two practitioners at the absolute top of their game, strung together in a row like pearls on a string. Eighty years later and it's still such a pleasure to see! Maybe some pictures really are like poetry, like sculpture, maybe some pictures will really last. (Yes, I understand that I'm talking about a farcical comedy with, like, a condom joke in it. I know! I just find it v. moving!) (I laughed out loud @ Rosalind Russell tackling the warden after the jailbreak!)

AT&T appears to have given up on using its stable of universally recognized intellectual properties to make for real money one dollar at a time. What are they doing instead? Desperately trying to survive & thrive in the imminent post-apocalyptic media future wherein consumers are maybe subscribed to one or two feedbags/firehoses of 'content' and that's about it. That's what this is, that's what shovelling tens of millions of dollars into Zack Snyder's open mouth is, that's what the stuff going down at Detective Comics Comics seems to be for. Just a complete abdication of any kind of standard 'buy a bag of flour for a dollar and sell it for a mark-up' Richard Scarry understanding of business in favour of something that seems more like a scam than anything else. Maybe it is a scam? Maybe it's even securities fraud, maybe it's a lie to investors, I suppose when you're $168.96 billion dollars in debt you have no choice but to look other people in the eye and say something like, "Very very soon most homes in western educated industrialized rich democratic societies will probably be paying for one or two of the following. They'll be paying for Netflix, they'll be paying for Amazon Prime, they'll be paying for us. We are going to be one among a very select few competitors in this marketplace. At this juncture doing anything that doesn't permanently latch ourselves onto a consumer is a waste of our time and money. We do not want anyone to buy our products. We want them to be permanently contracted to us forever in perpetuity." Is it true? Is it false? Will it work? I have no clue.

I just wish they'd go all the way with it and insist that the movie will not be playing in movie theatres in countries still in the full throes of the pandemic. I get it, all the data we have so far suggests that movie theatres aren't high-risk. I understand! It's still a low-to-moderate risk! Enough of those stacked up on top of each other equals death! Save a life or two, why not!!!!????

This week's Nightly.Net movie of the week is His Girl Friday (1940) starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. The movie was directed by Howard Hawks. The Internet tells me that "it is a screwball comedy about a newspaper editor using every trick in the book to keep his ace reporter ex-wife from remarrying." Okay!

His Girl Friday (1940) is a black'n'white movie. No need to adjust your television set! The colours are absent by design and deliberate intention! Not unfortunate error!

It is widely considered a classic and was selected in 1993 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Oooooh! Congress!

His Girl Friday (1940) is available to stream, uh, everywhere? It's on Amazon Prime, ImdbTV, The Roku Channel, Hoopla, Vudu, Tubi, Kanopy, DirecTV, epix, Popcornflix, PureFlix, Pluto TV, Classix, and The Film Detective. It can be also be seen for free via the Internet Archive or on DailyMotion or on YouTube.

It has a 7.9 rating on the Imdb. Movies that the ImdB algorithm considers to be better than or as good as His Girl Friday (1940) include such classics as Monster's, Inc (2001), The Help (2011), Logan (2017), Rush (2013), Star Wars Episode VI : Return of the Jedi (1983), Green Book (2018), Batman Begins (2015), A Beautiful Mind (2001), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Life Is Beautiful (1997), Joker (2019), La La Land (2016), Star Trek (2009), Cinderella Man (2005), Dragon Ball Super : Broly (2018), Boruto : Naruto the Movie (2015), Todd McFarlane's Spawn 2 (1998), and Todd McFarlane's Spawn 3 : The Ultimate Battle (1999).

His Girl Friday (1940) is appropriate for all Nightly.Net participants. Its running time is ninety two minutes long. Please, enjoy!

On 11/8/2020 at 12:51 PM, Ms. Spam said:

Alex Trebek passed away in his sleep last night.

Even though this has been anticipatable for the past nineteen months or so, nevertheless, actually hearing this news was still like being told of the death of a mountain or an ocean. An impossible loss.

One of the kids who play the Among Us game said something in chat that just endlessly amuses me : "blue dead. rest in spaghetti never forgetti". I gather that it's a meme, it's a thing the Twitch streamers say, but I still find it very funny nonetheless.

I'm kind of slow on the uptake but I just put it together that if the weather's real bad on Election Day this could actually be a landslide.

absolute best case scenario : terrible weather all across the United States delivers Biden an absolute landslide in the electoral college, 413-125

Biden win Texas, Florida, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa and Maine.

no, no, absolute best possible case scenario : 462 - 76. The President wins Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virgina + part of Nebraska. He narrowly loses Texas, Florida, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, South Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, Utah, Maine, Montana, Alaska + most of Nebraska.

middling best case scenario :

375-163. Biden wins Florida, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, and Maine.

realistically best case scenario :

300-238. The President wins every state he did in '16 except for Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio.

I don't think any of that's going to happen and even if it does America's 45th President will still be in office on January 21, 2021 regardless but it'd still be kinda funny. "In the Bible, Mr. President, rain is a blessing!"

(P.S. Sorry if the numbers don't add up or some of the states are missing!)

A small thing about Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2020) that kind of blows my mind. Almost always when it is Borat speaking his native tongue Sacha Baron Cohen is saying something in slow but fluent modern Hebrew that's usually roughly approximate to what gets subtitled into English. I assume that Maria Bakalova's fake Kazakhastani is actually Bulgarian or a language spoken in Bulgaria (Turkish???). I don't think either of them understands the other's language, like, I don't think this Bulgarian woman can speak Hebrew and I don't think Sacha Baron Cohen can understand Bulgarian. But they often act together in a way that involves the carrying out of whole conversations. Sometimes with other people around too.

I assume the obvious answer to this mystery is nothing more than preparation and post-production. They plan what they're going to do in advance, try it out, and stitch it together into something usable after the fact. Duh-drr! It's like everything else in the movie. But there are still parts of this movie that are emotional, and affecting, and intended to be taken as quasi-serious amidst all the farce. And those parts are basically two actors hearing what sounds like gibberish to them and saying what sounds like gibberish to the other person and yet each is managing to act in the scene nonetheless.

Also, the bit where they're in the beauty salon and Maria Bakalova reaches over and eats the lipstick followed by Sacha Baron Cohen eating the lipstick too was so immediately funny and so immediately gross that it made me actually physically retch. I coughed just writing that sentence, from the memory of it.

Saw it again.

I like all of Edgar Wright's stuff, been a huge fan since Spaced (1999-2001), I feel like The World's End (2013) is the best of the Cornetto trilogy and may actually be his best movie period, good to see A New Leaf (1971) and Deep Cover (1992) and Frailty (2001) make the top 1000 list, but just about every encyclopaedic-level cineaste kind of hates his breathing guts. I'm not a mindreader but I think they find him cutesy, glib, a sort of chameleon who has no substantial aesthetic and just assembles his screenplays with smarmy incessantly repeated half-jokes. (They also might be just be jealous of a guy who so clearly shares their preoccupations and mindset nonetheless being fairly successful at producing work suspiciously close to what they'd be able to manage yet feeling no need whatsoever to ever be serious about it in any way, shape, or form. They'd all like to make a zombie movie! They'd all like to make an action flick! They've all read some piece of creative work they'd love to adapt! My point is he gets to do it and yet he's clearly no cooler than they are. He's a complete drip! They can't look up to him because he's just a huge nerd and they can't look down on him because, again, they're just huge nerds.) I'm looking forward to Last Night In Soho (2021) although that'll probably be the first one in a while of his movies I don't catch in theatre. But. that's. due. to. unavoidable. circumstances!

- I literally laughed out loud @ "Wallace! Amazon.ca! What's the website for that?" Just a perfect joke. I think the first time I can recall hearing it was in The Little Rascals (1994) with "What's the number for 9-1-1?".

- Ramona's line of "You're just another evil ex waiting to happen" is a good'n. It's been a while since I read the volumes of the book that came out subsequent to the movie but I think that's something Scott gets offered, a future of grinding resentment where he joins the League of Evil Exes and gets to haunt Ramona forever rather than moving on like a grown-up. I think there's also something about how Gideon keeps the rest of his exes in crystal stasis diamonds ... ??? ... Great, now I've realized I don't remember how Scott Pilgrim ends. Great.

- If this movie had taken place in January 2020 I don't think the level of hostility and condescension shown to Scott by his bandmates, roommate, friends, and relative over dating a 17-year old girl would have existed. I think they'd have thrown him out of the band, out of his apartment, and out of their lives. I don't think he'd be believed that the two weren't really intimate at all, I don't think that'd actually even matter to them one way or the other, I think they'd call it grooming and he'd be chucked so fast. And if a vaccine ever pops out of the ground and life returns to grudging normalcy then I'm gonna guess this movie'll feel like Manhattan (1979) but if things go on too long as they are now then I'm betting things head the other way and it'll be inexplicable to audiences in the semi-plausible future why they're all so mad at poor Scott and Knives in young chaste love and the alternate ending from the Special Features will probably be semi-canonized to boot.

- oh, and R.I.P. Honest Ed's

On 10/17/2020 at 12:35 PM, monkeygirl said:

I'm exploring this right now. I've asked my therapist to help me because I came out of a discussion with a woman I really like, who is smart and who disagrees with everything I hold dear and the same for me to her. I can't 'fix' her (nor does she need fixing) so I decided to fix me. My therapist offered some homework. I'm to watch "the Vow", check out a journalist named Matt Talby, a book called "Why Liberalism Failed" by Patrick Deenan and a podcast called "Unspeakable" by Meghan Daum. Anyone know any of these?

 

Oh! Me! I do! I'm going to reply privately because I don't want to deliberately post in that specific thread! Sorry! (Oops. Scratch that plan.)

I have read Patrick J. Deneen's book, did not like it, and don't think it'll help give you particularly concrete answers as to why a smart person you like would disagree with you.

Matt Taibbi was a good writer, very accessible style, sharp, but I think the last couple of years have sort of ... broken? him. As it has done for us all, certainly. I'm guessing he might be more able to offer up something close to what you're looking for.

No clue on the documentary or the podcast.

This is another favourite! Rewatching it now will be, like, even more depressing than the last one because it's literally just scene after scene of where I live abuzz with people and excitement. Great! Great to see!

I have been repeatedly and relentlessly pushed out the airlock by groups of what are almost certainly literal children all for nothing more than the crime of 'faking task'. As near as I can tell 'faking task' means :

• doing a task too fast

• doing a task too slow

• doing a task at any speed but the green bar in the upper left corner of the screen doesn't change

• going into a room and then leaving a room

• running away from someone I assume is the Impostor

• looking at the map in the Administration room

I am not faking task! I would never fake task! I would very much like it if the youth of today would stop turning me into a ghost.

On 10/16/2020 at 7:27 PM, Fozzie said:

Being the impostor is totally random. I’ve gone days without being the impostor and also got it 5 games in a row.

I love it, but being impostor is definitely more fun. But I hate people who cheat, either through hacks or by sharing info or teaming up with the impostor.

Good to know!

I fell asleep a little over an hour in. Maybe rewatching Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) during a viral pandemic while playing Among Us on my tablet had a certain soporific quality and/or maybe I just didn't feel up to seeing absolutely everything come crashing down on these folks. There's still hope they'll turn things around at this point, they don't know Spock's an alien, they're calling in the authorities, as far as they're concerned normal life could very well be once again right around the corner. But it's not!

I figured I would give it a try and now I can't stop playing this dumb game. I keep going, again and again, hoping to be an Impostor. But I feel like I am never the Impostor! I should have a 1-in-5 chance of being the Impostor but I suspect the system is rigged to incentivize players to ... watch more ads? pay for the deluxe version? I don't know. I know for sure it is possible to cheat/hack because one time someone managed to pull a little ventriloquist trick on me where my account was saying things in chat that I didn't type.

I guess what I'm saying is I rate the game ★★★★☆ and now everyone around me is 'lowkey sus' and are all about to break my neck or headbutt my body to the floor then shoot me with a gun or crane their whole mouth open and impale me with the sudden snap of an alien proboscis.

My faltering brain registered the phrase 'limited series' in the thread title as an implicit criticism of how the show itself didn't have a great deal of range and struggled after its first few seasons to either expand beyond or deepen its own formulaic structure UNTIL memory of what those words are kicked in and then my brain was like : "Oh, right. A limited series. It's going to come back but only for a few episodes."

6 hours ago, David said:

 And it’s been 7 years.

This ALSO made my brain misfire! Could've sworn it'd only been closer to something like five years. Maybe I only caught up on the finale towards the tail end of 2014? I don't know.

This is one of my all time favourites. I think I've seen it six or seven times. Might be a few days 'til I get to it — I don't know what's wrong w/my brain nowadays that I'd rather watch something semi-newish instead of something familiar or something completely new (often it's punkt farkert) but that's where my head is for the moment.

I curse via Roger Rabbit rules, generally speaking. (Although, even while I was typing this my ancient laptop froze up for a moment and I let out a 'fuuuuuuuuuuuuu-' followed immediately by me saying 'Excuse my language.' Who am I asking to do that? God, I guess.)

On 10/3/2020 at 2:34 PM, Fozzie said:

 refrigerator

This word in conjunction with the topic at hand reminded me of my favourite story anyone's ever told here @ Nightly.net. About how their toddler would pronounce the word 'fudgsicle' as '****sickle' and that ever since they started correcting them on it anytime THEY would say the word 'fudgsicle' the kid would reply with 'NO NO. BAD WORD.' I think about this story all the time, any time I have a fudgsicle or popsicle or ice cream of any kind, pretty much any time I use a freezer or a refrigerator, I'm pretty sure this isn't even the first time I've mentioned how much of an impact this story has on my daily life before.

Haven't seen the show yet. I hear it's real good!

'Lazy' is one of those negative adjectives where half the time I just have to guess what the person means. Others include : 'weird', 'creepy', 'ugly', 'toxic'.

I don't think a lot of stuff that gets described as 'lazy writing' is really that. Certainly for any kind of collaborative medium involving full-time pay it's almost always an imprecise way to describe what went wrong in the process. Everyone involved worked really hard for an end product that failed to sufficiently entertain, inform, and inspire. No laziness whatsoever!

I think sometimes stuff gets tagged as 'lazy writing' that's nothing more than the unthinking and automatic acceptance of certain kinds of stock plots or sets of understandable expectations of an assumed audience. That's not laziness. That's narrative conventions. It's no lazier than starting your joke with the words 'Knock, knock'. Like, come on, Shakespeare. Prince Hamlet's dad comes back from the dead as a ghost but no one else does. Where's the explanation for why Polonius, Ophelia, both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Queen Gertrude, Laertes, King Claudius etcetera don't all become ghosts? Why doesn't everyone who dies in Denmark (or the world in general) come back as a ghost? What's stopping them? Are we to assume King Hamlet had a magic amulet that resurrected his spirit? Why is this magical amulet never mentioned in Hamlet? Pretty lazy writing, Shakespeare!

And a lot of stuff that gets bonked as 'lazy writing' in serialized mediums is just stuff that's unaddressed as of yet, or even stuff that's entirely orthogonal to the concerns of the work. So sometimes complaints or criticisms about lazy writing are just this :

Or this :

Conclusion : It's not laziness for a work of ongoing drama to not deal with some things or to not deal with some things at that precise moment. And it's not laziness for a work of ongoing drama to deal with things in a way that other works of drama already dealt with 'em.

Addendum : And I kind of think that any good writer or artist in general should eventually get to the point where they need to put less and less of a particular kind of effort into their work. Practice should make perfect, no? So a lot of stuff that's called 'lazy writing' isn't laziness and a lot of stuff that's really good is probably done out of quote unquote laziness. Is it lazy for Clint Eastwood to use a fake doll as a baby for his movie? I don't quite think so. Would it be fair to describe a ninety year old man who is still directing and starring in movies as lazy? Nope! Is it fair to describe Rob Liefeld as lazy because he can't or won't draw feet? No, because he seemed to go through a lot of trouble getting the little ammo pockets on the belts just quite right and crosshatching all those improbable muscles. It's lazier to call these people (or what they do) lazy than it is to find some other way to get at what you're trying to get at.

16 hours ago, Jedigoat said:

Jonesing for Shue and you keep watching Boys episodes, hoping she'll pop up?  Go watch Hollow Man or something!

What? I'm not. I only watched the one episode she's in this year. Haven't seen any of them but that one. Not going to watch any of the upcoming ones neither. Thought that was clear! Sorry!

On 9/30/2020 at 3:33 PM, Fozzie said:

If you want to pick a movie of the week, respond here.

Sign me up!

I've never read the book or the play or seen this before. I was pretty sure the cat was the murderer at one point. Didn't recognize nobody from it, neither, so either my memory's failing me or my moderate-to-severe prosopagnosia is worsening. Maybe both!

Best bits :

* First line of dialogue comes, like, five minutes into it w/"What a quiet place.' Classic!

* "Don't you believe in medicine, Doctor?" "Do you believe in justice, Judge?"

* Keyhole shots! Binocular shots!

* Look, a movie where someone says the word 'murder' and then immediately afterwards lightning strikes and thunder rolls is a real movie!

* "Shove it ... under the door, sir."

* "No sane person would think of using seaweed as a pattern for a shawl" strikes me as kind of an early ancestor for a gag like "No human being would stack books like this" from Ghostbusters (1984).

Bad bits :

* None! I approached the film w/an uncritical eye and was entirely glad that I did. It's a serio-comic masterpiece! And, besides, the presence of a monocle in a film removes and resolves any and all blemishes or flaws.

Some say he exsist some say no!

Haven't seen it! Probably not going to neither. I hate to be that guy but I guess I am that guy — the British original (2013-2014) is incredible, well worth watching, one of the most unsettling pieces of television I've ever seen. It's tough to imagine another adaptation could do anything other than ape it or abandon its particular stylistic choices, either way, not for me.

I enjoyed the movie for children! I hope they do another one, too. Watched it in two halves, lots of great comic turns from Burn Gorman, Fiona Shaw, Susan Wokoma, Adeel Akhtar, it's fun! The idea of a younger version of Holmes innately and automatically possessing the interiority and sense of self he will only gain after long association w/Watson is strong. Mycroft should've been Sherringford or whoever instead. Cavill doesn't much resemble the description of Holmes in the canon or the original Sidney Paget drawings but does look a bit like Paget himself. I'm okay/w/it, as Helena Bonham Carter says in the movie, "Try to be excited, not disappointed, in the possibility of something new."