connect

No, clearly I ain’t got no culture.

The boomers would probably get that one better, but I doubt there’s any kind of boomer community.

Seriously, I saw the word and was thinking they enjoy old literature.

Does it have something to do with the rise of smartphones and no one typing on real keyboards? (Maybe why blogs died.)

Is it a consequence of voting, which blogs didn’t have?

What happens to your thoughts? Do you turn them all in the form of a question? Do you tear them down into a Mastodon one-liner and hope a popular person notices it?

If Lemmy had more of ourselves in this way, maybe it would be a healthier place.

Being idle until the media put out an article on something for us to talk about gives them too much power over us.

There’s an actual_discussion community, which isn’t exactly lively. There’s a casualconversation community, and even that’s all in the form of a question.

I wonder sometimes how it could have worked out if I’d had decent guidance. The prospect of living back under my mother’s glare or having to do homework again feels awfully tiring, though. And I’ve forgotten my locker combination! And my schedule. And where the classrooms are. Fuck, I can’t remember what a secant is!

I would have to fight back for my own vision of life rather than my mother’s. Now that I have the life experience to even have one. Back then I was so aware I didn’t know anything about life and the world. Would she fold, or would she go thermonuclear?

Maybe the butterfly’s wing would be a little different and there’d literally be nuclear war.

Maybe I’d be satisfied to see videos of other versions of myself in other universes and see what was possible.

Say you still get your same kids.

I know the usual answer is to buy stocks, but that seems too easy.

If you were a character in a book, you’d try to stop one of the famous disasters. Conveniently, they always remember lots of details about the famous disasters.

I would occasionally read the genx subreddit, where people would say “we” did this and that, much of which didn’t apply to me, and which no one would bother to push back on.

And I’m reading a pop science book about brains, and it’s doing the usual thing about how immature teen brains are and what their behavior is like.

How true is it that “we” were taking crazy risks and being monsters to our families and so forth?

I was a good kid—although admittedly I was in an abusive home—but also if I think back to school, there are a good number of kids who didn’t seem to be awful, although maybe just seeing someone at school doesn’t tell you much.

By “old”, I mean they were probably in college in the 1950s or earlier. Generally in the USA.

I went to college in what today they would call the late 1900s, and I definitely did not have that. What I experienced was a heavy workload, an interesting computer to mess around with, this new thing called the internet, and what I saw around for those who weren’t coping well was heavy drinking to get drunk and addictions to MUDs. No intellectualism.

Maybe what happened was that, in those biographies, they were probably generally culturally Jewish, from New York, scientists, writers, from a certain milieu. And the GI Bill happened in the 1940s and the flavor of college may have changed in the wake of that.

They may have been raised hearing the grown-ups talk over issues, increasingly participating as they grew up, whereas we were raised staring dumbly at sitcoms (“Hey, remember the time on Three’s Company when someone overheard something and there was a misunderstanding?”).

Not for deep interests, but you know like that old song about someone’s favorite things where the examples are all like copper kettles. Where you might write a few sentences about the little thing you like.

Or that it doesn’t make much difference in quality for the difference in price?

Or is it forever transformed?

After uneventful years, I thought I could let it live outside of the refrigerator. I’m nursing it back to health and it’s rising again, but it still has somewhat of a sharp smell at this point.

The bread that I made when I didn’t realize the starter was in distress, I really liked the unaccustomed strong sour flavor, actually, although the nearly complete absence of rising was a problem.

By Robert Bresson. I know I saw Diary of a Country Priest, and I think I saw Mouchette, but both years ago. I suspect I liked them better than this one, and that they may have been less talky.

I wouldn’t normally be opposed to talkiness, but Bresson would use non-actors and, according to Wikipedia, would try to get them to be as blank and stiff as possible. Maybe that could have even been an interesting style if at least the dialog were more realistic. If something rang true in any of this. I was watching with English subtitles, but I doubt it was misrepresenting the French greatly.

Maybe he should have tried his hand at cartooning, or at least done a Chris Marker.

I was in sympathy with some of what he was trying to express with the film.

I’ve seen very few Hollywood films from before the late sixties because they’re almost always so unrealistic that I can’t get into them. But I just watched this because I see it mentioned at times and I can never remember whether The Night of the Hunter or The Night of the Iguana is the one I’ve seen. And now that I’ve seen both, I’ll remember which is which.

Did it boil down to “I don’t really buy any of this”? Yes.

Although it’s interesting in a way to see the stage where one era is starting to become another era. Where there’s some “hey, whatever gets you through the night” and a little bit of language—Sue Lyon saying bitch a couple of times, but the copy I saw went silent where Ava Gardner said ass—and the villain accused of being motivated by lesbianism (Were there hints of it in her behavior? I didn’t notice.)—but all totally drenched in Christianity so they could get into the American theaters of 1964.

Ava Gardner, her Wikipedia page images with an inch of makeup on make me think of someone playing a schoolteacher of the 1940s. Having seen her in a film now, what I couldn’t stop noticing 100% of the time was the smoker voice. She died from smoking. She…looks her age. Deborah Kerr was older but looked like she was holding up better. Although Kerr’s Wikipedia page primary photo is of her at 52ish where 52 is what she looks.

I skimmed a couple of reviews before watching this, and I think one said something about Gardner holding her chin up the whole time to avoid appearing jowly. So then I did notice her with her chin up all the time.

There was a fight in the middle that wasn’t intended to be realistic in the slightest, and so it just stuck out oddly.

I know nothing about acting, but I could see how Skip Ward would look wrong even in a still frame. I don’t know whether he didn’t know what angle to be at with respect to the camera or didn’t have the right kind of expressive face or body language or what. Beyond not being adept at delivering the questionable dialog of the era.

It’s hard to buy the idea that getting fired from a bus tour would be that horrifying of a development for Richard Burton. That he’d just get another job, and that if he was at the end of his rope, it wouldn’t necessarily be now because of this.

He has had terrible problems with getting chased by 16-year-old girls, but now he is like 40, so that particular problem can’t continue much longer unless his character becomes a movie star or rock star.

And it was undercut some by Ava Gardner saying he comes here twice a year when he’s in distress. But if he did have a history of showing up there, he wouldn’t have needed to be told initially that they’re closed because she’s always closed in August or whenever it was.

The theme of the nobility of keeping going is a bit undercut when, decades later, you can look at Wikipedia and see how lives turned out, chaos and woe, and what was it all for.

At least they only very occasionally brought in music to tell us what to feel. But if they could go 99% of the time without telling us what to feel, why didn’t they have the guts for that last percent?

At one point it was a commercial for smoking, and at the end it was a commercial for cola.

There was a bit with shaving. I swear every black-and-white movie has a guy shaving. Was it slightly intimate for the women watching, by the standards of the time, or was it always a razor commercial of sorts? I guess the former because who had beards then?

Oh, the walking on broken glass and acting as if he didn’t feel it, even if he had been drinking. As if.

If I had a background in literature or any sort of storytelling, it would be interesting to play “What would really happen?” I kind of think even a bunch of 1960s church biddies would be physical enough to get that distributor head back from Richard Burton. All of them and Skip Ward. Just get that bus going and be gone. Plus Burton would try harder to protest the reality of how Sue Lyon was chasing him, even if it might not have accomplished much to do so.

Did we get any good reason really for why Deborah Kerr was that much of a spinster?

It’s about monster movies, and some teens interested in each other, with the Cuban missile crisis as a backdrop.

Most reviews seemed to love it, but I didn’t. And I mean contemporary reviews, where they surely don’t remember 1962 any more than I do, so it’s not nostalgia for the stuff of childhood.

Some mention that the movie-within-a-movie is the best part, and I absolutely agree, although to be fair putting together an entertaining 10–15 minutes is easier than an entertaining hour and a half.

What bothered me the most was the relationships. They weren’t played satirically that I could see, other than that there was a criminal-slash-beat-poet type as the older bad boy villain. Kellie Martin’s still into the villain and he’s still into her, but for whatever reason she also takes on Omri Katz, who’s not playing a type that she’d want. His character is kind of nervous with the novelty of her. And the central character gets involved with a girl who might be as close in height to his much younger brother as to him. She just looks so young like maybe she is old enough to have a crush on a boy, but would he be interested back?

And the villain threatening and attacking Omri Katz reminds me of being bullied growing up.

I kind of liked Cathy Moriarty. I’ve never seen anything else she was in.

Yes, John Goodman is watchable, but I don’t find that character all that hugely appealing.

Oh, and the music behind it all. So Hollywood awful. Reminded me of Spielberg movies when I was a kid.

I did see something mention that the ending shot could be a suggestion of how Vietnam was just over the horizon for these kids. That’s interestingly dark.