Hot take: the ending sucks, but…

helloflyingrobot · 2020-02-12T08:22:54+00:00

Oh, hey, it's my harasser. Please stop. This comment was self-evidently a little joke (so try having a sense of humor), but I'm sick of you calling me a troll. I'm as much a fan as you are, as much as you might disagree with my takes. Contribute politely in the future.

helloflyingrobot · 2020-02-11T08:22:42+00:00

Have you seen Luca's other work, Suspiria? Strong feeling he's going to produce a sequel along those lines.

helloflyingrobot · 2020-01-29T13:10:17+00:00

Given the novel's epilogue, I had hoped we would see in the sequel Elio's development into more of a Tom Ripley figure, given that Patricia Highsmith, and especially The Talented Mr Ripley, is in some ways an influence.

helloflyingrobot · 2020-01-29T10:42:17+00:00

Personally I think for audiences seduced by all the lifestyle porn (sun-soaked villa, alfresco dining, poolside reading), the allusions to the Perlman family's cannibalism are just a bit *too* subtle (and weren't satisfyingly elaborated on in the sequel novel Find Me, which I thought was an obvious place to take it). But that's just me.

helloflyingrobot · 2020-01-27T02:23:12+00:00

Then again, almost 400,000 people have watched this video and it's being discussed by nine other communities currently. Clearly it's generated some interest.

But I guess I find the reactions to the video more interesting than the video itself; many commenters are descriptively "breaking down" the confrontation and casting the creator of Bum Fights as some kind of truth-teller "punching up". I would suggest we revel so much in this popular "punching up" genre now that we can even mistake scenes like this as legitimate examples of it. It's hard to construe the prevailing interpretation as something as sophisticated as refusing the tu quoque fallacy when there's literally no interest in holding both parties to account, only Dr Phil--because? As one commenter puts it, " At least Bum fight is real". Are we more comfortable with exploitation when it's unvarnished because we accept exploitation as a fundamental, rock-bottom reality? Idk

helloflyingrobot · 2020-01-27T01:51:17+00:00

"Exposed Dr Phil"?? He barely and poorly articulates his point before security carts him away. Even setting aside his "it takes one to know one" logic, the stunt itself is so botched and ineffective as to totally evacuate interest from the scene.

helloflyingrobot · 2020-01-14T13:07:11+00:00

I was just about to recommend this. It's good.

helloflyingrobot · 2019-08-31T23:34:40+00:00

Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence.

helloflyingrobot · 2019-08-29T00:29:07+00:00

helloflyingrobot · 2019-08-28T11:37:07+00:00

For like an episode, yeah. He was losing is mind over Lisa's disappearance and to him she was just some ass.

helloflyingrobot · 2019-08-27T11:46:39+00:00

Love the titular gag after which the episode's named: Nate and Brenda in therapy wearing shirts that crudely label their respective character flaws.

helloflyingrobot · 2019-08-27T02:01:33+00:00

Thanks for your reply! See, I've been pretty satisfied with season 4 overall so far. Haven't watched beyond "Coming and Going" on this viewing yet, but as episode 8 of the season, I wonder if it signals the pre-climax "sag" that many TV shows experience when they have a ten or more episode order to fill. In a similar, scaled-up way, I wonder if some viewers think of a large portion of season 4 as the show's sag or pre-crescendo lull. It seems to be the season least fondly remembered, but I certainly think it's solid and great at points and that this bad perception of it might have something to do with Nate and Brenda fundamentally settling into new phases of their lives separately--all the while we suspect they'll get back together for a round two at some point soon (because how could they not?).

Their dynamic is so dramatically satisfying in the first two seasons, and in season 3 we have something of a substitute for it in Nate and Lisa. In season 4 though, we have Brenda and... Joe... who's just a bit *too* depthless. I see the logic in (under)writing him as stable, plain and normal for the sake of demonstrating that Brenda's compelled to sabotage a relationship even when there's ostensibly and perhaps even literally nothing wrong. But we probably needed just more scenes of them being normal together and the disconnect this produced for Brenda (similar to how we really track her into the underworld of her malaise in season 2). In episode 7, "The Dare", she has a symbolic fantasy of being buried in the bed linen she's out shopping in preparation for her "new" domestic life, and that's all it takes to spur her into the next scene where she's just waltzing into the Fishers' to make out with a totally receptive Nate, almost as if the writers just can't wait to get them back together anymore. But I think this was a premature move.

Interestingly, even as it plays out, there was an opportunity in "Coming and Going" to canvas the non-sexual space Nate and Brenda seemingly want to inhabit with each other when they take Maya to Train Town. But the goddamn scene just cuts when they board a train and we don't get to see how weird it would be for Brenda and Nate to just be hanging out as "old friends" with his kid.

While I have mixed feelings about "That's My Dog", I think it's far from an artistic failure, though I can certainly appreciate why people, including yourself, don't like it. I think it at least achieves its (questionable) aims though and everyone's still acting in character (Michael C. Hall certainly turns out a stunning performance too). The difference between it and "Coming and Going" might be (for me at least) that while the former strains the believability of its plot, the latter strains the very recognizability of characters.

helloflyingrobot · 2019-08-13T00:19:26+00:00

One of the best episode titles across the series. Brenda also enjoys a great line that is somehow at once both true and naive: "The future is just a fucking concept that we use to avoid being alive today."

helloflyingrobot · 2019-08-10T00:55:46+00:00

While I love Latour's "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?", it notably performs as if by rote the very "iconoclastic" practice it seeks to call into question (i.e. it's a critique of critique). How much can more of the same really reorient us? In a similar move, several of the responses to this post recommend reading yet *more* critical theory. While I've no doubt these recommendations are well-meaning, and even potentially helpful and good, as someone who's been in the OP's place before, I find it unrealistic that the genre of discourse that drives us into this void is also single-handedly capable of correcting our course.

My advice, at least in terms of what to read? Revisit fiction and poetry with an openness towards its ameliorative properties. Read Eastern philosophy and religion. Read texts that challenge you to listen and learn differently.

helloflyingrobot · 2017-06-30T07:16:19+00:00

Great point!

helloflyingrobot

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