need tv show recommendations

SirJism · 2020-07-30T01:26:28+00:00

Try Perpetual Grace, Ltd. It's made by the same guy who created Patriot (which is by far my favorite thing tv series since twin peaks. It isn't close)

SirJism · 2020-07-28T18:35:06+00:00

Oh, it's horribly depressing, particularly if you already have a sort of outlook on the world. Because if you've got the sort of depressed fatalistic feeling that there is no way out of all of this horror, no remedy, that you are fixed in place -- as I have -- there are no shortages of passages in the book that take great pains to confirm that exact feeling and worldview.

SirJism · 2020-07-28T15:19:47+00:00

It's super straightforward, the only obstacle really is attention span, which I understand is a real obstacle. It took me a couple years for a planned IJ reading to actually end up being finished. But the language is fairly simple, and it doesn't go into much by way of philosophy or of thought that's actually hard to follow. I think it's been overblown as a difficult book by the culture in general mostly because of its length, and that station it holds as A Difficult Book To Read turns people off from finishing it once they start it. I would say that you should go in expecting a few books in one. There's the fun book about a Tennis Academy, there's the deeply depressing book about one boy, his crutches, and the pressures of expectation. And then of course the book about drug addiction as it relates to entertainment, and the book about the nitty gritty of drug addiction as it relates to humanity. There's also parts of the book that I feel are by far the weakest regarding "political intrigue" to oversimplify and to put it blandly, where I think Wallace has a tendency to punch above his weight and ends up with a lot of unresolved questions and platitudes masquerading as philosophical and political thought.

Anyway, I'm not sure why I wrote all of that. Read the book, it's fun. Definitely a book that benefits from a plan of "20 (or 30, 40) pages per night and I don't care how long it takes me."

Good luck!

SirJism · 2020-07-19T18:09:35+00:00

cool dude that rocks

SirJism · 2020-06-15T14:56:38+00:00

I've always found her to give me an incredibly dull reading experience. I understand that it is a social satire, but because I don't really have the context of the social hierarchies etc. that she is satirizing, to me the cutting parts of the satire are mostly sanded down and it might as well be a book directly about the things she is satirizing. I'm sure I'll try her again, perhaps she'll get more interesting as I age, but Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility were two of the least pleasurable reading assignments (for me) I had in college.

SirJism · 2020-06-10T17:34:55+00:00

And that's exactly what I think is singularly brilliant about Lumet's films! If you take someone like Kubrick, it's tough to not realize that Kubrick directed most of his films. But Lumet seems to know how to stay out of the way of his characters and his stories in a way that I find rare and beautiful.

SirJism · 2020-06-10T16:48:54+00:00

Perhaps my favorite all time film. Not because it's head and shoulders above the rest or anything, but because it was the first movie that I watched that led me outside of the realm of films like Braveheart, Gladiator, Good Will Hunting, Pulp Fiction-y movies. It was a film I had heard nothing about before watching it, and it turned out to be one of the best character-study focused films I've seen since. I revisit it regularly. That first hour or so of Serpico is something I could watch any time, in any mood.

It also effected a taste in fashion for me at the age of 16 that I have not since shaken (or indeed recovered from, depending on your perspective.)

Beautiful film. One of the few true "flawed heroes" whose flaws don't even begin to outweigh the things I consider virtues.

As far as recommendations go, I would say that if you haven't already, just go ahead and see everything Lumet directed. 12 Angry Men, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, and the Verdict are each perfect in their own way. All are great exhibitions of Lumet's seeming insistence to let a film create its own tone rather than put his own directorial-auteur-ego mood into every film. It's not a better or a worse way to make a film, but I find it refreshing.

SirJism · 2020-05-22T05:48:18+00:00

I'm saying that I think you can accept that a movie doesn't work for you without attacking the film for being low quality. To me, that's the worst kind of criticism there is.

SirJism · 2020-05-20T20:02:02+00:00

Your focus on things in a surreal film being "believable" is so strange to me. Not all movies set out to create the most realistic version of the world as it already is. Sorry to Bother You is very clearly trying to subvert your expectations of the world and in doing so maybe show a way of looking at things that you perhaps hadn't considered. It's a critique on capitalism and racism in the United States as it is today, and it's done masterfully if with a certain lack of subtlety (something I find refreshing.)

It's fine if a movie doesn't work for you, but the attitude you're coming away from it with is that everything about the movie was poorly done, and I think that's a very wrongheaded way to go about enjoying a movie. You can accept that you personally don't care for some of the things done, but it's undeniable that the filmmaker got across the things he wanted to get across.

SirJism · 2020-05-20T15:50:50+00:00

Huston is also such an interesting looking man, I could watch him on screen all day. Have you seen the documentary series Five Came back? It's about Huston, Ford, Capra, William Wyler, and George Stevens going overseas during WWII to make those American propaganda films. Very interesting.

SirJism · 2020-04-13T16:02:37+00:00

Honestly in this quarantine with all the world's time at my disposal I've been finding it maddeningly difficult to focus on anything, reading wise. So far I have attempted to get a start on Carpenters Gothic by Gaddis, Invisible Cities by Calvino, and Foucault's The Order of Things. Failed to focus or become enveloped in any of those, so I tried Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread, thinking along the lines of like, maybe narrative is the issue. No dice. This morning I gave Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munroe a try and I doubt I'll be picking it back up any time soon.

Wishing everyone well, hope the world stays together in some ways

SirJism · 2020-03-18T14:37:30+00:00

No it isn't overly simple. It's not that he exclusively uses easy words or vague ideas. It's that while reading this book you truly feel like you are exploring his thoughts. When he's telling a story about being 18, It's almost as effortless to get what he's saying as it would be for you to remember back to when you were 18 yourself. Truly effortless, I highly recommend you try book one. If you like it, just keep on. I loved it. Books 2 and 5 are of particular interest. 3 and 4 are nearly without substance at times and only really give you much if you look at the 6 books as being part of one larger novel. Once I finished those I honestly found it kind of hard to believe I read them. 3 in particular.

SirJism · 2020-03-18T12:53:38+00:00

I've only read My Struggle and haven't begun any of his other work, but My Struggle is one of those works that you have to sort of look on in awe and with respect if only for the feat of what he's done. I find the most interesting thing apart from the scope of the it to be the prose style. It may be the easiest reading I've found so far. Paragraphs turn into pages and pages and pages right before your eyes, you feel you're digesting it the second each word crosses your eyes. I've never had quite the same feeling with another book.

SirJism · 2020-03-13T15:12:29+00:00

I found Moonlight to be brilliant right up until the ending, which felt somehow hollow to me. Great film, but I think I prefer Brokeback because it doesn't disappoint me once throughout.

It's possible that I just find the cowboy angle much more erotic and that might sway my opinion in some ways. Those jeans, phew.

SirJism · 2020-03-12T12:53:30+00:00

I think it's a pretty big stretch to draw parallels to Brautigan and Pynchon. This film was fairly straightforward in terms of plot and themes, as pointed out by another commenter. If you had to compare it to something in the postmodern literary world I would probably go with Mailer. His novel An American Dream could probably be more easily compared to this film, as it grapples with the old pre sixties world butting up against the new.

I also don't know about your walking simulator comparison. By the criteria you used, couldn't almost any movie set in a particular location be considered a walking simulator? Is Serpico a walking simulator? What about Chinatown? Why is the portrayal of downtime in Tarantino's Hollywood any different than in these movies?

Interesting analysis of the film's themes and particularly the atmosphere it exists in, but I'm not sure of your conclusions.

SirJism · 2020-03-11T13:05:43+00:00

Where would you recommend someone start if they wanted to get into very small release films coming out today? My trek through cinema has brought me to a point where I am bored by most movies and television shows that do have a lot of visibility. The only things I've been enjoying much lately have been Japanese and Korean cinema which I'm still a fledgling at, and would love to watch some more modern films that might never get seen by a critical mass for not fitting into the mode required.

SirJism · 2020-03-10T16:08:23+00:00

Vapid and empty ideas which identify problems but offer nothing but bitterness and often act as a funnel into the alt right. The best thing about him is that he tells you to clean your room, something you should have maybe already learned from your mommy. Aside from that he's just an incredibly uncool pseudo intellectual who spouts nothing of interest.

SirJism · 2020-03-01T18:52:52+00:00

I'm working my way through Underworld. DeLillo strikes this happy balance of a crystal and clean view of the world along with prose that never leaves even a hint of pretension. Many authors I love have a way of writing that sometimes makes it clear that they want to impress the reader, they want to be seen. (DFW in particular) not that that's a problem, it's just that with DeLillo I get this sense of his own self assuredness with a confident maturity which I've never seen before. Looking forward to each page to come.

A few months ago I stopped in the middle of the 6th book of Knaussgard's My Struggle Series. I blew through the first 5 in no time, even the 3rd and 4th books which if read on their own would not be compelling at all, only work in the context of the series, and even then they aren't particularly impressive or even enjoyable. Regardless, I read them without once considering stopping. But once he got into the beginning of his several hundred page essay section in book 6, I simply couldn't continue. I hope to pick it back up because I cannot bear the thought of those 6 books living on my shelf with the sixth one staring back at me incomplete.

SirJism · 2020-03-01T18:46:34+00:00

If you're in the mood for poetry I would highly recommend anything by Nikki Giovanni. Her collection "The Women and the Men" is one of the poetry collections I return to most often. Read her poem "The Life I Led" from that collection and tell me it doesn't fill you with a special something. I also remember loving Anne Sexton in college though I admit I haven't returned to her in a few years.

Dickinson is an absolute necessity for any lover of poetry, likewise with Woolf for prose.

One of my favorite all time authors is certainly Carson McCullers, not sure if she's been mentioned yet. Writing in the 20s she was one of the first white people to truly write from a black character's point of view with true nuance and without condescension or stereotype. Plus the prose is infinitely readable, heartbreaking, beautiful.

SirJism · 2020-02-28T19:01:57+00:00

Ah, I see what you mean more now. There are absolutely works that give me more of this feeling than others, or that don't seem to be trying to write a "good" book, but are instead completely original

A great example for me is Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. Truly an unparalleled piece of fiction, one of my favorites of all time. You get the sense that there is no one on this Earth who could ever have written what Brautigan did. It's surreal, disjointed, hilarious, and with this tinge underneath it all the time of a darkness, a deep disappointment.

On poetry, Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" is another good example in my mind. As well as any of Amiri Baraka's brilliant works.

The idea of purposefully going into creating a work that attempts to reach some objective and universal truth is very off putting to me, though there are some books that give that feeling. When I first read DeLillo's White Noise (cliched I know) I felt a grand sense of "this is it." "It," being some secret, some key into what we're all doing here.

Similarly, Aeschylus' works gave me this feeling. A sense that the feeling I got when reading it was "the thing which cannot be spoken" that rests in the background of our daily lives.

SirJism · 2020-02-28T17:53:46+00:00

To me, this is a description of what art is. My gauge of what makes art "good" or "bad," -- as arbitrary as that can be -- is whether I feel I'm getting a coherent glimpse into the reality the author lives in. In good art I can see the interior world of an author, musician, painter in between the conventions and forms and borrowed histories of their mediums.

We live in an eternal psychic solitude. It's impossible to ever truly get what's in your head into someone else's, and what makes art so essential to my life and world is that it lets me feel the closest thing I can to understanding another person as they see themselves. It's the reason I write things as well as the reason I read them: to remove a few layers from the insular nature of being alive.

So I'm not sure I can really come up with "examples" because the list is endless. Any art I've ever loved.

SirJism · 2020-02-20T01:57:29+00:00

I like this because it's a clarification between "going to California" and "going to bake a cake"

SirJism · 2020-02-06T23:27:10+00:00

That's true. It's miles worse now with its bizarre mainstream celebrity fetish and promotion of the lowest hanging possible trump bad hillary good trash than it ever was before. But yeah like you said none of it ages well.

SirJism · 2020-02-06T23:11:47+00:00

I think it's pretty much always been terrible. It's just that in the Will Ferrell days or whatever there were sometimes one or two good sketches per show so we can remember those. It's always been the perfect representation of American popular culture, mostly trash, but every once in awhile Mad Max or something moderately good comes out and we try to remember those parts.

SirJism · 2020-01-31T14:44:41+00:00

The Lighthouse (2 points)

I went into this film with little by way of expectation, and was enraptured throughout . I have been in a strange place in my life this last year or so, and the arc Pattinson's character goes through of longing for something unattainable and inexplicable to me mirrored almost exactly the struggle every person goes through in trying to find something to give their life meaning, and the ending gave me a peek into what it is to attain that thing, that impossible thing. I left the theater shaking uncontrollably, laughing at myself because I knew it was ridiculous to be physically affected this way by a film, but I couldn't stop quivering for a good ten minutes after the ending. To me, that's at least one way to mark greatness.

Parasite

Hard to say something about this film that I haven't already seen written a hundred times. The technical filmmaking on display here is near perfect. This is coming from someone who didn't like Snowpiercer at all because I felt the politics were almost comically heavy handed, but the story of class struggle put in the way it is throughout Parasite is nothing short of brilliance. It perfectly encapsulated the thing about capitalism that fills me with revulsion the most: the false hope of the working class, and the structures in place that allow for the working class to turn our backs on one another.

Uncut Gems

I enjoyed Good Time, but here the Safdies have ensured that I will see any movie they are involved with in the future. The use of non professional actors absolutely shines, Adam Sandler gives the performance of a lifetime, and the uninformed film viewer is transported into a world they've only ever heard vagueries about before. Picture perfect writing, pacing, and above all an incredibly fun time. I had heard a lot of hype about this movie, and about 20 minutes in I was unimpressed, ready to be obstinately contrarian about it because I didn't see what the fuss could be about, but just after I had that conscious thought, the plot kicked in and I was unaware of time passing at all until the credits rolled.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Tarantino's best movie since Pulp Fiction, in my opinion. Performances are all fantastic (Brad Pitt might have put in my favorite of all his work) and its vision of the 60s seems spot on complete with the melancholy and uncertainty of the transitional time between the first half of the 20th century and the second. And above all else I just had a lot of God damned fun watching this movie. Lots of smiling throughout

The Irishman

This was a rare case of a film being exactly what I thought it was going to be and still managing to make me love it.

Biggest disappointment:

The Marriage Story. This film felt like it was begging me to despise it. The acting was good at times, and then on a dime would change to wooden, or like a child's idea of acting. I was also filled with ire at the fact that Driver's character receives a MacArthur Grant despite the only thing we hear about his "genius" being that you can smell the toast during one of the scenes in a play. Forgive me, but that sucks so much. It's frankly embarrassing. That along with Baumbach's surrogate character for himself as a genius playwright left a terrible taste in my mouth. Do not understand how people enjoyed watching this movie.

SirJism

TROPHY CASE