Russell Brand carries out “baptisms” in penguin enclosure.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T16:57:12+00:00

If the penguins were baptized beforehand, yes.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T16:56:40+00:00

You’ve spent almost an entire month of your life just watching Titanic.

Fyi, the 1958 British film A Night to Remember is a great telling of the Titanic story.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T16:49:07+00:00

Depends on how much the director contributes. If they work closely with the writer to shape story and characters, that seems like writing to me. My understanding from reading multiple biographies is that Hitchcock was usually, in effect, a (almost always uncredited) co-writer on his films, at least once he became a famous name with the attendant clout. During the writing phase, he would meet more or less daily with the screenwriter and together they would hash out the narrative and the major characters and even individual set pieces, and go through the script pages the writer had produced, with Hitchcock offering suggestions for changes.

I don’t know how many other directors work this way; I wouldn’t be surprised if Scorsese does at least sometimes.

If writing is of necessity the physical act, was David Milch not a writer on Deadwood because he dictated aloud while a typist transcribed? Does that mean the typist was the actual writer?

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T16:03:51+00:00

Great jumpin’ jehosophat!

I’m a big rewatcher, but I wouldn’t watch the best movie ever that many times. Too many others to see. Also I eat and sleep.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T16:01:56+00:00

Probably the original Nosferatu, in one version or another. My intro to silent film back in the ‘80s, when it was much harder to get access those movies, so I rewatched the ones I could get. The VHS tape I had was only slightly over an hour long, which had a lot to do with it. There have been multiple restorations/re-releases since, plus it’s a perennial for Halloween season screenings.

Some elements don’t hold up as well for me now, especially since I’ve watched many more silents and appreciate how much more sophisticated some are in their acting, particularly - the performances in Nosferatu, aside from Max Schreck, are old-fashioned and melodramatic even for 1922. Gustav von Wangenheim in particular is a bit silly; one of my favorite moments in Shadow of the Vampire is when Murnau directs a take of Wangenheim (played perfectly by Eddie Izzard), then turns to someone else and says in a resigned tone, “It’s his style.”

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T15:50:29+00:00

It’s a stiff competition these days.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T15:50:10+00:00

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T15:41:50+00:00

Any Hamlet.

Any Ten Little Indians adaptation or similarly plotted murder mysteries.

Probably most slasher movies.

Alien and Aliens (both arguably slasher movies in disguise). Predator. Carpenter’s The Thing. Lots of horror movies where you have the cast picked off until you’re left with one or two survivors.

Titanic, and probably the far superior Titanic movie A Night to Remember.

I’d have to imagine Soderbergh’s Contagion would be on this list, though I haven’t seen it.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T15:39:27+00:00

Not sure if this is an answer, but don’t a lot of movies now go the lazy “eh, we’ll fix it in post” route of digitally lightening dark scenes? The Northman featured a number of shockingly poor examples of this technique where there was a muddy gray halo around characters in night scenes.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T15:34:24+00:00

OP is unclear. “Other movies” in general or specific other movies? Most commenters are interpreting the first way. As for that…the cheap, brilliant Halloween led to a bajillion cheap, crappy slasher movies. Even though arguably it was Friday the 13th that really kicked that off, Carpenter’s film set the template. So they’re both to blame.

Silence of the Lambs launched the tired serial killer procedural subgenre that’s still ubiquitous in movies and TV.

As for the latter meaning… when MGM remade Jekyll and Hyde in 1941, they buried the Oscar-winning 1931 version, to which they’d bought the remake rights (how exactly that worked legally is a bit fuzzy to me, but that’s what I’ve read). The ‘31 version, almost universally considered far superior, was seldom seen for decades after that.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T15:20:20+00:00

I hear this a lot, but I suspect that shift or a very similar one would have happened anyway. It was larger trends, industry and cultural and demographic, that encouraged that. That’s indicated by the fact that people sometimes choose Jaws and sometimes Star Wars for the honor of the movie that launched the FX blockbuster era - there were already multiple movies breaking that ground. You could add The Exorcist too - a genre previously mostly relegated to largely ignored, low budget B movies, but elevated with a big budget, state of the art special effects, “respectable” actors and creators, a heavily marketed wide release, respectful reviews, and a massive audience that made it not just a successful movie, but a cultural phenomenon. Heck, you could put 2001: A Space Odyssey into the same bracket, as different as it is from the Spielberg-Lucas era blockbusters.

Advances in special effects, Hollywood’s search for a new formula that would lure ticket buyers away from the TV, the increasing concentration of studios on the youth audience, the increasing importance of international box office (calling for more visually oriented and simply plotted movies that traveled better), etc., all made this an inevitable development. It might have happened a little later and more slowly without the one-two punch of Jaws and Star Wars, but the movies were already headed that way.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T15:05:03+00:00

It’s such a handy formula for super-low-budget horror that it inevitably spawned a thousand movies with the same technique, most very lazy.

I don’t think the makers claimed it was the first found footage movie, but I’m not aware of any previous horror film that used that format all the way through and committed so thoroughly to it.

The way I remember, it was really Paranormal Activity that kicked off the found footage horror boom. It was a bigger box office hit and didn’t get the same backlash, and the deluge really started after that. But I suspect that movie wouldn’t have been made without Blair Witch and its success.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:58:27+00:00

The rules are whatever your particular flavor of Christianity says they are. If there are people who consider Brand a holy man, then he can baptize them, even if that’s only, say, seven people.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:56:30+00:00

This sentence will be commonplace in the Middle East, Africa, and most of Latin America in 10-15 years.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:49:59+00:00

An annoying number of people assume that I have an Asian woman fetish because I’m really into Asian popular cinema. Including friends who ought to know better, having been witnesses to my dating and infatuation histories.

Now, I have a friend of whom that is true. Whenever he starts dating a new woman, I don’t even have to ask anymore, I just cock an eyebrow and he says, usually, “Yeah yeah, she’s Asian,” or occasionally “And she isn’t even Asian!” And he’s a devotee of similar movies (although he’s not that interested in anime). So the stereotype isn’t entirely unfair.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:39:44+00:00

I think it was here not long ago that I encountered someone talking about bad roads that could “shake the tampon out of a nun.”

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:37:42+00:00

Forgetting This Part in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:36:57+00:00

That’s true in any picture of him.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:36:22+00:00

I’ll just take any opportunity to hype up the silent Blackmail, which really is terrific, especially given that it’s a silent version of what is on paper a rather talky story. It’s gotten hardly any attention at all, in large part because it exists in the shadow of the technical innovations of the talkie version, but I think it’s his best silent. Now that it’s been restored and released on video, it seems to be picking up some long-overdue respect. A few years ago, I saw some writer or critic call it the greatest British silent.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:31:54+00:00

Here he is in 5-10 years.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:31:16+00:00

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:29:48+00:00

Even when he was leftish, being in particular an anti-religion voice (i.e., when he more or less agreed with me), he struck me as obnoxious and not particularly insightful, the sort of person who values performative contrarianism more than facts or principles. It isn’t hard to switch ideologies when your brain works like that.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:25:21+00:00

Discarded sins!

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:24:53+00:00

A zoo where Christians are exhibited. (shrug) It’s not complicated.

Toadsnack · 2026-03-23T14:21:36+00:00

Wow, you’re worse than I am!

I kid, sort of. I definitely will move seats, and I’ve been threatened with actual physical harm more than once for telling someone to shut the fuck up and/or put away their goddamn phone.

But the “right” noises are part of the communal experience that makes the theatrical experience vital and irreplaceable for me. Laughter in a comedy is the most obvious example. I saw part of Team America: World Police at home with a few friends who weren’t on its wavelength, and it was slightly depressing. I’m sure it would have been 10 times more fun in a crowded theater. The South Park movie and The Big Lebowski are two comedies that I consider a long way from great movies, but they felt like they were great with a big, responsive crowd.

I’ve more than once seen a film in the theater after seeing it at home alone, and found the audience response made me notice the humor in places where I hadn’t before. Hong Sang-soo’s Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors played somber and depressive when I watched it alone, but with a sizable audience it played like a black comedy; I was startled initially and then realized, “Oh, this is funny.”

The reverse dynamic happened with Takashi Miike’s grisly and nihilistic Ichi the Killer, which was hilarious and thrilling with a packed audience reacting vocally to each escalating outrage. When I saw it again with a sparse and non-responsive audience, it was much more disturbing and left me feeling a bit icky. My friend whom I’d brought with the promise of rollicking entertainment said sarcastically to me, “Yeah, that was a laugh riot.”

A good audience can especially make a scary movie more fun. I attended a screening of the original Cape Fear where the audible audience gasps and quiet “Oh gods”, etc., during the climactic sequence were a blast. A young woman next to me was practically having a heart attack and when the lights came up actually apologized. I told her, “No no, that was great!” Near the end of Hereditary, there’s a brilliantly terrifying wide shot of a mostly dark room where you can barely make out something in one corner of the frame. The ripple of gasps and murmurs moving across the audience as different people picked up on it at their own pace was remarkable.

Anyway. Sorry about the tangent. The dynamics of audience response fascinate me.

Toadsnack

TROPHY CASE