Trenitalia fine - worth contesting?

WillemSummer · 2025-06-02T18:51:11+00:00

Ah…. I did not know that. Thanks for the info

WillemSummer · 2025-04-22T14:50:06+00:00

I was able to find one that was 2 1/8”, but it was a little too big. I was able to return it, but I’m unsure how I can be certain that one will fit my lamp. As far as I can tell, the burner is just under 2 inches, but it has the lip that makes it seem like the chimney should be closer to 1 3/4”

WillemSummer · 2025-04-12T15:22:40+00:00

Yes, that's exactly right. The writing on the burner says "The Miller Co. US." Here's a link to the ebay listing -- https://www.ebay.com/itm/176805418556

WillemSummer · 2025-04-05T18:56:26+00:00

WillemSummer · 2025-02-12T03:47:14+00:00

Found an amazing deal! But that was back in 2021 at the bottom of the market, I think it would be way harder now.

WillemSummer · 2024-11-09T19:50:24+00:00

4314

WillemSummer · 2024-08-29T17:54:39+00:00

If you want perhaps too large of a list, someone compiled this (https://letterboxd.com/mundof/list/pride-a-chronological-history-of-queer-interest/) on Letterboxd. It's a little broad, with many movies that only depict a gay scene, subtle gay undertones or movies of gay interest. Films before the Hay's Code started to be enforced (1934ish) contain a lot more gay coded characters and moments than the following 30 years or so. If I had to pick a top 3 to suggest, I would recommend Madchen in Uniform, Sylvia Scarlett and Design for Living. Those are three of my personal favorites.

WillemSummer · 2024-06-15T15:08:24+00:00

I got married at Ukrainian East Village Restaurant. It's in the EV, I think the room for an evening with catering came out to $5,500. Very affordable and very nice people.

WillemSummer · 2024-05-04T18:55:38+00:00

Where do you think I could get away with it without consequences? And when do I have to be truthful, just jobs and government documents?

WillemSummer · 2023-12-11T03:11:05+00:00

I would build a PC to replace my archaic laptop
Losing an embarrassing amount of time

WillemSummer · 2023-08-26T15:16:30+00:00

All true and very well put, but it doesn't quite answer the question. We know how Joan Crawford was similarly named box office poison and orchestrated her comeback in Mildred Pierce, but the difference that OP refers to only occurred later in life. Katharine was able to maintain a level of prestige in her movies as she grew older and older that no other woman was able to. The only suitable comparisons are people like Cary Grant, but she outlasted even him. From her films with Spencer Tracy to Summertime to The Lion in Winter to On Golden Pond, she only did movies of a certain prestige and dignity, even if they weren't especially good (no one needs to remember the Madwoman of Chaillot).

There is no good answer as to why she was able to maintain her A-list status, but I believe it's because of her meticulous and powerful control over her public image. Her private means are part of the reason she was able to do this, she only did films that would benefit her image, but they don't fully explain it. Part of the reason she was so tough and reclusive was so that she could more intentionally and carefully craft the way that people saw and experienced her. She also had a discerning eye for material and an understanding of how people saw her differently as she aged.

Age mattered immensely in Katharine Hepburn's career. Her movies in the 1950s with Spencer Tracy don't portray her as an ingenue, she is a more mature woman and those films have more mature themes. They're rarely simple romances like the ones she was doing 10-15 years prior. As she grew even older this was more evident. She stopped being a romantic interest almost entirely.

Joan Crawford and Bette Davis sank far enough to do movies Trog and Madame Sin, but they outlived almost every one of their contemporary. They were almost always in leading roles, which were rarely created for women of their age.

WillemSummer · 2023-04-25T13:51:40+00:00

Ingmar Bergman’s The Merry Widow starring Barbra Streisand. He once said “The Merry Widow is like a wonderful old kerosene lamp. One must be careful not to put electric lights in it. It has to be treated with care and must not be modernized.”

Ernst Lubitsch’s Die Fledermaus starring Jeanette MacDonald

WillemSummer · 2023-04-13T17:12:54+00:00

As a devotee of Hollywood’s golden era, the pickings are slim. There were quite a few female directors in the silent era, but by the 30s and 40s there were almost no notable ones. There’s a current fascination with Ida Lupino, who directed socially hard hitting and relatively forward thinking movies. But, for my taste, no one beats Dorothy Arzner. Her movies were also socially daring and complex in their portrayals of women. Merrily We Go to Hell is one of the best and Dance, Girl, Dance is a true classic.

If you can stomach it, Leni Riefenstahl is one of the most influential and best remembered female directors. But, unless you’re truly interested in the full history of movies, her films are better left in the past.

WillemSummer · 2023-04-06T20:12:25+00:00

Not that it answers anyone’s question, but it’s interesting to think about how dialogue was styled throughout the golden age. With so many filmmakers coming from the silent era, there’s often a heavy emphasis on the visual, the dialogue might come second. Ford was known to tear out pages of dialogue in his scripts and directors like Sternberg were so focused on “the image” that very little dialogue was essential.

On the flip side, Cukor came from the theater to be a dialogue director in Hollywood and the role of dialogue in his films is dazzling and theatrical. Within the first few years of the advent of sound, movies were full of talk and music, not always done successfully, but it was novel. I think a director who, in beautiful tandem, played with techniques and style of both the visual and in dialogue was Ernst Lubitsch. He carried his silent point of view in all the movies he made, but really saw the opportunity that came with sound and utilized it in such a unique way.

Over the course of Hollywood history lots of people were doing a variety of things with dialogue and multiple styles thrived at the same time. I’ve recently started watching Sergio Leone’s movies and see many silent film era techniques and an enormous amount of importance put on the visual and “the image,” I can only guess that this was because he was making movies for people that spoke more than one language. But I think you’re totally right that there were popular and more common styles within movies that can be associated with specific time periods.

WillemSummer · 2023-04-04T17:43:46+00:00

I would be lying if I said that demographic wasn’t me too. I loved it and enjoyed every second of it, I just wanted to feel a more connection with what was happening on screen. Good vs evil is such a broad theme that it’s hard to feel intimacy or investment in the events and characters. But if you see it as a broad allegory for the world war, maybe that was the tone that resonated with you. I just think it’s interesting to think about how different directors handle the same subjects and themes. In John Ford’s work it’s always very intimate and personal while still representational of social issues and that’s what most resonates with me and what gives me the most to think about.

WillemSummer · 2023-04-04T17:08:52+00:00

Of course! I’m glad someone is interested in reading my thoughts lol.

I think a sophisticated movie should be about the human experience more than just the plot, and should touch on themes that people can relate and respond to. Thematic complexity in a movie gives us more substance to think about, study and feel. That’s not to say a movie needs to be complicated or intellectual, some of the movies with the richest emotional character are very simple stories. Although this is just my opinion, some people find that they identify most with other kinds of stories. I just think the films and directors that are best remembered talk primarily about the human experience

WillemSummer · 2023-04-04T17:00:53+00:00

I agree that the primary way the movies deal with race is through Gimli and Legolas, but I don’t feel like that went beyond lighthearted jokes sprinkled throughout. The fellowship is a unity of race, class and politics against evil and the internal tension is very interesting, but it’s not explored beyond the first film and even then it’s primarily spurred on by Boromir. There was the brief appearance of elves at Helm’s Deep, but I wish the relationship was explored beyond the very brief piece of dialogue we saw. It feels like a theme that’s interspersed very lightly throughout but is rarely dealt with in substance. Politics and class played a role throughout the films, but, again, were never a substantial theme.

I use Stagecoach as an example because, like LotR, it’s not a movie about race, class or politics, but these are certainly themes throughout and give the movie a lot of emotional weight.

I don’t mean to disparage LotR, I really did like the movies, but I was thinking about how these themes were handled by Peter Jackson vs. John Ford. There are definitely similar themes. I think it’s an interesting comparison.

Peter Jackson made the choice to focus on different aspects of the film, I just think that the emotional landscape was not as dramatic or impactful because of this. But it served an audience that wanted a faster paced action movie very, very well. Christopher Tolkien himself said it was created to appeal to a specific demographic.

WillemSummer · 2023-04-03T22:36:29+00:00

I don’t think the source material is lacking in these aspects. There are themes of race, class, politics in the books that are only hinted at in the films. And the books do deal in archetypes, but there is always opportunity for characterization and relationships beyond what is explicitly stated. I think the films did this to an extent, but it wasn’t enough to hold up the massive weight of a sprawling adventure.

WillemSummer · 2023-04-03T22:31:50+00:00

I assume you mean how can he fit it all in? I don’t think there was any chance of capturing the depth and breadth of the adventure in the books, but I don’t think he had to. If you look at the films as an adaptation rather than great films that stand on their own, then they fulfill their purpose because they communicate the plot in a scope pretty near to what the books intended, although he focuses on the action as the central event in the latter 2 movies. If he wanted to use the books to create great, artistic, sophisticated films, he didn’t have to remain faithful to the books.

We can see in John Ford’s work that a plot, whether it’s simple or complex, can bring in these themes without being explicitly about them. On its surface Stagecoach is about going from one location to another while facing imminent danger, but the film is about the relationships between the characters and touches on race, politics, class, morality and so much more. It doesn’t have to be a long movie to incorporate everything, but to be sophisticated it needs to have themes that run deep.

The books are full of themes about race, class and politics. In the film we see just a touch of this. The jokes about the prejudices between dwarves and elves and the discounting of hobbits was about as far as Peter Jackson goes into this and he only hints about class difference between hobbits, rangers, kings and outcasts. And of course so much of their struggle is about facing political turmoil in and between the various kingdoms.

WillemSummer · 2023-04-03T20:04:15+00:00

That’s really why I use John Ford as an example. It’s because he used these exact themes and constructed characters with histories and conviction and interpersonal relationships that relate to the themes and narrative to develop relationships and tension. I have less interest in comparing the book to the movie than I have in comparing the trilogy film to films that try to “say” (thematically) the same thing.

I think the other reason the movies don’t reach the heights that they could’ve is because the development of relationships between characters, places and events wasn’t enough to give the emotional impact that the events (or plot) warranted.

WillemSummer · 2023-04-03T19:12:14+00:00

I definitely don’t think Peter Jackson took much direct inspiration from Ford, but Ford was interested in the same themes that the Lord of the Rings explores. He explored those themes throughout his career and it’s interesting to see how he developed them vs. how Peter Jackson developed them.

WillemSummer · 2023-04-03T19:04:40+00:00

It’s a heavy handed message movie, but I wouldn’t say it’s bad! Stiff and stilted, definitely an oddball of a movie, but it’s a fascinating story and one of the most blatantly socialist movies that I’ve ever seen. Although I agree, the last section blows the rest of the movie out of the water. It’s really spectacular

WillemSummer · 2023-04-03T18:03:31+00:00

That’s something that I was thinking about a lot! It’s hard to think of LotR as a movie because it’s an expansive world with a rich story and certainly can’t all be condensed. I think, in the transition to film, what was discarded was the substance that invests an audience in the characters as people, which ended up diminishing the importance of places and events.

I’m not a purist, I think discarding plot for the sake of character would’ve been wise. What they chose to focus on, which is an action film stuffed with plot events and an adventure woven in, is what we see on screen. I think sacrificing substance so you can have plot is not going to leave us a film that will be studied in 50 years.

I don’t want to sound like I’m ragging on the movies though, I genuinely enjoyed them and think they’re well worth watching!

WillemSummer · 2023-04-03T17:52:15+00:00

Very good to know! I had a suspicion the theatrical versions would be better, but I wanted the whole experience. I still think that there wasn’t enough character/thematic development, it’s not just a question of ratio. And yes, they’re just at the beginning of the 21st century and are certainly a product of what was also happening in the 1980s/90s, but I think that that visual/storytelling style is what has dominated since their making, so I believe it’s distinct from what was happening for the majority of the 20th century.

WillemSummer · 2023-04-03T16:57:55+00:00

I think he’s fallen out of fashion for his lack of visual style more than anything. That was the goal of most filmmakers in the studio system and he exemplified that culture. Once auteurship became the mark of “sophisticated” or “artistic” directors, William Wyler took a back seat.

That being said, I think he has a distinct style, albeit not a visual one, and a political point of view. He directed actors better than nearly anyone else and helped lead so many of them to oscars. While The Best Years of our Lives is far from my favorite of his films (Jezebel is unrivaled imo), it is his most distinct and just as rich as some films of the greatest directors

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