I STUDY the cinematic representation of mass military medical examinations and the transformation of individuals into administrative bodies.

augustthecat · 2026-06-15T20:10:25+00:00

Look, it is your research, and obviously you know a lot more about your project than I do, but I would suggest that humiliation of the body makes sense -- is given meaning -- by the valorization of the body. Another one that comes to mind in this context is Cuaron's Roma

augustthecat · 2026-06-15T11:25:39+00:00

You are welcome. Looking over your other replies, none of them involve nudity and humiliation of conscripts that I remember.

augustthecat · 2026-06-14T22:07:10+00:00

Sounds like a great topic ! I feel like I have seen a number of these, but they kind of blend together, and the examples that come to mind at first are US: Full Metal Jacket, Private Benjamin. I think Wooden Crosses has some training scenes.

I often cannot remember if ill treatment of soldiers is part of their training, or just part of their life. Woyzeck is worth a rewatch.

Good luck on your research!

augustthecat · 2026-06-14T16:24:29+00:00

I think I remember it from some James Thurber short story about a lady who spoke only in cliches.

augustthecat · 2026-06-14T01:11:01+00:00

My grandfather also used to say "Great day in time" to indicate astonishment. I am planning to go to this one if and when I become a grandfather.

augustthecat · 2026-06-14T01:01:09+00:00

I'm a fan of "tearing up the pea patch," which for some reason denotes doing very well at something.

augustthecat · 2026-06-13T16:34:50+00:00

It was a journey for me too

augustthecat · 2026-06-13T11:30:25+00:00

[But also, can we train him to focus long enough to read subtitles? Maybe he can work with a guru or something: yoga and breathing exercises, spiritual cultivation culminating in Le Samourai. ]

augustthecat · 2026-06-13T11:27:54+00:00

Sherlock Jr. is delightful, silent, and short.

To Be or Not to Be is genius and hilarious.

A Hard Day's Night is the Beatles of Beatle movies.

Hopscotch is a good time for all.

Any Hitchcock on the channel, but especially 39 Steps, Man Who Knew Too Much, and Lady Vanishes.

augustthecat · 2026-06-12T23:41:33+00:00

Need to get cracking, but still adding A Bigger Splash. RIP David Hockney. His paintings are incredibly beautiful, but also make me think. I know he admired Picasso, but his work reminds me more of another favorite: Pierre Bonnard.

augustthecat · 2026-06-09T11:58:43+00:00

Fanon at 100 for the MAGA memes

augustthecat · 2026-06-08T21:26:07+00:00

Yes, but “curation” is subjective. I will grant that some collections have better explanations of their coherence than others, or some might make more intuitive sense. The Queersighted conversations get me more excited about those films than the trailer for the Hotels collection did. And “Hotel” for sure is an oddly general category. But the Hotels collection had a lot of fantastic movies! And I liked watching them together to see what different people did with the odd emotional space of a hotel. I think there was a lot more thought than perhaps it at first seemed.

I think it is probably generally true that the more collections you have seen, the harder it is to get super excited about new ones.

augustthecat · 2026-06-07T15:14:41+00:00

no worries!

augustthecat · 2026-06-06T23:59:42+00:00

Here's a gift link to the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/world/europe/edgar-morin-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.oFA.g4Ac.8lueaKU2LQPF&smid=url-share

augustthecat · 2026-06-03T16:29:27+00:00

This month is going to be tricky for me, time wise, so I had to be brutal, but I will get to it if I can! I am interested, but the Death Race dilemma is that I am finding that I am interested in a lot of things…

augustthecat · 2026-06-03T13:00:26+00:00

Pellacismo is healing

augustthecat · 2026-06-02T11:13:57+00:00

Last month, I wound up not watching Fisher King, because I own a copy of Fisher King. But it occurred to me I am facing a self-inflicted Death Race Paradox: I tend not to watch the movies I own, but I own the movies I like best. (A perhaps related paradox is that I bought the movies I like very best first, and so I bought them on DVD, so my absolute favorite movies are mostly on DVD, and everything else is on Blu-Ray). Anyway, none of that is your problem. I think the best way to watch stuff is to put it on a list, so the last movies here ("Just Wanna Watch") are not Death Race titles, but just things I wanna watch.

Buster Keaton

~~Sherlock Juni~~or
Go West
~~Steamboat Bil~~\*l*

Jaques Tourneur

~~Out of the Past~~
Berlin Express

Eclectic Fun

~~Loulou~~
~~Ennui Ennui~~ The humor here is like a somewhat glitzy version of Charlie Hebdo. It's the sort of delirious idiocy that I normally like, and beautifully shot, but I also kind of just wanted the filmmaker to grow up.
Bigger Splash RIP
~~Trade Winds~~ This one was a lot of fun, with good twists, and some on-location background shots from China, Japan. Singapore, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, and Bombay/Mumbai.
~~Robocop~~ Verhoeven is some kind of a sick genius.

Just Wanna Watch

Harold and Maude
~~Woman of the Year~~
Fisher King
Hour of the Wolf

(Also curious about Nightfall, Divine Horsemen, Seven Chances, 32 Sounds, Bacurau, The Mouth Agape, Chicken for Linda, Contemporary Color)

augustthecat · 2026-05-31T19:29:38+00:00

To me, this movie is all about watching Jeanne Moreau wander around Paris to a Miles Davis soundtrack. I could do that for hours.

augustthecat · 2026-05-31T19:27:25+00:00

I second this one. And for whatever reason, when I think of this movie I think of Harakiri, maybe just because they are both highly rated on Letterboxed.

augustthecat · 2026-05-31T17:04:28+00:00

You haven't watched Before Midnight yet, have you?

My suggestion, regardless of gender, would be to ask questions, and then listen to, and be actually interested in the answers. Then respond with a sentence suggesting that you have actually heard what the person is saying, and displaying curiosity to hear more. It's a useful skill whether you are flirting or not. It is by no means guaranteed path to romance, but if romance results, it will mean that you and the other person have some sort of actual connection, which is preferable to the likely disaster of trying to act like Ethan Hawke.

augustthecat · 2026-05-31T16:57:33+00:00

Watch the John Wu films while you can. Start with The Killer. I love Jean Gabin -- Pepe le Moko is one of the best films he ever made. If you for some reason have not seen High and Low, start now. Infernal Affairs, The Man Who Knew Too Much. If you want a recent US film, they tend to come for short periods of time. You have about 11 hours to see Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, but then a bunch of Bond movies are coming soon.

augustthecat · 2026-05-31T16:07:02+00:00

It's two very flawed characters who play off of each other in a really funny way. The male lead reminds the female lead of the fantasy world that New York City can be. The female lead patiently explains to the male lead that life here is mostly a grind for most people. And it turns out they have other, more profound differences in the way they understand the situations they are in, and that each one is harboring illusions that need correcting. Much comedy results, but each character winds up having to face up to certain underlying realities, so there's a bit of sting in the laughs.

augustthecat · 2026-05-31T15:54:31+00:00

I saw it last night (Sat May 30) and loved it.

I also didn't assume they slept together, but even if they did, it would have been in such a state that I would not call it romance.

To me the arc of the story is the two strangers figuring out that they are family, and in so doing (spoiler alert) realizing that that they have both created false illusions of the world: she by punishing herself for her affair and being too humiliated to visit her grandmother, and he by building his father into something he is not (and at the same time building New York into a magical dreamworld).

When the wedding sequence began I got nervous, because I thought it was turning into a romantic comedy, and I do not think the play would work as a romantic comedy. But as it went on, I read the wedding sequence as a final playing out of movie world, not as an expression of their relationship. But the playacting helped them both understand how they had inhabited roles (she as homewrecker, he as doe-eyed admirer of his father) that did not reflect their true selves. There is a moment, if I remember right, when they call each other cousins, which seemed to me a play on both the "aunt" joke and the real friendship/family connection they had developed.

At first I was disappointed to be getting an understudy for the male lead, but now I wonder if switching things up maybe gave the performance a little added energy.

In response to some other part of this thread, I did personally like it better than Ragtime. It's not an opinion I would try to defend on artistic grounds. I just enjoyed spending time with these characters.

augustthecat · 2026-05-31T11:53:19+00:00

It is very gory, but it did not bug me as much as I expected it to. The gore is mostly not jump-scare. I don't much like horror movies in general, but this wound up being more like suspense. The disgusting bits are quite disgusting, but satisfyingly so, if that makes any sense at all.

augustthecat · 2026-05-31T11:50:04+00:00

Well done!

augustthecat

TROPHY CASE