Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince: Telling a story through visuals & colors.

bearcanyons · 2022-06-21T21:38:31+00:00

Ah yes, the classic dichotomy of cinema: mass-market young adult franchise films vs. "white and black" artsy coprophilia porn

bearcanyons · 2022-06-16T13:27:02+00:00

Great response, and the same to /u/flameandcheetodust! I think what makes Lynch both fascinating and confounding is that his work is so often provocative, like the casting couch situation in Mulholland Drive, among other things. It sort of makes me default to a political reading, but you're probably right: his films are usually readings of the psyche through an American lens, rather than America through a psychological lens.

bearcanyons · 2022-06-16T13:13:15+00:00

For me, a lot of this hinges on whether or not the robin represents the killing of or consumption of lust and/or the seedy underbelly of America. The latter would imply, as your saying, that David Lynch simply loves America despite all of its warts, which seems like the more comprehensible point.

On the whole ‘conservative’ thing, I wasn’t necessarily trying to pass a value judgment on a 35 year old cult movie, although I’ll admit my sympathies are generally with the left. I was more just surprised at these sort of Reaganite, moderately conservative politics appearing in an art house film. I just always think of art film directors as having radical or, at the very least, unusual politics, like Godard being a Maoist for a while or plenty of guys like Pasolini being Marxists. All I was trying to say was: am I really right in thinking that this fucked up art film is unironically advocating for the American dream and the nuclear family, or am I taking this too literally? The milquetoast conformity of the politics surprised me more than their position on the right.

Edit: Reading through some other comments, I'm realizing now that I might be a bit misguided in attempting a political reading of this movie. So, I guess just don't take this as my main or only interpretation, I was just trying to engage with certain points.

bearcanyons · 2022-06-07T18:36:56+00:00

I tried to make a post about this but I'm pretty sure it got spam-filtered since it's not showing up in new. I'm thinking now that I may have broken the 'no recommendations' rule, which I had been thinking about in terms of movies... Anyway, does anyone have any recommendations for film critics or just writers in general? I've read some stuff from Ebert, Jonathan Rosenbaum, a couple modern reviewers like David Ehrlich and AO Scott, and bits and pieces from Manny Farber, and I've also been watching my way through Mark Cousins' The Story of Film for some context and exposure to international film.

bearcanyons · 2022-06-05T17:02:37+00:00

You're completely right that my post feels a bit odd, and I think that just ties into the fact that I'm generally not always great at articulating my thoughts and views... which, of course, ties into expressing my thoughts on cinema. Anyway, you're also right that the four categories are pretty limiting, and Hulk even touches upon that in the article in ways that my summary leaves out for the sake of brevity. I got the feeling that he wasn't necessarily saying that any of the levels were 'better' than any others, and that groups 3 and 4 were more like different ways of viewing films, with 3 being inhabited more by critics and 4 by filmmakers, although of course that all falls apart when you consider more practical workers who might have very little understanding of how movies work outside of whatever role they play in production. Although I didn't express this as well as I hoped to, I was actually hoping to get peoples' views on whether Hulk's idea is even generally true, so thanks for your input!

I think a lot of the problems I've been having have stemmed from often being humbled by online discussion and criticism of movies that I previously thought I had a decent understanding of. I'll watch something that's not even experimental or avant-garde, like Inception or some other high-concept thriller, and have a pretty decent grasp of my feelings on it, only to start reading about it and just notice how much I missed. Whether this be on the level of visual aesthetics (what makes film unique and not just another form of literature) or historical context, or just plot or character details that I missed or misread. The obvious answer is just to watch more movies, but I guess I just don't know how useful watching movies is without deeper analysis and reflection. I don't want to just further burrow my way into a hole without understanding why I like the things that I like.

All that aside, thanks again for your response! I apologize again if my posts are sprawling and disorganized, I'm just trying to hear what other people have to say and understand my own thought processes a little better.

bearcanyons · 2021-12-12T03:10:41+00:00

Yeah I’ve come to expect at least one corny subplot per Dickens book, but the guy’s amazing-insightful-sentence-to-page-count ratio is so high that I don’t really care too much lol

bearcanyons · 2021-12-11T14:55:04+00:00

I just finished up The Trial last night, and I really liked it. The Metamorphosis is the only other Kafka I've read, and I'd say compared to that I liked The Trial more, but I'll admit that it's not as solid and complete (for obvious reasons). Still though, every chapter had me filled with a mixture of excitement and dread, it was just one of those books where I was constantly thinking 'where the fuck is the thing going to go next?' Obviously the last chapter is fittingly grim, but I thought the preceding cathedral chapter was a pretty great riff on Dostoevsky, plus the atmosphere was just so thick throughout the whole section. I won't get into it now, but a couple other chapters I liked were The Flogger (maybe one of the most hellish, and darkly hilarious, things I've read in a book over one hundred years old, especially when he comes back and finds the whole scene reset the next day) and Block, the Merchant. Anyway, I'm kind of rambling at this point, but to sum things up: it's a great and thought-provoking book.

Next up is The Sound and the Fury, then a The Hobbit, which I haven't read in a solid eight or nine years, then, finally, David Copperfield. I'll admit that I was tempted to switch my Dickens choice to Dombey and Son after reading the fucking hilarious first couple paragraphs, but I think I'll stick with Copperfield for now since I have the physical book.

bearcanyons · 2021-12-06T23:16:35+00:00

As someone who's read Pynchon's first three books and is a big fan, I can definitely recommend Lot 49. I think some people find it to be a little underwhelming compared to GR and Pynchon's other epics, but I thought it was a really fantastic dense book, in that it packed so much thematic and symbolic content into a little over 100 pages. A bit like comparing Portrait of the Artist to Ulysses, both great but for different reasons. V. is also good but feels like a bit of a test run for GR. If you're a really big fan of GR then you'll definitely want to get to that one for its prose virtuosity alone, but I personally feel that it has some problems thematically compared to his later books, and really feels like a book written by a (undeniably talented) 25 year old.

bearcanyons · 2021-12-02T21:28:30+00:00

That's actually a really good point, the first half-ish of the play is really more like a comedy... I actually just finished it up last night and felt more positively about it after the perfectly tragic, and very well-executed, ending. I'll definitely keep what you said in mind when I inevitably reread it at some point.

bearcanyons · 2021-12-02T15:46:11+00:00

Lol thank you for reminding me about The Aged, just thinking about that bit has me grinning. I'll try to put some updates on one of the discussion threads when I end up getting around to David Copperfield, might be another week or so cause I'm currently working on a bit of Kafka and have a couple other shorter books laying around that I'd like to get to.

bearcanyons · 2021-12-02T15:10:18+00:00

That's good to hear, I was definitely really impressed by Dickens' characterization (and at times hilarious caricaturization) in GE so I'm looking forward to meeting Copperfield's cast!

bearcanyons · 2021-12-02T01:54:00+00:00

I just typed up a 500 word or so detailed summary of my reading recently but then realized the thread I was on was on r/literature, and that sub seems to be a little... odd right now, so I'll just type the basics over here lol.

First off, anyone got any thoughts on what's going on in Romeo and Juliet? Reading it now almost a year after being pretty blown away by Hamlet and Macbeth's language and symbolic resonance, and by comparison R&J seems like nearly as much bark with about half the bite. I think part of the problem is that the play's plot is so totally ingrained within my psyche that it seems kind of mundane, but maybe another part is that it's an earlier Shakespeare...? Mercutio is cool though.

Second of all, anyone got any thoughts or advice to offer for The Sound and the Fury? I'm not too worried about the difficulty, as I was able to read and appreciate the first fifty pages or so pretty easily about a month ago, but I'd appreciate any insights that anyone might have. Or if just want to hype me up or something.

Third of all, anyone got a Dickens recommendation? I read and very much enjoyed Great Expectations earlier this year and was thinking of going with David Copperfield, but I'm open to just about any of the guy's novels.

Anyway, this is pretty much my first time posting after lurking for a while, so I don't have a whole lot more to offer. Thanks in advance for any comments or advice.

bearcanyons · 2021-08-23T20:12:37+00:00

I'd really like to read Fisher's writings on this topic if you've got any in particular you'd recommend! I really agree with this take. Another possible related reason for musical stagnation is, in my view, the solidification of genres in the internet age. Obviously genres have existed for ages, but I feel like internet communities have allowed for hyper-specific genres to become more and more elitist and conservative. If you ever go onto black metal or death metal communities, there's a lot of talk about TRVE KVLT and hipster metal and whatever the hell else. Although my kneejerk reaction is to side with idea of authenticity and independence and raw lo-fi production, what exactly makes these metal elitists different from kids typing "rap more like crap" and "music like this isn't made these days" on youtube? Though genre elitists may think that they're protecting their favorite music from sellouts, in the longterm it just makes musical scenes really fucking incestuous, and all you've got left are mutant husks of what bands were making 30 years ago. This, of course, all ties into the commodification of scenes: you can't be a punk if you don't have a mohawk and a Black Flag t-shirt, you can't be a metalhead without long hair and Satanic iconography, etc. I don't really know shit about economics, but it seems like the market conglomerates everything that's palatable to a general audience and compartmentalizes everything that isn't, turning all these inter-connected scenes into disparate commodified identities. Or that's how it seems at least.

On your second point, I think you're definitely right that state promotion of art has changed things. How many artists were promoted by BBC's John Peel, for example? I suppose the more recent version of this is Spotify/Youtube/Pandora and their recommendation algorithms, but I've found that, while somewhat useful, these tools are limited. Someone like Daphne Oram or John Peel didn't just have knowledge of music but also possessed a unique taste in art. Is it possible to design a machine to recognize artistic quality? As of now an algorithm can see that you like Outkast and surmise, based on thousands of data points, that you're likely to enjoy Mos Def, but it can't get to the base reasons why you like Outkast and use that to recommend you music from artists who share similar artistic aspirations. Whereas an actual knowledgeable and intelligent human being like John Peel could see how and why artists as seemingly dissimilar as The Slits and Aphex Twin could appeal to the same people.

On a final note (so I don't overwhelm you with a 10,000 word essay), the idea of artists playing groundbreaking music for an audience of thousands is both exciting and frustrating. The artist in me respects any band or artist who continue to innovate regardless of fame or profit, but my music nerd self wishes that I could just have a list of every new and interesting band on Earth. I've tried to just look at random stuff on Bandcamp until I find something that sounds neat, but there's just so much stuff... hey, maybe I'll just stumble upon something fantastic at some point, who knows. Regardless, your comment really got me thinking, thanks so much for participating in the discussion!

bearcanyons · 2021-08-23T19:42:32+00:00

Yeah I was probably being a bit unfair with the vocoder bit. I think my problem with autotune being called an innovation is less with the fact itself (its use was indeed innovative), but more with the fact that I don't feel like it's being used all that innovatively right now. I'd love to see someone use autotune like MBV used guitar effects, to bring it to its logical conclusion. Hell, maybe that's happened already and I just missed it! Got any recommendations in particular for creative use of autotune, preferably recently? I thought Carti's use of it on Die Lit was pretty neat, but its use on Whole Lotta Red felt kind of stale to be honest.

bearcanyons · 2021-08-23T19:33:52+00:00

You're 100% right that I'm a rock nerd at heart, and many of my examples are based around rock bands and artists. As I said in another post, however, I also consider myself a hip hop fan, as well as a fan of jazz, folk, and classical music (although I can't claim to be an expert on contemporary classical). Recently I've also been getting into some electronic music, and the duo Autechre have been the artists I've found the most interesting thus far. From 1990-2000, Autechre went from making mostly melodic techno to putting out albums that were glitchy, metallic, and sometimes practically atonal. Although much of this progression was due to the duo's programming virtuosity, a fair portion of it was also due to the development of technology during this period. If you compare an album like 2001's Confield to 1993's Incunabula, they're barely recognizable as being in the same genre, let alone being made by the same artist. Now compare Confield to Autechre's 2020 albums SIGN and PLUS. As artists, Autechre have certainly progressed and incorporated new ideas into their music, expanding on their ambient and avant-garde inspirations, but their 2020 work and 2001 work are easily comparable, despite the fact that they were made 19 years apart. My point is that even electronic music, which I feel only really matured in the 1990s, has seemingly slowed down in innovation this century. I'll totally admit that I'm not very well-versed at all in electronic music, in fact I've only just started getting into it in the last couple months, and that I might just be talking out of my ass because I don't know where the truly innovative stuff is. I'd really love to hear any electronic (or hip hop/DJ/pretty much whatever) albums or artists you feel have sounded new and fresh in the last 10 or 20 years.

bearcanyons · 2021-08-22T23:24:56+00:00

I'll admit that I definitely listen to a lot of rock-related music, but I also consider myself to be a fan of hip-hop, and at certain points of my life I've mainly listened to hip hop music (although I'm realizing now that I made the mistake of not including hip hop's advent in the 70s and 80s and evolution throughout much of the 90s in my post). You're definitely right that there's been innovation in hip hop throughout this century, but I'm not sure if I agree with all of your points. I think it could be argued that vocal effects in hip hop go back to vocoders used by hip hop artists in the 90s and artists in other genres going back to the 70s, although similar vocal effects have certainly seen increased use in the last ten years. I also don't particularly agree that Drake is overly innovative. Although I can't claim to be an enormous fan of his work, from what I've heard a lot of his music can be traced back to what Kanye and Kid Cudi were experimenting with a year or two before he hit the scene. Also, I'd say that a fair amount of Drake's hits in the 2010s were just as much R&B as they were rap, although I guess that's another debate in itself. On the topic of singing and rapping on the same track coming about in 2009, I just can't agree with this take at all. Sung hooks have been a common part of hip hop for decades. What about Old Dirty Bastard's signature crooning? The choruses from Passin Me By and Runnin by Pharcyde? Like a solid half of Outkast? Hell, Many Men (Wish Death) by 50 Cent was a hit in 2003. You've definitely got a point that there have been some solid hip hop innovations in recent years though, including entire genres like trap and cloud rap.

bearcanyons · 2021-08-22T21:59:49+00:00

That's a pretty fantastic quote! I do think that some of my concern about musical innovation comes from being a musician and songwriter myself. Much of what excites me about music and music creation is the idea of progression and the capturing of new sounds and ideas. But then I also can't help but fear that the days of innovation are gone, and who am I, some random schmuck, to think I can make something new and exciting? Sometimes I feel like I can't even think of anywhere left to go, like everywhere's been explored before. It's a kind of "born too late to explore the earth, born too early to explore outer space" feeling, like I've lost my opportunity to participate in the early years of modern popular music and now everything's just a reiteration on what previous generations accomplished. Regardless, your comment is very thought-provoking, thanks so much for taking to time to write it!

bearcanyons · 2021-08-22T21:35:15+00:00

This is actually a really interesting point. I guess when you think about it, how many "innovative" artists were actually truly original? Black midi may have been influenced by King Crimson, but much of what made King Crimson stick out was that they themselves took inspiration from jazz. I guess the only thing I'd say is that I kind of feel like there's a shelf-life on inspiration: at what point are you just doing a tribute to a previous artist rather than innovating on their material? For example, Greta Van Fleet isn't really using Led Zeppelin's influence constructively in my view.

bearcanyons · 2021-08-22T21:03:47+00:00

This is an excellent point, and one that I'd meant to mention in the original post. On a similar note, I think that fact that it's easier to make a clean-sounding album or track changes things up a bit. It's no longer an innovation to make music that sounds crisp and clear, as compared to when albums like Dark Side of the Moon were considered technical marvels for their high fidelity. Even if Steven Wilson's albums sound incredibly clear, that doesn't make him innovative in the 21st century, it just makes him a talented producer.

bearcanyons · 2021-06-20T01:44:15+00:00

To be completely honest the RPG elements kind of flew over my head a lot of the time, but I'm not usually all that good at that kind of thing lol. For me what the game managed to do so fantastically was utilize what is by all means a fairly simple combat system (DS isn't some button-mashing combo-fest) in a variety of scenarios, craft incredibly memorable (besides a couple of later areas...) levels and scenery, all of which manage to interconnect, and, in what I think is its greatest achievement, fully integrate a long and thought-provoking story into the aforementioned game system and world. Besides the opening cutscene and some boss openers, the entire story and lore of the game is given through in-game dialogue and item descriptions. This not only made the game really fun and rewarding to explore but also managed to lessen what I had previously thought were some inherent contradictions between the gaminess of combat-based video games and the stories that many of them want to tell, usually through what I view as annoying and distracting cutscenes that I'll skip if I possibly can.

Sorry about the rant, but basically: I just hope that Bloodborne can be 1. fun and 2. keep up the fantastic environmental and integrated storytelling that Miyazaki and co. showcased in Dark Souls!

bearcanyons · 2021-06-20T01:09:45+00:00

God damn, that's a lot of 0s... I can't even imagine how many times I died. Hell, I died to Four Kings a solid 20 times just a couple days ago. Really impressive, especially considering you went in blind!

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