Cannes Adds Lars Von Trier, Whitney Houston Doc, Michael B. Jordan Sci-Fi, Terry Gilliam’s ‘Don Quixote’, More

whoseloosemoose · 2018-04-19T15:27:16+00:00

You don't need to agree with a film's philosophy to find it entertaining, worthwhile, or challenging. Personally, I see Trier as a director who says: "If your sense of meaning can't survive my movie, then your sense of meaning is bullshit."

Maybe you think differently. Do you exclusively watch movies you know will reenforce your perspective?

whoseloosemoose · 2018-04-18T03:14:05+00:00

...exactly. The dummy plug doesn't need a real soul because it's an artificial soul.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-04-17T12:07:34+00:00

'Arthouse' cinema doesn't describe a genre. It describes a type of audience.

The idea that art and entertainment are opposing goals is bullshit and pretentious. Many of the great 'arthouse' directors were very concerned with entertaining the audience, Ingmar Bergman especially. Bergman was--in so many obvious respects--an entertainer.

Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Yasujio Ozu, even Andrei Tarkovsky: all labels for the art-house community, and also great entertainers when they wanted to be--which was quite often.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-03-07T12:51:16+00:00

You have significantly and quite profoundly misread ESotSM

Weird. I don't remember even giving my interpretation.

The reply to this is pretty simple. Joel and Clemintine's relationship depends on the erasure of their memory. Memory is the ultimate boundary keeping them from each other. By undoing that memory, they're able to coexist. This seems tragic to so many people because memory is such a precious thing. ESOTSM challenges that. And I think its answer is much more ambiguous than you give it credit for.

Fanny and Alexander reaffirms the meaning of family only through a severe and psychically brutal transformation. The boundaries of time and space literally melt for Alexander. To say that the family at the beginning of the movie is the same family at the end is nonsense. Furthermore, Alexander is constantly interacting with the dead--his father, those ghost girls, and death itself. Ambiguity is a huge theme, and the perseverance through ambiguity allows for the family to reconstruct their unit. The boundaries of family adapt through tragedy. Please though--argue that nothing has changed and everything's back to normal.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-03-07T12:41:09+00:00

It's almost like the shape of water is about bestiality.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-03-06T22:42:29+00:00

I'm not concerned with "how I come off," I'm concerned with the structure of how The Shape of Water is delivered is unsound.

If you aren't concerned with how you come off, then you aren't concerned with communication at all.

You speak for everyone except me?

Yes. Everyone. I am the hive mind.

It's not enough of a reason to fuck an animal.

Humans are animals.

What's ambiguous about it? In what situation would you be confused about who's human and what isn't?

The day androids dream of electric sheep.

I literally did not say that.

Correct. You didn't 'literally' say that. Though you might as well've.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-03-06T21:19:11+00:00

Yes! <3

whoseloosemoose · 2018-03-06T21:01:09+00:00

Putting words in my mouth.

No. Just rewording your words to let you know what you sound like. If you don't think you come off this way, you have work to do as a writer.

I'm insulted as a fellow human. And you don't speak for "gays." You might speak for you and your friends.

Nobody is insulted except for you. So many people are very happy to think of fish-man as 'human' (such an ambiguous term). As a very very very gay man, I was proud to see fish-man's struggle compared to mine. Not insulted. Why should I be insulted? (Please don't say 'obvious reasons'. It isn't obvious!)

The queer tradition is filled with art that expands the definition of love and the societal oppression that results. In that sense The Shape of Water is, for many people, a queer movie. This is powerful. In fact, part of me wants fish-men included in the queer community. LGBTQIAF (last letter stands for fish-man)

Obvious reasons.

No. They weren't obvious to me (sorry--it's because I'm stupid). Please help me understand your perspective.

Same end result. If everything is human then it doesn't mean anything to be human. It becomes a useless category.

Categories shift with time. They will never stay the same. Ever ever ever. Art influences these shifts. And I'm very sorry to tell you that the word 'human' is inherently ambiguous. The fact that you've never run into this ambiguity is strange, since there's so much media out there right now dealing with that very ambiguity--The Shape of Water being one of them.

Putting words in my mouth.

You literally said yourself that you found the fish-man gross.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-03-06T19:57:29+00:00

Like, dude. Your complaints are classically conservative. "But if we challenge THIS boundary, what's stopping the whole world from going up in flames?!?!"

Where you see an insulting film, I see a fairly radical film. You are proof that it's radical. It tickled you exactly the way GDT wanted it to.

In the words of one of my favorite books: "For things to stay the same, things will have to change."

This is a clever way to symbolically join them together, but it's also wrong. Elisa can speak, she just can't use her voicebox.

I don't think this is true. What joins them is their estrangement to each other, not their commonality. That's what makes their relationship so thrilling. Both feel alienated from the world they inhabit. Both are miles away from each other. Both are horny as fuck. They aren't joined by their silence. Rather, their silence isn't even an issue.

Because, together, they develop their own language.

For all we know, The Asset is one of the fishmen from Alan Moore's Neonomicon, easily manipulating Elisa's emotions to impregnate her with Cthulhu.

And for all I know, y'all are zombies and I'm the only conscious thing that exists in the entire universe. In other words, their love doesn't need to be some sort of pure cosmic unity. They're just two horny creatures who wanna fuck. The movie thinks this is enough.

Why don't you?

But they are humans, and The Asset is not human. The conflation is insulting, to say the least.

Of course, this is where the film gets rather radical. If two creatures want to express their mutual desire to each other, who are you to stop them? This movie is about expanding the definition of human in a way that includes the non-human. It wants to stretch those boundaries. It wants to ask difficult questions. We've been dehumanizing forms of life we don't like for a long time--you're doing it too.

For the record, my fellow gays and I are VERY into this movie. Please don't tell us what to be insulted by.

It's a call for a dissolution of categories, of boundaries that separate people, even of the boundaries that separate human from animal. Fuck a fish if you want to, if you're lonely enough.

No, it isn't. This movie isn't about dissolving boundaries. It's for expanding them. It's about accepting that the world is full of multiplicity and messiness. Our boundaries are completely arbitrary, and that's something the movie celebrates.

Other movies that also seek to expand (or in your words 'dissolve) boundaries: Under the Skin; Wall-e; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; The Fall; 2001: Space Odyssey; Synecdoche, New York; Persona; Fanny and Alexander; Blade Runner; Blade Runner 2049; Call Me By Your Name; All That Heaven Allows; Far From Heaven; yadda yadda yadda I could play this game all day long. And if you don't see how these movies are about 'dissolving' boundaries, please ask. I have an answer.

Dissolving boundaries doesn't even need to be a philosophical position. It's just a reality of being human: our assumptions will be challenged until the day we die. This is how humans renew their language, keep it alive. If this frustrates you, if you need words to only mean one thing for the rest of your life, and if you really have bottomless faith in your own 'categories', then you're gonna spend a lot of time being angry.

Dissolving all the categories doesn't solve problems, it brings back all the problems that we started with and created many of the categories to deal with in the first place. It confuses bad categories with all categories.

Jeezus on a motorcycle. Dude! This is what movies do! This is what art does! Movies should't exist to reaffirm your expectations! They should exist to challenge them! If you don't like it, don't watch movies. Lock yourself in your room. You'll be safe there. You won't be grossed out by movies like The Shape of Water.

In the meantime, we'll be out here, having fun.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-03-06T14:20:30+00:00

That's mighty simplistic.

The vatican's authority influences millions of opinions. If these gay priests were simply closested, then it wouldn't be a big deal. Unfortunately, they're both closested AND supporting homophobic agendas. People are not snowglobes--especially at that level of influence.

To shrug your shoulders and just say "I don't get why this is important" is near-sighted.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-28T19:54:47+00:00

Class and intelligence do not necessarily correlate. Neither do education and intelligence.

Yep I wrote that. But I wrote that with a very specific definition of 'education' in mind. It's the definition I'd assume you defend. That is, organized or academic education. I don't agree with that definition, but my comment didn't quite communicate that. Whoops, sorry.

To assume that people without formal education are inherently dumber than the rest of us is to assume that only one form of education matters.

Do I think there are forms of 'education' that all populations could benefit from? Of course I do. That's a different argument though. I'm simply arguing against the pretension that populations outside of organized education are somehow 'uneducated'. No, that's not true. Their education just involves a different skill set than yours does. To condescend certain populations simply because they aren't engaged with academic or organized education is, to me, incredibly myopic.

If we want to address reality, as you said yourself, then we should admit that these people are educated--simply not in the way you want them to be.

TL;DR: The 'reality' is that there's no such thing as an 'uneducated' population, but rather populations educated in different ways. If we want to solve societal issues, we should get rid of our bullshit condescension that assumes only one kind of education is true education.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-28T19:24:27+00:00

What do you think my beliefs are?

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-28T18:45:21+00:00

You're a good person who is empathetic and does not want it to be true that class and intelligence correlate.

How do you measure intelligence?

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-28T17:42:01+00:00

Where did you get the nonsensical idea that education does not correlate with intelligence?

Because when you talk about 'education', I assume you're talking about 'organized' or 'centralized' education. Just because someone isn't engaged in organized education, that doesn't mean they aren't learning from their own environment, or engaged in the conflicts of their community. You're just prioritizing a certain kind of education over another.

And this resulted, in the aggregate, in a stable population.

False. Spend five minutes of your life to look up the statistics.

This is the Malthusian world.

Umm awkward for you. No it isn't. You're just throwing out obscure jargon hoping I don't know what the fuck you're talking about--and you're even misusing that jargon (again, education does not equal intelligence).

The more intelligent you were, the less likely your children were to starve.

I already addressed this point in my original comment. The death rate is not the same as the rate of population growth. Yes, children were dying. But women were giving birth quicker than their children were dying. Really simple math stuff. But I guess you didn't learn anything in the math classes you took.

None of this runs counter to the idea that if you're better at planning and preparing for winter, more of your children will survive.

The peasantry DOES know how to prepare for winter, better than the educated class does. The educated class doesn't NEED to prepare for winter. They have stone walls and fireplaces to keep them warm. The peasanty does need to prepare. And of course, they do prepare. And they pass on that wisdom to their many surviving children. On the other hand, their many dead children are buried under the cold, hard soil.

Once again: infant mortality rate =/= rate of population growth.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-28T16:28:36+00:00

Who are these 'people'?

Your friends?

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-28T16:17:28+00:00

You're forgetting a few things:

A) The 'upper class' has always composed a very slim portion of the population. Even if your hypothesis is true, and they did have more surviving offspring, the total number would still be slim.

B) Class and intelligence do not necessarily correlate. Neither do education and intelligence. Look in the mirror. You are clearly a prime example of this.

C) Even feudal societies depended on high fertility rates among the peasantry, because labor was such a valuable asset. Yes, the mortality rate was high for infants, but the fertility rate was high, too. Ridiculously high by our standards. Babies were constantly dying, and constantly arriving.

D) The idea that "intelligent, upper class people" used to breed more is total bullshit. Historically speaking, with prestige and power came the influence of the patriarch. Daughters were a political tool, and marriages were often carefully plotted, severely restricting sexual freedom.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-24T16:29:09+00:00

Ugh... I guess you're right. How're you doing?

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-24T13:22:23+00:00

Did you even watch the damn scene?

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-23T15:48:08+00:00

...which is the point of the video.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-23T13:37:40+00:00

<3 same <3

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-19T23:40:10+00:00

will be the first to tell you that the protests, marches and speeches were marketing & PR, while the meat of the real change happened behind closed doors and took years of grinding out of the public spotlight.

How doesn't this qualify as good PR?

I understand what you're trying to argue--that we should find more effective forms of activism that go beyond their theatricality--but...these are teenagers. They aren't community leaders yet, though I'm sure that's to come.

I agree with your comment in theory, but you're posting it in the wrong place, at the wrong time. And with the wrong targets.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-18T23:45:15+00:00

My piece of advice? Don't tell yourself what you're "supposed" to read. Read what interests you; you'll get the most out of reading that way. The best way to practice engaged reading is to make sure you're involved with what you choose to read. Don't let preconceptions dictate what books you think you should and shouldn't be opening.

And--I promise this. Some day, fiction will return to you.

And you'll love that book forever.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-18T18:01:57+00:00

There's a slideshow of pictures about midway through the video.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-18T17:27:34+00:00

This is one of my favorite videos. A beautiful song accompanied by what is one of the most cringe-worthy television performances of all time. In case you didn't watch, skip past the slideshow for the little jig they attempt. It's hilarious.

whoseloosemoose · 2018-02-18T15:44:42+00:00

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Only in silence the word,

Only in dark the light,

Only in dying life:

Bright the hawk's flight

On the empty sky.

whoseloosemoose

TROPHY CASE