Petrol posted:i downloaded the curtis thing and i will watch it soon i guess. his last one had a lot of great footage but the narrative was all over the place. seems like the new one is going to stick with pushing the line, also present in his last effort, that the failures of late capitalism is directly analogous to the failures of late soviet communism. this time he's taking the idea of 'hypernormalisation' and running with it. i haven't read alexei yurchak's "everything was forever, until it was no more" which is where the idea comes from i think, but it kind of looks interesting as an indictment of an empty formalism associated specifically with post-stalin soviet culture, and even though it's not written from a communist perspective it still seems like it could give insights into how it felt when things went wrong there. curtis's stuff usually glides over the nuances so i expect him to make a fairly blunt kind of observation like 'see how things went wrong for the soviets when their culture disallowed criticism of the economy? well it's happening here too, right now!!' i thought making western follies seem shockingly bad by comparing them to the soviets hasn't been cool since the 80s, oh well
that book is super badass btw.
Petrol posted:it's also wrong because he doesn't look at whether any particular idea had merit or was practised properly during the period of stagnation and failure. the failures are just treated as natural inevitabilities. it's very similar to the zizekian approach in this respect - the old ways clearly failed, we need something new, no i won't suggest anything in particular, just trust me that the old ideas are all shit,
also any new idea that is tried is inevitably too mechanistic or materialist and can't cope with how humans actually live
but he's a good editor and the critique of neoliberalism and neoconservatism is entertaining as far as it goes
chickeon posted:im curious as to the specifics of peoples' problems with "curtis's ideas" aside from not being marxist and consistently erasing class and his dumb crap w/r/t the USSR
It's none too specific but I agree with the general criticism aerdil made:
aerdil posted:his ideology is a highly postmodern left-liberal ideology that basically amounts to "humans keep trying to control society and the misguided certainty that a specific ideology or sociological idea will fix it is their downfall" which okay but it doesn't really amount to much especially in the way of proposed solutions, it's a critique without a praxis
Curtis has targeted techno-fetishism, neoliberal economics, "totalitarianism" etc. but his criticisms usually boil down to "in hindsight, it was hubris". Perhaps he should make a documentary about how it came to be that left liberals are content to consume smug polemics as their only form of political activity?
I'm guilty of watching his docs uncritically: when the credits roll I'm all like 'makes u think' and 'wow that's effed up' without actually thinking about praxis.
To his credit, the medium and methods he uses are not well suited to nuanced historical analyses with carefully dissected primary sources. Curtis is a good editor, narrator and storyteller but his films are pitched a lot lower than Althusser. Still, they are on the high-brow side of TV/movies. Even if there was a director out there faithfully adapting anti-imperialist history books for the screen, that dierector would never make it onto the BBC due to sheer boringness.
e: i heard jools made this vid confirm/deny?
littlegreenpills posted:mean but funny.
e: i heard jools made this vid confirm/deny?
deny. it's outside, in sunshine
ilmdge posted:damn
second ep improved
2
6
4
5
3
1
3 would edge out 5 if the twist was better signposted, I found the reveal had no impact because it was unclear. Also i dont think its a coincidence that the scripts for 3 and 1 werent credited solely to Brooker. Anyway decent series, thought it was going to suck hard after that first ep but no, worthwhile, would pirate again
gyrofry posted:Adam Curtis is a poor man's Allan Francovich but hell, you go to war with the army you have
allan frankovich is extremely my shit. gladio watching party in 3 2 1
also whoever can find a better copy of this in a local library or something gets a prize
basiclo the spanish version of orange is the new black
Apparently they made a movie about a rHizzonE poster having kids.
thirdplace posted:did you watch the movie they made for that? no one did but i thought it was real good
So I got around to watching The Congress the other night. It was good and I enjoyed myself, although I do get what many critics said about how the actress' personal story didn't entirely mesh with the pharmaceutical regime plot, the movie often felt busy trying to divide attention between each and not doing either complete justice. Which is a shame because I think with a little better planning it could have worked.
Having read the book I filled in many of the blanks in the second half of the movie because I knew in advance what they were getting at, but for audiences unfamiliar with the source material I think it probably hopped skipped and jumped through the plot points too quickly and without giving each their due attention.
In the end this speed-read and the split attention altered the meaning of the text: Lem's Futurological Congress explicitly spells out the horror the people of the future live in and the ruthless cruelty of the regime that controls them, dragging around ravaged broken bodies and eating rotten slop. In both the book and movie versions, protagonist makes the decision to wake up from the illusion in a restaurant, and in the movie I was confused at why they made the decision not to show the truth of the hallucinatory fancy lobster dinner she was eating. Similarly, the neglect of people's bodies and health is skimmed over: they are shown as "generically impoverished" with dirty faces and grimy bulky clothes, but not suffering from obvious ailments and physical distress. This is where The Congress takes the "neutral" track of shying away from a direct condemnation of our ruling elites and the natural conclusions of their logic, and instead resorts to a cowardly ambiguous "Is this way better? Who knows!?!?!?"
The animation was gorgeous and fun, and in this way I think really captured the spirit of the novel even if it swerved away from the message at the last minute.
tpaine posted:i'm watching an anal sis of the 1982 film The Thing
ME: okay, get this, brace yourself, are you sitting down?, steel yourself, Winter is coming: what if sometimes the Things don't know they're things like in the rhetorical question asked by the one character in the movie to the other character, in the movie.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR: let's talk weekly column.
tpaine posted:
0.5 speed = yes