cars posted:the tension of these "friends" glistening thews foreshadows the intra-imperialist conflict to come, a lie more honest than truth itself.
cars stop i can only get so hrnotyy ;_;
cars posted:yes, also Exorcist III is good even with the stupid tacked-on exorcist parts they forced Blatty to add, Fangoria nerds only ever remember the scene with the nurse's station but almost every other scene in that movie is as good or better
I watched this and liked it. But what do you mean by tacked on? The movie is called "Exorcist 3" so what was there going to be instead of exorcism? You're not making any sense!
swampman posted:cars posted:yes, also Exorcist III is good even with the stupid tacked-on exorcist parts they forced Blatty to add, Fangoria nerds only ever remember the scene with the nurse's station but almost every other scene in that movie is as good or better
I watched this and liked it. But what do you mean by tacked on? The movie is called "Exorcist 3" so what was there going to be instead of exorcism? You're not making any sense!
Blatty called it "Legion" originally which works a lot better as a title. He hated Exorcist II (because it was bad) and didn't want his new movie associated with it. The studio first demanded the movie be called "Exorcist III", then later demanded that Blatty shoot and insert the scenes concerning the exorcism and the priest who performs it.
All of that added stuff draws attention away from a couple of key parts of the story, about how the multiplicity vs. the unity of evil doesn't change its presence in the world and how its ultimate presence remains ambiguous because of that paradox, unless someone risks joining "the dance" as both victim and perpetrator. Having the Devil show up in an extraneous scene is distracting and unnecessary; the Gemini Killer is both the Devil's servant and the Devil. The character refers to himself as both "I" and "we", but also tells Kinderman, concerning "The Master", "There is only one." Trying to wedge the exorcism scene into that concept detracts from it by differentiating Venamun and his Master, while most of the rest of the movie (including Dourif's amazing performance) emphasizes how neither Kinderman not the audience can draw that distinction with certainty, nor can Kinderman even prove the Devil's hand in the world to others.
And I just gotta say it. Interesting to me that Black Panther is huge in the USA right now, while the Exorcist III is not. Very interesting.
swampman posted:And also I don't think they ever say or imply "Oh this is no longer the gemini it's the Devil Now".
they do though, in that scene possessed Karras says Have you come to save God's servant? Well, I must save mine. My son, the Gemini. He has work to do. which sets up this tiered conflict between Morning and the Devil over and above Kinderman and Gemini, and the movie would have been better off without it rather than the studio forcing Blatty back into reshoots post-production where it was impossible for him to even make Morning into a character involved in the movie's story.
Like if they wanted to keep sarcastic reviews and confused audiences from asking "where's the exorcism" the answer to that is probably not to prompt those people to orient their thinking toward how ineffective and boring the short exorcism scene was in this movie vs. "The Exorcist", and if you read the bad end of the polarized contemporary reviews of the movie that's exactly what happened
cars posted:they do though, in that scene possessed Karras says Have you come to save God's servant? Well, I must save mine. My son, the Gemini. He has work to do. which sets up this tiered conflict between Morning and the Devil over and above Kinderman and Gemini,
It's cool dude. The Holy Trinity can be really confusing.
It almost seems like Blatty wanted to show contempt for the exorcism scene compared to how the rest of the movie was written, because that's the one little speech in the movie where, if you removed it from the context of what you see on the screen and only told people it was from a movie called "Exorcist III", they could probably guess correctly who's saying it. It's one step up from "Now I, the Devil, have arrived for the exorcism part", while most of the rest of the movie's dialogue would be impossible to parse without seeing it delivered, that or detailed description of what's happening on the screen.
swampman posted:I like the proposed ending that follows the book where the Gemini was gonna be wrested back down to Hell because the object of his hatred happened to die, which appeals to me more because the crux of the exorcism is always this circus trick where Satan who spends eternity planning human misery and who can do telekinesis and regenerate brains forgets to check to make sure the priest is really dead and put all their crucifixes down the toilet, I don't think it's right that Kinderman gets the better of the Devil, that's just how I fuckin feel.
I don't think Kinderman does win necessarily. I think that's left ambiguous, with the last line of the movie being as ambivalent as the rest of its portrayals of Kinderman's experience of otherworldly good (minus the tacked-on crappy exorcism scene, funny how that keeps happening). It's never made completely clear that Karras's death is the will of God simply because it's a way to put an immediate stop to one single aspect of the Devil's influence in a world full of them, nor that either Kinderman or Karras necessarily do the right thing by working together to kill Karras at the point they do, which is a pretty thorny question in context of the particular religion used as context for the movie.
Like... from what the nurse overhears, Karras begs God to "save" God's "servant", and follows it up with "Kill it", which doesn't exactly sound like Karras is placing the value on the life of that servant that his faith would demand he do even in the valley of the shadow of death. Karras fears evil, which is why he's tormented by witnessing himself perform acts of evil. Karras wants to die, and in the end, Kinderman wants to kill him, and they're both convinced that means they "won", but it doesn't mean they did. There could have been another way, and Kinderman's not at all motivated to help Karras die because of some sort of divine moral calculus about saving God's children in the future. Kinderman cares about his family more than God's, which the movie rightly presents as only natural, but not necessarily as Godly or good.
Whether Kinderman and Karras "win" is an open question the movie hints at repeatedly earlier on, like in the scene describing the carp swimming up and down in the bathtub and the desire to simply kill it rather than look at it one more time because you know what's happening to it and what's going to happen to it and that you're going to be a part of it. In the movie's idea of things, the point of that scene isn't that it's God's will to kill the carp just because you're grossed out watching it continue to exist in that way. Disgust is not a holy reason to kill in the movie, and Kinderman precedes what he does with an anti-profession of faith, like he's reciting the liturgy of his own personal Black Mass: he professes belief only in disgust and that which causes disgust, and ultimately in the Worm at its root. It's a great scene for George C. Scott (who loved Blatty's vision for the movie dearly and championed it for the rest of his life, for whatever that tells anyone given Scott's own life) and it's one of the more interesting ways to present the idea that belief in the Devil does not equal faith in God.
That's what I mean about joining "the dance" as both victim and perpetrator: we don't know that Kinderman has to kill Karras to beat the Devil, if that's even possible in the world presented by the story. We know Kinderman "has" to kill Karras because of Kinderman's own self-interest, because Kinderman cannot take what's happening to Kinderman anymore, because the Gemini told Kinderman that Kinderman is part of the dance now, and simply by Kinderman contributing his surname to the family he loves, they're all part of the dance too... Gemini got to Kinderman.
So whether or not Karras and Kinderman "won" as they believe at the end, or whether the Gemini pressured Kinderman and Karras to damn their own souls through joint commission of a mortal sin which they wrongly believe to be a blessed act of God's mercy... the answer to that is not clear at all when the movie wraps up. If Karras was wrong about the whole thing before he encountered Kinderman again as Patient X, heck, if he was wrong about it when he tried to kill himself in "The Exorcist", which is an open question for the exact same reasons in the exact same context, then Karras is still wrong about it at the end of this movie, and that means he's going to Hell and now, he's probably dragged Kinderman down to Hell with him.
Edited by cars ()
Aime Cesaire posted:First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and "interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.
Caesura109 posted:Black Panther was hot garbage as expected, a shallow caricature of black liberation defeated by a bourgeois nationalist black elite with the help of a CIA agent, with the heroes resolve in the end being 'more aid to ghettos and also sharing new technologies with oppressor governments instead of channeling them to the oppressed'.
ahahahahaaaaaugh
Caesura109 posted:Black Panther was hot garbage as expected, a shallow caricature of black liberation defeated by a bourgeois nationalist black elite with the help of a CIA agent, with the heroes resolve in the end being 'more aid to ghettos and also sharing new technologies with oppressor governments instead of channeling them to the oppressed'.
i saw the movie and this is spot-on. the Kindly CIA Pal seemed especially out of place considering the setting has its own fictitious agencies like SHIELD to draw upon.
that said, there's a bit to temper it, too; the mentioned shallowness of the villain owes explicitly, in the text of the film, to the fact that he himself was a CIA-trained murderer, still working off their playbook. plus at this point the bar is so low in US mass culture that even introducing a discussion that makes no bones about the ubiquity, even banality, of imperialist destabilization tactics probably qualifies as a positive step.
anyway, film qua film, i'd still probably rate it as top-three material within the MCU to date
