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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.167
Posted on Saturday, February 20, 2021 - 10:32 am:   

Monster Squad on the projector. Thanks to Amazon Prime Video it was in widescreen for the first time for me, and like half a new film. It's from the time when every film seemed touched by the action genre c/o of Arnie, which made a lot of things quite crowd pleasing but also marked a tricky times for "straight" films. But it's cosy and filmic and looks gorgeous, and it's funny and likable, even if there's a shorthand air and the monsters have the appearance of McDonalds toys. I enjoyed even if it did feel like a composite of better films, a kind of Frankenstein monster itself.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.167
Posted on Monday, February 22, 2021 - 11:03 am:   

Sliding Doors on the projector. It has become magical, shots of the London underground, lots of people in busy restaurants and pubs. A different world. Time is broken like it is in thoughts. It has bled into life. The film seems about things it can never know and was never meant to be about, the characters not knowing how the world will change, how lucky they were. At one brief point we see a sad blonde woman on her own in a bar. "She's having her own Sliding Doors adventure," I say to my wife, and she agrees.
The River Wild on the projector. Stunning scenery. Real tension. Really involving. Maybe silly. Back in the day it go so so reviews, but now it seems a perfect gem of a thriller, every object we see playing a part. We were lucky then with movies and didn't realise it - I'm finding I can only really relax into films over twenty years old. They feel purer, "themselves" somehow.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.167
Posted on Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - 10:39 am:   

The Happening on the projector. An odd film that I love even though it doesn't really punch you. It always has something to show you that you forgot; this time the model house they stay at momentarily, where the wine in the glasses is coloured wax and the hero keeps holding it like it's real while he's talking. Things feel significant and yet random and it's definitely surreal. If George Romero had directed it in the seventies it would have been held up as a masterpiece.
Wife at samaritans today so I go in early, 6 am, see a sleeping Durham and Cathedral and that lots of shops and cafes have closed down since I was last there, not even long ago. Not for the first time have I felt like a ghost wandering a town.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.167
Posted on Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - 07:34 pm:   

His worst fault might be just his awkwardness I think. But then I actually think he engineers that, because I've seen older movies with that quality actually remain more enduring when other more skilled films have taken on a stuffy, sometimes sterile air.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.73.199
Posted on Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - 10:47 pm:   

Is this M Night? He's on the Norm McDonald show on Netflix and said that he found that after Sixth Sense his craft started to take over from his instinct because it's safer. I think that explained his slide. But then he said for his last two films (which would have been THE VISIT and SPLIT at the time of the interview) he consciously went without the safety net of craft and got in touch with his instinct again. I think it worked as i really enjoyed those films.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.167
Posted on Thursday, February 25, 2021 - 10:04 am:   

Wow! Great to see you...
I'm reading an Irish book set in Dublin and was thinking of you (the locations are very vividly described). Yes, Shyamalan. I think generally he's excellent and original, but that his first film kind of made things difficult for him. I loved Glass so much, a total anti Marvel film that you kept expecting to turn into one, but it resisted it all the way, even criticised our desire for it to.
That book is partly set in Howth. Nothing is happening in it but it is incredibly absorbing. The texture of life is the story.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.78.0
Posted on Friday, February 26, 2021 - 02:00 am:   

The Sixth Sense was, I think, his third film. There are no film director wunderkinds. So much practice is needed. Kubrick's first, FEAR AND DESIRE, was very flawed but still magical in places, I thought. I've started an ascent on the Dunning-Kruger curve of my own knowledge of film-making. Let's see what happens...

The texture of life being the story... I get that will some favourite films. Strange how there isn't more ambient film. Something between a strong narrative and one of those ambient landscapes.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.167
Posted on Friday, February 26, 2021 - 11:25 am:   

I think I meant his first "noticed" film, though I wasn't aware he'd done two before it!
I've been talking about the death of film and story, and the well of experience growing shallower. Maybe films need now to explore the depths in the shallow, because nothing IS shallow really, we all have pain and die, no-one is spared the loud notes.
The book is so good. It is like Ramsey in many ways but more sedate, the supernatural running in the way it really does, quietly woven into the everyday, like a patch of light catching our eye, almost indifferent but not quite. There if we look, not good or bad.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.78.247
Posted on Saturday, February 27, 2021 - 12:44 am:   

He wrote Stuart Little. Bet you didn't see that twist coming. Speaking to "nothing is shallow", I've started to believe that art that tries to be important rarely, if ever, achieves that. It's art that just wants to be the best version of whatever it is that can later become important.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.167
Posted on Saturday, February 27, 2021 - 09:00 am:   

No, I knew about Stuart Little!
We have been watching movies on the projector and generally finding old films are the best. Last night was Polanski's The Tenant. God, so real and grubby. I got lost in it even though, as with all his films, it goes on twenty minutes too long, like they have some inner fourth act.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.167
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2021 - 10:16 am:   

Odd, in the Irish book I'm reading Stuart Little gets brought up and discussed at some length, at least for a novel.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.75.27
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2021 - 11:21 pm:   

I never saw SL. I watched DUMB AND DUMBER for the first time this week. Er, not great, but still better than the Seth Green comedy LONG SHOT which seemed lazy, indulgent, too cool for school and boring. I can't believe it put me in the position of defending Jim Carey (whose films I abhorred) but that modern comedy made him look like a committed professional to what he was doing, whether you liked it or not. (Posting this knowing there's no erase button...)
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.75.27
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2021 - 11:22 pm:   

Not Seth Green, I meant Seth Rogen.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.1.107
Posted on Wednesday, March 03, 2021 - 12:33 am:   

I liked Carrey films at the time, and like his more serious movies, but I really dislike Seth Rogen for smoking pot and thinking it's funny whereas my son smokes pot and is ruining his life because of it.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.1.107
Posted on Thursday, March 04, 2021 - 10:46 am:   

Projector; the bloody awful Nicholas Cage film Willy's Wonderland, there to prove we no longer, like cobbling or ironmongery, know how to make films.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.76.210
Posted on Thursday, March 04, 2021 - 02:31 pm:   

I watched FIRST REFORMED by Paul Schrader and whatever you think of the film it had that feeling of solid craft under it that reassures you that you're in good hands and allows you to relax into the film. So the craft isn't just good carpentry, it allows deeper immersion in the world of the film.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.2
Posted on Thursday, March 04, 2021 - 05:03 pm:   

It's that old thing, but real, "layers". It doesn't mean easter eggs or whatever, it means degrees of shade and people in conflict with themselves, senses of real place and a history to them. They feel "upholstered".
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.0.95
Posted on Sunday, March 07, 2021 - 09:51 am:   

Projected Dead Calm and Fall of the House of Usher. Neither great, don't know why, but House was the lesser of the two. It had the whiff of Bonanza.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.0.95
Posted on Sunday, March 07, 2021 - 04:09 pm:   

Projected Dead Calm and Fall of the House of Usher. Neither great, don't know why, but House was the lesser of the two. It had the whiff of Bonanza.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.79.59
Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - 10:41 am:   

Maybe put him back? Give it another few hundred years and see what a world he wakes up in. Do people periodically update time capsules and replant them? That might be interesting, to get one that had generations of input. I wonder if urban time capsules would fare better than rural ones? Much less likely that a city park will be rezoned I suppose.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.79.59
Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - 10:43 am:   

Oh, I was talking about the Star Trek toy. Will repost there in case I confuse both of the people who read this. (Ah, that old "both" joke.)
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.0.95
Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - 12:01 pm:   

"Both" would be good with me.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.75.55
Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - 05:07 pm:   

It's a testament to how my imagination has shriveled that I brought time travel down to local rezoning in one paragraph.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.0.95
Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - 07:04 pm:   

I couldn't leave that figure. I can't part with things. Last thing I did was when I threw a late JG Ballard I couldn't get into into the sea.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.0.95
Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - 07:14 pm:   

My son said something I never fully said out loud in my mind, that in Star Wars everyone is surrounded by wonders - anti grav vehicles that just float there, aliens, massive space ships etx - but they are all bored by it, taking it for granted. How genius that is because it makes the Force all the more amazing. I don't think I will never not love proper old Star Wars.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.75.55
Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - 09:24 pm:   

I just watched Star Wars (as I'll always think of it) on blu ray for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I could imagine it as an actual film coming out in 1977 because I remember when it was the only one. What struck me was how battered and dirtied up everything was in HD - C3PO was filthy. I was more impressed by the film because it reminded me that these were all physical things that had to be made from nothing. Star Wars was made by people.

Good point about making The Force special. Got to side step Clarke's 3rd Law for it to work.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.0.95
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2021 - 09:40 am:   

Oh, the movie was one of the last masterpieces. It sucked up everything great into one film and made a kind of "best of", almost rendering film "finished" or "solved". I remember reading he said it was a machine made to cheer you up. Having a mission in art is like putting an engine in a car at last, I've found. I realised that last year and it gave everything I'd tried to do before life.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.75.55
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2021 - 10:59 am:   

That's interesting. Yes, I find I just wander if I don't have a purpose in creativity. I've been thinking of art as some sort of applied medicine. Expose people to shapes, sounds, colours, stories and it does affect them.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.75.32
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2021 - 12:38 pm:   

This came out today. A 1 hour 20 min detailed analysis of C3PO. Yowsers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kibrZQg1xVQ&ab_channel=CollativeLearning
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.0.95
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2021 - 02:51 pm:   

Crazy, I realised last year that art was a kind of psychic/emotional engineering, for "us". Actually that pragmatic. But it has to be done in a certain way, it has to smell as rish as a forest or whatever, like I said another day "upholstered". I was into witchcraft the other year and this line stuck out - "the more handmade something is the more power it has". It said everything has a degree of sentience and that that sentience is pliable and movable. It made sense to me. But I think sentience might be the wrong word (I think we can solve a lot of problems sometimes by changing one word for a new one, or also find new ways to appreciate things).
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.0.95
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2021 - 03:29 pm:   

The C3P0 thing is great! Got it on now.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.0.95
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2021 - 04:36 pm:   

I love this interview.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/sep/14/mark-leckey-interview-tate- britain
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 89.19.88.236
Posted on Saturday, March 13, 2021 - 11:29 am:   

"the more handmade something is the more power it has". I read that one piece of advice for making your job future-proof is the leave fingerprints on your work. This is easier for art, but personalizing things can happen in a lot of jobs.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.27.214
Posted on Sunday, March 14, 2021 - 08:19 am:   

Pet Semitism remake - thanks spellchecker- Sematary - much better than I remember, though that sadly doesn't mean it was any good. The impression is still of someone who could make something well but doesn't have the interest or energy for this story, it still peters out, as if they were happy to have just done what they'd done and nothing more.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein- seen it many times, always watchable, feels like a wannabe musical. But what stood shockingly out was the thread about the spread of smallpox, the man who resisted the vaccination killing the man giving it to him and ending up with the pair of them combined into the monster. So odd hearing lines like "We'll get married after quarantine ". A better word than lockdown, but maybe too French now for English tastes.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.76.151
Posted on Monday, March 15, 2021 - 12:50 pm:   

A couple of other Star Wars HD moments - the skeletons of Luke's aunt and uncle are very clear on blu ray - it really sinks in what you're looking at. An atrocity, worse than anything I can think of in a film for children. I think it's a key scene - it raises the stakes hugely, it's the Empire in microcosm so it makes clear what everyone's really fighting for (or against).

Also (and I'm sure there are many things like this that we don't even see as being someone made a decision about and wrote down since Star Wars has been around most of our lives) Biggs being blown up on the trench run - his last words are "Wait!". Which is a strange, poignant choice. Almost like a child wanting to stop the game because he got hurt. It's not just like Beggar's Canyon back home.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.27.214
Posted on Monday, March 15, 2021 - 01:34 pm:   

We were talking about Avatar today, how we always enjoy it when we watch it, and I mean REALLY enjoy it, but after it never crops up in conversation. Star Wars, we talk about it daily. Heck, even "grown up" movies we barely discuss (maybe because they have already done it themselves). I know the prequels are usually held in disdain but they are every bit as rich. When C3P0 says "Thank the Maker!" in the first movie nobody realised he was talking about Darth Vader/Anakin.
Yes, those bodies are absolutely horrific. We always gasp.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.73.45
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2021 - 12:29 am:   

When you see what George Lucas had originally planned for Star Wars, you've got to wonder where his complete confidence in what he was trying to do came from. I think STAR WARS was called "The Journal of the Whills" originally.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.27.214
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2021 - 10:43 am:   

I heard a radio show about the making of Star Wars and NOBODY was behind it and a lot of backers pulled out. But then footage of the attack on he death star was shown, the x wing swooping down into the trench, and everyone went crazy.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.27.214
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2021 - 10:45 am:   

He had a dream. I hear in his car accident he had an NDE and it had a huge effect on him, like the artist in the article I shared who saw a fairy under spaghetti junction as a kid.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.78.144
Posted on Friday, March 19, 2021 - 12:52 am:   

He dreamt Star Wars?
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.27.214
Posted on Friday, March 19, 2021 - 01:24 am:   

I meant in the Martin Luther King sense
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.78.144
Posted on Friday, March 19, 2021 - 09:30 am:   

Ah, okay.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.27.214
Posted on Saturday, March 20, 2021 - 10:16 am:   

Watched two duds on the projector last night, Time Cop and the Dark Water remake. I first saw Time Cop in a huge mansion that had been turned into a hostel in a wood and LOVED it, but now it seemed much older than it was. At one point we see inside a bustling mall with a huge banner proclaiming it is 1994, like it's proud of it, and i feel so sad because of that... the pride seems at once earned AND empty. God imagine the scene in a mall now, a crowd watching a fun little fight... the two men would be alone, maybe a couple of people in the background, disinterested. The whole tone of the movie just couldn't happen. Heck, the movie would be a joke because at one point a bad guy is threatened with the "punishment" of being left in 1994... :/
Dark Water, they got a man who made the amazing Motorcycle Diaries ( a dvd i saw in a remote and beautiful old scottish house overlooking snow capped mountains, alone because our dog didn't get on with our friend's dogs in the next building) to make it, as a test to see if he was "up" to being in hollywood. It was like caging a bird of paradise, or getting a highly trained police dog to fetch your TV remote. (Even so the films had atmosphere by the bucketload...crumbly cheap housing blocks, a grey wet New York, everywhere wet...not the world of the exact ten years previous Time Cop).
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.74.12
Posted on Thursday, March 25, 2021 - 10:06 pm:   

I remember the scene with John C Reilly showing them around the brutalist apartment block, which was a good scene, but nothing else.

Never saw Time Cop, and now I can't see it as anything other than a curiosity I suppose...
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.27.214
Posted on Friday, March 26, 2021 - 08:46 am:   

Dark Water is emotionally a steady straight flatline. We stay in the same emotional state throughout, hanging on the edge of a precipice without falling or even really feeling we are going to fall. I dunno. Nothing comes.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.27.109
Posted on Monday, April 05, 2021 - 10:34 pm:   

Watched the latest three Godzillas/Kongs. Godzilla King of the Monsters wins, kind of, because it's quite fierce and the monsters have real personality. Godzilla vs Kong was pretty inventive and viually stunning but ultimately rushed.
Highlight of the week on the projector was Bourne Identity which has aged fantastically. It's a pretty grown up action movie with yes, an odd structure. It gets less actiony and more intimate, and even fits in a few strange moments, the kind we used to get in drama movies once upon a time.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.205.241.23
Posted on Thursday, April 08, 2021 - 01:34 am:   

Just projected Neil Jordan's Greta, a commonly available bargain bin film, and was loathe to because of that, but my god, it was the most cinematic thing I've seen in ages! He must be one of the dying filmmakers who know how to frame shots and use space and movement... it's just sublime. And the suspense! Jesus Christ, I'd forgotten what that was. Get yourself to Morrison's now and pick it up pronto.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.75.177
Posted on Thursday, April 08, 2021 - 10:07 am:   

I don't know what Morrison's is! But I saw it in the cinema with a Q&A with the director when it came out. I didn't pay much attention to the technical aspects, might be worth a second viewing. I thought that though THE CRYING GAME has aged poorly, ANGEL and THE COMPANY OF WOLVES are both still exhilarating. I really enjoyed BYZANTIUM too. Makes me want to see BREAKFAST ON PLUTO again and see if it's held up.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.0.43
Posted on Thursday, April 08, 2021 - 03:31 pm:   

Oh, it's a UK supermarket chain the sells dvds in literal dustbins. I got it for £2. I have to say, projected and thru a wireless speaker it looked and sounded amazing. It was, as I said, basically a popcorn movie but the craft was everything, just as with Hitchcock. They style was the substance. We forget that now, everything has to make a point and craft has been overlooked. I loved every minute of this because I felt IN it, and it was so tense and nightmarish I was on the point of tearing down the screen to get Chloe out of there. Every cut had the gleam of golden cogs in some amazing clock.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.0.43
Posted on Thursday, April 08, 2021 - 03:47 pm:   

TURNING in some amazing clock
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.77.253
Posted on Friday, April 09, 2021 - 01:04 am:   

Yes, don't try to be important. Be good and that'll make your work important. I read as much this morning in Hitchcock/Truffaut.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.77.253
Posted on Friday, April 09, 2021 - 01:38 am:   

And yes about the big screen. Just saw an interview with Terry Gilliam where he talks about nothing he watches on Netlfix sticking with him, because the big screen should dominate you, you're going to the temple.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.205.241.52
Posted on Friday, April 09, 2021 - 10:35 am:   

Yes, cathedrals can't be small. I mean small things can be beautiful, but we don't get awe at molehills. I watched Star Trek TNG big the other week and you saw the stitching in the furniture and Picard was lifesized innyour room. I do watch Netflix big, and while Gilliam is right the films netflix produces have a missing quality. I don't know what it is. I told Craig recently that I felt people making films now don't fully love the job, it was just a sense. Maybe that's why crazy films like Greta get made, people like Jordan just love the making.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.205.241.52
Posted on Friday, April 09, 2021 - 10:36 am:   

By the way, you don't need a big room for a projector.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.205.241.52
Posted on Friday, April 09, 2021 - 10:37 am:   

It's definitely worth it
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.205.241.52
Posted on Friday, April 09, 2021 - 10:39 am:   

I remember a photographer on instagram recently who said he had come to realise the subjects of his photos didn't matter anymore, it was the frames and texture surface quality of the paper, not even the picture quality itself mattered.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.205.241.52
Posted on Friday, April 09, 2021 - 10:40 am:   

It's great learning these things because you can extrapolate it to the meaning of life.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.78.166
Posted on Saturday, April 10, 2021 - 01:10 pm:   

Yes, I wonder if labeling creative works "content" rather than "art" has lowered standards. You're just making widgets. It should be life itself.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.72.149
Posted on Sunday, April 11, 2021 - 10:12 am:   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjDNtwh2i5M
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.1.75
Posted on Sunday, April 11, 2021 - 08:21 pm:   

The 26 year old son of a friend's ex husband has hung himself, they switch off his life support tomorrow. Reason - his sense of failure.
Earlier today I asked someone if "value" was harmful. It felt like I got my answer a horrible way.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.1.75
Posted on Sunday, April 11, 2021 - 08:39 pm:   

The 26 year old son of a friend's ex husband has hung himself, they switch off his life support tomorrow. Reason - his sense of failure.
Earlier today I asked someone if "value" was harmful. It felt like I got my answer a horrible way.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.205.241.160
Posted on Thursday, April 15, 2021 - 12:51 pm:   

The movie we put on the projector last night was David Lynch's Elephant Man, which came out in Craig's cut-off year for the last good movies, 1980, and rightly so. I don't think I've ever been so moved by it, a film so ravishingly honest as to show tears on faces in close up, so naked and yes SO moving. And to show a character die and drift off to heaven... my God. My emotions felt sand blasted in a way I can't remember them being for a long time. And yet there's the strangeness and sense of looking over the shoulder of a sleeper into their dreams, where unknown they are at their most disingenuous. My son has never seen it and his jaw dropped at the start and stayed there. And fuck me but it was about art, wasn't it? Art being as close to the soul as - well, there is no gap. I have friends who won't watch it because they fear it is too sad. I wish they would. I think - part of me dreads a bad response to it from them, to find out they might be cold about it. I love Lynch but I think there were things in this film he never pulled off again.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.107
Posted on Thursday, April 15, 2021 - 06:20 pm:   

https://sphinx.mythic-beasts.com/~mark/random/david-lynch/
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.72
Posted on Friday, April 16, 2021 - 01:59 am:   

https://youtu.be/MIlmdLPUdpg
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.72
Posted on Friday, April 16, 2021 - 10:11 am:   

Crazy. This feels like people doing impressions.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h9CzJkxKKd0
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.205.241.160
Posted on Friday, April 16, 2021 - 06:06 pm:   

Ignore that one, unless younintend to find part 2. This one is better.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Em3XplqnoF4
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.205.241.160
Posted on Friday, April 16, 2021 - 07:20 pm:   

There is something so eerie about these old interviews. It's the courtesy and intelligence. Also, this feels directed by Lynch himself, like he somehow makes the world around him Lynchian, like a statue affects the world when not placed on a plinth.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MmsJvR2sVmA
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.4.227
Posted on Monday, April 19, 2021 - 05:13 pm:   

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S78NYOaamRM
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.4.227
Posted on Tuesday, April 20, 2021 - 10:52 am:   

Love and Monsters, on netflix and oñ the projector. Very good indeed, a lot of heart for a monster film, and gets better as it goes along. Did what Zombieland tried to do I think, but better. Movies about long journeys should, I think, focus on small, poignant encounters, and this one did.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.4.227
Posted on Tuesday, April 20, 2021 - 11:00 am:   

Listen to this.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UBTHfmFT5aY
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.4.227
Posted on Tuesday, April 20, 2021 - 11:01 am:   

Watch this. Just the awe of this logo, these opening notes. It's so awe inspiring it hurts.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S78NYOaamRM
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.25.181
Posted on Thursday, April 22, 2021 - 02:34 pm:   

Princess Mononoke. Didn't appreciate it before on tv, on the projector I do. Very good.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.217
Posted on Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - 01:02 am:   

Man of Steel, then next day Batman vs Superman. Projector for the latter. I think both are excellent on repeat viewing.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.27.252
Posted on Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - 12:36 am:   

Amazing to see Batman having visions. Eally opens the future up. Not that we will ever see the story followed up.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 108.221.136.29
Posted on Monday, May 17, 2021 - 07:05 pm:   

I saw my first 2021 film yesterday: Made-for-TV SORORITY SISTERS KILLER on Lifetime Network.

Here's my 1st Grade book report on it: "It was good. The girls acted good. There was a party and people were drinking through tubes. One girl was pushed off a building. She was killed by another person. I didn't know that person killed her. It was sad the girls were bullied. Friendship was the moral. The end."

Teacher's Grade: A+.

Nailed it!
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.76.27
Posted on Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - 01:57 am:   

I watched DIRTY DANCING for the first time. It's fun. Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey will return in... RED DAWN.

I thought last week maybe SEVEN is a sequel to THE USUAL SUSPECTS.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.249.184.228
Posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 12:23 am:   

I remember seeing the trailer for Dirty Dancing when I went to see The Untouchables and Hellraiser. The cinema's gone but the memories are indelible.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.74.57
Posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 09:23 am:   

It sounds like the marketing was happily inefficient then, matching that trailer to those other films. "If you loved Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in DIRTY DANCING, try RED DAWN."
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.74.57
Posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 09:23 am:   

They're in RED DAWN too, is the joke.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.129.74.57
Posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 09:25 am:   

Too much nostalgia or fantasy isn't good for us.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.240
Posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 10:03 am:   

It's a symptom not a cause
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 89.19.67.172
Posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 10:27 am:   

It can be both.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 108.221.136.29
Posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 07:25 pm:   

Nostalgia is a destructive emotion.

Bradbury's short-story, "Mars is Heaven." One of the greatest... can't say it, would ruin it, but one of the greatest [xxxxxx] stories every written. And a nostalgia cautionary-tale....
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.0.110
Posted on Saturday, June 05, 2021 - 07:19 pm:   

Watched and enjoyed the very good Empty Man, after initially finding it meandering and dull. Switching off halfway and going back to it next day fixed it somehow. Maybe *I* changed in the interim?
Anyway, it is the best horror I've seen in a while. Made the Lovecraftian almost an answer to our current problems.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.25.34
Posted on Tuesday, June 08, 2021 - 07:36 pm:   

Quiet Place 2. One of the best film experiences I've ever had.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.28.217
Posted on Wednesday, June 09, 2021 - 03:38 pm:   

Yes, excellent.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.249.184.213
Posted on Saturday, June 12, 2021 - 08:40 am:   

A couple of scenes in The Fury by Brian di Palma, seen on a hotel tv (the best way to see a film). SO fantastic, the woman escaping the house and being chased down the street and Kirk Douglas shooting people. Doesn't sound like much but possibly the most beautiful scene I've seen this year. I miss De Palma.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.249.184.213
Posted on Saturday, June 12, 2021 - 08:48 am:   

Great talk on here.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.180.70.140
Posted on Thursday, June 17, 2021 - 07:34 pm:   

I can't believe I'm mentioning a cheesy Lifetime movie, but I have to give it some kudos. It even has the obligatory terrible title: THE EVIL TWIN, and yes, the plot's pretty much what you're thinking right now.

But credit goes where it's due - and it does have fun and takes left turns with the premise. And even me, a veteran of such fare, many many years of consuming horror and suspense and thrillers and whatnot under my belt... there was one spot where even *I* was blindsided, completely thrown for a loop! That's hard to do! So bravo, THE EVIL TWIN! Masterfully done! And hey, if McDonald's makes the perfect Big Mac someday, I'll come on here and praise that, too.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.28.131
Posted on Saturday, June 19, 2021 - 10:59 am:   

I did like those two summaries of Christmas films.
While on holiday in Scotland the only good thing we found on the hotel tv (I love hotel tv) was Medium, a show I used to like a lot but have come to love. Might the family in the show be the best tv family ever? It's also quite horrific, something at odds with the almost I Love Lucy set up.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.180.70.140
Posted on Wednesday, June 30, 2021 - 03:56 am:   

I really liked the "Medium" episodes I saw, sad that it's gone. The problem with network TV at least, is that... it's not that people hate things, it's that people don't even know shit exists. No one even is aware at all. This has always been the case, in one degree or respect, and other. But it's just accelerated to the point where everything on network TV is like it's happening in an abandoned mall on the other side of town.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.7.229
Posted on Friday, July 02, 2021 - 09:30 pm:   

Yes! Arthur, played to that empty auditorium... And yet I really love catching live tv and old shows... but then I like weird gloomy stuff. Best thing about tv is not having to SCROLL. At least not so much. Scrolling has become the new jerking off.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.180.70.140
Posted on Sunday, July 11, 2021 - 06:31 am:   

I'm noticing that I'm not liking the feeling of complete ignorance, as in, not even knowing something exists. I think this absolutely chilling feeling has, rightfully, hit all of Hollywood. Forget the $$$ angle, but of course, there's that. It's that feeling that NO ONE CARES, no one is even aware of your existence. It's like a little kid dressing up in a blanket-cape pretending he's superman to his parents' dinner party guests - and the guests can't be bothered to noticed the child even exists. But it's worse, it's the "cool kids," i.e., CULTURE, the prevailing culture, which Hollywood so wants to BE IN THE HEART OF, like being at the coolest party around as the host... it's the "cool kids" who have completely laughed off these guys and tossed their cigarette butts at them, and turned and rode away to somewhere Hollywood can't find them, they're so over it now. Hollywood is in terror mode, realizing: no one cares about them. Terror. And imho... they haven't even SEEN the extent to which the public will be ignoring them yet!!!
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.31.115
Posted on Sunday, July 11, 2021 - 10:32 am:   

I will always love film but you know, I think scrolling is killing them for me. All this choice. Nothing I watch FEELS good, I "made a mistake in my choice". Ugh. Butblast night we projected a Gamera film, a giant tortoise fighting what looked like a giant horse dog with mournful eyes that fired rainbows out of it's back. It looks sad, like it's avoiding the world (it falls down to the ground and sleeps as much as it causes havoc). At one point they reflect it's rainbow back at it and it injures it, and this hot Japanese scientist says "I've seen this in zoos. If an animal hurts itself by accident it never does that thing again. We won't see that rainbow ever again." And then it dies, kind of from failure, and it's more heartbreaking than any Kong or Godzilla film - or indeed any film - has been in years.
Maybe film needs to be destroyed, or become a cottage industry, made by amatuers in sheds, unfettered by taste or message.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.31.115
Posted on Sunday, July 11, 2021 - 10:33 am:   

Proto will follow soon, now you've been on. He likes you. Or finds you smart.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.31.115
Posted on Tuesday, July 13, 2021 - 09:35 am:   

Is gloom at EVERY angle we turn, now?
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.180.70.140
Posted on Monday, July 19, 2021 - 07:25 pm:   

Maybe we want too much? Why more and more, this need to constantly replenish... well, what may not need it? What happened to pouring over a single work for a long long period of time, unlocking its magic and mystery? Luther discovered this with the Bible; and to this day, so many religious people are doing, really, what any lover of literature does: going deeper into the text. Do any of us have the patience to live with one single work for a span of time - a month? A few months? A year? Is it the work, or is it US, that can't handle that?
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.205.241.132
Posted on Thursday, July 22, 2021 - 11:21 am:   

The monster being fooled into injuring itself with the mirror. That's pure Jung. And the mirror? Pulp Fiction again. The thing that gazes into itself.
But i remember that quiet world, the past, where the lack of things to watch and do made what there was jewel-like, made us hungry to absorb whatever landed in front of us. People say we should embrace change, but surely not all? Change is catching fire, losing a leg. Interesting, but not always good, surely. Like near me, for years there has been a path at the edge of a field, a tunnel of trees. Someone decided to walk alongside the trees, on the edge of the field itself, and now the tunnel of trees is sealed. It was magical, that tunnel. But now, whenever the grass grows along the new path people make a NEW one alongside THAT one, and so now there are going on four paths, all eating into the field (a crop). The council used to keep the grass in the tunnel down but stopped, is what I remember. Anyway, yesterday I go there for the first time in a long time to walk the dogs and it just got me down, like I was seeing an illustration of the world's progress, and found fences had been put in front of places you could at one time walk through, the whole place kind of depressing. I say "kind of", it just WAS. It sounds trivial, but in reality all the changes to this walk feel symbolic, and it was that that got me down, I've come to realise symbols DO speak to us, make us angry or whatever. Like the mixed race kid who found himself angry and estranged from his white mother because of what she represented, not who she was.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.29.154.8
Posted on Saturday, August 28, 2021 - 02:05 am:   

I think my comments on the overgrown path might represent all I could want to say about now.
Have just watched the last great films again, the Harry Potters. Something for everyone, which is an undervalued thing. As profound as any filmS could be. I can't think of anything in life they don't cover or try to help us through.

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