BF2S Forums Rate the last movie you've seen

Saw the Squid Game trailer. I feel like the trailer showed me everything I needed to see about the show. I can't imagine sitting through that for however many hours.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Saw the Squid Game trailer. I feel like the trailer showed me everything I needed to see about the show. I can't imagine sitting through that for however many hours.

it's basically black mirror only it's actually south korea now rather than some speculative twilight zone western scenario.

i have no intention of watching it but it's pretty bold stuff for korean media, which has historically rarely been critical.

tv series equivalent to parasite, i guess, in that it's glossy and high-production-value. a little bit self-congratulatory in a media bubble kind of way. but still covering some pretty uncomfortable topics: the debt crisis, disappearing/disappeared persons, sinister overlords (some of whom are noticeably white, japanese and chinese) running a ruthless game.

they turned an entire subway station here, one of the more popular ones, into a giant 'interactive' advert for the show. was a surreal experience getting off the train half-drunk with no knowledge of this show, and having to navigate my way through a house of horrors with giant fucking dolls' heads everywhere when i just wanted to find the exit.

Last edited by uziq (2021-10-10 19:47:31)

there are no drugs in south korea – except for alcohol, which is fairly life-destroying and has been a blight on generations afflicted by war, trauma and PTSD, and now further aggravated by some of the highest levels of household debt, workplace bullying, and peer-group pressure of any capitalist nation on earth.

south korea has the world's 2nd highest suicide rate, predominantly in young males and the elderly. debt, which is the topic of squid game, is a huge part of it (as well as little social support for the elderly, especially those who didn't earn a state pension during their working life). want to guess how often alcohol is a compounding or influencing factor? don't look up the stats – you might not like them.

people in south korea are on the piss 4-5 times a week. the culture around alcohol is so unhealthy, what in the west we could call 'substance abuse' if not addiction, that it can even be career-ruining if you decline afterworks drinks. it's literally considered disrespectful to your elders if you don't accompany them to after-work drinks and if you don't match their drinking pace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoesik

look at the history of this. hardly harmless drinks with colleagues. part and function of the militarism and military culture instilled in this country after 40 years of american-backed dictatorship. know any countries on earth that have rituals of enforced drug-consumption backed up by fascist dictatorship? LOL. 'but alcohol is fine and you must be weird because you take drugs'. in my informed opinion, korean culture NEEDS a 'summer of love' counter-cultural moment. they need an alternative to alcohol. this country is a pressure-cooker with only one particularly harmful poison available with which to let off steam.

Last edited by uziq (2021-10-11 02:01:01)

because it's a great and exciting place in many ways but also obviously was one of the major cauldronized zones of the cold war. coming to a hyper-capitalist society that went from being totalled levelled by war to the 7th biggest economy in the world in ~20 years makes for quite the spectacle. the collision of tradition with modernity is fascinating, with all of the complexities and paradoxes and strange efflorescences that entails.

berlin is also a great place but bears a lot of scars of warfare as well as the heavy load of intergenerational trauma. there's a reason the place is so engagingly weird and deviant nowadays and for why it attracts so many youngsters and misfits.

vietnam is a top tourist destination despite two decades of war and the scars and deformities still worn fairly on the surface.

i'm also, obviously, not a korean native shouldering immense amounts of household debt and trying to navigate a still-militarist and ultra-competitive culture. i'm an outsider looking in; their problems are not my problems. does a visitor to the UK assume the emotional toll of brexit?

my point was, to your 'you were probably on something LOL' comment, is that, yes, this culture is on something, and it's a fairly devastating and problematic relationship to your favourite tipple ... alcohol.

is it so hard to understand?

Last edited by uziq (2021-10-11 03:19:48)

doubt that, it would break your cardinal rule of inessential foreign travel, chap. better to hunt out the divorcees of watanga bay.

uziq wrote:

there are no drugs in south korea – except for alcohol, which is fairly life-destroying and has been a blight on generations afflicted by war, trauma and PTSD, and now further aggravated by some of the highest levels of household debt, workplace bullying, and peer-group pressure of any capitalist nation on earth.

south korea has the world's 2nd highest suicide rate, predominantly in young males and the elderly. debt, which is the topic of squid game, is a huge part of it (as well as little social support for the elderly, especially those who didn't earn a state pension during their working life). want to guess how often alcohol is a compounding or influencing factor? don't look up the stats – you might not like them.

people in south korea are on the piss 4-5 times a week. the culture around alcohol is so unhealthy, what in the west we could call 'substance abuse' if not addiction, that it can even be career-ruining if you decline afterworks drinks. it's literally considered disrespectful to your elders if you don't accompany them to after-work drinks and if you don't match their drinking pace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoesik

look at the history of this. hardly harmless drinks with colleagues. part and function of the militarism and military culture instilled in this country after 40 years of american-backed dictatorship. know any countries on earth that have rituals of enforced drug-consumption backed up by fascist dictatorship? LOL. 'but alcohol is fine and you must be weird because you take drugs'. in my informed opinion, korean culture NEEDS a 'summer of love' counter-cultural moment. they need an alternative to alcohol. this country is a pressure-cooker with only one particularly harmful poison available with which to let off steam.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg08cdR … e=emb_logo

I dig the song from that video,

I think knowing the history or book makes it harder to enjoy a movie based on history or a book.

looks shite. is that matt damon wielding a halberd? purely ludicrous.

casting maahhhhky mark wahlberg as a science teacher is more plausible.

also people really need to get over ridley scott and reassess that guy. his last, like, 5 films have been self-indulgent rubbish. hitchcock didn't make 5 bad movies in a row. kubrick wasn't a co-producer on endless reams of kitsch rubbish. ridley scott's movies are, in fact, kitsch shite for proles.

Last edited by uziq (2021-10-14 17:32:29)

Like Kenneth Branagh in Tenet, there are some actors who are just wrong for some roles.

Here is an example of perfect casting.

An Affleck interview has pretty much set the tone for what I expect:

latimes wrote:

“So it wasn’t so much about hewing fastidiously to historical truth, because that wouldn’t have served the narrative needs we were as interested in, as much as illuminating the fact that the vestiges of the sexism and misogyny of the patriarchy we live with now come from a place that was Western civilization’s codified value system.”

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-a … leck-damon

"Historical truth wouldn't have served the narrative needs," suggests to me that the movie is a highly fictionalized cherry pick.

The article goes on to state that the movie is "at least 75% accurate," which is hugely not useful in terms of historical viewing without a lot of disclaimer and supplementary material like an historian's commentary/caption track or even a lecture.

This genre is all like "based on a true story!" and I'm sitting here like "bAsEd oN a TrUe StOrY," and then people watch it thinking they might have learned something but a quarter or more of it could be complete and utter fabrication for "narrative needs."

Like Chernobyl.

Dislike.

It's not like these projects don't have historical advisors on stuff. The advisors just get ignored. Read and watched the gripes from people in that business. I don't really have a problem with movies taking huge liberties with history as long as there's a big fat disclaimer and they don't try and sell themselves as being accurate to any extent.

Ugh, don't get me started again on the lost potential of rejected scores with fitting period instrumentation and/or "non-western" sound for the sake of the expectations of western audiences. I think one of my posts on that required a pagedown. Still a serious pet peeve, hugely FWP I know. Just feel like I'm missing out on so much that ultimately never got a proper recording.

8/10? it's literally watered down nikita. besson and ridley scott have a lot in common.

every single one of dilbert's film reviews contains some completely unnecessary comment on how the women look.

imagine being that thirsty lmao