It's ludicrous to claim that Cats '19 was just unfairly ganged up on by the bandwagon.
And yet neither you nor uziq have actually seen it so you're both going off sheeplike groupthink.
I'm sure The Sopranos has some great acting, that great acting could have been done in a TV show about a decent high-achieving individual who was a useful member of society, not a vicious self-pitying self-serving lowlife who the world would be better off without.
thank god the moralistic, philistine engineers of this world aren't in charge of culture.
can you imagine if every aspect of culture had to be broiled in their 1950s kitchen of ethics first? mary whitehouse reality.
all representations should be of 'decent high-achieving individuals': how bolshevist does this sound? you are literally describing socialist realism, in which the only permitted artforms portrayed the proletariat in a noble light and extolled the virtues of labour. how incredibly enriching! people really remember that stuff. 'igor moves to big city to make good success and support family', a classic for the ages. shame its sequels, 'igor buys own tractor' and 'igor falls in love with tractor' were hampered by stilted character development.
so with those criteria, we have no don quixote, no othello or macbeth, no hardy, no dickens, no joyce ... no faulkner, no hemingway, no scott fitzgerald ... no baudelaire ... no thomas mann ... no dostoyevsky, no nabokov, no chekhov ... wow, i could go on.
meanwhile, you lap up edgy, nihilistic teenage crap like the 'joker' movie. decent and high-achieving individuals, you were saying?
the irony isn't lost on you, i presume, that you routinely spit and direct invective at 'high-achieving individuals'. apparently a tenured top-tier professor who is also a best-selling author doesn't 'do real work'. one would love to know what sort of high-achieving individuals should people your impeccably-credentialled art.
it would either resemble a technical manual or a robert heinlein novel. i think i'll stick with the sopranos.
"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
“It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
blood meridian. well known as a very, very bad book.
You are being unfair to the Joker movie. The movie was 9/10ths 'mentally ill poor person is broken down by society'. I remember sitting in the theater wondering "when is this movie going to get to the jokering?' I am further upset at how Social Justice Warriors hyperventilated about the movie inspiring killing before it was even released. That mostly settled down after the movie was released though there were still people who were saying "I'm not even going to see this movie that will inspire men to post cartel victims on the internet'. Chef's kiss by the way.
i don't think any movie leads people to kill, except for extreme limit cases of deluded and mentally unwell individuals. cf. my remarks about the batman theatre shooting, passim. i don't think christopher nolan is responsible for mass shootings; i think anyone who is compos mentis can consume a work of art with what is called in dramaturgical theory the 'suspension of disbelief' and then return to ordinary life, knowing that what they saw was in fact not reality. art is a reflection upon life, its function is to analyse it: most humans over the mental age of 5 seem able to distinguish between representation and reality.
dilbert enjoys umpteen examples of movies/tv shows that portray violence. he doesn't like the sopranos because he has a chip on his shoulder about 'sophisticates' and doesn't like the idea that smarmy well-educated liberals are 'intellectualizing' over a mobster. it's philistine and reactionary, which is nothing surprising from him. but he consumes any number of media starring less than 'fine and upstanding citizens', and of course he knows it. there would be nothing worth watching without them, for fuck's sake. a drama or plot fundamentally requires a conflict: and where do you get conflict in a world of perfectly well-behaved virtuous citizens?
Yeah, I knew quite a few fresh off the boat Poles through my friends. The Polish girl I was dating when I joined the forum had a strong Polish accent. The East Coast is pretty close to Europe so we get to interact with a lot of recent immigrants. It's not like I live in the God damned Great Plains.
fair. i know quite a lot of poles – dated one for a little over year too – and i imagine the polish in the UK are different to the USA, though how i couldn't pinpoint.
i don't think any movie leads people to kill, except for extreme limit cases of deluded and mentally unwell individuals. cf. my remarks about the batman theatre shooting, passim. i don't think christopher nolan is responsible for mass shootings; i think anyone who is compos mentis can consume a work of art with what is called in dramaturgical theory the 'suspension of disbelief' and then return to ordinary life, knowing that what they saw was in fact not reality. art is a reflection upon life, its function is to analyse it: most humans over the mental age of 5 seem able to distinguish between representation and reality.
dilbert enjoys umpteen examples of movies/tv shows that portray violence. he doesn't like the sopranos because he has a chip on his shoulder about 'sophisticates' and doesn't like the idea that smarmy well-educated liberals are 'intellectualizing' over a mobster. it's philistine and reactionary, which is nothing surprising from him. but he consumes any number of media starring less than 'fine and upstanding citizens', and of course he knows it. there would be nothing worth watching without them, for fuck's sake. a drama or plot fundamentally requires a conflict: and where do you get conflict in a world of perfectly well-behaved virtuous citizens?
i am losing IQ even having to explain this.
It promotes criminality and violence.
Drama is all the same, the only difference between Eastenders and The Sopranos is the location.
Drama has always bored me, one group of tedious egotists in conflict with another group of tedious egotists in conflict over something I don't care about.
what i find most unbelievable in this discussion is that you're laying all this blame at the feet of a highly stylized, ironic, comedic, slapstick, drama.
you talk about real victims and real-world consequences: err, have you heard of this genre called 'true crime'?
i could almost understand your moral squeamishness around that. i find some of the hipster podcasts around recent murder cases to be in very questionable taste myself: there are real victims, real grieving families, real legal consequences. if you want to arraign the morality of our media's obsession with low-lifes and criminality, why not go after true crime? nobody is getting hurt or having their lives trampled on by tony fucking soprano.
'drama is for small-minded egotists'. i mean how do you even argue with that. your marvel movies are 'drama', retard. (and so much for calling shakespeare or racine 'small-minded', i mean, LMFAO). just because you feel excluded by theatre thespians or liberal tv critics or whatever. you really need to sublimate and get over your fundamentally teenage attitude to the world. 'i don't like it so it sucks! they are all losers anyway!' okay dilbert. the world is a big place and it encompasses more than your narrow-minded little thrills.
some people like their drama to reflect 'realism', real human beings with complex motivations, nuanced emotions, contradictions and the mess of real ordinary life. you like to get it from hyper-inflated legendary beings from comic books, where Good meets Evil in manichean explosion-fests. that's fine. both groups of people are getting the same thing from it: what aristotle, in his poetics, called catharsis.
I can't imagine anything more dull than realism, why people watch Eastenders when they could, you know, actually go to a pub.
I don't really claim the superhero genre is anything other than fluff entertainment, its not even science fiction.
Low-level kitchen-sink drama is for small minded people. I'm not sure who highly stylized, ironic, low-level kitchen-sink drama is for really, there's literally nothing big or clever about it.
who was talking about kitchen-sink drama? that was a very particular genre – with, moreover, more than a little undertones of the 'socialist realism' you were asking for earlier: you know, hard beset upon, valiant people trying to be good citizens through the goodness of their hearts, etc. isn't that basically every mike leigh movie?
the sopranos is very well written and is very clever. it deconstructs not only tv series but movies too. it is very 'literate' and self-aware of its own form. it gives a commentary not only on american culture, but on the history of television and film. the writing is superlative, just on the level of script and dialogue. honestly every episode is just so rich and well done. to say it's 'not clever' or 'poorly written' is just objectively wrong. it's you versus every single tv critic on earth on this one, i'm afraid. you have a tough argument ahead of you.
'pretentious' is the rescue-signal of the dimwitted. has it ever occurred to you that you just have dreary tastes? realism doesn't have to be boring: it reflects complexity and real situations, which people are interested in. endless explosions, inane and implausible plots, two-dimensional characters and cookie-cutter franchise sequels are boring, dilbert.
I don't really care, its small-minded people who can't imagine anything they can't see, or conceive a world different from the one which is in front of them, or situations which haven't already happened.
So yeah, an ironic backwards looking show about a criminal in a dreary average place - no thank you. I'm sure the references are terribly clever but I also don't care.
It's ludicrous to claim that Cats '19 was just unfairly ganged up on by the bandwagon.
And yet neither you nor uziq have actually seen it so you're both going off sheeplike groupthink.*
I'm sure The Sopranos has some great acting, that great acting could have been done in a TV show about a decent high-achieving individual who was a useful member of society, not a vicious self-pitying self-serving lowlife who the world would be better off without.
*Yeah, no. See previous post. Funny how it's not good enough for us not having seen Cats '19 because of what we know about the original work, play, the writing, commentary from critics, also backed by commentary from writers, artists, musicians, and experts on the genre (iT's GoT tO bE a bAnDwAgOn). But your not having seen Sopranos (which is practically at the opposite end of the critical spectrum), and dunking on it besides, are perfectly fine because you have a gutfeeling. Hyper-hypocrisy, dude.
lmao
Go hang out with Jack Thompson. You could exchange notes.
Dilbert_X wrote:
I don't really care, its small-minded people who can't imagine anything they can't see, or conceive a world different from the one which is in front of them, or situations which haven't already happened.
Say what?
Very good dramas out there about fictional characters in fictional situations that aren't exactly "the world in front of you" despite more realistic settings than sci-fi or high fantasy. The edgy comic book stuff you defend usually just has a veneer of depth. There's no rule requiring superhero fare to be stupid, that's just its default stance.
I don't really care, its small-minded people who can't imagine anything they can't see, or conceive a world different from the one which is in front of them, or situations which haven't already happened.
you do realise how wide a category 'realism' is, right? saving private ryan was 'realistic'.
why do you have to invent spectacular, fantastical new worlds for something to be interesting? flaubert is 'lesser' than sci-fi/fantasy? are you quite literally insane?
I don't really care, its small-minded people who can't imagine anything they can't see, or conceive a world different from the one which is in front of them, or situations which haven't already happened.
If only you felt the same way about the real world around you dilbert.
