uziq
Member
+492|3422

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Ken and Uzique are fans of the show though. They are morally obligated to watch this.
i have literally zero intentions of ever watching the movie.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689

https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
KEN-JENNINGS
I am all that is MOD!
+2,973|6602|949

I tried to watch MSoN and it was no longer available on HBO Max. How unfortunate
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

I tried to watch MSoN and it was no longer available on HBO Max. How unfortunate
Just read my spoiler review.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
KEN-JENNINGS
I am all that is MOD!
+2,973|6602|949

Maybe I will. In the meantime I am going to watch Free Guy tonight. Maybe.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
Deleted scenes from the Sopranos movie.

https://youtu.be/nIQgkG5kHaY

Those are excellent. They cut this out to make room for Black Lives Matter. Ugh
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422
i still haven't seen it and don't feel any particular desire to. sopranos is one of my favourite ever shows and i still don't care about this thing.

i'll never understand why comic book or star wars nerds get so angry about the latest installments. you can just, you know ... not watch it?

half the time these reboots don't have the same directors/producers, the same original writers, or even the original cast for the most part. it's just a continuation in name only. who gives a fuck? just excise it from your canon and live without it. easy.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

They feel time-invested in the franchises. Very intentional marketing that goes into some of this catch & keep. Same tactics used in video games, only I think some of those companies take it a step more. "You don't want to stop playing now, do you? You've come so far! We've sent you a welcome back code that you can redeem for currency just for logging on."

Someone surrounded with comic book everything is of course going to feel upset when a new movie isn't up to snuff.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
'time invested' in a 'franchise'. some people really need to take an arts degree. a good film or a good novel is not a 'franchise'. burger king is a franchise. these things aren't infinitely replicable or extensible, and it's no shame that they can't be.

look what happened when those shameless profiteers bullied a senile harper lee into making a 'sequel' to mockingbird. disgusting.

even with regards to some of my favourite writers on the planet, the ones who have impacted and influenced me most, i still haven't read everything they've ever done. i still don't even like everything they wrote. not everything is going to be masterpiece, every time. it's lightning-in-a-bottle stuff, after a certain application of talent, that is.

people seem confused that david chase could write and orchestrate one of the greatest tv shows of all time but then also create a really mediocre movie 25 years later. i am not surprised at all. i will pass on david chase, film director.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
Did you ever read the Pale King by David Foster Wallace? Awful book.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422
i did, and i wrote about it partly in my master's thesis also. a deeply flawed writer, occasionally brilliant, sometimes godawful, who in the last 10 years has been made over by pop-culture hagiography into an 'icon'. i am really not very into the contemporary cult of DFW. it is, as the gen-z'ers say, 'cringe'.

TPK could have been a good book. it's hard to say, of course, as it's basically only 30% done. similarly i feel like michael pietsch, DFW's editor, should have put his foot down and taken about 30% out of infinite jest. it would have worked just as well without the random interludes with boston street kids and trannies that never went anywhere. i didn't need to read 80 pages of a WASP'y neurotic aesthete from amherst college doing his best impression of black ebonics.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
Yeah those Wardine chapters were awful.

I liked him in college but now eh. Different time and place in life. DFW and AAVE have some history. He explained he admittedly overly condescendingly told off a black student who wanted to use AAVE in a writing class. The essay is "use and American usage" or something like that. Good essay though my memory of it is a bit hazy.

Dude would get cancelled today. He lucked out killing himself when he did.

His essays were probably better than than the total of his creative writing.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

uziq wrote:

'time invested' in a 'franchise'. some people really need to take an arts degree. a good film or a good novel is not a 'franchise'. burger king is a franchise. these things aren't infinitely replicable or extensible, and it's no shame that they can't be.

look what happened when those shameless profiteers bullied a senile harper lee into making a 'sequel' to mockingbird. disgusting.

even with regards to some of my favourite writers on the planet, the ones who have impacted and influenced me most, i still haven't read everything they've ever done. i still don't even like everything they wrote. not everything is going to be masterpiece, every time. it's lightning-in-a-bottle stuff, after a certain application of talent, that is.

people seem confused that david chase could write and orchestrate one of the greatest tv shows of all time but then also create a really mediocre movie 25 years later. i am not surprised at all. i will pass on david chase, film director.
"You already have 8 punches in your loyalty card, why would you stop before your 10th?"
uziq
Member
+492|3422
hmm i think the essays are overall more enjoyable, in that harpers/new yorker'ish way of tuning into someone who is an amusing, witty, sometimes incisive and trenchant, etc, commentator. he had a very strong voice which is why i guess so many people cottoned onto him as a 'once-in-a-generation' writer. (joan didion, who died recently, fulfilled this same function for a previous generation.)

in some ways he really did sum-up the sort of hyperactive, hysterical tone of culture and society in that late-90s/early 00s moment. the information overload, the persistent nagging addictions and enticements, the superfluity and overwhelmingness of it all. his style really cracked that, sometimes in an overly mannered and self-conscious'ish (the constant footnotes and asides are funny ... at first, but c'mon) way, but sometimes very beautifully and in a high, elegiac lyrical mode.

i actually think the opening section to TPK is one of the best things he ever wrote. if he kept up that momentum through the whole thing, it would have been an astonishing step forward, and maturation, from IJ. also, some of the best fiction he ever put out is buried deep in the short story collections. like george saunders, his short stories tend to get done with their allegorical-moralizing stuff a lot quicker. they're less tedious.

you're right about him getting cancelled. his literary stablemates have been in for a drubbing in recent years. it's fashionable to hate on franzen and co. now when in the 1990s they were the 'bad boys' of the literary scene and the rising stars. now they seem like middle-aged boorish white men. DFW was bad to women and it's no accident that 85% of his most fanatical readers are college-age guys.

but i could go on about that for a while. there's a veritable literary tradition of 'male' books written by domineering male 'genius' authors and looked up to by cultish, adoring male fans. that goes back from DFW to delillo, to pynchon, to joyce ... etc. books that can be wielded as an easy signifier of intelligence. you get the idea.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

uziq wrote:

'time invested' in a 'franchise'. some people really need to take an arts degree. a good film or a good novel is not a 'franchise'. burger king is a franchise. these things aren't infinitely replicable or extensible, and it's no shame that they can't be.

look what happened when those shameless profiteers bullied a senile harper lee into making a 'sequel' to mockingbird. disgusting.

even with regards to some of my favourite writers on the planet, the ones who have impacted and influenced me most, i still haven't read everything they've ever done. i still don't even like everything they wrote. not everything is going to be masterpiece, every time. it's lightning-in-a-bottle stuff, after a certain application of talent, that is.

people seem confused that david chase could write and orchestrate one of the greatest tv shows of all time but then also create a really mediocre movie 25 years later. i am not surprised at all. i will pass on david chase, film director.
"You already have 8 punches in your loyalty card, why would you stop before your 10th?"
Have you gotten around to watching Sopranos yet?
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

Not start to finish in the traditional sense. Seen a lot of highlight reels though. It's on a backburner.

You don't seem very happy as a fan, so I can't tell you how long it will remain on the backburner.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

I'll add that by the time I get around to feeling like starting one of these shows, sometimes it's already migrated off of the streaming service. Remind me again, Mr. Gates, why physical media is pointless.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689

uziq wrote:

hmm i think the essays are overall more enjoyable, in that harpers/new yorker'ish way of tuning into someone who is an amusing, witty, sometimes incisive and trenchant, etc, commentator. he had a very strong voice which is why i guess so many people cottoned onto him as a 'once-in-a-generation' writer. (joan didion, who died recently, fulfilled this same function for a previous generation.)

in some ways he really did sum-up the sort of hyperactive, hysterical tone of culture and society in that late-90s/early 00s moment. the information overload, the persistent nagging addictions and enticements, the superfluity and overwhelmingness of it all. his style really cracked that, sometimes in an overly mannered and self-conscious'ish (the constant footnotes and asides are funny ... at first, but c'mon) way, but sometimes very beautifully and in a high, elegiac lyrical mode.

i actually think the opening section to TPK is one of the best things he ever wrote. if he kept up that momentum through the whole thing, it would have been an astonishing step forward, and maturation, from IJ. also, some of the best fiction he ever put out is buried deep in the short story collections. like george saunders, his short stories tend to get done with their allegorical-moralizing stuff a lot quicker. they're less tedious.

you're right about him getting cancelled. his literary stablemates have been in for a drubbing in recent years. it's fashionable to hate on franzen and co. now when in the 1990s they were the 'bad boys' of the literary scene and the rising stars. now they seem like middle-aged boorish white men. DFW was bad to women and it's no accident that 85% of his most fanatical readers are college-age guys.

but i could go on about that for a while. there's a veritable literary tradition of 'male' books written by domineering male 'genius' authors and looked up to by cultish, adoring male fans. that goes back from DFW to delillo, to pynchon, to joyce ... etc. books that can be wielded as an easy signifier of intelligence. you get the idea.
Yeah I liked TPK's opening too. Thinking it over, there were flashes of brilliance.

I never read "Freedom" or whatever it was by Franzen. People call it a modern great American novel but the synopsis and some spoiler reviews make it sound meh. The whole thing about the Iraq War also sounded like something that wouldn't age well since 10 years from now people will barely remember the Iraq War. People already do in fact. This is of course if I am thinking of the right thing.

Speaking of suicide, and being bad to women, I want to read for whom the bell tolls or whatever by Hemingway. I already know the ending, the famous ending but the book has all of my obsessions: fascism, war, European women with big noses and accents.

I think my Zombie book is more culturally tuned to 21st century America than Franzen's Freedom. Maybe my feelings would change if he shot himself.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Not start to finish in the traditional sense. Seen a lot of highlight reels though. It's on a backburner.

You don't seem very happy as a fan, so I can't tell you how long it will remain on the backburner.
I am unhappy because the Sopranos, and Cowboy Bebop were masterpieces. You need to see both. You could finish CB in one sitting. The episodes are 24 minutes long and only 20ish episodes
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
Also regarding the soprano clips
Spoiler (highlight to read):
the reason why that guy twice slapped tony when he said he thought about killing his dad is because that character did in fact kill his dad. He killed him during an argument over the big nose girl in the other thread. That girl was his dad's new wife that he stole. That's why in the end of the scene in the other thread when she calls him a "mother fucker" it was a big deal because she knew that he killed his father to sleep with her.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Not start to finish in the traditional sense. Seen a lot of highlight reels though. It's on a backburner.

You don't seem very happy as a fan, so I can't tell you how long it will remain on the backburner.
sopranos is a near-perfect series. why would a shitty netflix movie blemish the integrity of the original series?

watching a canonical tv series by 'seeing the highlights' is like saying you've read a novel because you skipped to the end. you're literally missing 95% of what makes it so good: the long character arcs, the worldbuilding and sense of setting/place, the modulations of pace and tempo.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

It doesn't. One of the points I've made a lot is that a remake or bad sequel or whatever doesn't invalidate a quality original.

I'm not saying that seeing bits and pieces is the complete experience. It comes so highly recommended that I fully intend to watch it, when in the mood. I was just messing with macbeth.

pass on cats, matrix 4.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
i just renewed my subscription to mubi for the year, which is basically a well-curated version of netflix for movies, so expect plenty more reviews of insufferable pretentious dramas with tricky european or asian language actors.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
I have Disney Plus from a relative. They have a Boba Fett show now. I will not watch it.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422
1 corinthians 13:11

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