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Posted: **Tue Jul 23, 2019 11:51 pm**

As I get older, the one vein of film criticism that I have less patience with than any other is this Film School 101 approach where films are doing something wrong if they're not rigidly structured in a particular way. The merits of Schoonmaker's contributions aside, "it has five second acts" just sounds like such a conformist line of criticism.

Posted: **Wed Jul 24, 2019 12:06 am**

And most of those people seem to think the three-act play’s the only dramatic structure in existence.

Posted: **Wed Jul 24, 2019 12:29 am**

I lived to see the grown-up version of that child from The Goodbye Girl indirectly bash Thelma Schoonmaker on social media.

Posted: **Wed Jul 24, 2019 12:30 am**

Mr. Sausage: Exactly. It’s just something they read in a screenwriting guide or secondhand from some other hack critics and now talk that way because it makes them sound smart.

All that said, Scorsese’s movies seem pretty conventionally structured to me, so the criticism seems especially bizarre in this case. But CASINO was long so I guess he doesn’t know how to tell stories.

Posted: **Wed Jul 24, 2019 12:31 am**

Neither Scorsese nor Tarantino is particularly to my taste but the internet handwringing about them today is so annoying that it makes we wish like mad I was a huge fan of both, just to avoid any association with all the incompetent point-scoring and hot takes.

Posted: **Wed Jul 24, 2019 3:32 am**

Were you thinking of this, by any chance?

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/j ... -hollywood

Basically a glorified rap sheet (as if we hadn't already heard about all these things ad nauseam) with some curious inclusions: one supposed outrage perpetrated by the director referenced in the article includes the scene in Pulp Fiction in which Uma Thurman gets "stabbed" by a hypodermic needle in an attempt to save her from an overdose. If the writer thinks that qualifies as an instance of cinematic violence against women, I hope he never visits an actual hospital.

(Though it’s fair to say male characters were also subjected to extreme violence.)

You don't say.

All of this culminates in an admission that the writer has no idea what's in this film, but with a question as to whether it's really worth bothering to find out. Well, I dunno. Is it? Maybe you can make that choice for yourself and spare us your thinking out loud about it?

The question now is: is it time to cancel Quentin Tarantino?

I think the real question is whether it's time to cancel your Guardian subscription.

(I know it's shooting fish in a barrel to make fun of "comment is free" pieces in The Guardian. But where do they find these utterly pointless, piss-weak provocations?)

I'll say one thing for Twitter: shit discourse, but the thorough roasting the writer is receiving here is at least some salve for the wound of reading the piece. Even if they're QT fanboys, they're on the side of the angels for once here.

https://twitter.com/RoyChacko7/status/1 ... 7840447490

Posted: **Wed Jul 24, 2019 7:36 am**

Shit got downright juicy when someone posted this image of the actual body count in his films up till Django Unchained.

Some more gems:

Mia Wallace was given a life saving adrenaline shot. Which this person calls abuse? Okay.

"Respect a woman's right to die from an accidental drug overdose." ~ No woman ever

Posted: **Wed Jul 24, 2019 7:41 am**

I was considering linking to that Guardian piece but it was too awful to merit and discussion. I never thought the Guardian would let something like this in, but then again I rarely ever read the Guardian so...
How did all this Socraese shit get started? I can understand Tarantino getting some heat right now, but why Marty?

Posted: **Wed Jul 24, 2019 8:01 am**

Mr Sausage wrote: Wed Jul 24, 2019 12:06 am And most of those people seem to think the three-act play’s the only dramatic structure in existence.

But give them this, and they'll say "oh, but that's just another 3-act play, how unoriginal !"

Posted: **Wed Jul 24, 2019 3:45 pm**

dda1996a wrote: Wed Jul 24, 2019 7:41 am I was considering linking to that Guardian piece but it was too awful to merit and discussion. I never thought the Guardian would let something like this in, but then again I rarely ever read the Guardian so...
How did all this Socraese shit get started? I can understand Tarantino getting some heat right now, but why Marty?

DiCaprio connection, which lead to Ira shade of the two filmmakers. Even more amusingly was one of the comments in the thread said Marty was the Ace of Base of film, just repeating the same beats all the time. The director who's made Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, King of Comedy, New York New York and Silence. It's as if they are still stuck on Scorsese only doing gangster pictures with Gimme Shelter in the soundtrack.

This gem was deleted last night, ironic coming from a Michael Mann fan.

Posted: **Wed Jul 24, 2019 3:51 pm**

And that gets dozens of likes. ](*,)

Posted: **Wed Jul 24, 2019 5:19 pm**

The deletion was a good move. Apologizing for trivial things is worse than any ridiculous review.

Posted: **Thu Jul 25, 2019 8:14 am**

waste of a movie. things happen and that's it

Posted: **Thu Jul 25, 2019 2:43 pm**

A contemporary review of L'Avventura?

Posted: **Tue Jul 30, 2019 5:14 pm**

hysterical Colin!

Posted: **Thu Aug 01, 2019 12:27 am**

(Haxan) looks like Mad Max: Fury Road if made in 1920.

Posted: **Thu Aug 01, 2019 12:38 am**

By those standards, Nosferatu looks like a 1922 version of EastEnders.

Posted: **Thu Aug 01, 2019 2:39 am**

Jack Kubrick wrote: Wed Jul 24, 2019 3:45 pm This gem was deleted last night, ironic coming from a Michael Mann fan.

I hadn’t seen what he was faux-apologizing for until Glenn Kenny retweeted someone who had a screenshot:

Posted: **Thu Aug 01, 2019 3:57 am**

I mean it's one thing to criticize the Catholic Church as an institution but I'm unsure what that has to do with the film proper? If you're a really brave and inquisitive soul though you can go to Richard's Twitter account and read about his juul habit which provided me more entertainment than his drive by comments about films.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2019 7:00 pm**

“Verified Amazon Customer” would like you all to know this about the Better Off Dead Blu-ray:

Five Stars
For an 80's dvd well condition and great movie clear and brought me back to my teen years

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Posted: **Thu Sep 12, 2019 5:44 pm**

This review of Shinoda's Assassination has 42 likes on Letterboxd.

I'm not a huge fan of these types of films. The camerawork was pretty good, though. It slid and zoomed. Right around 1:39:20 into it, the frantic handheld camerawork was pretty crazy.

Vegan points:
There's a song about not tying a horse to a tree.

Posted: **Thu Sep 12, 2019 5:47 pm**

Nevertheless: three stars.

Posted: **Thu Sep 12, 2019 7:50 pm**

Ah, the Vegan Alert woman can post literally anything and it gets a ton of interaction on there. The gimmick was (and sometimes still is) funny in its misguided earnestness, but she's a terrible reviewer.

Posted: **Thu Sep 12, 2019 9:34 pm**

soundchaser wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 5:47 pm Nevertheless: three stars.

I’ve already mentioned this before, but this is the most useless part of her omnipresence— 99% of what she watches is three stars or a half star on either side. Completely useless when someone grades everything as okay

Posted: **Tue Sep 17, 2019 10:03 pm**

From a review of American Factory:

We are a country of Hippocrates that will stay in this cycle until we start recognizing what it will take to improve our own culture.

Love it.

Also in the same review:

The UAW in my opinion helped ruin the auto jobs in the US. Sure these people were quoted as making $29 / hr for GM and now make $12-$14 which needs to be fixed, but unions need to find a place where they can partner with business, rather than the constant adversarial role they play in the auto industry.

They seem to have missed how virulently anti-union the management is in the film. During some large company function, Sen. Sherrod Brown comments that the plant should unionize , and the American VP of Fuyao gets real upset, and angrily jokes that they should kill the senator (pretty much his exact words). The company spends $1M on an anti-union consulting company, and forces employees to attend mandatory and multiple anti-union meetings. Yet somehow this reviewer comes away with the idea that unions are adversarial.

More:

One US lady summed it up well, by stating the union does not help her (a good worker) rather it protects the bad worker.

Very wrong. The union protects all workers. The good worker would very likely benefit from higher wages (just the threat of unionizing leads the company to up wages $2/hour, in an effort to thwart the union). There would be better enforcement of safety regulations. A fairer process in case of termination or injury or dispute. More job security. Etc.

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