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Added 2024-09-01 17:43:06 +0000 UTCwill, barring hasard (the French kind), be up Monday-night-into-Tuesday-morning
thanks for yr patience and, as Keith Cozart used to say, Sorry 4 the Weight
MSJ (from Missouri, Joy of Man's Desiring)
Comments
Sometimes I wonder if Bresson was making Lancelot as a sneaky comedy. The decision to make the armor incredibly noisy—we’re subjected to almost constant creaks and squeaks from people thudding along in their plate armor—is so perverse that I can’t imagine it wasn’t done in the spirit of fucking with the audience.
Ashley Naftule
2024-09-03 23:21:38 +0000 UTCI love FOUR NIGHTS as well. *Jean Eustache voice* Isabelle Weingarten, helloooooo on the commentary track for MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, Terry Jones talked about how, when LANCELOT was shown in the UK, it was months *after* HOLY GRAIL came out, so audiences were primed to laugh at the (deadly serious, ghastly) carnage in Bresson's film. He didn't even sound like he felt bad about it, it was like "Damn that's crazy, sorry Bobert"
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-03 14:10:21 +0000 UTCI get the sense of a sticky gravity, or like one of those feverish dreams wherein you're arguing with yourself desperately about something that doesn't make any sense at all but you feel it's desperately crucial you get to the bottom of it, and when you wake all you have is sweat soaked sheets and a dull headache.. but then I've currently got COVID so... Lived in a hinterzone that sounds a little like that in England, but really, the ghosts that haunt England seem nothing at all like the deranged spirits of the American terroir
Divad Kong
2024-09-03 07:52:44 +0000 UTCReally that's pretty close. Missouri is a land of neither/nor. • It's geographically at the edge of the Midwest, but it's really more like the South. • It's a redneck state, but the big cities are mostly far more "white ethnic" than WASP. Tons of Irish Catholics such as myself, Czechs, Balkanites, Italians. It's overwhelmingly white and segregated, but there's a whole city within Kansas City that's like 200,000 Latinos, many of them either recent immigrants or children of immigrants, with street signs in Spanish, Spanish-speaking cops, etc. • It was, and probably still is, the crystal meth capital of the world. Specifically the city of Independence, which is where Joseph Smith said the New Jerusalem would be. I swear to god that there's a Mormon church here that has a helicopter pad in case Jesus Christ returns via helicopter. • That all-important American qualifier, "Which side of the Civil War did it fight on?" – Missouri's answer is "Neither! Both!" We never joined a side, and there were huge Union vs. Confederate militia battles here, one quite close to my house. • All our heroes – Charlie Parker, T.S. Eliot, William Burroughs, Stan Brakhage – got the fuck out of Missouri as quickly as they could. • Over the last couple years, Missouri seems to have inherited the status of "allusion to shithole place nobody would want to live," which was previously accorded to states like Idaho, West Virginia, Oklahoma, et al. • You could call it a Rust Belt state, at least the big cities in the north, but it really isn't, because we never had an economy based on heavy industry. Our old thing was stockyards and river shipping, and our new thing is predatory loans.
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-03 06:54:53 +0000 UTCLancelot du Lac rocks. It’s like the evil twin of Boorman’s Excalibur drained of all magic and myth—just sullen, weary men clomping around in the woods in squeaky armor and pulping themselves in the least dynamic battle scenes ever put to film. Also strongly recommend Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (it’s on Internet Archive). It’s a film his estate has disowned at certain points, but it’s great—a loose adaptation of “White Nights” that really captures the vibe of bumming around downtown at night and trying to find meaning in synchronicities and weird shit you see along the way.
Ashley Naftule
2024-09-03 05:34:33 +0000 UTCPete - and this applies whether or not you are the wandering, and apparently very online shade of the late singer/activist - definitely run don't walk to L'argent, which looks fantastic on the Criterion Blu-ray (and is probably on the channel). Une femme douce, his first Dostoevsky adaptation, is kind of a twin to The Devil, Probably, in that both are anchored by suicide but approach it from very different angles. Fuck, Lancelot du lac might be my favorite actually.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-01 21:23:21 +0000 UTCPete, I'm gonna be frank with you: I think it was bad when you tried to cut the power cables with an axe at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival because Bob Dylan was playing a Stratocaster
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-01 19:52:10 +0000 UTCI need to do myself a favor and watch L’argent. Loved Au Hasard Balthasar, Trial of Joan of Arc, and The Devil, Probably.
Pete Seeger
2024-09-01 19:38:29 +0000 UTCWhat's up with Missouri? One of those places as a Scottish person I can't really be convinced exists in any real sense. Missouri... Na it's no right. Off somehow
Divad Kong
2024-09-01 19:13:53 +0000 UTCHighly recommend taking the whole ride, although if animal harm (even if faked) is a trigger, take that into consideration for AHB. The two times I saw it it wrecked me but adding 2 dogs to my life has made my animal empathy an unprotected nerve, so.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-01 18:53:45 +0000 UTCBresson is one of those guys that I've known about for half my life, but I'm pretty sure I only ever "saw" his work while obliterated on some combination of booze and pills in my early 20s, so I don't really know
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-01 18:34:55 +0000 UTCdo you fuck with Bresson in general? on some days I think it's his masterpiece. (although on most days I think it's L'argent.)
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-01 18:20:04 +0000 UTCthat's very kind of you, but this one's just late cos I've been away from home & ended up being unable to record at the hotel, which I thought I could probably do
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-01 18:10:41 +0000 UTCexactly what I was thinking, because I'll tell you something you may not know, and this is official D/C lore: I've never actually seen that movie, but I love donkeys
Michael S. Judge
2024-09-01 18:09:53 +0000 UTCExcited, but remember that you can take time off production if your health demands it
William Engels
2024-09-01 18:09:02 +0000 UTCAu hasard, Michael S. Judge
Rohmer Simpson
2024-09-01 18:07:46 +0000 UTCinsha'Allah 🙏
Watermane
2024-09-01 17:45:25 +0000 UTC
