Tag: Books & Movies

Ignoring Today

Entertainment

John Nolte has written an excellent piece over at Breitbart about the absolute suckage that is modern movies.

I don’t waste my days, my life watching any of this crap. Every time I give something a chance, I get burned. Movies vouched for by critics, stuff I recently wasted my time with,  like Lucky (2017) and The Outfit (2022)…  Why? Why did I do that? Why did I waste my precious off-hours sifting through the massive pile of garbage that is Amazon Prime, that is Netflix, that is modern-day entertainment?

Like Nolte, I have a collection of movies on DVD, and not one but TWO multi-format DVD players (one in use, the other in an unopened box in a closet), and my Christmas/birthday lists inevitably contain “old” movies that I love.

As for the modern shit, I consider it a good year if there’s ONE movie I can watch all the way through.

Business Decision

Business, Marketing / Advertising, Movies

I love to read bullshit like this:

John Wick 4 trailer sets up battle between Keanu Reeves and Bill Skarsgard: ‘Only one can survive’

Uh huh.  Like any movie studio is going to kill off the hero of a very successful “franchise”.  I can just visualize the management’s response to some young dimwit suggesting that action:

Let’s face it:  when it comes to art, business always wins.  Always.

Afterthought:  I watched the first Wick movie, hated it with a passion (actually never made it to the end) so I’ve never watched any of the sequels.  The above post has more to do with the marketing thereof than anything related to the movie itself.

Cinematic Crap

Entertainment, Movies

Via Insty, here’s another piece about how today’s movies suck, from a sound perspective.  (The article is only listed as “Updated Sep 22, 2022”, so it may actually be a rewrite — and a lot of it seems familiar.)

I was going to comment on it in a post, but a lot of what I planned to write seemed awfully familiar to me.  And somewhere in my broken memory, I remembered that I’d already done just that, in Mumbles In The Darkness earlier in June of this year.

So that’s my comment.

Which leads me to a tangential thought.  In looking to see whether I had written on the topic earlier, I used the “Search” function on this very web site, to the right of the page, just under the header.

All I did was type “movie” in the search bar, and a veritable timeline of my writings on the topic followed.

And I found myself wasting spending the next hour or so re-reading some of my old posts, and apart from anything else, I was amazed at how little my opinions have changed (not too surprising, considering the writer, but still).

Here’s a thought.  If ever you’re horribly bored with life, are sick of playing on the Internet but couldn’t be bothered to get out of your chair, type in a random topic (e.g. “rifle”, “travel”, “Colt” or “socialist” and so on), and go back in time to see what I’ve written on the topic.

As journeys go, it’s cheaper than driving or going to the range (!!!!!!).  As to how much you might enjoy it, I make no comment.

Classic Beauty: Anna Magnani

Classic Beauty

Quite possibly the greatest actress who ever lived, Anna Magnani was so good because whatever character she played, she was always playing herself.  No better description of her acting is this one:  “Whenever Magnani laughs or cries (which is often), it’s as if you’ve never seen anyone laugh or cry before: has laughter ever been so burstingly joyful or tears so shatteringly sad?”

And her best quote ever:

“No man can control me, although many have tried.”

The Guns Of August

History

I’ve probably read Barbara Tuchman’s book of the same name about half a dozen times, maybe more.  It’s a massive read, I think;  not for the faint-hearted and certainly a difficult one for the non-military-history reader.

TGOA is magnificent as a military textbook alone, but what Tuchman brings to the party is an exhaustive set of the biographies of the principal characters so that we can understand not just what they did, but in many cases why they did it.

And I know that Tuchman was a tired old New York Lefty, but not in this work.

Anyway, I happened on this EwwwChoob video which follows the book faithfully, albeit cutting a few parts out (because otherwise it would run for not 100 minutes, but for three days — about as long as it takes to read Tuchman’s volume).

And it has lots and lots of original footage, none of that tiresome reenactment nonsense.  Enjoy.

Afterthought:  Tuchman’s prequel to The Guns Of August, A Proud Tower, will change your ideas of history completely, and for the better.  It did mine, at any event.

Also:  link fixed.