#Aggregate Films

[darkmovies]

Hell Of A Summer (2023) Date de sortie : Prochainement Réalisateur : Billy Bryk, Finn Wolfhard Scénario :  Billy Bryk, Finn Wolfhard Avec : Finn Wolfhard, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Fred Hechinger Pays : États-Unis / Canada

[bkenber]

Melissa McCarthy on Playing a Con Artist in 'Identity Thief'

WRITER’S NOTE: This article was originally written in 2013. Ever since she first found recognition for her character of Sookie St. James on “Gilmore Girls,” Melissa McCarthy has left an indelible impression on us all. After watching her breakthrough role as the abrasive and shamelessly raunchy Megan in “Bridesmaids,” a role which earned her a deserved Oscar nomination for Best Supporting…

[yellowmanula]

Drugi dzień Aggregate Festival w Berlinie – wyjątkowe doświadczenie dźwiękowe w niezwykłej przestrzeni! 🎶 Wędrujemy przez miasto, zatrzymując się na grecką ucztę (i klasyczne Ouzo 🍸), a potem trafiamy do kościoła Auenkirche, gdzie organy stają się syntezatorami! 🎹 Elektronika i akustyka przenikają się w hipnotyzujących kompozycjach. Jeśli chcesz poczuć klimat tego wydarzenia, zostań z nami do końca!

[unproduciblesmackdown]

since summer stock's Official like press opening was wednesday, there's a couple reviews i've found (without extra digging) and they don't have a world of relevant information but a tiny bit

nyt made it a critic's pick so that's as a rule helpful for the show, says orville "has a secret — no, not that one" in an unisolated and unsurprising instance of prioritizing the critic's own general savviness over actually giving the reader info. i'm assuming this Quip means to imply "his secret is not being closeted (gay style)" but there's nothing further on this point. also says that gloria's character is "beefed-up" which like, you figure all the roles, plotlines, themes are, but one might especially hope for it for gloria b/c really that's who the film is meanest to, and the review says that she has involvement in like created backstory/explanation for aesthetic elements of the "get happy" number (also present in the film's of course) which is truly great and generally encouraging for the role, who in the film despite being responsible for bringing about the whole premise of "her sister discovers following her passions. which are also gloria's passions btw" really only gets the role in that finale of "staying out of jane's way" so, already knew the musical was handling these things v differently but confirmation is nice. the review also mentions will's performance, among others', is always funny.

and that review and the also positive one from the hartford courant also provide the lore that margaret wingate "wants to own all the land in the region. The Falbury farm is in her way, and forcing a marriage between her son Orville." the sentence, surely erroneously, cuts off there: i'm guessing it's like "and Is forcing a marriage between Jane And her son Orville." explains the mystery of "hmm what's that possible map framed on the wingate house set panel" (and maybe what orville's got rolled up underarm in that next gif) and also does help kind of enhance the film's points where like, it doesn't seem like orville and jane Don't like each other or anything, they Are already engaged (probably not the case in the musical), but also orville's dad is pushing it and getting in the way b/c this is like [the town is implicitly named after both wingait and falbury] but no particular Practical reason given. like how he mentions like "yknow jane your great great great grandfather falbury was the one who made Acting illegal here" (like lmao what?????) and this is not explained further nor reckoned with further b/c nobody actually tries leveraging this lol. and he's also like got this shop and presumed local influence and is well off while jane is in some financial straits and that's relevant but like, all via the tractor that they absolutely did not want to put in this stage show (as everyone agrees with lol) and this would make things more direct. and it also says the show within the show is partly a fundraiser for the farm which also makes everything work better with more cohesion and relevant stakes lol

and also everything (even via reading between the lines of a [not officially published] review where they didn't happen to like it much) saying what was also what i figured (based as well as like, what people involved were just telling via interviews) that like nothing's really trying to "subvert" the movie even as they're being completely flexible with reworking it; "book writer Cheri Steinkellner stuck to the movie’s spirit rather than its letter" as the nyt review says. with the review that didn't like it pointing to that the person did not like that spirit lol like well yeah then that adds up. but that's what i've learned from that press opening so far: Orville's Secret and Margaret's Land Scheme

[garvescope]

You Can’t Upload to Amazon Anymore, But You’re Not Out of Options

If you were hoping to release your indie film directly to Amazon Prime Video, it may already be too late. Amazon Prime Direct, once a wide-open platform for filmmakers to upload their work without a middleman, has quietly finished phasing out open submissions from independent creators. No fanfare. No press release. No dramatic public takedown. Just a slow fade into the background, replaced by a…

[reimenaashelyee]

The Creator's Guide to Comics Devices is OPEN!!! comicsdevices.com

An online library of visual-narrative devices that are used in the medium of comics and other sequential art.

Happy Halloween! I'm really excited to be finally launching* what is maybe one of my most ambitious, largest work yet. This online library is the next phase of a research project that began in May 2020, when I first mused on how comics as a field doesn't have a resource that catalogues devices used in the medium. Like, theatre has devices, so does literature, and film! So why shouldn't comics? I always had an interest in comics studies and analysis. I love reading, making and thinking comics. However most of my knowledge was intuitive - I learned comics from osmosis and experience. This is true for many of my peers. Speaking about comics as a creator is hard, because we don't have a robust system of language. When we had to speak, many of us tend to reach for the language developed for film by film practitioners. If there is language specific to comics, it's either scattered in multiple blogs or hidden away in academic journals. The Comics Devices library is meant to aggregate everything and everybody into a single hub! After exploring some multiple resources, alongside some original, independent research, here is the first edition! * The Comics Devices project is still a work-in-progress! It's not final, nor will it ever be. This is why I am seeking contributors to help build this library. Translations, comics examples, etc. There is a lot of work to do! If you are interested, reply to this post or submit an expression of interest on this page.  Have fun everyone!! (Now time for me to melt x_x)

[gael-garcia]

PALESTINE FILM INDEX

Palestine Film Index is a growing list of films from and about Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation, made by Palestinians and those in solidarity with them. The index starts with films from the revolutionary period (68 - 82) made by the militant filmmakers of the Palestine Film Unit and their allies, and extends through a multitude of voices to the present day. It is by no means a complete or exhaustive representation of the vast universe that is Palestinian cinema, but is only a small fragmentary list that we hope nontheless can be used as an instrument of study & solidarity. As tools of knowledge against zionist propaganda and towards Palestinian liberation.

The century long war against Palestinians by the zionist project is one waged not only militarily but also culturally. The act of filmmaking, preservation, and distribution becomes an act against this attempted cultural erasure of ethnic cleansing. The power inherent in this form as a weapon against the genocidal project of zionism is evidenced in the ways it has been historically & currently targeted by the occupation forces: from the looting & stealing of the Palestine Cinema Institute archives during the siege of Beirut in 1982, through the long history of targeted assassinations of Palestinian filmmakers, journalists, artists, & writers (from PFU founder Hani Jawharieh, to Ghassan Kanafani, Shireen Abu Akleh, Refaat Alareer, and the over 100 journalists killed in the currently ongoing war on Gaza).

It is in this spirit of the use of film and culture as a way of focusing & transmitting information & knowledge that we hope this list can be used as one in an assortment of educational tools against hasbara (a coordinated and intricate system of zionist propaganda, media manipulation, & social engineering, etc) and all forms of propaganda that is weaponized against the Palestinian people. Zionist media & its collaborators remain one of the most effective fronts of the war, used to manufacture consent through deeply ingrained psychological manipulation of the general public agency. Critical and autonomous thought must be used as a tool of dismantling these frameworks. In this realm, film can play a vital roll in your toolkit/arsenal. Film must be understood as one front of the greater resistance. We hope in some small way we can help to distribute these manifestations of Palestinian life and the struggle towards liberation.

This list began as small aggregation to share among friends and comrades in 2021 and has since expanded to the current and growing form (it is added to almost every day). We have links for through which each film can be viewed along with descriptions, details such as run time, year, language, etc. We also have a supplemental list of related materials (texts, audio, supplemental video) that is small but growing. We have added information on contacts for distributors and filmmakers of each film in order to help people or groups who are interested in using this list to organize public screenings of these films. The makers of this list do not control the rights to these films and we strongly urge those interested in screening the works to get in touch with the filmmaker or distributors before doing so. This list was made with best intentions in mind, and in most cases with permission of filmmaker or through a publically available link, but if any film has mistakenly been added without the permission of a filmmaker involved and you would like us to remove it, or conversely if you are a filmmaker not included who would like your film to be added, or for any other thoughts, suggestions, additions, subtractions, complaints or concerns, please contact us at palestinefilmindex@gmail.com. No one involved in this list is doing it as a part of any organization, foundation or non-profit and we are not being paid to do this, it is merely a labor of love and solidarity. From the river to the sea, Palestine

[brainrockets]

People act like the characters we've met from the Citadel must be suspect. Must secretly be evil and untrustworthy.

And like has media generally rewarded that instinct? Yeah. Do I think that's what's happening here? Probably not?

Because I think it's worse. I think that many of the Citadel folks were have met are nice. Good to their families. Not jerks. Not mustache twirling monsters. Just people.

People that are inside an imperial machine where they don't have to generally count the cost or consequences of what they do.

And where's the line between just living your life and complicity? Suvi and that scared farmer girl who believes the enemy EATS people. Suvi and Silver view themselves as defending the homes of their people and freeing them from the enemy. Is that evil? Are they evil only in the aggregate? If you have to zoom out that far how could you know? And if you know, what do you have the power to change?

I live in an Empire. In systems of racism and murder at the foundation. I have had to do a lot of work to learn that and decide what to do with that. There's things that are out of my scope of control. There's things that are within my scope of control. It's hard to know the difference.

I wrestle with it constantly.

I don't think the story WBN is telling, a story that explicitly harkens to Ghibli as a strong influence, keeping in mind the strong moral stance taken by Ghibli films, is likely to make it super easy for us or the characters to draw the kind of lines that are comfortable.

Silver might break Sky's heart in a conflict between their loyalty to the Citadel versus their fidelity to one another, sure. But also, maybe not. I mean we also don't know who will get swept up in Quest fever next. We don't know if there will come a breaking point for multiple folks or if a breaking point will ever come for any of them.

Suvi's parents did their sneaky shit together. So we know that it's happened. And sure, it could be the trio on their own versus the world. But it could also be thousands of thousands of people all singing the Rain Road in defiance.

[reasonsforhope]

"Samuel Onyango’s office at Kibera Primary School is serene and spacious. His table is neatly arranged, with an assortment of files and an array of books. One side of his cream-colored office is decked with aggregate performance scores, and another shows off several trophies in a glass cabinet. Last year, Onyango’s school performed a traditional dance and scooped third place in the National Drama and Film Festivals, where schools across the country competed for the top prize.

But today Onyango, the school’s principal, is bragging about something much more basic: Thanks to an innovative community program, his students and teachers are no longer getting sick from dirty water.

Onyango’s school, with a staff of 30 and a student body of about 1,700, is in Kibera, a neighborhood in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi that is widely known as Africa’s largest informal settlement. It is a community of houses made from mud or tin sheeting where residents have to hustle to meet even their most basic needs, like electricity or clean water.

It is also a community where creativity and innovation, at the heart of any hustle, are changing how some people can access clean water — and making major ripples in public health.

Onyango’s school has long gotten its water the same way many people in Kibera do: by buying it from independent suppliers, who truck water in and sell it for around $30 per 10,000 liters (about 2,650 gallons). But trucked water can be contaminated, despite suppliers’ promises, and Onyango’s students and staff were often using unclean water at home, too. It was common, he says, for both teachers and students to get sick and miss school because of waterborne illnesses.

Last November, Onyango’s school got connected to an aerial clean water system built by a local grassroots organization called SHOFCO, which stands for Shining Hope for Communities. “Once we got connected to SHOFCO’s water,” Onyango says, “cases of these ailments reduced to nil.”

SHOFCO’s water distribution system currently reaches about 40,000 people and distributes more than 3.7 million gallons of clean water per month.

Access to safe drinking water — and its equitable distribution — underpins public health. But for the estimated 250,000 people in Kibera, who live without any government infrastructure, clean water is often a luxury. Many people are using illegal water connections, which proliferate among the poor — there are nearly 130 in just three lesser-resourced Nairobi neighborhoods. But those DIY hookups can mix clean water with raw sewage, and Kenyan officials have recently warned of a looming public health crisis if water access is not prioritized.

Shifting weather patterns also increase the risk of waterborne illness, government officials say. The Ministry of Health and the Kenya Red Cross Society have called out severe flooding during the El Niño weather pattern as a source of a recent major cholera outbreak in parts of the country. Kibera was not spared this risk: The floods led to the contamination of various sources of water in the sprawling neighborhood.

But the aerial piping system SHOFCO built in 2012 — the one that brings water to Onyango’s school — saved some Kibera residents, quite literally. With collaboration from health and county authorities, SHOFCO has all but eliminated diarrheal disease in the communities that use its aerial piping system, according to Gladys Mwende, a program officer at SHOFCO. In the health facilities SHOFCO runs, the incidences of diarrheal infections have also gone down, she adds.

Pictured: People in Kibera’s Makina section pass by the signature blue pillars that hold up SHOFCO’s aerial water piping system. Visual: Sarah Waiswa/Harvard Public Health Magazine

“[Poor sanitation is the reason] that our water is aerial piped,” says Kennedy Odede, the founder and CEO of SHOFCO. Piping water in helps clean water maintain its integrity without interference from elements including tampering. In a huge community with no major infrastructure, piping seemed impossible — there was no money and no will to build a disruptive underground system connected to the city’s main water supply. Instead, Odede and his team put the pipes up in the air. “As somebody who grew up in Kibera, to see this clean water — which I have also drank — is powerful.”

SHOFCO’s water distribution system currently reaches about 40,000 people and distributes more than 3.7 million gallons of clean water per month — nearly 46 million gallons per year — at community water kiosks, which residents access with tokens linked to the mobile money platform M-Pesa. The water kiosks are pre-programmed to fill jerry cans that hold about five gallons at a cost of 3 Kenyan shillings, or about 23 U.S. cents.

A recent evaluation of SHOFCO’s clean water efforts, undertaken by the African Population and Health Research Center, shows diarrheal disease among children under age five have decreased by 31 percent where community members used SHOFCO water kiosks and received SHOFCO’s sanitation messaging.

“We don’t get as many cases of diarrhea even though now we are in the middle of the floods,” Mwende says. “Communities have not reported any outbreaks within the areas where we are working.”

Mohammed Suleiman is grateful for the change. Suleiman, 25, was born here, and it’s been his job for the last 18 years to fetch 135 gallons of water daily for his family’s personal needs and for their samosa business.

Two months ago, Sulieman contracted typhoid from the unsanitary water he was consuming. Once he recovered, he says, switching to SHOFCO water kiosks was a no-brainer.

“I don’t know where the other independent vendors get it from,” he says. But he trusts SHOFCO water. “Water sourced from SHOFCO is cleaner than that of other vendors,” he says. “I don’t have to treat water from [SHOFCO] kiosks before consuming it.”

And he’s the living proof: Since switching to SHOFCO water, Suleiman hasn’t been sick even once."

-via Undark, August 13, 2024

[play-now-my-lord]

A funny thing about the attempt to make Scorsese into one pole of those "highbrow (actually middlebrow) vs. middlebrow (actually lowbrow) art" tastes-great-more-filling stealth advertising things - okay, let's start over, a funny thing about Disney/Marvel directors and Scorsese talking shit on each other is this:

Scorsese views himself mostly as a craftsman, his films primarily as a jobsite, and gets asked questions about movies as part of that (admittedly very weird) job. His admirers see him as a visionary artist, but that's ultimately secondary for him to getting shit like cinematography, casting, direction, etc right - the things a director does, not what they aspire to. This is all over how he talks about other directors, focusing primarily on craft; it's actually pretty rare for him to make blanket statements about such-and-such a genre being artless schlock, the sort of shit you'd hear from someone who is a film critic for a living rather than gladhanding producers for a living.

The Disney/Marvel directors view themselves mostly as artists, their films primarily as a form of self-expression (admittedly under tight limits imposed by the demands of money), and are strongly incentivized to engage in something we might call "counter-criticism" by a mix of ego and studio pressure. Their concerns are at the end of the day artistic concerns, prestige and respect for achieving finished films, which is measurable in part by box office returns and in part by aggregate critical reception - which skews absurdly positive to begin with! But negative reviews by people they can't brush off are something they have an incredibly difficult time tolerating.

This state of affairs is, to put it lightly, incredibly strange. Scorsese is globally admired as a filmmaker with a specific artistic vision, but his vocabulary and concerns in embodying that vision are technical. The various directors of Disney/Marvel films are a revolving door of hired hands who have, exercise, and seemingly desire close to zero creative control over their most noteworthy work - and yet their concerns are artistic.

This is a dialogue that takes place on a smaller scale in many forms of art; it's extremely commonplace for artists with outsized industrial-scale success (and let us diplomatically say significantly compromised fidelity to their stated desires as artists) to wear the brittle persona of a misunderstood visionary, and for the actual visionaries who have achieved some notoriety (and the nobodies who live in their shadow) to have primarily technical and economistic concerns, and for these two groups to frequently butt heads while talking completely past each other. Something something Walter Benjamin, I guess!

[mariacallous]

One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.

The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon. What has transpired is fairly clear: A series of ICE raids and arrests late last week prompted protests in select areas of the city, namely downtown, near a federal building where ICE has offices, and around City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been other protests south of there, around a Home Depot in Paramount, where Border Patrol agents gathered last week. The majority of these protests have been civil (“I mostly saw clergy sit-ins and Tejano bands,” The American Prospect’s David Dayen wrote). There has been some looting and property destruction. “One group of vandals summoned several Waymo self-driving cars to the street next to the plaza where the city was founded and set them ablaze,” my colleague Nick Miroff, who has been present at the demonstrations, wrote.

As is common in modern protests, there has also been ample viral footage from news organizations showing militarized police responding aggressively in encounters, sometimes without provocation. In one well-circulated clip, an officer in riot gear fires a nonlethal round directly at an Australian television correspondent carrying a microphone while on air; another piece of footage shot from above shows a police officer on horseback trampling a protester on the ground.

All of these dynamics are familiar in the post-Ferguson era of protest. What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown.

Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what’s happening in L.A. varies considerably.

Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms. It is possible that one’s impression of the protests would be incorrectly skewed if informed only by Bluesky commentators, MSNBC guests, or self-proclaimed rational centrists. The right, for example, has mocked the idea of “mostly peaceful protests” as ludicrous when juxtaposed with video of what they see as evidence to the contrary. It’s likely that my grasp of the events and their politics is shaped by decades of algorithmic social-media consumption.

Yet the situation in L.A. only further clarifies the asymmetries among media ecosystems. This is not an even playing field. The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone. (It is not, despite President Donald Trump’s wildly disproportionate response, which includes deploying hundreds of U.S. Marines to the area and federalizing thousands of National Guard members.)

I spent the better part of the week drinking from this particular firehose, reading X and Truth Social posts and watching videos from Rumble. On these platforms, the protests are less a news event than a justification for the authoritarian use of force. Nearly every image or video contains selectively chosen visuals of burning cars or Mexican flags unfurling in a smog of tear gas, and they’re cycled on repeat to create a sense of overwhelming chaos. They have titles such as “CIVIL WAR ALERT” and “DEMOCRATS STOKE WW3!” All of this incendiary messaging is assisted by generative-AI images of postapocalyptic, smoldering city streets—pure propaganda to fill the gap between reality and the world as the MAGA faithful wish to see it.

I’ve written before about how the internet has obliterated the monoculture, empowering individuals to cocoon themselves in alternate realities despite confounding evidence—it is a machine that justifies any belief. This is not a new phenomenon, but the problem is getting worse as media ecosystems mature and adjust to new technologies. On Tuesday, one of the top results for one user’s TikTok search for Los Angeles curfew was an AI-generated video rotating through slop images of a looted city under lockdown. Even to the untrained eye, the images were easily identifiable as AI-rendered (the word curfew came out looking like ciuftew). Still, it’s not clear that this matters to the people consuming and sharing the bogus footage. Even though such reality-fracturing has become a load-bearing feature of our information environment, the result is disturbing: Some percentage of Americans believes that one of the country’s largest cities is now a hellscape, when, in fact, almost all residents of Los Angeles are going about their normal lives.

On platforms such as Bluesky and Instagram, I’ve seen L.A. residents sharing pictures of themselves going about their day-to-day lives—taking out the trash, going to the farmers’ market—and lots of pictures of the city’s unmistakable skyline against the backdrop of a beautiful summer day. These are earnest efforts to show the city as it is (fine)—an attempt to wrest control of a narrative, albeit one that is actually based in truth. Yet it’s hard to imagine any of this reaching the eyes of the people who participate in the opposing ecosystem, and even if it did, it’s unclear whether it would matter. As I documented in October, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton destroyed parts of the United States, AI-generated images were used by Trump supporters “to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.”

In the cinematic universe of right-wing media, the L.A. ICE protests are a sequel of sorts to the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. It doesn’t matter that the size and scope have been different in Los Angeles (at present, the L.A. protests do not, for instance, resemble the 100-plus nights of demonstrations and clashes between protesters and police that took place in Portland, Oregon, in 2020): Influencers and broadcasters on the right have seized on the association with those previous protests, insinuating that this next installment, like all sequels, will be a bigger and bolder spectacle. Politicians are running the sequel playbook—Senator Tom Cotton, who wrote a rightly criticized New York Times op-ed in 2020 urging Trump to “Send in the Troops” to quash BLM demonstrations, wrote another op-ed, this time for The Wall Street Journal, with the headline “Send in the Troops, for Real.” (For transparency’s sake, I should note that I worked for the Times opinion desk when the Cotton op-ed was published and publicly objected to it at the time.)

There is a sequel vibe to so much of the Trump administration’s second term. The administration’s policies are more extreme, and there’s a brazenness to the whole affair—nobody’s even trying to justify the plot (or, in this case, cover up the corruption and dubious legality of the government’s deportation regime). All of us, Trump supporters very much included, are treated as a captive audience, forced to watch whether we like it or not.

This feeling has naturally trickled down to much of the discourse and news around Trump’s second presidency, which feels (and generally is) direr, angrier, more intractable. The distortions are everywhere: People mainlining fascistic AI slop are occupying an alternate reality. But even those of us who understand the complexity of the protests are forced to live in our own bifurcated reality, one where, even as the internet shows us fresh horrors every hour, life outside these feeds may be continuing in ways that feel familiar and boring. We are living through the regime of a budding authoritarian—the emergency is here, now—yet our cities are not yet on fire in the way that many shock jocks say they are.

The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way.

[seat-safety-switch]

For a couple years, I worked in a video store in a small town. In many ways, this was the culmination of a childhood dream: routine, unchallenging labour. If you were a particularly annoying labour analyst, all I actually ever “did” was ring up rentals, restock returns in the morning, and clean the windows. Customer service has its own way of filling the space left by the actual work, though.

People who have worked retail are a sort of elite corps. For one thing, you’re never rude to another retail employee for the entire rest of your life. You’ve been in the trenches, too, and even if you somehow managed to escape, you’d still have had that shared trauma to know how bad that shift could get for that shelf-stocker at Maybe’s Drugs off I-40.

I have all the usual complaints, but there’s something else, too. My unique problem is this: I had this one customer who came in every Monday morning, asking for the same movie. We never had that movie, which is the crux of our conflict. He – and I can’t remember his name anymore, even if the electroshock therapy had been effective – never took “no” for an answer, and would come back the next week. He’d ask for the same thing, by title. No other details: no barcode, no publisher, no actors. Not even a description of the plot (he hadn’t seen it yet, obviously.) Now, this was before broadband internet was widely available, so I’d have to dial up after hours to America Online, and see if the movie had been added to their database. It never did, except one night I saw some folks talking about it in a video store chat room.

Their customers, too, were asking for this film. Insistently. After talking about it that night, we decided that we would form a bit of a trade union group. If any of us heard anything on this mysterious VHS, we would share the knowledge with the rest of the group. That retail-worker camaraderie at work again, you see. Nothing ever came of it, but I did end up becoming good friends with a manager at a Hobart’s Movies in Ames, Iowa, and we were even roommates for awhile before he got a new job at Seaworld. I moved on, too, making my slow, but inevitably in retrospect, drift towards the coast. Still, the whole thing bothered me. For years afterward, I would turn on my computer every Monday night, long after I had left the job, and search for any clue as to the existence of this film.

Once, on a day off, I called a librarian, who got pissy at me for even asking about it, and demanded to know who had put me up to calling her as a prank. I hung up in a panic, but she called back for hours. Obviously, she was also undergoing the same situation, and I felt shame at having brought a momentary pain to another proud Retail-American.

Now, video rental stores are a thing of the past. Even in small towns, they have been reduced to just a fond memory and an abandoned corner of a strip mall. Maybe my customer’s quest doesn’t matter anymore. The aggregation of the world’s knowledge into one hissing, unseen beast at the centre of our collective technological hallucination is complete. If they don’t have it, pick a different one. All I know is that, one day, someone will find a copy of this movie, and I’ll be able to go back to that town and shove it in the ground where the video store once stood. On that day, I can finally rest, freed from the slavedriver that is Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol.

[valuedeversourcecustomer]

on film and computational thinking: or how the internet impacts you, even if you think you know better

as someone who watches more movies than most people I know who aren't filmmakers/film critics with an interest in watching complete filmographies i find myself constantly struggling with and teetering this line with some directors who intimidate me and asking an extremely unproductive question. "do i watch what most people would widely consider to be their best works first or early on, or do I build up to it?" this is also something i compulsively struggle with especially with authors to the point of it interfering with me reading as much as I'd like.

something i arrived at tonight after reading margaret killjoy's the barrow will send what it may cover to cover in a single sitting is that life is too short to be that absurd and think that little of my own capacity to appreciate art when i very obviously do.

i maintain a letterboxd and review everything i log so long as i finish it (there is not a single work that is owed your time if you are not getting anything from it) and my reviews skew like this

for the record, that is absurdly positive and i think a truly baffling number of movies are perfect bc quite honestly i'm just not that much of a believer in numerical scores, and i tend to give a film 5 stars based on whether or not i was thoroughly entertained/it provoked meaningful thought and took no issues with it and thought it was exactly the movie it was intended to be. the only things that shake that are when someone in the cast/crew is blatantly not on the same page.

by comparison, here's the stats of a mutual i have on there who i often disagree with but respect their opinions all the same and sometimes our opinions line up more or less exactly

if you showed me this without context I would just think this person did not like movies very much and was watching them out of spite but it's also very reasonable to say that on a technical level most movies are fundamentally flawed. I'm just coming from a place where I acknowledge not everything is, nor should everything be, a Kubrick, Godard, Tarkovsky, or any other widely acclaimed auteur.

now, why did I feel the need to share these graphs in supporting my own point about how I'm not respecting my own capacity to love narratives on their own merit? put simply, I believe that aggregations of art criticism, being reduced down to a numerical value is doing atrocious things to the brain, even if you otherwise may think you're immune to it.

CLEARLY I don't care that much and am bringing my own personal connection to the table when I'm engaging with film criticism on my own. I often watch widely acclaimed films and think "really? THIS?" just as I watch a forgotten action movie from the early 90s starring Pierce Brosnan in which terrorists create an odorless tasteless liquid that turns the human body into an explosive device and give it a 5 star review.

so if I am so rooted in my own tastes, why do i still hesitate to watch things for fear I'll like them too much to get as much enjoyment out of other works? the answer, unfortunately, is the same reason that people dismiss complex movies that end up with a 70% on rotten tomatoes, assuming it's "mid" and carrying on, and it's a pervasive problem plaguing the entire internet and the way we think away from it.

for all of the convenience and access to entertainment the internet has afforded us, it has also limited the bounds of what we seek out in a way that is undeniable. nearly nobody is going to refute that you need to actively try to break out of algorithms these days. in the very same way that these algorithms and computers and even how rotten tomatoes calculates a percentage on the "tomatometer" only generally understand yes and no values with zero nuance between it, the more time we spend in that space, the more susceptible we are to imitating it.

James Bridle refers to this phenomenon as "computational thinking" in his increasingly prescient book "New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future" and if there is one book of theory out there that I believe everyone on the internet should read it's that one, especially with how things have developed post-covid since its initial publishing in 2018.

The gist of his idea of computational thinking involves our own increased tendency to respect consensus and be vulnerable to defaulting to confirmation bias. it's so incredibly easy to dunk on people who are wrong on the internet and laugh when they are unable to articulate a response, but once you see it as an imitation of a computer, unable to comprehend outside of what it knows the same way an automated voice redirecting your call to customer service doesn't understand nuance, it's bonechilling. it looks a lot less like a closeminded fool on the internet and more like they're someone who has been sequestered to their own bubble and can't get out and literally has been fed regurgitated propaganda to the point of sickness for the benefit of the oppressor

at what point do the devices we are forced to engage with beget serious illness and will we collectively know where to draw that line, or should it already have been drawn? was this always going to be the destination so long as the rapid development and incorporation of information technology into daily life coincided with capitalism? was this in lock step with the surveillance state the point all along? i wish those answers weren't so straightforward, because it makes me feel like a pessimist.

some of this makes me think of generative AI as well and the battle for creative integrity. it makes me question whether we've had creative integrity at all for a while. for what it's worth, when we've collectively pared our tastes down to the lowest common denominator by allowing algorithms to take over without even noticing, made space for only established IP to thrive, and allowed confirmation bias and numerical scores to drive the zeitgeist, and the studios pandered to cinemasins ass dorks who've never heard of willful suspension of disbelief and we ate every snarky "well that just happened" up for over a decade, were we not all complicit in paving the way for some AI bullshit to write scripts and generate content? I don't think it's far fetched to argue that these are all rolled into a progression of the same technostate and I'd also argue that it would be hypocritical to reject AI without also rejecting what turning the world into a tech space has done to our collective humanity. at best, looking at generative AI, for all it's trained with, is like looking in a crude mirror and i think it's safe to say we don't like what it's reflecting, not just the means of how it reflects it.

i still feel a lot of hope for the world in spite of everything, perhaps specifically TO spite everything, and if there's anything I want whoever reads this unedited meandering stream-of-consciousness lightweight theory piece with. please interrupt your own thought process every day, especially when you wish to reject something outright (except fascism) and ask. is it actually rejection or is it discomfort with the unfamiliar? am i being the AI i criticize?

for the good of the world, please talk to your neighbors and be kind, especially to the people you don't expect to agree with who don't hold power over you. at a certain point positive tangible experiences can and will change minds in meaningful ways. above all else please be safe, it's only going to get more confusing from here because none of this infrastructure we've built will be going anywhere unless in a cataclysmic event so buckle up.

[garvescope]

What I Wish I Knew Before Releasing My Indie Film

Distribution is where most indie filmmakers go to die—or at least to disappear quietly. After the blood, sweat, and credit card debt of production, it’s easy to think your job is done. But distribution is not dessert. It’s not a celebration. It’s the war after the war, and most of us walk into it completely unarmed. You don’t know what you don’t know. Until you do. And by then, it’s usually too…

[zsakuva]

Hi with some of my bizarre questions from my long bucket list :

1)when Andrew and darling were filmed did his parents tried to contact him for blaming or warning i might read your reply somewhere that he rarely talk to them plus in the audio of Christmas he said that the holiday doesn't sat well for him was that the fact or it was only about his brother ?

2)why Asirel want to make pet as his heir just because their immortality and strength so they can protect his family especially if they'll aggregate with his social activities not only in muder missions i mean he can lead that to his sister's children and keep pet as their bodyguard ?!

3) Did Asirel spied/stalked on ivan and pet previously even if he might know him from friend to friend how did he get all the informations until the tragedy happened so he managed to cover the murder!?

Nope, his parents didn't contact him.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No, he didn't spy or stalk them. Asirel is powerful and very connected, as are his friends, so if he asks for something, he'll likely get it.

[silverview]

alright bear with me. or don’t, if overthinking tv shows is not your thing, it doesn’t matter. when i say overthinking, i mean this is a post talking about talking about in9. i think it’s a concept that most people understand intuitively anyway but i’ve just been thinking about it a lot and wanted to explicitly set down what i see as the critical approach that makes this show uniquely interesting

by playing so many different characters over the course of in9, r&s also played – for want of a better term – emergent ‘meta-characters.’ by this i mean their respective presences on the show, considered as a whole

when you consider every character reece played in aggregate, or every character steve played in aggregate, or you find echoes / patterns / contrasts across episodes, that’s meta-character analysis. when you count how many times they killed each other (and talk about differences in how they killed each other & in what circumstances), that’s meta-character analysis. when i talk about reece characters experiencing rejection/betrayal, that’s meta-character analysis

the meta-characters are not equivalent to the real human men, though they do of course include the fictionalised versions of themselves that they played on the show. this kind of analysis is a tool for better understanding the show, not for armchair analysis of the actors (though obviously everything in the show does reflect on them in SOME way, i believe that what it says about them at this level is likely to be pretty obscure) (however armchair analysis is fun and i indulge in it anyway)

the narrowest form of this approach says there is something meaningful to be gained from considering every character they played across in9. the intermediate form says the same about every character they ever created for themselves, across in9/psychoville/tlog. and the broadest form of this approach says there is something meaningful to be gained from considering every character each of them has ever played in anything, including other random films and tv shows. at that point you’re basically doing something you can do for any actor, i.e. analysing their overall screen persona and choice of projects (take reece's tvtropes page for an example). and typically there is indeed something meaningful to be gained there, though outside projects are rarely in conversation with each other as loudly and directly as in9 is in conversation with itself