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#I think. It's been a while since I watched Goncharov
morimementa · 1 year
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I can't believe Ice Pick Joe stabbed Caesar yesterday!
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wilwheaton · 1 year
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favorite goncharov character
Goncharov! Holy shit I haven't thought about Goncharov in YEARS!
I remember seeing it at the Vista theatre downtown in ... I want to say 1983? It was either 82 and I was 10, or 83 and I was 11. Now that I think about it, it must have been Spring of 83. I remember that Kimmy Mendini was my babysitter, and she drove my friend Ahmed and me all the way downtown to see Goncharov. She would have been at least 16, but I feel like she was a little older. I remember that she LOVED movies and just never stopped talking about European cinema.
Ha! I can still her her sort of roll "Cinema" out of her mouth. Movies were for the masses to watch, while sophisticated adults experienced Cinema. I'm just realizing now that she absolutely pronounced it with a capital C. She was like "you are so lucky to see a clean print of Goncharov!"
I had no idea what a clean print was, but I understood it was important and impressive.
She had read about this screening in the LA Weekly, which I didn't know at the time was TREMENDOUSLY subversive in our suburban part of Los Angeles County, and we were going to an old theatre in maybe not the greatest part of town, but Kimmy had been watching me since I was in second grade and was like my big sister. I knew we'd be safe with her.
That old theatre (which is now a fucking swap meet) was just so beautiful inside. 100 foot ceilings, box seats, gold paint and murals. It felt like a place you went to experience Cinema, but, like ... it had absolutely seen better days. I remember that I felt kind of bad for the place, a little embarrassed, like when I got a good grade and accidentally made eye contact with a friend who got a D.
Okay. This clearly hit a memory artery, and I appreciate you staying with me this far, when we finally get to the fireworks factory. We're walking up to the box office, and she tells Ahmed and me that we have to wait on the sidewalk, because *technically* it's rated R, and she's not our legal guardian, but what does this guy making two bucks an hour know about art anyway?
So we wait. She buys the tickets, and then we all walk in as casually as we can.
I remember how scared I was that we were going to get caught and they'd call the cops (that's how it worked in my anxiety-ridden brain), but literally nobody cared. The theatre wasn't even half full, and everyone there was a dude at least as old as my parents.
You know the story, so I don't have to recount all of it, but I can at this very moment remember how shocked I was when Bruno was shot. This was the first time, ever, I had felt an emotional connection to a character. I didn't cry when Bambi's mother was shot, I didn't cry when ET died, I didn't cry E V E R.
But when Bruno died? I didn't make a sound. I just silently wept. Tears just poured down my face and I wanted to roll back time, rewrite the movie, and get him out of that room.
I obviously understand now, all these years later why I connected to him and why his story meant and means so much to me, but at the time I had no idea. I just thought the actors were that good.
I can't believe that guy who played him died so young. I think he was like 40? I remember thinking that was old. Now I know different.
When the movie was over, Kimmy asked us how we liked it. Ahmed was obsessed with the photography (he grew up to be an illustrator), and I obviously had my Bruno Moment.
We got Thrifty ice cream on the way home and listened to Donna Summer in her Datsun.
I haven't thought about Goncharov or Cinema or Kimmy in FOREVER. Leave it to Tumblr to boost my nostalgia check to a natural 20.
tl;dr: Bruno. I know he's supposed to be that character we all hate, and there are so many valid reasons for that. But when I was 12 ... well, I was a different person.
Oh! And now that I know what a "clean print" is, having seen so many "dirty prints" in revival houses before they all turned into swap meets or churches (hey, two places where people sell you stuff and take your money!), I retroactively appreciate it in a way that would make Kimmy happy.
Thanks for the trip into the crumbling mall that is my childhood memories. I haven't been here in awhile and it was nice to visit.
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renard-dartigue · 4 months
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I never realized its been 50 years since Goncharov came out. My dad handed me a rare vhs copy his cousin purchased in a dollar store in NYC many years ago. I saw this film back in 2009 when I was just a little fella, completely ignorant to what good cinema entailed until I was exposed to this greatness.
My mind was BLOWN.
I told my friends about it and after watching it together, they too were enamored.
We laughed, cried, and were cheering by the end of the film.
No longer were the playground filled with games of patty cake and freeze tag. NO. We only played mafia, exchanging gold and diamonds (rocks) for elicit substances (dry erase markers). If one of the kids ratted out our dealings to the authorities (teachers who were in on it) we would "kick him out of the family" (an iconic line the Boss uses when his favorite son betrayed him to the Russians) We tried bribing the authorities but they were "too clean for it".
But after a while, we stopped playing because we didn't really have any competition. How were we supposed get into cool action fights if we were the only gang on the block. We got bored.
Admittedly, I don't think any of us really understood what the film was about. We just thought the action was cool.
Oh, the scene when the weiner dog pulls up on the motor cycle to save the main character from a 50ft fall off a cliff was pretty rad.
Its a shame I no longer have a vhs player to watch this amazing film again. 😔
Happy 50th anniversary Goncharov.
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imp-furiosa · 1 year
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Goncharov is a Bad Meme...
...because it’s a bad movie. I don’t begrudge anybody their cult movie favorites, but so few people have heard of Goncharov that there’s a joke going around that it doesn’t exist and people have made it up just to troll. Ironically the things that have won it acclaim as a cult success are the very things that doom it as a work. You need look little further than the box office reception for proof.
Check out the top grossing movies of 1973 and you’ll notice that Goncharov doesn’t make the list. The Exorcist tops things out with a gross of $193 million. The bottom spot goes to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid with $8 million. Goncharov on the other hand was a commercial failure at release, barely recouping its unnecessarily bloated budget. Not that the budget was big, it was really a shoestring, but a list of production issues and re-shoots ate more and more time and money just to get something out the door.
Now I’m not trying to argue that box office revenue is all that matters for a good movie. It doesn’t at all. But in the case of Goncharov, the box office flop is informed by the way the film was made and thus informs its unique problems.
You see, Goncharov was filmed on location in Naples in the early 1970s during one or perhaps two extended “vacations” for most of the cast in the film. Highly unusual. But that’s sort of how things work when Stefano Pessina of Walgreens Boots Alliance (then Petrone Group) has an urge to play in an American mobster movie. He footed the bill himself (or rather convinced his daddy to), and the mess they shot was largely derivative and not worth any notice.
Scorsese wasn’t even involved until De Niro and Keitel approached him for help. Doing what he could to piece together what he assessed as workable bones, Scorsese tied together formerly loose threads and themes (notably the clock motif wasn’t nearly as significant before he took to work on it). The biggest thing is that he insisted on re-shoots as possible, adding new scenes, cutting scenes entirely, and notably excising all but a cameo of former star Pessina--the man can’t act. But he was paying the bills and while he’d find himself lucky to break even on the venture, his checkbook did at least allow the thing to see the light of day. Saved as much as possible by Scorsese’s talented eye.
All that cut material was saved, possibly at Pessina’s insistence, and has found its way to the public in the half century since its debut. Which has resulted in a number of new cuts and editions. It’s a favorite for film students to practice editing because the copious extra scenes allow wildly varying stories to be told. Since most people aren’t even aware of the movie in the first place, those that see it happenstance may well have found an unofficial edition. This is why we see many wildly varying “canonical” scenes. They all exist, but very few of them actually showed up in Scorsese’s theatrical release back in ‘73.
This is also why it’s lauded on that famous poster with “Martin Scorsese presents.” Despite his extensive work directing re-shoots and new scenes, editing and producing, Scorsese saw it for the train wreck it was and chose to distance himself from the thing. Al Pacino once joked in a TV Guide interview that he wished he had been “able to distance my name from it in that manner. I think we all do.”
Look, who among us has watched Mean Streets or Serpico? Both of those are better works than Goncharov and came out that same year. For a modern audience they would have worked just as well for this joke. Except then instead of topping it off with the ultimate punchline of hunting down the thing and being disappointed you wasted two hours of your life, Mean Streets or Serpico would be enjoyable watches. So save yourself some disappoint and go watch one of those instead.
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This Idiot Has Seen Goncharov
So today marked the coalescence of the Goncharov Incident as I’ll be calling it, so I think it’s finally time to share.
For a bit of context, you need to know a little more about one of my co-workers. We’ll call him Zeke. First it’s important to note that despite being in his early thirties, Zeke doesn’t have any sort of social media accounts outside of a MySpace page. Dude has straight up been living like it’s still 2007. Zeke also has a fixation with my friend/roommate who also works with us. Zeke will hop onto whatever bandwagon this friend, who we’ll call Jesse, is on. But most importantly to this whole tableau, Zeke likes to tell tall tales, like no matter what you’re talking about, or what you’ve done, this guy has done it but bigger and crazier.
That alone would be annoying, but it wouldn’t be enough to push myself and Jesse to the level we’ve hit with him. For me, it’s the constant need to put other people down for ‘knowing less than he does’ despite the obviousness of his knowledge being a collection of poorly constructed lies. Like not only does he lie, but this dumbass doesn’t even bother to check into the things he lies about. Several times he’s tried to convince me of something in a subject I know everything about. He refuses to admit to being wrong and he won’t back down from anything he’s said, it’s infuriating.
For this, and quite a few other reasons transphobic cough cough augh, he’s been bothering Jesse and I for quite a while. Badly enough that the spite fueled wasp nest that lives in the back corner of my brain Morse coded a plan to me.
Goncharov.
What better way to trip up a ride or die compulsive liar than a piece of media well known for being entirely fictional?
The next day, when Zeke climbed into my car during our lunch hour, Jesse and I began talking about this old movie we’d recently watched. The two of us have known each other more than long enough to able to follow each other’s bullshit like second nature, we’ve played an assload of DND together. In ten minutes we’ve got the whole first arc talked out with a few of the “best scenes” highlighted. (Personal favorites being Andrey juggling guns “a la John Wick/Guns Akimbo” and Katya killing a man point blank after saying ‘Get Gonch’d bitch’ in a 1973 film.)
Zeke didn’t respond too much, just kind of nodded and ignored most of the convo since it wasn’t really about him. I didn’t really expect him to engage to start, he usually doesn’t, but we’d planned to keep this up for another couple days anyhow.
But like clockwork, the more Jesse talked about it, the more Zeke seemed to remember it. Enough that I jumped ahead a little and pulled up the faux movie poster to show him.
He squinted at it then nodded and said he’d definitely seen the movie before.
When I tell you I almost fucking screamed.
Of course he couldn’t remember many details because it had been so long since he’d seen it. To tell you the truth I’d checked out at that point, I was focused on not losing my shit, I have no fucking idea what he said.
While this was an entire meal served up on a silver platter, it would have been pretty easy to say he’d seen the poster somewhere despite not having socials. I want this man incinerated, not merely singed.
Which leads me to the events of the last couple days.
So Zeke came up to Jesse and I and told us he wanted to re-watch Goncharov and asked us if it’s on Netflix.
Jesse and I both said that it is, without hesitation.
Zeke went to look for it (at work, while we’re working no less, again I missed the rest of what he was saying here I was mentally biting him) and obviously found nothing. So he searched every other streaming platform he had, and Youtube, all once again coming up empty.
At this point, I was sure the jig is up. He was actually searching it now so obviously he’d find one of the search results letting him know Goncharov’s true nature. I’m fairly certain the first result for it on Google says that it’s fake.
Oh hoo hoo, no.
Zeke came to me to complain about not being able to find the movie and in a fit of clandestine fervor, I told him that we probably watched it on a pirating site.
It was beautiful, it was inspired, and it worked.
Zeke asked me for the site and I told him that I’d have to get it from our other roommate since she’s in charge of the tech in our house. Then I hauled ass to go find Jesse and spill the latest tea before Zeke could. 
Later on Jesse sent him the link to the site, and he told us he’d find it over the weekend.
Well today, friends, is Monday.
Most of today we spent too busy to go grill Zeke about whether or not he’s crossed over into the fucking Mandela timeline and managed to watch Goncharov. But ten minutes before close, while we’re waiting to go, suddenly Zeke perks up, and remembers that when he gets home, he has to finish watching the movie. He’d had trouble getting the site to work on his phone, but his Xbox had run it, and he’d started watching it, but had unfortunately fallen asleep before he’d finished.
Now. I am a calm man, I can keep a straight face if I need to. But hearing this fucking idiot tell me he’d started watching a fictitious movie made up by Tumblr.com of all places nearly sent me to the fucking Shadow Realm with the amount of effort it took not to crack.
He talked for a couple more minutes before fucking off to do something else, I have no idea again I wasn’t fucking listening, I was trying not to visibly cry from holding back laughter.
But then he left and like instinct, like the inevitable impact of atoms inside of the Hadron collider, Jesse and I turned to look at each other. I knew what Jesse would say, Jesse knew what I would say, and like fate, like destiny, like two people who had witnessed a man commit manslaughter against his own damn self, we spoke at once.
“This idiot has seen Goncharov.”
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cha-melodius · 1 year
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Oh a TMFU/Gorncharov cross over??? Maybe Illya, Napoleon, and Gaby are just in Naples for an unrelated issue. Or Gorncharov knows Illya from childhood and calls his old friend in for help. We all know that Gaby and Katya would get on great. Illya and Gorncharov can both be idiots pining together over Napoleon and Andry respectively. Napoleon and Andry can probably bond over their tastes for finer things in life or something I dunno.
This is of course a very natural crossover! It's no secret that Goncharov is one of Guy Ritchie's favorite movies, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. definitely shows the great influences of all his movies; he's said before that he wanted to set TMFU in Italy as a nod to Goncharov, and in the original script Victoria's name was Sofia. However, since Goncharov was more or less still lost in 2015, I feel like the parallels are definitely underappreciated, especially all the clock/watch imagery and its ties to both the themes of broken families and Goncharov/Illya's trust issues. Few people realize that Illya's "You know what my mission is?" line when Napoleon returns his father's watch is a direct reference to Goncharov's "You know what the job is?" line in the clocktower scene when he confronts Andrey. Of course the very fact that Illya gets his watch back shows that Illya still holds on to his sense of self, unlike Goncharov, who loses it for good. (Goncharov google doc, short analysis of Goncharov's watch)
Now about that crossover.
I assume we're going on a crossover before the events of the movie, since, well, spoilers (can you spoil a 50 year old movie?), but there's not a lot of opportunity after. Perhaps set in the late 60s, after UNCLE has been a team for a while.
I like the idea that Goncharov knows Illya from his past, before Illya's father was arrested, and before Goncharov was truly inducted into the family business. When Illya's father is arrested and he's sent to an orphanage (common for children of political prisoners), he of course loses touch with everyone from that life, including Goncharov. I think Goncharov, even well-connected as he is, wouldn't know Illya is a KGB agent now, but perhaps Illya does know about Goncharov's move to Naples. He finds out about it during a KGB operation and doesn't really think much of it, but then the UNCLE team ends up in Naples on a mission and whoops, it's connected to Goncharov. This could definitely lead to some angst and conflicted feels since they were good friends as children, but now Goncharov is part of the mob, so they're obviously thrown into this antagonistic relationship. Despite himself, Illya can't help but want to try to find a solution that doesn't end with his old friend dead.
He's surprised to find that his partners support him in this, but of course Andrey and Napoleon hit it off (leading to some scenes of jealous Illya & Gonch; Goncharov gets threatening toward Napoleon because he thinks Napoleon is trying to make a move, only to be shocked that Illya is deadly serious about protecting his American; Illya and Napoleon have an argument about all the time Napoleon is spending with Andrey), and Gaby and Katya would definitely share a certain kinship. I think that seeing Goncharov and Andrey's relationship, fraught with unresolved homoerotic tension, and how destructive repressing those feelings is, would help Napoleon and Illya recognize the cycle in their own relationship and break it, finally admitting what they mean to each other. Perhaps Gaby secretly tries to convince Katya to leave Goncharov and the mob behind, but of course she fails because Katya's not at the breaking point yet, she still believes things can work out.
Obviously there's a ton of potential here for a crossover! And that's not even delving into the hints at Goncharov, Katya, and Andrey's histories with the KGB in canon, which is pretty much unexplored.
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Ok! So! Big Goncharov revival has happened on tumblr recently, and I’ve decided to take the opportunity when it’s handed to me to talk about one of the best movies I have ever seen.
Bear with me for a moment.
For those unfamiliar, Goncharov (1973) was a movie directed by Matteo JWHJ0715, a (then closeted) bisexual filmmaker from Italy. Martin Scorsese then lent his name to it to provide a popularity boost for the American release, which is where we get the common misconception that he directed it.
It stars a Russian mob boss named Goncharov (no first name given, for reasons I’ll discuss later) who’s brought a few key members of his gang to Naples, Italy in order to get revenge against Italian mob boss Mario Giglioli. (A good breakdown of the movie’s plot can be found in @mst3kproject’s review, which I would link here but tumblr is being weird)
Along the way, we’re introduced to his wife, Katya Goncharova, his right hand man, Andrey, Mario’s wife, Sofia Giglioli, and a few others.
Goncharov is an almost nauseatingly stereotypical man. What stereotype, you ask? Why, all of them! He’s a tall, heavily built man with a thick accent and a tendency to reference “Mother Russia” in tones of alternatively nearly reverential praise of Soviet era Russia and harsh condemnation of the Russia he leaves during the movie - the Russia directly after the Soviet Union’s fall. The way he does this is heavy handed and obviously written by a man who’s never visited Russia in his life in any era, to the point where my own lax education on the country doesn’t actually leave me unqualified to analyze the film, despite the majority of the main characters originating from it. (Though I’m sure there are great analyses to be made on the cultural inaccuracies within the film, especially given how many are entirely deliberate- but I’ll get to that later)
He’s also exhaustingly heterosexual, and very much being so with an eye towards to the beliefs of the time. There are many scenes in Goncharov that are hard to watch today, and many of the scenes between Goncharov and Katya are among them, especially the dinner scenes.
Here, you may be saying, “But Sol, didn’t you say the director was bi?” And hey, hold your horses, we’ll get to that.
Katya, Goncharov’s wife, is on the surface an ideal 70s housewife, if a bit more murderous than the average due to her mafia husband. She makes him dinner every night, defers to his whims without argument, and spends most of their shared scenes standing behind him, never beside.
She also violently murders him to avenge her lesbian lover, but as I’ve said, we’ll get to that.
Mario Giglioli, Goncharov’s rival, is just Goncharov with an Italian accent. I think if they could have cast Robert De Niro twice and had him play Mario as well as Goncharov, they would have. He has a german shepard and Goncharov makes one of his henchman steal it near the start of the film. I am unhinged about this man.
One of Goncharov’s few named henchmen is called Icepick Joe. He’s an ostensibly minor character who gets a bizarre amount of screentime covering his personal journey of *checks notes* petting Mario’s dog, stealing said dog, murdering his wife, stealing Mario’s dinner, and dying alone due to the poison in said dinner while the dog abandons him to run off into the woods.
He is quite possibly the most important character in the entire movie.
To explain why, I have to introduce two more characters, who fans of the film have no doubt been waiting for me to bring up since they started reading this post.
But first, let me talk about Goncharov’s marriage for a bit!
Goncharov and Katya are often said to have a loveless marriage, but the truth of the matter is a lot more complicated than that. There are moments throughout the film where it’s implied that they care about each other deeply, and that in any other circumstances they might have a perfectly healthy relationship, but they’re so mired in the idea of being the perfect mafia man and the perfect mafia man’s wife that everything they say or do is filtered though so many layers of performance that any actual affection they might hold for one another is suffocated under it.
No one in the film ever refers to Goncharov by his first name. There are a few contenders for what it might be - he signs his name N. Goncharov, which some have hypothesized could stand for Nikolai, some of the early promotional material called him Ivan Goncharov… but there’s nothing sufficiently internally consistent for it to be stated as his first name with true confidence.
This is deliberate. In an interview, JWHJ0715 stated: “[Goncharov] is a man consumed by his work. He’s forgotten how to be anyone other than Goncharov, mob boss, and the lack of a first name is part of this. […] Goncharov is a man who’s lost his identity in favor of the image he projects”
Katya, conversely, is only ever referred to by her first name, even when speaking to characters who would be expected to use her last. It’s not quite as complete an erasure - there are a few moments where she’ll be introduced as Katya Goncharova instead of just Katya, but the vast majority of the time she’s referred to as either Katya or “Goncharov’s wife”.
This, too, is part of an erasure of identity, though in a different way. Katya has so thoroughly separated herself from the role she plays as Goncharov’s wife that in the few moments she is referred to by her full name, you can spot a split second of confusion, like she doesn’t know who’s being spoken about.
There’s a sense that Katya is unable to be herself with Goncharov, that she’s become so caught up in the person she thinks he wants that she can’t be the person she actually is, and it’s masterfully played as this slowly poisons her ability to care for him and eventually leads to her faking her death and later killing him.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
(And, uh. Also ahead of my ability to write. This is getting long, so I’m going to break it here and post the rest later.)
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purgatoryorbust · 1 year
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Look, I know when film bros pull apart Goncharov, the stand out aspect is always the use of montage and cuts, the connection to Soviet montage theory. I get it, I loved the Goncharov-Andrei knife fight scene, the dynamite in the boat, the fast paced montage in Pompeii when Katya pulled out the gun - masterful cuts! Stylistically epic! But guys, guys,
Can we talk about the Italian neo-realism visual techniques? I've been waiting to talk about the Italian neo-realism visual techniques all day.
Scorsese uses it sparingly, but my god does it have a huge effect. The meandering tracking shot through the markets at night, the build up to the apple scene, feels so disjointed with the previous fast pace - suddenly, we're following Goncharov and Andrei slowly, at street level, winding through the stalls next to them, the camera veering off here and there to catch other snippets of conversation, little glimpses into other lives in Naples. It feels more real all of a sudden, slower and less urgent, and their conversation over the apple could almost be innocuous, if quite intimate. Only a few cuts are used, but the zoom is applied liberally when the apple comes into play. I think it's this sense of intimacy from the bystander perspective, too, that solidifies the homoerotic tension between Andrei and Goncharov.
There's also the Katya and Sophia walk/dance sequence through the party in the underground club and out to the street - despite how busy the scene is, there's one, maybe two cuts used between them leaving the chaise lounge and lighting up each others cigarillos outside (I've checked). While they waltz around the drunken singer, the broken clock (which I'll get back to in a second) and Coppola Cap Guy collecting money for the bet, their eyes are only on eachother. Once again, we're given a look at a wider world, while our main characters are shown to be deeply caught in a moment with one another.
This is showing how deeply Goncharov and Katya value these relationships with Andrei and Sophia, that their focus is so intense that intimate time with them recieves no ellipses - I think Sorcese wants the audience to know that had things been different, Goncharov and Katya may have had more time, with the other two, with each other, in general, perhaps? Goncharov is about time, about not having enough time, but in these moments the Italian neo-realism style gives a surplus of time - further represented by the broken clock in the ballroom, and Andrei having thrown away his pocket watch. And even more than that, the conversation we catch between the apple vendor and his wife about her niece, coming to visit next spring - the spring that Goncharov and Katya are looking forward to, the spring that their grand criminal empire will never live to see. Time will go on without them, whether they like it or not.
I know it's not a perfect comparison, since Italian neo-realism is thematically more working class focussed, and Goncharov aims to maintain the upper-class veneer that mob life can afford him. The film does, however, reflect an Italy still scarred by WWII. Both scenes were reportedly filmed on-location. The fact that Scorcese used Italian neo-realist techniques, juxtaposing the soviet montage style, the way all this influnces the overall film noir feel - god it gets me every time.
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noir-renard · 1 year
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Okay so stop me if you've heard this one before, but I'm really happy to see the long-overdue recognition Goncharov is getting now (just in time for the 50th year anniversary too!)
BUT! Something I haven't seen anyone talking about is the 1987 stage adaptation of Goncharov, which is really too bad because it is ICONIC.
Like, okay, it's been a few years since I took American Theater History, but Goncharov was doing things no one else was doing. It did things no one has done since. This was a transformative adaptation to the point where it deserves to be recognized as its own thing.
I don't think I can possibly encapsulate everything this play is and accomplished so I'll focus on a few things, but I recommend looking up Taylor & Francis Contemporary Theatre Review for some articles on Goncharov (the play).
So, first of all, they had A Different Actor play Goncharov in Every Scene (*almost every scene, we'll come back to that). That in itself is absolutely buckwild, like this should have been a relatively inexpensive play to produce (small cast, minimal set, small stage, etc etc) but there were at least twenty four Goncharovs, possibly more. No one actually knows how many actors played Goncharov during its full run because they kept rotating the cast, but some estimates number in the hundreds; but there were never more than 24 during each performance. InSaNe, right?
But it doesn't stop there. See, the various Gonchs didn't wait backstage for their scenes, oh no. They sat in the audience. Pretending to be the audience, but was it really pretend? I really wish I could have been a fly on the wall for opening night. You arrive, you're excited to see this timeless film classic on stage (Theater purists will tell you stage theater is always better). The opening scene happens (you know the one lol), and you think, okay, this is fine, they're playing this by the book.
AND THEN THE GUY SITTING NEXT TO YOU WHO CAME WITH HIS WIFE STANDS UP AND WALKS UP TO THE STAGE, TAKES GONCHAROV'S HAT, COAT, AND TIE, DOES THE COSTUME CHANGE ON STAGE, AND STARTS THE NEXT SCENE!!
(and then the opening scene actor comes and sits down next to you, taking Gonch II's place, awkwardly squeezing past in the tiny seats to sit, asking you if he missed anything while he was in the bathroom??)
So you're confused, but the play is still going so you try to focus. Andrey is acting like everything is the same. Goncharov II makes a phone call to Ice Pick Joe, and he doesn't say he's ordering a hit, but you've seen the movie, you know what's up (this will be important later stay with me).
So there's another scene change, and sure enough, someone else gets up from the audience, walks to the stage, does the costume change, continues the play as if everything is normal and fine.
And this happens 23 times.
Now, you might think this is a novelty and that even if no one who watched the play talked about it to anyone who hadn't seen it, if you went back for a repeat viewing you'd know what to expect. But get this: they changed the order of the actors every night. And where they sat. And how they were dressed when they were part of the audience. So. Even if you knew it was going to happen, there was no way to predict exactly how it would happen!
Okay, so, I need to talk about the costume change on stage bit. Like, sure, kind of neat, but we all know there's a repeated motif in the film of Goncharov trying to fix his tie (symbolic of the "noose of time" tightening around his neck) but he never gets it quite right until Andrey fixes it for him.
And they did this in the play, too, but with a twist. See, up until the Andrey Ties The Knot Scene (lol subtle much), the Gonch who was leaving the stage would put the hat, coat, and tie on the new Gonch. So of course it wasn't quite right, all of these actors were built really differently! (Incredible costume design credit has to go to Nana Hastings here, like I don't know how she made the Sisterhood of the Traveling Goncharov work on stage but by god did she make it work)
Okay ajsjsjsb I keep getting sidetracked. Anyway. When Andrey fixes the tie and coat for the Goncharov on stage, this is, in fact, the final "actor" change. There are further scene changes, but now there's no one getting up from the audience anymore. And if you've seen the film, then it dawns on you: the Goncharov on stage is the one Andrey is gonna kill. Notably, the play reordered things a bit so the Katya Betrays Goncharov scene already happened before Andrey Ties the Knot, and the Gonch she tried to kill was a different Actor (yeah yeah symbolism of who you can show your truest self to we've all seen it).
So, back to the Andrey Ties the Knot scene (it's really important can I live). You might remember the argument that happens at the beginning of this scene in the movie. Well, in the play, the argument happens closer to the end. So if you know what's coming, the tension is building and building, and then the iconic line: Goncharov yells "how can you claim to understand me? To know what I want? To promise to give it to me? You don't even know who I am! I don't even know who I am!" Which, chills. But you see, at this moment, all the Goncharov Actors who've returned to sitting in the audience all stand up and yell the final line of this monologue with the Goncharov on stage. SO WILD. can you even imagine what that was like? You're so engrossed in the drama that you've forgotten the woman sitting next to you was on stage during scene 3. And now she's standing up and yelling! What's going to happen next??
Well. You know the line. Andrey sighs fondly, walks up to Goncharov, and says "I know you." And fixes Goncharov's tie.
And then it's intermission.
You're getting a snack in the lobby, and it's 1987 so you don't have access to a phone to tell your Goncharov Discord Server what you just witnessed. And what's going to happen next?? You still have half the play! (Or ⅓, at least!) But all that's really left is the betrayal scene. How are they going to stretch it out? You can't wait to see.
Intermission ends, you go back to your seat. It opens with Katya and Sofia. Ah, you think, so they've gone with the 'faked her death' interpretation. But then you notice the clock—which is front and center on the stage at all times during the play—has been set back. Is this a memory, then? A dream?
The question is never answered, but then Ice Pick Joe comes on stage and physically changes the hands himself. You see him get a phone call. You remember this—from the other end of the line. Goncharov is calling a hit. Ice Pick Joes accepts the hit. Hangs up. Walks to the clock. Moves it forward an hour, and leaves the stage. Another Katya scene, but she's changed into summer clothes. An actor you've never seen is on stage with her—this is her father, before he died. A death she feels responsible for.
The scene ends, Ice Pick Joe again. Same deal—a phone call from Gonch. He accepts the hit, and moves the clock forward. The next scene is an Andrey and Katya scene. There's so much subtext, it's hard to follow. Are they flirting? Plotting? Do they hate each other?
Ice Pick Joe again.
Now, at this point you start to notice something. There are fewer people in the audience than there should be (it was a small Blackbox theatre that got torn down in 1993, so I couldn't find any good photos, but it was small enough that you'd notice people missing).
You then realize that the ones going missing are the actors who played Goncharov. And then you see a pattern: every time Ice Pick Joe takes a call, an actor disappears. What does it mean?
This is never actually given meaningful resolution in the play, by the way, and the director refused to elaborate. What does it mean to you? Is all he'd say on the matter, but no one knew that while they were watching. Anyway I had to mention it because it's one of the wilder things this play did.
So there's all these out of time scenes staggered with Ice Pick Joe (until he dies RIP), and we "catch up". It's the final betrayal. Andrey is going to kill Goncharov, and everyone knows it, including Goncharov. "I never thought it would end like this." "You never were good at imagining happy endings," says Andrey. (I know you mouthed the lines don't lie no one can resist)
Andrey pulls the trigger, lights out—
When the lights come back up (RED LIGHTS) there's no body onstage, just the Goncharov costume. Andrey picks up the tie, the hat, the coat. He puts them all on. And he walks off stage.
AND THATS THE END OF THE PLAY. We don't see Goncharov actually die. We have no idea what happens to him. (When I tell you people have argued about this for decades, I mean it.)
The house lights turn up, you look around and see how empty the theater is. How many of the audience members were actors? You don't actually know. There is no curtain call. You walk out into the lobby in a daze, and all the actors are there, chatting. "Wild play, huh? I'm not sure I quite understood it, to be honest," they tell you. None of them break character. They are committed to the bit.
One of them tells you he enjoyed your performance. You think it might be Scorsese himself, though possibly it's Matteo JWHJ0715 in the flesh. Or maybe it was just another theater go-er trying to sound smart. Who knows?? Not you.
And that's Goncharov (1987), off Broadway in a nutshell.
It unfortunately only ran for a year because as it turns out, the theater owner had actual ties to the real mob and had to flee the country, and no one knew legally whether the play could run or if the theater counted as evidence—but that's another story.
The cast and crew of the play refused to move to a different theatre, though whether that was out of loyalty or fear, who can say?
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opabinia-777 · 1 year
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You know something I’ve been thinking about ever since I watched Goncharov that I don’t know if anyone else has to touched on regarding Ice pick joe
Is that while Ice pick joe as a representation of a mentally ill chracter is certainly problematic especially by today’s standards, there’s a complexity and nuance often lacking even in modern films which have (inadequately) touched on the subject
see, it’s heavily implied that Ice pick joe’s violent,homocidal tendencies aren’t inherent to his mental Illness,
that they instead developed as a result of a lack of
proper treatment and support alongside being on the receiving end of severe abuse which he also
Did not receive adequate support or care for
for a film released in 1973 that’s rather impressive
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brinconvenient · 1 year
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FOR THE LAST TIME! MARTIN SCORSESE DID NOT DIRECT GONCHAROV!
I wrote all of this on a reblog of a great post  by @mortalityplays that explains how Twitter’s broken copyright protection system is finally letting the world appreciate the up-til-recently lost film “Goncharov,” but it was a reblog, so I don’t think enough people are seeing this. And honestly, it’s just like tumblr to go hog wild on a media property without knowing even a scintilla of the actual history of it. 
I know that Martin Scorsese is getting a lot of love for tumblr’s favorite new rediscovered film, but (and I can't believe I have to fucking go all filmbro on this, but I fell down a hyper-fixation rabbit hole on this a while back) what's pissing me off about all of this, is that everyone, including op, keeps giving Martin Scorsese credit as the director, when the title card clearly shows "Martin Scorsese Presents" (I think it's the snippet in the 3rd tweet, maybe the 4th) which means that Martin Scorsese was the DISTRIBUTOR.
Like. Ok, so Scorsese graduates film school roughly the same time as George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, Brian DePalma, and the rest of the Movie Brats, coming up with Steven Spielberg etc, launching the American auteur era of film, but smack in the middle of research for Mean Streets, Scorsese encounters this film by the mononymic Italian director, Matteo (JWHJ0715 was his member id number in Italy's version of the Director's Guild of America - pretty sure they stopped requiring directors include their guild number in the credits after Fellini refused for like 20 years and they just gave up trying to fine him. This is also what inspired Lucas to cow the DGA into submission on the credits at the end thing for Star Wars).
And Scorsese is just fucking blown away. Like, it's everything he's wanted to do since he went into film school. The symbolism, the interpersonal intrigue, the conflicting loyalties between love, honor and duty, the family you are born into vs. the mafia family that finds, accepts and trains you, the constant ethical tension between doing what's right for your morality and what's right for YOUR family vs. what's right For the Family.
I mean. Jesus, look at Goodfellas if you want to see how Scorsese tries to touch on SOME OF THAT when he finally feels like he knows enough to even attempt to approach Matteo's mastery.
Of course, that's not even touching on the Cold War intrigue about the Russian mob operating outside of Soviet Russia and the whole KGB subplot aspect of it all.
Anyway, so back to 1972. Scorsese is just absolutely blown away. The Godfather has just come out and America is mafia mad! Scorsese has had some modest hits. He thinks that Mean Streets is gonna be his big break, and he sees this movie. Not only does he dump his original lead actor to cast Robert Deniro because of it, he decides that he's gonna use the connections he's been making to get this film in front of American movie goers, to help finance the films he wants to make.
So he just, he just fuckin COLD CALLS Dominico Procacci and says "I know people and I can get this movie seen over here" and Procacci takes the meeting... Like, the balls on Martin!
But Procacci doesn't tell him that the real Russian mafia is already sniffing around. Anyway, Scorsese gets the distribution rights for the US and starts getting prints made and ready to distribute to prop up the mob-movie-fever so he can ride it when Mean Streets hits later in the year.
Like, the film was already in cans and at the theater, when the Russian mob knocks on Marty's door and have a very convincing conversation with him.
Next thing you know, all of the prints are back at the warehouse where, reportedly, the fucking Russian mob counts each and every single one. Then they toss the fucking master on the pile (I don't know where they got that, does anyone have that story??) and set it all alight, while Marty watches his future go up in flames.
But then they just fucking walk away and Martin Scorsese, with britches full, goes back to his car and doesn't even see the bag of cash in the backseat until the next day. Business concluded.
Gotta give Old Ivan credit. Just like Matteo depicted - they keep their fucking word. Martin Scorsese decided to stick to the Italian and Irish mobs in his movies from then on, and leave the god damned Ruskies alone.
Of course, none of them knew about the test prints back at the warehouse of the company that was hired to make the copies for American distribution. I could be wrong, but isn't the leading theory about the provenance of the Twitter copy that someone probably found one of those test prints in some corporate asset auction or something?
Anyway, sorry for the ramble. I just hate seeing Matteo getting left out of the fucking conversation, especially now that arguably his greatest work is finally getting attention.
Scorsese has been basically fanfic AU-ing "Goncharov" his whole fucking career and now he's gonna get actually credit for the original? Not on my fucking watch, thank you.
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clockworkrobotic · 1 year
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The Tragic Saga of the Goncharov Tie-In Game (1995)
so since everyone has discovered goncharov i get to talk about a personal fascination of mine, which is the wild n wacky tale of the goncharov video game tie in. If youre thinking "what the hell are you talking about, there wasn't a video game tie in" theres a reason for that, bear with me
so the game came out sometime around 1995 (different sources place it at various points between 1994 and 1995), and it was one of the first properties to be licenced by sony for a console. It was originally planned to be a SNES-CD release until that console was cancelled, at which point it was ported to the playstation. if youre wondering why goncharov got a tie in like twenty years after the film released, that's kind of why it's so unheard of. sony was testing the waters with its new hardware to see if there was an older audience for gaming, and a few investors were willing to put some money behind the idea. it was actually pretty well-funded all things considered, with a budget of around $1.1m, and the gameplay was similar to that of goldeneye, which released a couple of years later. it was also fairly sophisticated, featuring branching decision trees and several different endings (I think 4? there isn't a lot of gameplay footage available, but there were at least 4)
unfortunately, development was plagued with problems from the get go. Despite its healthy budget, the studio couldn't convince any of the original cast to return to do voice work. Of course they couldn't, the film was two decades old -- you think harvey keitel was gonna bail on pulp fiction to appear in some experimental video game? of course not. so the dev team went for the next best thing: soundalikes.
the problem is, the soundalike VAs they hired weren't used to doing longform work. don't get me wrong, they did their darndest, but their experience was very much rooted in things like radio commercials and short voiceovers. they hadn't really had to act before. oh, and all but one of them hadn't seen the movie. the anecdote goes that they showed up on day one expecting a couple of days work tops, and much to their shock were handed several dozen pages of script (remember the decision trees? branching dialogue baby) and told they were employed for the next six months. Good for them, I think?
The voice acting really suffered from this. a lot of it feels very stilted, it ruins the immersion. yknow how in elder scrolls oblivion all the voice lines were recorded in alphabetical order? It sounds similar to that (altho personally i think the goncharov voice acting is a bit better lol). the directors and actors really struggled to pull everything together.
the result was that, while the game itself definitely wasn't bad, it was outright innovative in places, critics really couldn't get past the baffling performances, which they near-unanimously agreed made the game a slog. someone suggested the game should be played on mute with goncharov the film playing on a second tv, though went on to say that you wouldn't even finish the game then, because you'd just end up watching the far superior goncharov film instead. The game flopped, causing its global release to be cancelled, and was only ever distributed in the UK, Australia, and Japan.
the game had a brief stint as a cult classic, garnering a small online fandom in the early days on the internet. there is allegedly an italian fan translation out there somewhere, although a copy has never surfaced and it is considered lost media. a couple of people have come forward claiming to have worked on it -- they also claim to have met in the neopets forums of all places. i believe them -- and there are a couple of youtube videos showcasing what appears to be an italian fandub, but without the game files it's not possible to know whether theyre real or edited in post.
so now you know the story of goncharov the movie the game, my favourite game i've never played and probably never will. while it may well have been a missed opportunity, i like to think it paved the way for such classics as enter the matrix, and ratatouille the movie the game, and what would the world be like without them?
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alvadee · 1 year
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Curious as to how no one seems to be talking about Victor Buono's bit role in Goncharov (1973). He's only in the movie for like four scenes but STILL.
Your words in God's ear! I mean I've posted about it before, like, three years ago when I was still watching movies with him for the first time. It was one of those hard to find movies I traded for with someone else I found who's into old niche media. I had been looking for it for a while... Just back then nobody cared. lol
I KNOW!! I always think that even though it was a small role (like so many he had in high profile movies, sigh) I loved it! Not only because he looked hot but he was also essential to the plot by getting the action going with his sleazy scheming and making sure Katya found the gun in time and is rescued later on. That's more than he got to do in so many other movies.
Anyway, since you brought it up again, two screencaps from "Goncharov" because I liked his more casual look. <3
Tumblr media Tumblr media
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retvenkos · 1 year
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olive my mind has decided it will take me back to my tmr roots randomly last night so 🚀 with gally from the maze runner if you’re still accepting these
jen!!! hello friend!!! how are you?
(also, @heliads you asked for gally, too, so i’m tagging you <3)
GALLY in a MODERN, CELEBRITY, PR RELATIONSHIP! AU. now, this is one loaded™ au so stick with me, asdfghgfds. gally is a small time celebrity. correction: gally is the son of two famous actors who fell in love on set of an action film, and had an incredibly public romance. from very young, it was thought he would follow in his parent’s footsteps and become an actor as well - in fact, he even did a few acting jobs as a child and while he wasn’t exactly critically acclaimed, he was talented enough as paolo morelli in goncharov, and he was a child and so it was forgivable. when he was eleven, however, his parents famously sent him abroad, to go live with his grandparents in some rural town. he grew quite a bit in those 18 years, and now he’s a talented ufc figher (with a background in boxing, wresting. kockboxing, and taekwondo, though occasionally he’ll throw in some jiu-jitsu or muay thai. he has a wide range of fighting styles, alright?) who would really rather not have celebrity status at all because while it’s flattering that people cheer for him in the ring, he really would like to just,,,, walk around new york city like a normal human being every once in a while. you, on the other hand, are a somewhat up and coming actor, still diversifying your roles and trying to figure out where you belong. your career really shot off when you played a major character in game of thrones, and then later, a role in bridgerton. you’ve done other work before that - small time roles, nothing of note unless your a die hard fan that wishes to watch every piece of media you’ve ever acted in - but you were recently offered a role in a blockbuster of epic proportions, and you’re staking your entire career on it. the problem is, it’s not exactly a period piece or any kind of historical fantasy (of which you are most well known and popular)... it’s an apocalypse movie. a sort of revival of the genre amidst the influx of superhero movies, if you will. you auditioned and got the part, and so there’s no real worry over your ability to act the hell out of this film, but when it comes to convincing the public, something more has to be done. you’re not exactly well known for your fighting ability, after all. wait. fighting ability?? the director of the film is a bit on the young side, but she’s been friends with gally since his amateur acting days i mean they starred together in goncharov after all. gally begrudgingly sees her as a younger sister, so when she begs him on her hands and knees to come back to acting - just for a small role that involves a lot of stunts!!! - he can’t exactly say no. and so what if she forgot to mention that his character has a small, heavily implied yet next explicitly stated, romantic arc with you, the main character? it’s not like she purposefully left that out when attempting to convince him, haha. and so when you and gally first meet, he already has a bad taste in his mouth for this entire affair. really, he was the idiot for not reading about his character as thoroughly as he should, but that doesn’t change the fact that he officially hates this. any anyone taking part in it. and so...... you, too. and really, you are just a bit annoying in your Extreme Dedication to an acting job that probably won’t become that big a blockbuster, anyway. i mean, who wants apocalypse movies, anymore?? (mr. gally, sir, i think you are underestimating the found family dynamic) you both play your parts on camera well, but the dissent between you is starting early, and off camera, no one wants to be near the two of you. and so when your director sees you guys aren’t exactly... chummy with each other, she goes out of her way to send the two of you on Bonding Field Trips... that a desperate photographer notices and latches onto, immediately. the news breaks early the next day - is there a romance budding between hollywood’s newest actor and most forgotten star??? gally is allergic to press and so he doesn’t actually realize what’s happened until he’s been caught by paparazzi and he deigns to check the news. this reporter by the name of thomas,,,,,, he better watch his back, gally is not pleaased. and so when the both of you rush onto set that morning you’re both understandably upset - you have a partner!!! well,,, okay, maybe you have a crush on a fellow actor - but it was certainly progressing!!! it was going somewhere!!!! never mind if they still overlooked you for someone else, you were going to confess to them soon!!! how can you do that now??? and meanwhile gally is like!!!!! this goes against my loner status!!!! the ~bad boy~ appeal!!!! i already took a season off of fighting for this stupid movie, and now you’re ruining my image, too???? but that’s when the both of you are stunned. absolutely blindsighted. this is good pr for the movie, can’t you just pretend to be dating during the shooting process, press tour, and like four months after the release??? oh, someone is about to die on this set piece - we can call it an unfortunate accident, and the press from that will cover up this ridiculous dating scandal that will not ever, in a thousand years, under any circumstances happen— hard cut to you and gally planning your first ~undercover~ date. this is not going to well - of that, you are most certain. gally is the hardest person to get along with! nothing is ever good enough! he doesn’t even want to be here! he was born into the very profession you’ve been desperately chasing since you were old enough to realize the people on screen were actors and not just characters, and he mocks you for having any ambitions at all! at least you try things. at least you give them your all! what has gally done but squander his acting talent from the moment he arrived on set? well, did it ever occur to you that he hates show buisness? that he ran away from it for a very specific reason and never wanted to come back at all, but does so because he does have a heart, actually, and doesn’t want to see his old friend create something that’s a flop?? you know what? never mind. he’ll do whatever you want for these stupid dates. and he’ll be a good little puppet and smile at the cameras and everything. you just make the plans. he’ll wash his hands clean of any of it. if you hate him so much, the least he can do is let you choose what activities you have to grin and bear with him. and so you go on a date, and luckily, the press manages to miss the awkward moments. and then, sometime later, you go on a second. and at the end of that second date, the both of you get so drunk you’re actually laughing the whole way home. and maybe you don’t hate each other so much after all.... maybe you actually fall in love with this idiot - so much so that for a moment, you forget entirely how this relationship began in the first place. that is,,,,, until a Notoriously Hard-Ass Interviewer asks you about the pr relationship outright. after all, weren’t you seen trying to approach another actor, right around the time that the first images leaked? and so you admit when the first pictures leaked, you and gally weren’t dating - you were doing bonding activities so that your on-screen performance would seem more real. and then the rumors broke, and the two of you were a bit awkward about going to places together afterward, but you still did those bonding activities, and at some point, started to contact him outside of those events. you were given ufc tickets and wanted to go with someone who could explain what the hell was going on. you wanted to try out that new korean bbq place and wished to go with someone who would openly state his opinion on all of the food present, and eat it all with a smile anyway. you wanted to go to an amusement park with someone who was good at all the fair games and would insist on giving all the prizes to you. you wanted someone who would get incredibly competitive over inconsequential trivia when watching jeopardy on game night (he did grow up with his grandparents after all, and so game night was a very sacred occurrence, thank you very much). so you were interested in someone else when the rumors began. but when you started dating him - officially, that night when the both of you went to that release party for a fellow friend’s new movie - that was real. and so was everything after. but who knows? maybe gally was just treating you like some pr relationship. the reporters would have to ask him, next. and gally, who is in the car, commuting to an interview of his own yet watching this all take place live, swears viciously. you would do something like this. and despite himself, that’s why he loves you.
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the-light-of-stars · 1 year
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this is deranged but whatever im losing it so here's the Goncharov ending scene (incoherent summary edition):
Goncharov (played by DeNiro) and Ambrosini (played by Al Pacino) have been hiding out in a tiny old hotel room for days. empty bottles, crumpled and strewn papers and zigarette buds everywhere. they have been joined by two of Ambrosinis friends, and have at this point been frantically trying to figure out a plan about how to get out of the mess they got themselves into alive. they're in the middle of discussing their ideas for a plan as the score cuts out and Ambrosini suddenly looks up in terror and shushes the others. "shh be quiet...do you hear that?" the faint ticking of a clock starts appearing in the background "hear what?" we start hearing sounds of steps now overlaid perfectly over the ticking sound, the image cuts to a closeup of a ticking grandfather clock, the steps we hear matching the movement of the clock hands. "shh just listen....the steps.." cut to a closeup of someone wearing expensive shoes walking down the hotel corridor (we only see the shoes and bottom of the legs) Ambrosini
grows more anxious "the steps...dont you hear them?" closeup of the clock again. the ticking and steps grow louder. one of the friends: "i don' hear anythin'" , Goncharev, now growing concerned too: "Mario whats going on, you-" quick cut between the shoes and ambrosini's face thats quickly growing more terrified: "the steps!! dont you hear them??" multiple quick cuts between the clock face and the shoes, the sounds growing louder , "...like the..like the ticking of a watch..dont you hear it?" (he grows frantic) "*tick tock tick tock* " as he says the tick and tock we see the shoes again stepping perfectly in sync, with a loud ticking noise overlaid. "what's he talkin about??" "i think the stress's done 'im in, he's gone nuts" the friends in the bg, but we focus on Goncharev's face growing concerned and angry, (since its the only way he knows how to express his emotions) " Mario stop with that tick tock bullshit whats going on what do you hear?" closeup of Ambrosinis eyes , reflecting a nonexistent watch in Ambrosini's eyes, the same one we saw changing hands being gifted to different friends of the don multiple times in the movie .
"the steps, Goncharov!! THE STEPS!!" (he starts grabbing his shoulders)
"Whose steps???" (he grabs Ambrosinis shoulders back and starts shaking him while yelling)
"HIS" the ticking and steps grow uncomfortably loud. "HIS?? *HIS*??? WHO IS HE ??" Goncharev shakes a sweaty and almost delirious Ambrosini. all background noise suddenly dies out. "the inevitable" Ambrosini whispers, eyes wide witb terror. Goncharev has stopped shaking him but still grabs him, white knuckled, his face growing pale, but he cannot let go of the other man. the other friends are equally shocked , they dont know what this means, but cant dare say anything. a few short moments of this silence and standing still. then, the doorknob of the hotel room theyve been hiding in being shot out as the clock strikes twelve . he is here.
we never see the man's face (if it even is a man - it might have been ...Katya ?). instead, we only see. a gloved hand, pointing the gun. shooting Ambrosini.
and maybe the other two friends as they try to flee , but theyre in the background. as the camera holds on Goncharov holding a bleeding dying Ambrosini in his arms , cutting from closeups of each of their eyes to the other.
see its ultimately not about *who* shot Ambrosini, its just about the inevitability of death. he has lived too fast and risky, trying to get tied up in the criminal life he should never have gotten tied up in, and about Goncharev realising that all of this , all the deaths, couldve been prevented had he been less stubborn, had he overcome his trust and emotional issues. but now it's too late. and this is ofc all to say we'll never know if he actually learned his lesson or if he will continue as before, doomed to ruin himself and everyone he meets. or if he even got killed too? since this is the last scene of the movie 😔 as the camera zooms out into the ceiling above him as hes holding Ambrosini like the Pieta. and the score that played during Goncharev's childhood scene plays again, except now interspersed with the themes of the people he met, adding into it in order of their appearance until ultimately we realize the movie's main theme - Goncharev's theme - had been an amalgamation of all these themes all along.
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quill-of-thoth · 1 year
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The Years When I Wrote Stuff
So it’s the wake of the year 2022 and as of two months from now it will be two years since I spent a significant amount of time writing anything. I watched The Glass Onion last night and I want to write a mystery so badly that my stomach hurts, but also I want to go home and time travel is not an option. Feel free to skip the introspection but I miss Livejournal, and I thought other people also waiting for a dead year to be buried who have also tried to make stuff during the last eternity might find this a little cathartic.
I spent my morning rereading some stuff I previously wrote, back in college, approximately a decade ago, and it’s... good? In ways that I didn’t expect, given a whole host of personal factors like ten years experience, the fact that some of what I wrote then was fanfic for a very small and insular writing and reading community and not actually fanfic of a property that exists*, and that what I remember as communitywide engagement is an average of five unique commenters per chapter. (*People who never lived on Live Journal: there were several of these sorts of emergent meta fandoms, long before Goncharov. I was in a handful of them. One of them was the Sims 2 legacy challenge community, where there is no canon, everyone is trying to win points on a spreadsheet while playing a completely different game, and people just straight up borrowed each other’s characters to write combination screenshot and text stories about. It was considered flattery to do it if you could write your way out of a paper bag. Or if your forum threads / livejournal entries got enough engagement to be equal to or more ‘popular’ than the original author. Other metafandoms involved sporking [critical reading of another work with jokes worked in], and meta-fanfic like protectors of the plot continuum.) So, what did I have in twenty mumbleteen that let me write, and do it pretty well for my level of skill at the time? 
I was not less depressed: the year that I wrote 48k of cathartic mystery investigation that I still like was not a good one, personally, and the year before it was definitely top three worst. I also wasn’t just astronomically talented at the time: I was concurrently writing a non-fanfic attempt at a novel that has fully earned its position in the mental compost bin. (The physical location is somewhere in a folder within a folder on a thumb drive, probably labeled “junk” and “old junk” respectively.) 
I was not less busy: on top of classes I was writing a thesis that was so bad, the singular time any other living human mentioned they’d read it after I graduated, I blurted out “Oh god WHY?” (I got that job anyway.) In contrast since the beginning of the pandemic I have been unemployed off and on and not exactly super busy otherwise. I may have been doing a less overwhelming amount of the work of living, since I was living in dorms at the time, but... (checks my apartment) I think I’d better not investigate how much work of living is technically getting done around here.  I honestly think the major difference has been community. Don’t get me wrong, I like tumblr. I like twitter too. There is not a lack of people joyfully engaged in making stuff and talking to each other about it on either platform. We are (probably, at least in my case) a little cooler about it too: twitter’s villain of the week and the eternal problem of internet harassment aside, the dominance of short form and mostly public posting has made a lot more people than I remember aware that joining secret locked fandom groups devoted to hating specific members of your community is a bad thing and not a badge of acceptance into the Big Name Fan inner circle. Also, the first time Diane Duane turned up to my livejournal I acted like an embarrassingly star-struck teenager. Given that I was an embarrassingly star-struck teenager and have since managed to have actual conversations with published authors, I think I may have matured some. But with shorter, faster posts, and an internet economy that is increasingly about advertising, and single streams of information, we’ve definitely lost an aspect of the previous writing and fannish community. Not just the ability to off topic chat in a forum or a comments section with days or weeks between replies instead of wading through the discord, or community reading lists instead of reblogs and quote tweets, or spending hours uploading photos and gifs to new third party hosting sites and re-linking them every time free hosting got discontinued. From my perspective here on Tumblr we seem to have lost a huge amount of support for each other’s projects. Let me explain: back in the days of Livejournal there was fandom, meta fandoms, and original work. The three nations lived in harmony until - okay, technically they weren’t three nations, because we were a bunch of individual people doing a bunch of different things and even if you didn’t tag for shit, if you stuck around and commented enough you met other people. You would get invested in one of their projects, or they would get invested in yours. Most importantly, you would talk about things in the comments section. If you went looking for book reviews you would go to the comments for more recommendations. You’d also get arguments between people you’d never met, essays written by someone who appeared to be commenting on the mirrorverse version of the post you’d just read, and a decent number of bots. But you would be at the party talking about your favorite movies, the novel you were writing, and your thesis in the corners with photos of someone’s cat, instead of shouting across the width of the internet. You can still DM people, yes I know. You can still, if you’re too experienced to be embarrassed by being perceived like @seeingteacupsindragons and I, have a loud personal conversation in public via reblogs and tagging other people. It can even be a relatively private conversation if you’re deep enough into twitter replies or you’re only notable to a few dozen or few hundred people who only follow you in case you have more confessions to make about your former feral gremlin exploits back in the years when you wrote things. I can’t imagine writing the usual fandom disclaimer of “don’t own: don’t like don’t read” the way I used to during a spork or analysis. I legitimately once advertised the story that kicked off this round of introspection with “I obviously don’t own [book series we were dissecting to see why we hated it] because if I did you guys wouldn’t love me anymore.” Not just because it’s assuming my audience has strong feelings about me (easy to assume when there are seven of them and they loyally keysmash every chapter,) but because the firehose of social media feels very impersonal. Not on a caring about other people personally level, but on a level where, outside of fandoms, which aren’t built as sturdily as they used to be, it seems a little absurd to assume people care about your ongoing projects.  I’m not saying prior fandom iterations were better. Fandom problems and blog and social media problems have always been the same community building problems dressed up in different posting limits. Human nature has always been that of miscommunication, self interest, and sarcastic asides no matter how low you can sink the stakes. People have always struggled to organize community in the face of corporate censorship, societal bigotry, and Russian government takedown bots.** I’m saying that the things that used to go hand in hand with fandom, like your own oc’s and the ability to spend six months in a fandom and come out with a writing group passionately keysmashing over each other’s original characters and original stories are much, much harder to find than they used to be.  (**The bots are not always russian but false DMCA reports and the other apparatus of modern internet bot problems is not by any means new. And the eventual deathblow of Livejournal was struck by Russia. For more information I’m afraid you’ll have to google it all, due to me failing to locate any of the tumblr posts that filled me in on specifics long after the fact, on the very same day I successfully found my old Livejournal story I had forgotten the time of via a string of related tags. Irony, it turns out, cannot die.) AO3 and tumblr have kept fandom going, arguably stronger than ever, and it’s not like metafandom has died, given that it hasn’t even been two months since a critical mass of tumblr users decided to collaboratively write a summary of a movie based on a pair of bootleg shoes. I’m almost guaranteed to get more “interaction” with this post than my average original story in livejournal days.  But goddamn it, I miss the comments section. I miss replying to people demanding to know what was coming next with cutesy replies like “well you see, next chapter, [redacted] will [spoiler].” I miss having to break five thousand word conversations into multiple comments and the accompanying ability to trade theories and refute assumptions point by point without either flooding the dash or having to shove it all behind a readmore. (I miss customizeable readmores and the ability to put up a summary to click on or make a cryptic comment about the plot. Upon reflection, I don’t miss breaking up comments, I miss having collapsible threads to discuss specific points of speculation.) Most of all, I miss the semi-private space where people overwhelmingly were not shy about saying “hey, this reminds me of some things in my original story, you want to read some?” and where the link you received when you said yes ended either with you giving out a polite comment about the similarity to the original conversation and ‘I might not keep up with it, but good luck!’ or falling madly in love with someone else’s blorbo. I’ve tried to recapture the magic here and elsewhere, but as lovely as most people in writeblr are there is just so much advertising that it hasn’t worked for me, as a vehicle of actually talking to people about writing. Without a word written of the actual story there’s a moodboard and a playlist and a near-constant feeling of talking to yourself in front of a microphone. We all might want to publish this some day: have two paragraphs and an entire tag of endlessly recycled promotional material about the aesthetic. Everything is a pitch contest and the rules of engagement are written down in a completely different post: above all else act professional. Well, professional enough. You can be a clown and you can be a jerk but you cannot just hang out and expect that everyone will get their own turn to talk about their OC’s, regardless of whether you’re seriously hoping to publish or not. I’d love to talk about the process and art of writing again with people I only sort of know, instead of only doing it in DM’s with my oldest friends. I’d love to drag my OC’s out of the metaphorical compost bin and tell you that I don’t currently have a WIP that is anything like ready for public consumption, much less publication, but that if you watched Glass Onion last night and cried over the idea that you can’t have justice for the ones you love and you can’t bring them back but you can damn well be sure their work was not in vain, you’d love them. They’re my children and they’re my self, they live in my brain and they’re in love and better yet they’re best friends who will never, ever loose each other. Whether that’s to the slow diaspora of having to move across the country to make a living or finding that a dumbass billionaire pulled the plug on the liminal space where they gather. They’re part of a family of orphans and outcasts and they’re the spiritual descendants of a lot of people who taught me a lot about community. They know way more than me about how to help the friends who are suffering yet another pointless accident and wring some kind of catharsis out of a world that has not stopped ending in a thousand different ways since before any of us were born, and it’s only partly because one of them can literally do magic. Mostly it’s because when you write for five people who all hated the idea that resistance to the cruelties of the world is pointless even in fiction the exact same way you can actually give them a single webpage where justice exists, the people who are supposed to keep people safe care more about that than maintaining their structural power, and rich assholes who ruin people’s lives are the ones who go to jail. Now if only my perfect, (but not too perfect) darling, useless daughters would bring me a plot so I could actually use the sadness and anger for something. Even if no one ever reads it.
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