what are you watching?

RCH · Post by **RCH** » Tue May 05, 2020 3:46 pm

Update on Charlie Bartlett, cont.:

O hai Aubrey

tomcarroll.online · Post by **tomcarroll.online** » Wed May 06, 2020 10:53 am

Anyone watching Pluto TV? It's an app that has the same interface as classic cable and everything is live, but each channel is just one show i.e. there is a channel that only plays MST3K and one that only plays Unsolved Mysteries! I've felt crushed by the tyranny of choice recently and not being able to program my media as specifically has been a blessing! Plus you get served weird commercials (MyPillow). Overall, I've found it very comforting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Wed May 06, 2020 2:12 pm

We do Pluto sometimes! It’s fun to just land in the middle of some sci-fi movie when you’re feeling aimless.

We finally have the time/mental space to get into watching CINEMA (or as [mention]ritchey[/mention] calls it, “French pornos”) rather than just our favorite prestige TV dramas. Last night we watched Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which I have just never been able to muster myself into doing before. What a journey. To be fair Jona and I both fell asleep for a crucial twenty minutes once the writer, the professor and the stalker actually arrived to the “room” but we plan to revisit it this afternoon. I have never seen a movie like this and it completely blew me away, affected my dream state, made me feel disconnected from time & space, just generally knocked me asunder. The sound design alone! The way the sound disconnects from the picture in slow subtle ways that leave you feeling like time is slowing down and jumping around. And there’s these sounds that seem like they’re natural (a train, for example) that slowly distort and loop until they’re in between sound and music while not being either. The textures! The color choices! I read that Tarkovsky spent a year shooting all the exterior shots and then something happened to the film stock, like the Soviet film lab didn’t know how to handle some newer Kodak film, and everything was lost and then he shot the WHOLE THING shot for shot a second time. I also read they shot the movie near an abandoned chemical factory in Estonia and that multiple crew members died of the same rare cancers later in life?!

Post by **joni** » Wed May 06, 2020 2:24 pm

HOT TIP: The Criterion Channel also offers a free 14-day trial. That's where we watched Stalker. Even thought Kanopy claims they have it, I couldn't get it to work?

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Wed May 06, 2020 2:27 pm

Ugh, it's so good. I think I watched it once while sitting on a concrete floor and just let my ass go completely numb because I was so absorbed. It really does change you while you're watching it and for some time afterwards. I feel like all Tarkovsky movies have that effect on me, but Stalker does the most intensely (so far).

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Wed May 06, 2020 6:04 pm

We're gonna watch Solaris next!

matthew · Post by **matthew** » Wed May 06, 2020 10:59 pm

I saw that Mubi has Beanpole! Pumped to see it (sad I missed it irl before the virus)

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Thu May 07, 2020 1:31 am

I have only seen Solaris on some downtown hotel rooftop in LA. The sun was still way too high and almost no one showed up and everyone was fidgety because the experience was not what anyone hoped it would be. I remember nothing about the actual film.

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Thu May 07, 2020 8:14 am

Ah, a bad rooftop film screening! Now that’s something I DON’T miss about pre-quarantine life! Watch a movie in the theater like god intended, ya friggin BUTTHEADS

Evan.V.N.S.J. · Post by **Evan.V.N.S.J.** » Thu May 07, 2020 3:42 pm

I remember that Solaris screening, it seemed like a cool idea but it was indeed bad

One of the best filmgoing experiences of my life was seeing Stalker in a theater with a huge crowd, I think at UCLA. I don't think I would have been able to get through it as a home viewing experience, but with an audience it played almost like a comedy. I mean not in a campy way. It's hard to describe. But sometimes things that are incredibly moving are also... kind of absurd?

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Thu May 07, 2020 10:35 pm

It helps so much to watch movies with others. I don't think I could ever have gotten through LA Plays Itself, which is one of my all-time favorite documentaries (?) if I hadn't watched it in a theater! We need to psych each other up!

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Fri May 08, 2020 1:00 am

Comedies are especially fun in a crowd! The laughter of others is a blessing bestowed on us all.

Post by **joni** » Fri May 08, 2020 1:27 pm

This is available to rent for $3.99 as of today!

SPACESHIP EARTH

SPACESHIP EARTH is the true, stranger-than-fiction, adventure of eight visionaries who in 1991 spent two years quarantined inside of a self-engineered replica of Earth’s ecosystem called BIOSPHERE 2. The experiment was a world-wide phenomenon, chronicling daily existence in the face of life threatening ecological disaster and a growing criticism that it was nothing more than a cult. The bizarre story is both a cautionary tale and a hopeful lesson of how a small group of dreamers can potentially reimagine a new world.

alex · Post by **alex** » Fri May 08, 2020 2:07 pm

My old place of employment is doing a "Watch from home" film series, which is featuring SPACESHIP EARTH. If you use their link, they get some kind of affiliate something money thing: https://bampfa.org/event/spaceship-earth

#ad #promoted

Evan.V.N.S.J. · Post by **Evan.V.N.S.J.** » Fri May 08, 2020 2:20 pm

It's funny that we've imported the word "rent" from the world of physical media and are now using it to mean "pay money to watch something one time" which is a totally normal and understandable way to interact with a film

Like what if going to a movie theater to see a movie was also called "renting" the movie

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Fri May 08, 2020 2:37 pm

alex wrote: ↑Fri May 08, 2020 2:07 pm My old place of employment is doing a "Watch from home" film series, which is featuring SPACESHIP EARTH. If you use their link, they get some kind of affiliate something money thing: https://bampfa.org/event/spaceship-earth

#ad #promoted

That’s funny cause we’re renting it from a DIFFERENT indie cinema nonprofit (Vidiots)

alex · Post by **alex** » Fri May 08, 2020 2:43 pm

Too many indie cinema nonprofits these days

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Fri May 08, 2020 2:45 pm

Long may they reign

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Fri May 08, 2020 3:00 pm

Hey kids, that's MY hometown!

ritchey · Post by **ritchey** » Sat May 09, 2020 3:04 am

Last night we watched The Square, a movie by the guy who made Force Majeur. Force Majeur is SO good. If you haven't seen it I beg ye to put it to the top of yon lists. We were excited to see his follow up and it was also so good! Both are so precise and fully realized. They're both about the weird pathetic experience of contemporary (upper class) masculinity but in very quietly hilarious ways. The Square also explores a critique of the (high) art world and of late capitalism generally that I found pretty satisfying. All the performances are amazing. Did anyone see it?

I LOVE MOVIE

Tonight I think we are watching the movie about Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" that somebody for some reason made, god bless them

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Sat May 09, 2020 8:22 am

Jona and I saw the Square in theaters in France. I think we didn’t entirely realize that it would be mostly in Danish with French subtitles, so parked my head on his shoulder and simultaneously whisper-translated the subtitles the for the entire movie.

That scene with the ape performance artist is so fucked up! I think about it often

ritchey · Post by **ritchey** » Sat May 09, 2020 9:28 am

It's SO intense!
Apparently there's a special feature on the DVD about the filming of that scene and we want to watch it.

Sidenote: we got the DVD from Facets.com, a DVD-mailing video store in Chicago we first got into around 2008 when we were living in Iowa. Then we forgot about them for awhile. Turns out, they are STILL renting DVDs through the mail! So we signed back up. It's so fun and funny. You just send somebody an email of movies you want, and then they send them to you kind of in random order, with A LOT of "mistakes" thrown in. But the mistakes are usually really good--we ended up discovering "In Bruges" and the amazing Spanish thriller "Tell No One" simply because Facets mailed them to us incorrectly. We talk about Facets as though it is just one guy: Mr. Facets. "Have you emailed our new movie selections to Mr. Facets yet?"

Highly recommended

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Sat May 09, 2020 11:22 am

Update: the Biosphere 2 documentary is INCREDIBLE you all must watch it. The whole project was the dreamseed of a hippie commune/group that read a lot of Buckminster Fuller and basically believed they could do impossible things. Over the decades before starting Biosphere they built their own massive ship with no engineering training whatsoever and sailed around the world doing planetary-scale ventures like building a hotel in Kathmandu, managing a parcel of rainforest in South America and opening an art gallery in London. It’s deeply radical!

RCH · Post by **RCH** » Sat May 09, 2020 1:49 pm

I kind of hate Biosphere 2. There were many shades of dishonesty in the work they represented, including misrepresentation of data (I'm sorry, I can't find where I read that, so it's just an opinion). It strikes me as a highly publicized, highly funded project that was inherently vulnerable to outside pressures (pun intended!).

I don't see it as heroic at all. I agree with a magazine that called it "New Age drivel masquerading as science." Building a hotel in Nepal and "managing" land in the Amazon is colonial ugliness. However, I think there is a great deal of value in learning from its failures.

The premise of taking an ecosystem in isolation really bothers me. My views have changed over time... I despise the concept of space travel. I don't think it's possible for humans to live apart from Earth, and I especially think it's unethical. It feels like grave robbing... something that can be rationally justified but which in turn robs us of our humanity.

It would be amazing to see a film treating Biosphere 2 he way that The Thing treated Antarctic research. The best thing about B2 was the absolute drama that unfolded. Did you know that The Steve Bannon was involved?? From Dikipedia:

During a 1996 trial, Bannon testified that he had called one of the plaintiffs, Abigail Alling, a "self-centered, deluded young woman" and a "bimbo."[71] He also testified that when the woman submitted a five-page complaint outlining safety problems at the site, he promised to shove the complaint "down her fucking throat." Bannon attributed this to "hard feelings and broken dreams."

Post by **joni** » Sat May 09, 2020 2:53 pm

[mention]RCH[/mention] You should watch the documentary. I bet you'll look at the whole thing a bit differently. Steve Bannon was brought in at the end after all the actual founders were kicked out of the organization and dragged by the press hype around it. The press didn't want to showcase a nuanced and complicated idea, they wanted to sell papers, magazines, and ad time during "good TV."

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Sat May 09, 2020 2:55 pm

I'm with you that space travel is a problematic fantasy! We should only get to travel into space once we've proven to the Universe that we can responsibly live on Biosphere 1 (planet Earth)

RCH · Post by **RCH** » Sat May 09, 2020 3:23 pm

I'll drink* to that!!

*my own recycled pee

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Sat May 09, 2020 5:20 pm

popping in to report that Party Down is on Hulu now, if anyone needs a funny show
(I've seen both seasons at least 4x)

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Sun May 10, 2020 2:32 am

B2 is an exciting and sordid tale.

As kids we had to visit with school when it was still an active project. That meant bussing 30 nine year olds out to the 100 degree desert spending an hour walking us around the outside while describing what we couldn't see through the fogged up glass.

My friend Laura and I wrote a musical (4 or 5 songs?) about how B2 was super boring, set to the tunes of Les Miserables songs. I remember that one was all about ants. One about banana trees?

I finally went back a year ago and actually went inside. It is undeniably awe inspiring. They are working on climate change research there now!

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Sun May 10, 2020 11:11 am

We visited a few years ago too. It totally blew my mind.

: BB1DA17E-731D-40B9-A75D-AB2B9B19CE60.jpeg (1.62 MiB) Viewed 4802 times

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Mon May 11, 2020 2:47 am

Arizona is a rich mishmash of screwballz and people interested in joining militias. Screwballz and Screwballs.

RCH · Post by **RCH** » Mon May 11, 2020 7:57 am

Thinking about moving to Sedona to go to palm-reading school...

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Mon May 11, 2020 8:54 am

You have my bessing!

infopetal · Post by **infopetal** » Mon May 11, 2020 5:57 pm

pizza wrote: ↑Wed May 06, 2020 10:59 pm I saw that Mubi has Beanpole! Pumped to see it (sad I missed it irl before the virus)

brace yourself! a beautiful movie but one I did manage to see in the theaters before "all this" and left feeling devastated. curious how it will land for you now.

I saw Stalker at CSU Northridge right when I moved to Los Angeles in 2016. it was being screened for an undergrad film class there but apparently their class screenings were also open to the public…? has anyone else here gone to those? I don't even know how I heard about it, was it on 5 Every Day? somehow driving an hour to this really suburban-feeling state school campus setting made the viewing experience even more surreal.

last week I finally did a Mur Murs + Documenteur double feature, which was so gratifying! (both are also available on Criterion Collection.) this scene in Documenteur really resonated with my quarantined life:

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ritchey · Post by **ritchey** » Wed May 13, 2020 7:15 am

ALERT! Meredith Monk has just made her incredible 1988 film Book of Days available for free streaming, just until the end of May, if you use promo code COMMUNITY:

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/bookofdays

It would be hard to unpack what exactly I mean by this but I just want to say that this movie is sort of why I became a musicologist!

For a long time it was totally unavailable. I had a VHS tape of it I dubbed from my undergrad professor who had taped it off PBS when it aired on television (!?) at some point. Then a few years ago she started selling DVDs of it on her website--you emailed a guy named Dave and told him you wanted one, and he sent you a PayPal link. So then I had it on DVD but I would still not call that "widely available." NOW IS YOUR CHANCE

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Wed May 13, 2020 7:41 am

I will DEFINITELY watch this tonight. Big fan o' the Monk.

alexshred420 · Post by **alexshred420** » Wed May 13, 2020 9:29 am

Everything about this 45 minute Brazilian knock-off of Ratatouille (which I have not seen) is incredibly bad and satisfying.

Sasha found it on Twitter. Worth watching on weed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3XE14upb4I

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Wed May 13, 2020 2:17 pm

m o l l y wrote: ↑Wed May 13, 2020 7:41 am I will DEFINITELY watch this tonight. Big fan o' the Monk.

It turns out that I will not watch this tonight. Tomorrow (fingers crossed). It got me thinking though, I got into Monk years ago, when I was in an LA dance troupe called bodycity. She was definitely an influence of ours. As a result I always think of her as a dancer first rather than a musician first. I look forward to seeing this film and continuing this train of thought.

ritchey · Post by **ritchey** » Thu May 14, 2020 4:09 am

Yes!!! I loved bodycity--it coincided with the three years I spent in LA and was a large source of pleasure for me. I can totally see the Monk influence.

It's funny though how our different fields/interests lead us to think of people in different ways. Despite the fact that I KNOW she is committed to dance as part of her practice, and I love her dance work and am very aware of it, I absolutely think of her as a "composer" first and foremost.

I wonder how she thinks of herself???

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Thu May 14, 2020 10:44 am

Meredith Monk is two braids with consciousness

astral hellion · Post by **astral hellion** » Thu May 14, 2020 11:20 am

Sentient braids!

Post by **joni** » Thu May 14, 2020 12:25 pm

[mention]infopetal[/mention] Love that image.

infopetal · Post by **infopetal** » Sat May 16, 2020 11:02 pm

alex · Post by **alex** » Sun May 17, 2020 12:06 am

On a hair note:

Watched Disney’s Tangled and Pixar’s Brave the past few nights, which both prominently feature hair. Tangled was kinda meh (Disney seemingly don’t make em like they used to). Brave was quite good, maybe not in Pixar’s upper echelon (Cars, anyone? Just kidding. Or am I?) but good. Even better was a Brave-related short called “Modun” or “Mordor” (no) or something like this. It told the tale of some lore (not Data’s evil twin) that is touched on in the main movie. At times the animation almost approached a sort of Wizards/Bakshi vibe...I got the sense that they kind of let the animators get a little looser on the shorts. Or there just wasn’t budget to polish it too much. There were moments that were like still reaction shots (bad guy looking menacing in the shadows), probably cheaper than animating a whole other sequence. I remember in a interview Bakshi saying that a lot of the choices in Wizards was due to low budget, like the entire final action sequence (in my mind its like 20 minutes long or longer, but it’s been a while) being effectively stop motion of a few drawings with trippy colors and effects.

RCH · Post by **RCH** » Sun May 17, 2020 8:43 am

Lynn Shelton's Humpday is great. I saw it during a mumblecore marathon several years back—I was probably following a trail of Duplass. Movies like that, that create whole new genres and communities of filmmakers, are just so special to me. I hope her memory lives through her collaborators and viewers. I certainly will be trying to watch as many of her movies as I can.

It's been a while, but I remember what a rush it was to see Humpday, a story about two ostensibly straight men, navigating intimacy through the direction of a woman.

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Mon May 18, 2020 1:25 pm

You guys! Why didn't any of you tell me about bon appetit test kitchen? Anyway, it's fine. I'm watching it now.

rcnederveld · Post by **rcnederveld** » Sun May 24, 2020 9:30 am

My housemate and I are do a thing where we type in something in the criterion and then pick a random movie that comes up. For example, I typed in comedy the other night and we watched the 1965 USSR comedy Adventures of A Dentist.

I should say, a month or so ago I had a REAL covid moment when I realized a friend had been trying to get off the phone with me as I was telling them all the different things on Criteron Channel for about 20 min straight.

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Sun May 24, 2020 10:18 am

We're still watching the wire! On season 4 now, and still good. I keep mentioning movies we should watch but the vast expanse of wire beckons more strongly most nights.

RCH · Post by **RCH** » Sun May 24, 2020 11:43 am

I watched all 5(!) Phantasm movies and Midsommar.

The first Phantasm is the best (to me). When I watched it, I learned that it was remastered by JJ Abrams and felt like, get your hands off this indie franchise, big shot! But the promise of the cool sci-if story is not really carried out through the series and at this point, I'd be into it if he made something with it.

Deeper Phantasm comment—it's so touching that in the last film, we see that the Tall Man is actually a great actor, he just didn't really have any lines until then. The series is special in that it uses the same actors and writer for each movie (except that in the 2nd film, one actor has been replaced, but then he comes back for 3–5). Their aging becomes intertwined with the story in a beautiful way. The movies are even cut with unseen footage from prior films, so as a viewer you really feel invested in the characters.

Midsommar was as good as I'd hoped it would be. I respect that Ari Aster is like "oh you want a horror movie? Well nothing you can imagine is more horrifying than real life" and "oh you want gore? How about instead you deal with the least voyeuristic, subjectified, realistic physical trauma, so you will never think it's 'cool' to be horrified again?" That's kind of what I take from David Lynch, as well—the horror told in a humanistic way that forces you to empathize, not simply consume.

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Sun May 24, 2020 12:44 pm

I find his movies to be too traumatizing- too much violence and awfulness seen and heard. He's very skilled and the ideas are interesting but I can't deal. Too explicit for me, aka never need to know what it sounds or looks like when xyz happens to the human bod!