Even if I haven’t seen the movies it’s lampooning?
I think there are some things on my list that are really too late for me to enjoy properly now. I get the impression that the John Hughes movies are remembered as beloved coming-of-age movies for anyone who saw them while growing up in the 80s, but if you didn’t see them for the first time when you were in the proper age range then the effect doesn’t work.
Oh, I thought of another one.
I had never read even a single page of DC or Marvel comics until I was 30 or so. And even then it was only one little “Superman for Dummies” paperback ever.
It’s a good point. They were just so horrible that I got dizzy from all the eye rolling I had to do. I still think Fatal Instinct would be funny without the context, but you’d miss something.
The only thing comic book related I’ve read is The Last Days of Krypton by Kevin J. Anderson. It wasn’t great, but it was a decent Sunday read. I tried reading Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, but that’s one of the few books I quit after the first couple of chapters and never picked back up. Anderson is a slightly boring author, IMHO.
I never got into comics because there’s just too much back-story.
I didn’t get into them when I was young because I never had the money or the patience to buy one chapter at a time of a story arc that might span months or years. Later I discovered trade paperbacks and graphic novels at the library and came to appreciate them more.
there are a few other things like pudding/dessert scotch tape/stello tape lift/elevator etc etc.
Not a ‘seen’ but ‘heard’:
Never heard anything by The Clash other than their hits and ‘The Magnificent Dance’.
Never heard anything by The Talking Heads other than their hits. I listened the beejezus out of Byrne and Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, though.
As for ‘you gotta hear this’:
Amon Tobin is a one-person supercollider of sound and melody. Listening to his work for the first time will induce neurogenesis because that’s the only way you’ll be able to comprehend it. This goes double for his most recent work.
Do not take hallucinogens before going to an Amon Tobin performance like this one. Mr. Tobin has already taken them for you. He’s a nice guy that way.
Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus is actually non-fiction too; it’s a memoir/biography centered around the story of his parents’ ordeal during the Holocaust. The narrative is real but the characters are drawn as animals (like mice for the Jews and cats for the Nazis) instead of humans. Might be a good companion piece for Palestine.
ETA: You just reminded me to check out Sacco’s book. I just put a hold on it at my local library.
ETA 2: I also recommend checking out Persepolis if you’re into non-fiction graphic novels (or is that a contradiction in terms?)
@japhroaig
Everything Kurosawa did is worth seeing, and since he did do a fairly wide variety of films (not just samurai stuff), you can pick and choose where to start (or where to start digging deeper) basically on a whim based on what sounds interesting. For example, the talk of House of Cards in this thread reminded me of The Bad Sleep Well, a Kurosawa film starring Toshiro Mifune but set in modern time (for when it came out), about corruption etc. (in the corporate context, not government). Then there’s Ikiru, an absolute masterwork along the lines of the best Frank Capra films (better, probably), also set in modern times for when it came out, about death and living but also about the notorious Japanese bureaucracy.
Of course, many people are initially attracted to the samurai films, which are all incredible, powerful works of art, even when they’re more or less basic action/adventure films on the surface. Seven Samurai is of course the standout - one of the very best films of any kind of all time (the remake The Magnificent Seven is a great film, but pales in comparison - it’s really that good). And for most people, that’s a great place to start. But then depending on your taste, Rashomon could be better place to start - it’s an art-house classic that stands with the best of the new wave cinema of the 50s and 60s - and is also a samurai film, though not action/adventure.
One of the things that’s important when delving into world cinema is getting accustomed to the film language from various countries - watching many Indian films can be jarring, for example, because they play fast and loose with most of the conventions we’re used to from Hollywood (though there are plenty of great films from India that aren’t in the fast and loose Bollywood style). With Japanese films, Kurosawa is a great starting point for most because he was greatly influenced by Western cinema (John Ford westerns famously being a big influence), but the films are still very Japanese. It’s a good way to ease into the other great classic-era directors (with Ozu being probably the “most Japanese”, although far from unapproachable). Of course you can just stick to Kurosawa too - there’s a lot to go through, and it’s a very rewarding experience to see them all for the first time.
Going back to Indian cinema, for me it’s always been far less approachable - I think primarily because far less has been written about it in English, apart from discussion of the director Satyajit Ray. I’ve only seen one of his films anyway though so that can count as my answer to the thread. I’d love to dig deeper in Indian cinema besides Bollywood musicals (which, let’s get real, are fantastic).
interestingly i was listening to this-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijjGcKc5pfY
when i read your comment. not identical but in the same family.
I mean that’s just how out of the loop I am; I didn’t know whether Rogue One had been released yet or not.
And no, I hadn’t planned on making any concerted effort to see it.
FWIW, and this is coming from someone who loathed the prequels (except for Ewan McGregor, who I’d watch sing the phone book), Force Awakens was more like the original trilogy. The best description I’ve seen was that it gave us everything we knew we wanted, but none of the things we didn’t know we wanted. Which is another way of saying it wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was a nice trip down nostalgia lane. Then again, Return of the Jedi was largely a repeat of A New Hope, so they ran out of plots pretty quickly.
I’m not a big fan of reboots/remakes in the first place, which is why I was so surprised that I liked the recent Ghostbusters as much as I did.
I’m Cancerian; we hate for anyone to fuck with our nostalgia…
I’m piscean, one of those fishy people.
And yeah, even though Force Awakens was technically a sequel to Return of the Jedi, it felt a lot more like a reboot.
So is my mom.
You know to make Kevin J Anderson bark like a dog?
Douse him in gasoline and toss a lit match: “WOOF!”
seconded.
it was one that had escaped my viewing and it was showing on the big screen when the kid was in kindergarten and he sat through all three and half hours of it rapt by the movie not giving in to tired as it ran well past his normal bedtime.
ETA Every Frame A Painting on Kurosawa’s visual style…
Kevin j anderson 8 bloody books just to tell me what happened after chapter house, next thing I know hes trying to put things inbetween dune and dune messiah. Well that was when I was done. You had one job man just one tell us the ending that was it.
Oddly enough, I’ve seen Gremlins 2 (both in a theater and in videotape - there were edits made for some meta-jokes), but not the original.
Never seen American Pie.
No Die Hard except the Christmas one.
Never played a lot of console video games except in arcades, and I sucked at them. Have fond memories of the Atari 2600, though.
Nightmare on Elm Street
No David Foster Wallace at all
Once William Vollmann started writing about Vikings I stopped reading him
