Indeed, it does. The funny thing is that “property isn’t theft” also alienates people, and often does so intentionally! But the difference is that it asserts that the alienation of those with property matters, while the alienation of those without it does not. Or not as much, they can be pitied.
The psychology behind the notion that “My survival/influence matters more, because I am special!” is so pervasive, despite being so lacking of evidence, that it can be truly awesome to witness the conceptual and institutional contortions that billions of people undertake to perpetuate it. As a perspective for perceiving the world, it is nothing if not popular!
As they say, “everyone is the star of their own movie” (on topic?). It usually takes a lot of both economic and emotional security to get beyond that. Most of the great revolutionaries of history were from the bourgeois at the least. My BIL was raised and schooled in a very materialist and elite environment that he rebelled against.
So I went to see Italian horror last night with @LDoBe and @SlyBevel. The Ghost with Barbara Steele. A fun if a bit slowly paced by modern standards bit of cinema. A nice twist at the end for a movie where none of the main characters are good guys. The thing that struck me the most is for something set in Scotland only the constable actually had a Scottish accent.
Fun fact I learned from the movie host Barbara Steele despite being an English speaker was always dubbed over so supposedly none of the movies she has been in have her actual voice.
Also I think I have watched enough Italian schlock from that era that I am recognizing the dubbing voices from other films.
ETA you can hear her actual voice in TV land. She played Dr. Hoffman in Dark Shadows and holy carp she had a part in Piranha in 1978…
Most of Steele’s classic continental gothic roles were dubbed, but she can be heard in quite a few later movies. It’s too bad, she’s a good actress with a fine voice.
Not quite: see Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Groundhog Day and the music video for Bjork’s Bachelorette.
All damned good, all using a repeating-loop narrative structure. So, either we classify those as unusually good time travel stories, or classify them as a non-time-travel plot device for fucking with causality and permitting plot revision.
…is a very good film based in Australian history. Closest thing there is to an Australian Western.
So, of course, it features several scenes of Aboriginal people being massacred.
Instead of turning it into a stupid action movie or just presenting a realistically horrific gorefest, the director chose to portray all of the massacre scenes as sound effects over sustained still images of relevant paintings.
The first two aren’t time travel at all, they deal solely with memory loss. Groundhog day is simply an amusing fantasy not an actual SF time travel story, there’s no attempt to rationalize it any more than the magic in Fantasia, it just is. The “SF” version was that steaming pile of Tom Cruise turd “Edge of Tomorrow”.
“The Magicians” 1st season delved into the timeloop swamp with just as silly results, some characters are aware of the loop and some not. Magic!!
Kinda my point; SF time travel is not the only plot device used to fuck with causality and narrative plasticity, and the resulting stories can often be (IMO) very good.
See also multiple perspective / unreliable narrator stories like Rashomon.
I see, you were taking issue with “There’s simply no other plot device where you can undo what has already happened or take action on what is for sure to come.” You should not mistake non-linear narrative technique for causality glitches. If there’s no TT there’s no true messing with the past. A recent example would be Westworld embedding flashbacks as a huge part of the narrative that are only exposed at the end of the season. Clever, but no causality break.
Oh, I liked this one. Definitely a little amateurish, but is still reasonably fun PKD-ian weirdness. And I love the name of the nationalistic org: “Friends of the American People” (FAPers).
Well, it was Rollins aright. Except, maybe he wasn’t so much of a loner in this film.
I liked the pacing of the film, which saved it IMO. The acting was kinda there sometimes, hit and miss.
Actually, the end was my favourite bit and the best bit of acting from Henry and seemed to kinda imply a much deeper story going on behind the story we were seeing behind the story that was implied to be going on behind the scenes. Like, this was maybe not uncommon ground for these particular people, or maybe their incarnations or something, to be going over?
Not sure if I’m misreading or not. I wasn’t criticizing Primer for requiring charts and multiple viewings to figure out, I was agreeing with you that yes, it is an inherently difficult thing to pull off correctly, and that by comparison most movies do a shit job of it because they just hand wave away the difficulties. Most movies dealing with time travel require you to not use a chart or else you’ll see the problems with it.
That’s a problem with science fiction, sci-fi, SF, etc. generally when adapted to television or cinema. Since Star Wars the default is for such stories to function more as a scaffold to support effects-based window dressing. Heady concepts are usually implied as being significant to give the setting a reason to exist, but deliberately avoid any real scrutiny.
Which still amazes me because, as I mentioned above, great ideas don’t cost anything! But we see a marketing-based culture mill where sci-fi cannot be too scientific, and horror cannot be actually horrific - because the audiences for those genres would supposedly be alienated. A thesis which does not appear to be backed up by the popularity of genre literature. This is why Primer is one of my favorite movies. It being cheap was no obstacle to it being interesting. If people make charts in an effort to understand your movie, then you are engaging with your viewers more than 99.9% of media manages to do.
