ToothyBj | Bluesky
Transcript
3 Panel Comic
Panel 1: James sits clutching a mug nervously as he listens to a conversation he’s afraid of. He stares at something off screen. Near by, a woman and smartly dressed man talk movies over their drinks. The woman nods along.
Man: I’d say probably the best filmmaking I’ve ever seen, has been ‘The Sacrifice’ by Tarkovsky
Woman: Mmhmm
Panel 2: James is pulled from whatever holds his attention as he’s dragged into the conversation.
Man: What about you James? What would you say is the best film you have ever seen?
James: Huh?
Panel 3: James turns back towards the window he’s been watching as he feeds the man an expected answer.
James: Ah! Uhm y’know… ‘Mulholland Drive’, maybe ‘Vertigo’
Outside the window, the movie ‘Step Brothers’ bangs on the glass demanding to be acknowledged. knock knock knock
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Can someone please explain why people llke Step Brothers so much?
The movie is literally about two NEETs being as insufferable as possible. Where is the comedy in that?
I wasn’t a big fan but I watched it in front of others and they really liked the ‘putting my balls on your drum set’ part.
You don’t see how a bunch of former Redditors could like and relate to a movie about NEETs?
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Starship Troopers
Casablanca and Demolition Man are tied for first.
So as a person of culture, how do you think the 3 seashells are used?
Demolition Man is one of my all time favorites, up there with Fifth Element
~ diva dance ~
Why is it raining inside?
I think that’s supposed to be patterns on the wall. In the last panel the main character is nervously sweating.
I know, but I only got to this conclusion after thinking “they’re clearly inside, so that can’t be rain. So what is it?”
It’s just giving the wall texture so it’s not just a flat colour
It’s doing it wrong.
Gattaca. That “I never saved anything for the swim back” line always gets to me.
I watched that movie so long ago and as quite a young child, but that line and Gerome Gerome the metronome always stuck with me.
Bullet Train, every day of the week, and twice on Sunday
Whenever someone asks me what I think is the best movie I just say Robocop.
Some people will will be disdainful. These are people I’m not interested in talking about movies with because they equate pretentiousness with quality. These are boring people to have a conversation with.
Some people will be like “Fuck yeah! Robocop! Dead or alive you’re coming with me! I’ll buy that for a dollar!” These people don’t care about getting any kind of deeper meaning from a movie, but that’s cool. It’s fun to talk about cool action scenes in movies.
Then there are people who are actually capable of understanding the subtext and are willing to look for meaning in a movie that from appearances is just a dumb 80s action movie. These are the people that you can have interesting conversations about movies with.
I do this for Starship Troopers since it’s both a masterclass in parody but also works as a solid idiot filter. Though there is always the chance for it to devolve into two largely intelligent people devolving into a weird mashup of Earth Defense Force, Helldivers, 40k, and Starship Troopers memes.
Also go watch the sequels, they get increasingly weird and eventually devolve into weirdly horny 3d anime. Also read the book and then read any of Heinleins other books, the dude was a competent author and just kinda liked playing around with weird ideas like psychic sex cults and obviously fascistic protagonists.
I said devolve way too many times.
RoboCop radicalized me.
Robocop is a great movie and far from bring a dumb action movie. Behind its appearance it’s actually a very deep and layered movie Even Paul Verhoeven couldn’t see it when he first saw the script until he actually read it carefully. The title and the main concept are subtly satirical and it’s not apparent until you actually watch it. When I say it is one of my favorites to movie people, they always look at me funny. Unless they actually saw it.
My favorite movie IS actually Mulholland Drive but I never say it to anyone because I’m always afraid people will think I’m a pretentious dick trying to look smart. This post doesn’t help XD
Yeah, Blade Runner was great for the atmosphere, but it didn’t really emphasize PKD’s overall message about empathy. Robocop came out of that, it was about underlining that message. And yeah it’s about a corporation literally taking away a person’s humanity, but also removing humanity from society in general.
The US is at war with Mexico in Robocop, but nobody even cares. There’s one line where a cop says “Damn! They bombed Acapulco!” the other cop says “So what?”, and the first cop says “I booked my vacation there, I gotta call my travel agent!”
It’s a world where there’s virtually no empathy left, and turning a human into a robot is representative of what corporate culture is doing to people.
Alex Murphy is able to recover some of his humanity, but he doesn’t fully escape from the system. He is still limited by the corporation’s directives at the end of the movie, but he does have his identity as Alex Murphy in the end, so that’s good I guess? It doesn’t hold your hand about this, it’s a smash cut to the end credits. It’s just like “you figure it out!”
I remember when Harmontown existed, they invited Neumann over and most of the interview was just drunk Dan Harmon saying “ok so you wrote two of the best screenplays in history, what the fuck bro”. (Second one was Starship Troopers obviously). On a podcast that was obsessed with dissecting storytelling, this must have been the most cited movie, along with die hard.
Personally my go to is Mad Max Fury Road, as a kind of filter similar to what you have going on. It’s a movie you need to engage with on its own terms, otherwise it is completely meaningless and you will miss the whole entire point.
It seems a lot of people have a problem with clear and radical artistic choices, and will mistake them for defects. This kind of media “literacy” is utterly boring to me as they just train themselves to detect and detest any deviation from Hollywood norms.
I’d just be suspicious of they idolized any of the sequels. They were tacked on and not nearly as well written as the first one.
Was the first one a critique on the praxis of computerized sentinels and the morality behind that, the sequels where more of a celebration of the cool shooty cyber cowboy.
You’re right to say RoboCop. It’s a masterpiece of cinema.
What makes a man a man? What makes a human a human? When has society used us up? When have we sacrificed everything for nothing, and come to the realization in front of a house where we are no longer welcome? When can a sacrifice bigger than one’s self close the final chapter on a life lived in naive folly?
If someone doesn’t come away from watching RoboCop feeling nearly every feel, they missed the point.
The movie is also a pretty hardcore criticism of capitalism and its willingness to reanimate your corpse to make a buck and then kill you again when you start to question it.
You may want to check this comment for typos…
LOL, thanks. For what it’s worth, Niger is the name of a large country in West Africa, and a state in Nigeria. I lived in the county for years. So my autocorrect defiantly knows the name and threw it in there instead of “bigger.”
I choose to believe you meant to call autocorrect defiant :)
Gods above. Sorry, I need glasses and they’re far away! But imma leave it like it is. Defiant-ass autocorrect
I know, but also bigger is spelled with two "G"s, so you got really lucky with that. Lol
Well, the slur isn’t saved as a word in my phone. So autocorrect can’t accidentally make me a bigot.
I always pull out “Velocipastor” or “Iron Sky” for very similar reasons. There’s quite a bit you can dig into on any level with those movies.
Holy shit someone else who knows about Velocipastor.
If you haven’t, you should check out Kung Fury.
Oh I love Kung Fury. And Kung Fu Hustle. And Shaolin Soccer.
I’ve just found around me more people have seen Velocipastor and Iron Sky, or are more willing to watch them, so they work better as discussion pieces with others. My real friends get introduced to everything.
How about a side of Kung pow?
That one has been on my list to watch for a while. I wanted to do a big drink viewing with friends though so it’s gonna be a bit
I’m still mad that the follow-up/remake that was a full feature length film got shelved.
And the Iron Sky studio collapsed. I keep my fingers crossed something will happen eventually.
Yeah, that is a shame, I agree.
What are you getting out of Velocipastor?
I mean I’m not pulling anything new out of it that hasn’t been done before but there’s a lot in there.
Subversion of expectations with a hooker being a good guy and Christian ninjas being the bad guys (among other things). Discussions about VFX and what’s actually needed to sell a scene. Pacing (the whole movie moves at a decent clip without feeling rushed, but still takes a moment for slower scenes). Camerawork and lighting especially for the nighttime scenes. Budgets. The acting is decently solid.
Like really there’s a lot that the movie gets right with like a $30k budget that big Hollywood movies fail at. It’s cinema stripped to some of its essential parts and it’s much better than it maybe has any right to be.
But then I’ll talk about it with people who don’t care about all that and just think a velociraptor fighting ninjas is fun and, well, they aren’t wrong.
Subversion of expectations with … Christian ninjas being the bad guys
Finally, someone has subverted those pesky expectations we have about Christian ninjas.
Finally, someone has subverted those pesky expectations we have about Christian ninjas.
Yes. It’s hard sometimes to tell who has been genuinely deceived by Christian Ninja propaganda, and who is just being paid to prop up Christian Ninja talking points.
Sorry, I’m in a silly mood, and just desperately wanted to yes-and your delightful post.
I always give 2 movies.
Fifth Element as my personal favorite that everyone should see and holds up.
North by Northwest as my “Film” of choice.
That way I can still hold a conversation no matter what anyone wants to go on about. Plus it lets me push for someone to broaden their horizons no matter where they fall on the spectrum of movie nerd.
West by Northwest
I’m assuming this is supposed to be Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, or is this a parody that I’m unaware of?
Ahahhaha it is. I was not awake when I wrote that lol!
Fixed it.
If they don’t respect The Fifth Element as the iconic masterpiece that it is, I don’t want to hold a conversation with them anyway.
Agreed haha.
I don’t think anyone ever has, but I am meeting more and more people who don’t know what it is
The Fifth Element is a movie that in theory I should hate, but I actually love it. The title refers to love and the romance plot doesn’t work for me at all. They do an overly clever thing where the villain and the hero never meet (and kinda rub it in your face about it) and normally I hate it when movies are overly clever in that way. And Chris Tucker is annoying as hell.
But somehow that doesn’t matter because it’s so over the top about everything. The action, the costumes, the dialog, the visuals are all so over the top the stuff that normally would make me not like a movie doesn’t really matter.
The overall meaning works even if the execution on the romance plotline falls flat for me. Gary Oldman and Bruce Willis not having any kind of confrontation is fine, since it’s kinda how things work with billionaires. You oppose them without ever meeting them. Corbin Dallas is a man of action and Zorg is a man that’s all about money, so they’re from different worlds so it makes sense they never actually meet. And everything being weird as hell works because it’s the future, things should be weird and unfamiliar. Chris Tucker is somehow the same kind of annoying as social media influencers are today, so even that works.
So the Fifth Element is a movie that is terrible on paper, but somehow everything fits together so well that it’s actually great.
Perfectly summarized. It’s so weird and really shouldn’t hold up, but actually it just causes it to be a masterpiece.
It’s just a constant good time.
Here a weaponized film suggestion for “i need deep meaning” snobs. Dancer in the dark. It sucks the joy dry out of you and is a masterpiece.
The sunscreen commercial is possibly one of the most dystopian things I’ve ever seen in a movie. That might’ve been in Robocop 2 though. Still both films are legitimately two of the best dystopian sci-fi films out there.
Robo want oreo
Just wanted to say, that’s an excellent transcript. I have good vision so I don’t need it myself, but I appreciate the effort for those who do.
Somehow I thought this was a joke from the movie step brothers so I was reading it in will ferrels voice and the response in jon c rileys voice.
Id say go ahead and make it cannon.
Thanks. They’re annoying to write out sometimes, but it seems like people read them, so I’ll keep writing them.
Sometimes longer comics I’ll put off posting because writing the transcript can take time. But yeah if the artists didn’t write one (which only some do), I’ll do them.
The best movies i have seen in my life for me personally were probably:
- Sharknado (all of them) because of their absurdity. It’s something to laugh at, and they do not aspire to be anything else, which is something we all need from time to time, while it is seldom provided. Honorable mention for anything Monty Python.
- Nolan’s Batman movies, because they capture the atmosphere Batman Movies deserve perfectly (I am not a fan of his later stuff tho. Dunkirk was fine but somewhat boring for a film that should embody tension, Tenet is a fucking mess regardless of how often you watch it. Things like “The Prestige” are somewhat of a foreshadowing of his ability to create suspension and drama. They should really take away a bunch of tools from him to get better results - he fails when working without restrictions, he seems to get lost in the detail. Probably why I like the Batman movies so much - there he is confined to a preexisting world where he can’t just do whatever his mind produces.) The Joker movie also hit that same mark.
- Akira. This thing has formed my relationship to messy and gory anime, and i would never have it any other way.
- Braindead and Event Horizon. The same thing for horror and splatter movies.
The best series:
- Battlestar Galactica remake: The soundtrack alone is something to die for, and both the story and the acting are top-notch, surpassing their source material. I’ve been an Olmos fan ever since. Great stuff! (I’ve watched it 3 times from start to end)
- Cyberpunk: Edgerunners: I was an old-school Shadowrun RPG player back in the 90’s (Hermetic Mage all the way btw), and this anime really hit all of the targets. The crumbling society with normal people trying to life their lives in it, and the people being pushed to the edges and their resulting attempts to break the cycle they are caught in are fully shown here. Can’t wait for the second season.
- Breaking Bad: not so much for the series itself, although both acting and story are fine (i tried watching it a second time, but it’s just not the same), but for the portrayal of how health issues ranging from cancer, getting hurt on the job (Hank), psychiatric problems like kleptomania (Marie) and PTSD (Hank again) or drug addiction (Jesse) can cause common people to spiral out in the US (while the whole premise is moot in most of the developed world with socialized health care and available mental health professionals (this needs improvement even here)), and how people who want to get out are caught up in this mess without any real options to escape (outside of Walt rigging up an M60 in his car trunk)
- Death Note: Such an intelligent series. I love it to death (although the last few episodes can’t keep up the pace).
Honorable Mentions:
- Psycho Pass: a very solid Sci-Fi detective anime, touching on some very heavy subjects.
- Monster (2004): Another Anime, medical drama x detective story. Pretty heavy stuff, but a great watch.
- Konosuba: It’s somewhat of a Sharknado of Anime. If you like anime, you’ll be very much entertained.
- Star Trek (TNG, Voyager, Deep Space Nine): Each of them focuses on a different scenario, but all of them are both great entertainment and something to keep you thinking, with moral dilemmas to be discussed everywhere. While TNG is more focused on general moral dilemmas, Voyager makes decisions more personal because they mean it might take even longer to go home and there is no Federation to judge them for violating their princples, and DS9 then gets down and dirty with the politics of a Space Station right in the middle of multiple conflicts between different nations and religious belief.
- Lost: I absolutely love the first seasons. It is a shame that you can pinpoint the exact moment they knew that there will be no more funding. The 4th season does not even exist in my mind, tbh.
- The Game: A movie you can only watch once. Doesn’t make sense to watch it again. But that first watch is worth it.
- Monogatari: An absolute masterpiece regarding japanese mythology, wordplay (sadly i do not understand japanese, but even with subtitles and explanations it is a great thing, and one day my japanese will be up to the task!) and storytelling.
Edit: I forgot to mention my all-time favourite Anime:
Hellsing Ultimate.
I fucking love when Seras Victoria uses Zorin’s fucking head to give the walls of Hellsing Mansion a new coat of paint. I could watch that segment every day, and it should be the fate of all Nazis.
Your description of breaking bad actually makes sense as you why I didn’t understand the hype around it. I just didn’t have the cultural context.
I am very sure that an appreciable amount of criminality and violence in the US stems from the missing health care, not just in the context of a series. If your quality of life depends on making enough money to pay the doctors, you will be deciding pretty quick to turn towards illegal methods to secure your wellbeing.
It also explains the far more common overall grimy behavior where so many of us will do whatever awful (but legal) things our employers demand, because we have almost no worker protections and keeping employment can literally be life or death. Its an insidious rot that permeates our society.
The Game is worth two watches, minimum, to catch all the details.
Upvote for Dead Alive.
Not one mention of Tombstone. Not a ‘ner one of y’all got any sense at all.
You gonna do something, or just stand there and bleed?
Nausicaä, and it’s not even close. Goosebumps and tears every time
Have you read the comics, tho? The movie is only the first 1/4th of the whole plot
Some of them! Unfortunately I moved, and had to put my boxed set in storage, and I can’t get to it because it’s lumped in with all of my family’s stuff, probably buried which is really annoying and makes me wanna just repurchase them at this point
I did get as far as past the section that the movie was based on, definitely didn’t expect the
TolmekiansTorumekians to be just the knights, with no chickenhead soldiersor birdface tank guys, with the chickenheads originally being wormhandlers. That is one thing that I prefer about the movie since the chickenhead helmet bears a striking resemblance to the giant warrior, which is a nice parallel to the monster that they aspire to useEdit: just realized that you can actually see the birdies in some panels like here
I enjoyed Nausicaa but Princess Mononoke improved upon the formula imo
I think that the soundtrack, the designs, and ultimately just growing up with it, are what make me partial to it
Nausica is the superior film imo, both are trying for different things. One is a coming of age story that is post societal upheaval. The other is an adventure into the unknown that is pre societal upheaval.
Castle in the sky really combines both.
I think that’s what makes it so good. It gives you hope that we will find peace in this huge barren land where mercy wins in the end
Step Brothers was alright and it was good for a little referencing but it never made me feel the things that 12 Angry Men, Rear Window or Jaws has.
Woah. Too soon.
Ewwww
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I tell people that my favorite film is Vertigo, but my favorite movie is Tommy Boy.
Sounds like weird fun tbh.
I know this type of convo, where people try to top each other with name-dropping, but I believe one should participate honestly, not driven by self-profiling. Maybe the lady in the picture won’t be impressed, but somebody will be.
It’s a classic. Definitely watch it if you’ve never seen it. Just good dumb humor
How do you honestly answer such an open question though? Unless someone is very passionate about a particular film, it seems like a good compromise to just name something that fits in the context or allows for further conversation. Answering it correctly would require the person to memorize all candidates on the spot and rate them all objectively in the same personalized way.
I usually answer these “what’s the best [bla]” type questions by narrowing the scope. I’ll go, ‘well, I don’t know about objectively best movie, but the movie [I’ve seen the most times/I remember from the youngest age/that gets better every time I watch it/that had the coolest box art at the rental place/that I saw in theaters/that made me cry on a plane/that I used for the basis of my cult/whatever] is [bla].’ Ideally no one cares about literally settling a debate. If it’s a conversation worth having they’re more interested in your metrics than your findings. I find conversations about empirical ranking are tedious and always end in that anticlimactic awkward silence where everyone has exhausted their actual opinions and is trying to hastily cobble together new opinions on the spot to keep the ball rolling out of politeness.
I love your take.
E.g., I’m inclined to say Star Wars (IV). But, I saw it in þeaters 14 times þe summer I turned 11; þere was noþing like it before it came out. It was a perfect film, for me.
I also saw Wizards in þe þeater when I was a kid; in a lot of ways it was a better film, and I’d be hard pressed to say which had a bigger impact on me. I’m probably progressive politically because of Wizards.
I’d argue þat boþ are examples of peerless filmmaking. You’d be hard pressed to make an argument against Star Wars, at least, against sheer evidence of impact on þe film industry and on Western society. It’s not a typical film snob’s first choice, þough.
The gender divide in film criticism is a bit obnoxious. Male directors and male concerns = serious. Female directors and female concerns = frivolous and unworthy of study.
I’m guessing this lady would love to talk about Stepbrothers.
And yet I’m here thinking Mulholland Dr. is the best movie ever made, and I feel like a stupid sap for saying it in this discussion XD
The right people will be impressed.
![Glad I saw it in theaters [ToothyBj]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/379450b7-73bc-4bda-bb42-55c65ab3ebf1.png){kind=link}