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Post by Celebith on Mar 28, 2024 21:30:28 GMT -5
We've probably said it before, but 'you can't go home again', not because you have changed, but because home has been sold, set on fire, demolished and then locked behind a gate, which is also on fire.
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Post by Floyd D Barber on Mar 28, 2024 21:51:57 GMT -5
The bastards finally did it--they nuked the comments. Comments are back today, for whatever that's worth. I still have no comment history anymore, so fuck 'em all!
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Gumbercules
AV Clubber
Get out of my dreams, and into my van
Posts: 2,979
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Post by Gumbercules on Mar 29, 2024 6:31:21 GMT -5
We've probably said it before, but 'you can't go home again', not because you have changed, but because home has been sold, set on fire, demolished and then locked behind a gate, which is also on fire. Oh, so a FIRE WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALL
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Post by pantsgoblin on Mar 29, 2024 8:38:35 GMT -5
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Apr 10, 2024 18:37:43 GMT -5
I am a big fan of The Next Picture Show, which is the film podcast made by the core ex-AVC film critics (Tobias, Phipps, Robinson, Koski, so ¾ double-barrelled Dissolve too) with frequent guest spots from other former AVCers, e.g. Emily St. James a couple weeks ago. This week, discussing Do not expect too much from the end of the world, the guest was Katie Rife, a name that sounded familiar but I couldn’t remember from where. Quickly I realized it was from this thread.
It’s still worth a listen and she’s not wrong about the film in a broad strokes sense, but she’s very out of her depth, basically just bringing a bunch of pop culture take-writer clichés to a film that deserves analysis from someone with actual…you know…socio-economic knowledge. Where she does miss something big is in that she describes a lot of what’s going on as satirizing “victim blaming” wrt lots of stuff in the Romanian economy, after all who could possibly think that the Romanians are responsible for the various miseries here? When Nina Hoss’s character says “well if our company is over-foresting it must be because your government permits it” it is a clear, simple indictment of western capitalism, right?
What’s missed is that what gives Hoss’s statement real bite is that it’s true. Romania’s offered itself up as the economic frontier for Western Europe in part through a “favorable” tax and regulatory environment (I’m actually reminded of people’s surprise when the likes of VW—a firm whose corporate leadership is co-determined with its [German] unions—is such an opponent of unionization in the—in this case exclusively southern—United States and it’s a similar thing, that’s why they went to the south in the first place). Do not expect too much is pretty merciless against Romanian society, too. Bobita, protagonist Angela’s face-filtered satirical alter-ego, is a send up of the Insta/TikTok rich guy lifestyle poster, a pretty ugly thing that, despite being fundamentally exploitative (of women but also Romania as a country, cf. Andrew Tate) is still seen as aspirational, and the film hints that Bobita has a lot of followers who don’t get the obvious satire. The exploitation works because people in Romania think they can use it to get ahead, regardless of collateral damage.
There’s a lot of time spent in traffic, and while I think (particularly as Americans) we are kind of conditioned to think of traffic as a “different” state the way people treat one in traffic really does not say anything healthy about the Romanian social fabric (again, see the United States)! People are trying to literally get ahead, even if at the cost of lives of those around them. There’s a conversation (again with Hoss’s character, I believe) about one road in Romania that’s become over-congested and dangerous. Rife describes this as “enshittification.” That’s a weird way of putting it—Doctorow was describing the dynamics of advertising-dependent websites. In purely economic terms I do not think “underinvestment in infrastructure” is that obscure a concept, and a much better description of “failing to upgrade a road” but there’s more to it than that. Jude follows up this conversation with the only color sequence in the film, a long montage of roadside memorials. It’s an outpouring of honest feeling, but from the film we also know that the last things these people heard (or said) was something along the line of “Learn to drive, slut!” Public life in Romania’s clearly denuded, is it a surprise that public investment lags as well?
Anyway Rife misses about half the social criticism of Do not…, and arguably the half that should hit Americans harder. I usually learn a ton from The Next Picture Show and this time I felt like I was listening to someone who knew less than me and it was frustrating.
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Apr 25, 2024 18:23:16 GMT -5
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