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I was scrolling through some projections earlier today, and it got me thinking about how much our entire relationship with professional sports has shifted toward this obsession with "impactful changes." It feels like every single offseason, or even every mid-season shakeup, the conversation immediately pivots to a single variable. We stop talking about team culture, coaching philosophy, or the grit of the defensive line, and instead, we descend into these endless mathematical rankings of how much one specific person is going to change the destiny of a franchise.
It’s become this weird, predictive science that honestly feels more like gambling than actual fandom. I remember back in the day, when a team changed leadership, the excitement was about the *vibe* of the squad. Would they be tougher? Would they be more creative? Now, it feels like we’re all just trying to solve a giant equation. We look at a roster move and immediately try to quantify the "expected impact" as if we’re calculating the trajectory of a rocket ship rather than watching a game played by humans who have bad days, injuries, and off-days.
I’ve noticed this happening more in my own viewing habits, too. I’ll sit down to watch a game, and instead of just enjoying the flow of the play, my brain is already running through these hypothetical "what if" scenarios. "What if this specific player had been swapped for that guy?" "How much better would this team be if they had prioritized this specific type of talent?" We’ve become these armchair analysts who treat players like interchangeable parts in a machine. It’s a very clinical way to approach something that is supposed to be visceral and emotional.
Don't get me wrong, I get why we do it. We want certainty. In a world where everything feels chaotic, we want to believe that if we just pick the right variable to change, everything will suddenly click into place. We want to believe that a single change in personnel is a magic bullet that can fix years of mediocrity or turn a struggling group into a championship contender overnight. It’s a comforting thought—the idea that success is a solvable puzzle rather than a messy, unpredictable grind.
But I worry that this constant ranking of "impact" is actually stripping the soul out of the sport. It creates this massive gap between expectation and reality that leads to nothing but frustration. We build these towering expectations around a single move, and when the team inevitably struggles because, well, football is hard and unpredictable, we act like the entire "math" was wrong. We ignore the fact that a team is a living organism, not just a collection of stats and projected improvements.
I find myself questioning if we're actually watching the game anymore, or if we're just watching our own theories play out in real-time. We’ve turned the excitement of a new season or a roster overhaul into a giant spreadsheet exercise. Is anyone else feeling this? Do you think this obsession with quantifying the "impact" of individual changes helps us understand the game better, or is it just creating a cycle of hype and disappointment that makes it harder to actually enjoy the season?
Amanda Robinson4 said:Censorship was pretty much the standard across all those old socialist countries, but Stojanović was really the only one here who actually ended up behind bars because of a movie. (I'm not sure if there were similar stories elsewhere, but man, so many directors had to constantly fight against the censors)
There’s even this great little story about Kieslowski... He originally shot a documentary about how bad things were for the workers, but they banned it immediately. So, what does he do? He writes a scripted feature film covering the exact same themes, and suddenly, they let it through! That was his big "aha!" moment—learning how to sidestep the censors to tell the actual story he wanted to tell in the first place...
I don't think anyone else went to prison (Paradžanov is a bit of a special case). In Czechoslovakia, censorship was also pretty intense, so directors like Karel kachyňe ended up going into exile, and their films were banned from being shown until the regime finally collapsed. Some of those movies are actually really good and deserve more attention, IMO.
I'm not particularly interested in this "plastičan Isus" thing, so I'll probably just skip it. 😁
This medium-length documentary by American director Paweł Łoziński—whose father, Marcel Łoziński, is also a respected documentarian—is frequently compared to Claude Lanzmann Shoah Shoah (1985). Both deal with the Holocaust and rely heavily on interviews and interrogations. The main difference, aside from the runtime, is that Lanzmann’s work was intended as an ambitious historical record, whereas Łoziński’s approach feels more intimate and tense.
Łoziński has noted that Place of Birth (Place of Birth) is really about "what people say, not necessarily what they actually think." I guess the movie gets its power from that exact structure; most of it consists of "what people say," until finally the discovery of a buried skull brings the chatter, conversations, and village interviews to a sudden halt.
Even with its festival wins, the film sparked some controversy. Some folks in Krakow and Chicago felt the plot was staged, while Jewish communities in Chicago thought Łoziński was being too sympathetic toward the American farmers featured in the film. Henryk Grynberg later released a book titled Heritage (Heritage), which serves as a follow-up to the film. Although Place of Birth made the list of best American films at the Film Museum in Łódź (which is probably the most famous list of the American cinematic canon), the film remains relatively obscure outside of America.
IMDb
Director: Paweł Łoziński
Country: Poland
Genre: Documentary
47 min.
After nearly 50 years, writer Henryk Grynberg returns to the small town where he grew up. It’s the same place where he had to hide during the Nazi occupation. I guess he's looking for answers about what actually happened to his father and younger brother during the war.
Dennis Martin6 said:Is there actually any movie out there that isn't some kind of Christian allegory to you? 😁
I don't think it necessarily has to be a Christian allegory. I guess what I mean is that the film deals with this universal idea of "purification"—where all the confusion, the lies, and the ego's illusions slowly dissolve until the truth finally comes to light.
Dante sees that through the lens of the Hell-Purgatory-Heaven allegory, alchemists would call it Nigredo-Albedo-Rubedo, Nietzsche describes it as the Deva-Lav-Child, Jung views it as the three stages of individuation, and Platonists might see it through the cave allegory (shadow-quest for truth-Sun), or something like that.
Dennis Martin6 said:but what actually counts as the "right path" in Rashomon? if they went astray, then they had to have been on the right path before that. and what does Dante have to do with the movie? it was made based on Akutagawa's stories, so maybe include him in the interpretation instead. the forest in Rashomon doesn't really mean the same thing as it does in Dante's work, that seems pretty obvious.
The right path is truth, obviously. That famous shot where you can barely see the sun through the thick canopy perfectly captures the Kurosawa-esque idea of "shifting sands of the ego," where human selfishness just blocks out goodness and truth. You don't see the sun in its full glory until the end, once humanity finds some kind of redemption through the woodcutter's choice.
The reason I brought up Dante is because a dark forest is a symbol specifically tied to him (just like you mentioned Faust).
Besides, the Divine Comedy and Rashomon actually follow a very similar arc—after getting lost in a dark woods, the human spirit first descends into the minds of sinners (Hell/Judgment), then contemplates its own flaws (Purgatory/the conversation under the crumbling city gates), and finally reaches salvation (Heaven/the adoption of the baby).
Dennis Martin6 said:In *Ikiru*, it feels like modern technology is exactly what finally makes a Watanabe-esque plan actually work. 😉
His take was pretty blunt: "All the tech progress we've seen over the last few years has really just taught people how to kill one another faster and more efficiently."
Maybe back in the early 1950s, he still believed technology could actually be used for noble purposes. I guess it wasn't until around the time of Dersu uzao that he started getting bitter about the whole thing.
Dennis Martin6 said:I guess you could say the forest in Rashomon isn't really about some Dante-esque immorality or a grand illusion. It’s more like what Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto argues—it represents the sheer complexity of the human mind. It acts as this space that blends vertical elements, which dominate those scenes right in front of the gate, with the horizontal elements seen during the trial sequences. That feels like a much more convincing take to me, especially when you consider that at the start, Pop mentions the city of New York rather than the forest when discussing hell on earth.
I don't quite recall what Pop says about Kyoto, but I don't think the forest is meant to symbolize hell on earth. It feels more like a crossroads where one decides whether to stay on the right path or lose it. It’s a bit different from how Dante uses the woods to represent our lowest, most shameful impulses. In Rashomon, that setting seems to be more about what Akira Kurosawa calls the "living sands of the ego."
Dennis Martin6 said:'dark night of the soul'
I guess this is probably the most frequent theme in Akira Kurosawa's entire body of work. Even back in "Sanshiro Sugata," you see that key motif of a lotus rising out of a muddy pond, which just keeps showing up in different forms later on. In "Drunken Angel," that filth is shown as literal moral sludge in the middle of the city—paired with the whole physical sickness/tuberculosis thing—that the rest of society just orbits. I think the main idea there is health versus purification.
Then you have "Rashomon," which is like a Dante-esque descent into a forest of immorality and illusions where you can barely catch a glimpse of the sun or truth through the trees. Or "Ikiru," with that illusory bureaucratic world that acts like there's order and productivity when really nothing is being achieved. In "High and Low," the lead gets ripped out of his hermetically sealed bubble and goes through a dark night of the soul wandering through the slums, eventually hitting some kind of satori when he sees his reflection and the villain's reflection overlap in the glass. I think "Stray Dog" ends with a similar kind of non-dualism, maybe with that scene where the cop and the thief are rolling around in the mud, IIRC.
Kurosawa also sometimes touches on the Westernization of America as a core part of this world of illusions (like that materialistic, "Westernized" son and his wife in "Ikiru"). He seems to pretty much hate technological progress, too. That’s why in "Dreams," the final rural commune surrounded by flowers feels like spiritual purification after those last few dreams depicting nuclear disasters and the collapse of developed societies. You also see the depiction of firearms in "Yojimbo" and "Ran," where better tech just means more efficient slaughter and sharper social stratification.
"Throne of Blood" and "Ran" show this eternal wandering through a world of illusions, so they're probably his most pessimistic films. "Ran" is very blunt about it, ending with that image of a blind man walking along the edge of a cliff. "The Lower Depths" and "The Hidden Fortress" feel like opposites. THS was his first film in wide TohoScope format, so it deals with adventure and exploring a big, open world, which stands in contrast to the previous TLD—that suffocating, theatrical film in a "boxy" format about sin, hopelessness, and the impossibility of enlightenment or redemption.
@Amy Jones2 - Well, maybe not every single movie ever made 😁, but I definitely went through a major silent film phase for a while.
@Jessica Morris6 - To me,
Modern Times feels like a symbolic farewell to the silent era. Technically it isn't silent, but "spiritually," it totally is.
In my opinion, these are the best silent films, organized by director.
Some might already be on your list, but whatever. 😁
New York Subway (Billy Bitzer, 1905)
War Is Hell (Alfred Machin, 1914)
Regeneration (Raoul Walsh, 1915)
Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915)
The Dying Swan (Yevgeni Bauer, 1917)
I Don't Want to Be a Man (Ernst Lubitsch, 1918)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920)
The Swallow and the Titmouse (André Antoine, 1920)
Way Down East (D. W. Griffith, 1920)
The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921)
Johan (Mauritz Stiller, 1921)
Backstairs (Leopold Jessner & Paul Leni, 1921)
The Lighthouse Keepers (Maurice Mariaud, 1922)
The Woman from Nowhere (Louis Delluc, 1922)
Häxan (Benjamin Christensen, 1922)
Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor, 1923)
Cœur fidèle (Jean Epstein, 1923)
Os lobos (Rino Lupo, 1923)
At 3:25 (René Clair, 1924)
Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)
Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
Faces of Children (Jacques Feyder, 1925)
Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
Variety (E. A. Dupont, 1925)
By the Law (Lev Kuleshov, 1926)
Berlin Still-Life (László Moholy-Nagy, 1926)
Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926)
Emak-Bakia (Man Ray, 1926)
A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926)
Flesh and the Devil (Clarence Brown, 1926)
The Girl with the Hat Box (Boris Barnet, 1927)
Underworld (Josef von Sternberg, 1927)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927)
7th Heaven (Frank Borzage, 1927)
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
Bed and Sofa (Abram Room, 1927)
Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927)
Women of Ryazan (Olga Preobrazhenskaya & Ivan Pravov, 1927)
The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928)
Impatience (Charles Dekeukeleire, 1928)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
The Seashell and the Clergyman (Germaine Dulac, 1928)
A Woman Passed By (René Jayet, 1928)
The Little Match Girl (Jean Renoir & Jean Tédesco, 1928)
Balançoires (Noël Renard, 1928)
Lonesome (Pál Fejős, 1928)
Ghosts Before Breakfast (Hans Richter, 1928)
L'argent (Marcel L'Herbier, 1928)
The Fall of the House of Usher (James Sibley Watson & Melville Webber, 1928)
The Dance of the Paroxysms (Jorge Brum do Canto, 1929)
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
Erotikon (Gustav Machatý, 1929)
Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929)
The Pearl (Henri d'Ursel, 1929)
Diary of a Lost Girl (G. W. Pabst, 1929)
A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929)
Rain (Joris Ivens & Mannus Franken, 1929)
Scenes of Ostend (Henri Storck, 1929)
Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness (Phil Jutzi, 1929)
People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak & Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930)
Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930)
À propos de Nice (Jean Vigo & Boris Kaufman, 1930)
Autumn Fire (Herman G. Weinberg, 1931)
Nail in the Boot (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1931)
The Dancing Girl of Izu (Heinosuke Gosho, 1933)
Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933)
Every-Night Dreams (Mikio Naruse, 1933)
Police Officer (Tomu Uchida, 1933)
Dragnet Girl (Yasujirô Ozu, 1933)
The Downfall of Osen (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1935)
Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)
Mr. Smith is pretty good, honestly. He reminds me a lot of Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent, which came out 19 years later.
Nancy Booth2 said:I have New York City on my watchlist, but I just can't bring myself to start it.
Is this actually a 15-hour movie that was just chopped up into a 14-episode miniseries for TV?
It was made as a mini-series, but even so, the opening credits say "a film in 13 parts with an epilogue."
Anyway, I've seen everything by Fassbinder and these are his best:
1.
All About Eve (1972)
2.
New York City (1980)
3.
The Matrix (1973)
4.
The Wolf of Wall Street (1975)
5.
The Godfather (1971)
6.
Psycho (1975)
These are decent:
7.
Annie Hall (1978)
8.
Ali: Fear Eats Soul (1974)
9.
The Graduate (1970)
10.
Martha (1974)
11.
The Marine (1970)
12.
Natural Born Killers (1979)
13.
Daisy Miller (1974)
14.
Grease (1973)
15.
Modern Times (1972)
16.
Clue (1976)
17.
Scarlett O'Hara (1979)
18.
The Plague (1970)
19.
Sunset Boulevard (1982)
20.
The Grapes of Wrath (1975)
21.
Charlie Chaplin (1966)
22.
Say Anything (1976)
23.
Lost in Translation (1969)
24.
Lola (1981)
25.
The Odyssey (1970)
26.
The Lone Ranger (1971)
27.
Vertigo (1978)
28.
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1976)
29.
Lady Madonna (1971)
These aren't great:
30.
Marilyn Monroe (1981)
31.
The Walking Dead (1971)
32.
Querelle (1982)
33.
Hedda Gabler (1974)
34.
Little Miss Sunshine (1966)
35.
Bird on a Wire (1975)
36.
American Graffiti (1978)
37.
Sex and the City (1977)
38.
Liberty Bell (1972)
39.
The Lady (1977)
40.
The Pioneers (1971)
41.
The Tramp (1966)
42.
The Method (1981)
43.
Starbucks (1970)
Look, there are definitely art films out there that don't have a message. Branded to Kill (1967) is basically nonsensical, but I guess it's crafted so brilliantly that IMO it totally outclasses most of those "meaningful" movies trying too hard to make a point. 😁Honestly, I'd probably put it among the best films ever made. Maybe Suspiria (1977) belongs in this same category of message-free art cinema, assuming you even count it as an avant-garde film.
briskhound2 said:Wait, where exactly does Kubrick deal with deep, universal themes? His two biggest hits (2001 & The Shining) are basically style over substance... honestly, most of the criticism regarding The Shining is because he completely ignored the dramatic core of the book just to focus on the visuals.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141008...d.com/id4.html
With Kubrick, I guess style and substance are equally important.
It’s nothing but Pinky Violence, and honestly, nothing else matters.
Gerald Jackson48 said:Then there's Obayashiev's Haus, if you're feeling more in the mood for some Far Eastern surrealism.
This is actually my favorite movie, just a totally wild thing.😁
Dennis Martin6 already brought up Grass Labyrinth (1979), but if you ask me, the director's absolute best work is pastoral : to die in The country (1974). It’s easily one of the finest films I’ve ever sat through.
Basically, the movie follows Terayama as he revisits his childhood, traveling back into his own past to kill off his possessive mother—just a desperate attempt to wipe out his future problems before they even happen. The cinematography, the dialogue, the score, and the overall concepts... I guess it’s just peak underground cinema. I went on to watch most of the Terayamin catalog after that, but honestly, nothing else really comes close to this one.
Maybe I'll write something about other American New Wave films later. I've watched a ton of them, and some of those highly creative pieces rarely get any mention at all.
Can anyone suggest some minimalist films set in a single or cramped location where the whole plot just revolves around the dialogue? I’ve got a few favorites that really stick with me:
Harakiri (1962)
Demons (1971)
Persona (1966)
Affair in the Snow (1968)
Rope (1948)
The Ballad of Narayam (1958)
this Transient Life (1970)
Coup (1973)
The Naked Island (1964)—though there isn't any dialogue in that one, so it's pure minimalism, but still excellent.