Posts by Paul Rogers94

silentridge3 said:My argument is that those two things are directly linked—cause and effect. The more "fantasy" and technical wizardry you throw at a movie, the shallower and cheaper the drama becomes.

I'm sure you're the expert here and know way more about cinema than I do. Out of those 31 films I listed as currently most interesting to this forum, how many are actually realistic? (Meaning actual people in situations we might face today?)

Look, I’m no expert—I just appreciate good movies. But out of those 31 that the forum crowd finds interesting, they all suck to me... honestly, it's just the worst kind of pretentious, superficial layer of mainstream production masquerading as being "more than just a movie."

you still have to dig beneath the surface in America

silentridge3 said:3. To idea of a "realistic film of today" demands 90 minutes of pure directorial focus and razor-sharp screenwriting.

From what I can tell, you’re constantly attacking mainstream fluff—yet somehow, boring art house flicks are your kryptonite. Most film productions actually fall under what you call "realistic films of today," but let’s be honest... you just don't watch them.

Would you consider something by Luis Buñuel "realistic"?

It’s the same deal: most movies are either loose adaptations of classic dramas (think Romeo and Julia in modern New York City, just without those specific names) or some kind of interpretation of actual events—which are essentially inspirations where nothing is pulled out of thin air.

I can't stand mainstream garbage either—but my issue isn't with the spectacle, it's the cheap, shallow, and utterly mindless dramatization. I'll happily sit through a low-budget flick if the drama actually hits home.

Nicole Johnson20 said:Sure, but we're talking specifically about those settings here. And who better to immerse themselves in such backdrops? No one was actually questioning the core essence itself.

Honestly, what kind of movies would even "thoroughly deviate from shallow, boring human nature and its attendant clichés"? Any examples?

I was thinking of Antiviral from 2012 (Brandon Cronenberg’s debut, if I recall correctly)—personally, one of the most impactful films out there—plus another one that's slipping my mind right now. Though, when you really dig into it, it's just an extreme depiction of an already twisted "human nature." It's funny how elastic that term "human nature" is... probably because man hasn't quite figured out where he fits in the "natural order." Besides that, humans are inherently contradictory and at war with themselves—literally schizophrenic because they lack self-awareness. For instance, one moment someone is wearing one uniform and bowing to one flag, then in the very next scene, as if nothing happened, they're in a different uniform bowing to different symbols, seeing no paradox whatsoever. That's just how it is...

Nicole Johnson20 said:If I'm following her logic correctly, she's saying you can still showcase human nature—and draw conclusions about it—even through these drawn characters, superheroes, and the like...

It’s not just that we *can*—it’s that humans are so incredibly anthropocentric. We view even our own pets as merely imperfect, flawed versions of ourselves, despite them being perfectly complete on their own terms. Everything is increasingly measured against and forced to fit human values. It doesn't matter if it's aliens from another planet—who we perceive as more advanced or complex—or fantasy creatures, which are really just distorted reflections of an already distorted humanity. Humans can't even accept themselves as they are; we’re obsessed with becoming "better"... and that obsession bleeds into everything in our culture, not just movies.

Take zombie films, for example. They are a perfect mirror for the relationship between the individual and society—specifically, how a person dominated by herd instinct is basically just a transitional stage between animal and human. A true human being is an individual who isn't ruled by that atavistic pack mentality, which means they are perpetually under pressure to be hunted, bitten, infected, or devoured by the mob. The herd cannot tolerate an individual narrative. Anything falling outside the herd's value system is considered unknown—and in our minds, the unknown is synonymous with evil, because anything we don't understand is terrifying and unacceptable...

Isn't that what makes a movie truly "realistic" today? At some level, it hits the absolute core of the issue.

silentridge3 said:Interesting observation.

Does that mean places like interstates, sub-space rifts, hand-drawn characters, flying people, talking animals, or centennial half-werewolves actually exist somewhere? And all this... today?

Or are those of us who crave realism considered "relics of the past"—that the future belongs solely to audiences craving massive machines causing massive explosions and superheroes barking shallow lines in movies without actual scripts? Is the future of cinema really that bleak?

Even within those surreal fantasy creatures, there's usually just some more or less classic drama about unrequited love (say, between two warring species), blah blah—the movie essentially boils down to drama which is always the same old story or just variations on a theme in any film, set against various backdrops. Either that, or it's some looming catastrophe—a comet, a war, various historical or futuristic scenarios—and even those surreal beings are anthropomorphized to such an extreme that they aren't significantly different from "real" modern humans when it comes to their needs. The drama is always existential and always the same... movies that truly deviate from shallow human nature and its accompanying clichés are incredibly rare.

"A realistic modern film"???
Since the dawn of time, human nature hasn't changed—only the scenery does

A deep movie? Please. It’s nothing more than a collection of someone's shallow, half-baked personal opinions.

Lawrence Edwards58 said:Pedersson, huh.
Paul Rogers94, have you seen Lust, Caution—same director?

What exactly seems suspicious to you?
Maybe she just wanted some empathy, damn it... how would you feel if you were assaulted and the guy next to you was acting like a total block of ice..?

What do you mean "ice cold"? He did everything humanly possible to help her process the trauma. He even let her ruin his performance, despite it being obvious she wasn't ready—she didn't want the doctor, didn't want the police, wouldn't even hold onto the perpetrator's car... so what else could she want? (In the first half of the movie, I thought maybe it was too cliché—that she had a lover and things went sideways—which is probably what the director intended, since the whole plot kicks off like a standard crime thriller search for the culprit)

Whenever someone tries to shove love at me—regardless of whether it’s queer or straight—it feels just as intrusive as being fed fascism or Christianity. And if this is all playing out in some exotic Shanghai during a supposedly romantic wartime setting, then I think the director is seriously insulting my intelligence. Ang Lee hit his absolute peak with Hulk; Hulk is the purest distillation of what Ang Lee can actually achieve as a filmmaker

Lawrence Edwards58 said:I can actually relate to the lead in this queer drama—even though I’ve never had those kinds of ambitions myself (take Brokeback Mountain, for instance, which is really just a universal story about love).
It's the same deal in this movie; she kept thinking he cared way more than he actually did, and then all that nonsense follows...

Brokeback didn't hit home for me.🙂 I couldn't get into it at all—to me, it's just cheap, loud filmmaking; a generic, pathetic story about a gay romance.

In this specific flick, her behavior is suspicious from start to finish. She spends the whole time manipulating him—this, that, we're going here, we aren't doing this, you need to do that, this isn't good enough... (she doesn't love him, and honestly, neither does he.)

Lawrence Edwards58 said:It isn’t about justice, Paul Rogers94—it’s that he treats her like property, just like how Grace Sanchez50 treats her smartphone. He sets his passcode, and if anyone dares to mess with it, he'll hunt them down to the ends of the earth... meanwhile, he couldn't care less about her feelings. She feels it, obviously, and that's why the connection snaps.

Whether you enjoy a movie or a book depends entirely on how much it aligns with your own personal value system—which, let's be honest, doesn't necessarily have to match the "standard" values used in film and literature as if they were universal truths. Any "relationship" or bond depicted inherently involves certain compromises or a type of psychological dominance; that's just part of the narrative. For me, that's a line I simply won't cross. Having been through enough relationships to know, there's nothing in it for me. I can't stomach any kind of conceptually restrictive relationship—friendship, love, an emotional bond, whatever. To me, those are just empty buzzwords masking what we project onto them. Of course, this inevitably turns into a form of systemic violence while maintaining the outward illusion of "how a relationship should be." And that "should be" only exists because the reality isn't meeting it—not to mention how we ignore what actually *is*. Regarding that specific cinematic issue: treating her as property is standard in those petty, small-minded dynamics, but so is that ultimate pursuit of "justice"... it's like some hardcore Midwestern farmer who identifies so deeply with his land that if someone accidentally steps on his grass, they might as well have stepped on him personally.
Basically, we interpret film through our own lens, filling in the gaps with whatever fits our worldview. That's how we process all of reality, I suppose—wishful thinking at its finest.
The point is to ignore your preconceptions and your biases so the film can be received exactly as it was given, without interference. That's the only way to truly take it in. All these "mindfuck" theories about the viewer being a "co-creator" are just excuses for an inability to accept what's presented without distorting it. In my experience, you get the most out of a work if you let the book or the movie just *be* what it is. Then, and only then, can you judge it properly by one single question: did it touch you or not? If it didn't, the film failed. If it did, it succeeds even if it's technically flawed.
Ugh...
There’s another crucial element in perceiving film: identification. For instance, how is someone supposed to identify with anything in a gay romance if they aren't... well, in that "film"? If they can't, then it's simply not their movie. Perception is as varied as the people experiencing it, though most are swayed by the same subconscious values. But perception is one thing, and reality is another. A Rorschach blot is just a Rorschach blot.

It’s somewhere between a social drama and a thriller. A husband and wife—he’s a professor, she’s an actress—move into a new apartment, and while he’s out at work, someone attacks her. He becomes obsessed with finding the culprit and seeing justice served... but when you pursue justice at any cost, you usually end up with this hollow feeling where nobody is satisfied, and even "justice" itself feels unfulfilled. I’m not typically a fan of mixing film and theater, but here, it actually works for the movie—and likely the play itself. In this case, Miller’s *Death of a Salesman* in New York has a deeper connection to the plot, almost acting as a metaphor for the resolution. The film hits another crucial mark: it provokes curiosity. If I’m not constantly wondering what happens next, the movie has failed. It does a very good job 🙏

It’s stuck on my screen and driving me absolutely crazy—I’ve scoured the web trying to find a fix, but nothing works. I even went as far as reinstalling Chrome and Firefox, yet here we are... tried a few different utility tools too, but zero luck.

What should my next move be?

Aaron Doyle said:What antivirus are you running? I ran into some weird issues on one machine where Norton or Avast kept fighting me when I tried to attach an adblocker to Google Chrome—ended up having to wipe and reinstall them just to fix it... strange, but it happened.

I've got Avast running constantly and I'm happy with it, but now I'm going to run a sweep with Malwarebytes Premium. If the issue persists, I'll just uninstall and reinstall my browsers—I already nuked Google Chrome, but I'm keeping Safari for now to see if the cleanup actually works. If not, I'll toss that too and start over. I'll let you know how it goes; I have this nagging feeling you can actually get infected by using some of those free antivirus tools...

I think this might be tied to Windows Photo Viewer—some kind of malware that’s latched onto both Firefox and Chrome. Even though I have an adblocker running on Firefox, it doesn't seem to help... I probably need to scrub this virus out first, or whatever it is. Spent all day yesterday fighting it and I'm still at it today. Does anyone know of a decent tool for this?

Aaron Doyle said:That’s weird—really weird... maybe some software is blocking it and preventing the install. It works perfectly fine for me in Chrome on my laptop running Windows 10 64-bit. If you can't get it sorted soon, just PM me your TeamViewer ID—I'm happy to hop on and take a look. In the meantime, try searching Google; someone else has definitely dealt with this same nonsense...

I always make sure to Google things thoroughly before I even consider asking a forum as a last resort—and I haven't seen anything about this online—but I still can't stand these ads. I'll try what Peter Flores77 suggested first by reinstalling Chrome, then I'll let you know how it goes.

He used to run AdBlock Plus on safari without any issues, but now it just rejects the installation every single time I try to add it—safari, windows 11, everything else seems fine. I can't for the life of me figure out why this is happening... I even went as far as resetting safari, but it’s still the exact same story.

They’re essentially urban nomads—a depiction of the "tribe" concept that cultural theorists love to pitch as an alternative to our dominant sedentary society. It’s that tired, romanticized notion of returning to some "primal" nomadic way of life; they’re basically urban guerrillas...

Just one observation: it took Star two-thirds of the movie before she finally joined them in singing one of those brainwashing little tunes—much like every other song in this film. It seems it took her quite a while to actually buy into the concept...

And then comes the final initiation—that ultimate sign of belonging and devotion to the tribe (which, by the way, operates on mutual solidarity rather than competition). Everyone dancing around a campfire and getting baptized in water—it’s just pure Neo-Paganism mixed with Hollywood sludge.

All in all, the film is a massive failure on every single level.

Jack Murphy5 said:Honestly, now that you've pointed out who this movie was actually made for, I actually like it even more. ☕

Just boil the whole message of the film down to one single, blunt sentence and everything will be crystal clear...

stormytinker40 said:It looks like you completely missed the point of the movie.

You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to see this film is nothing more than mindless filler for small-town YouTube brains.