Pleased to meet ya. I hope this doesn’t sound speciest, but some of my best friends have been rats
Okay, so no archy and mehitabel. What would you recommend I read?
Oh, and see if your computer has a “sticky keys” option. Just a suggestion
Thank you.
Dave L
dear dave l,
it’s interesting that you would say some of your best friends have been rats for two reasons…
- all of my best friends are rats
- and yeah, rats don’t live very long, don’t rub it in.
this is an excellent question if by ‘you’ you mean ‘all of humanity especially america’ and by ‘should’ you mean ‘must.’
personally, i like a good story. but i like to know how it’s going to end. now don’t get up on your heals. you already know how just about every story is going to end. when you watch hamlet do you really think he’s getting out of that play alive[question mark]
i would like to see you humans read as much as possible — it doesn’t matter what. the more you’re reading, the more you are not making the lives of the rest of us worse.
but i won’t leave you with this. just so that you should all be prepared for the future, i recommend The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
in particular, you should pay attention to the sonderweg thesis.
[parenthesis]this is different from the soderbergh thesis, which holds that people will only put up with your pseudo-avant-garde bullshit before they stop pretending to like it.[parenthesis]
the sonderweg thesis holds that there is a direct line from martin luther to nazism. if you question me — and many easily dismissed human historians have — you should check out this quote frank posted before i was born, Antisemite Martin Luther. if luther had just gotten to his eighth point — paper was expensive back then — i’m sure it would have been genocide — a ‘final solution,’ if you will.
obviously, martin luther was not an american — unless you are a mormon — who knows what those people think. but the vast majority of americans are christians. and a large majority of those christians are protestants.
so i’ll spell it out. they ain’t done killing witches.
protestantism is the religion that the antisemite martin luther started. it was a stupid idea. he thought people should actually read the bible because then they would know what god really wanted rather than getting it filtered through the hateful corrupt catholic church. the problem is that the bible is a whole lot of contradictory rubbish that only an expert can make any sense of at all.
luckily, almost none of these protestants actually do read the bible. they just allow it to be filtered through their hateful corrupt churches.
bob dylan, during one of his most annoying periods, sang ‘gotta serve somebody.’ in my experience, christians have to hate somebody.
it may be the jews
or it may be the spicks
but you’re gonna have to hate somebody.
i know that a lot of you out there think that trump will leave office and everything will be fine. that’s not true.
first, roughly half of you idiot americans voted for the man. and it’s not like he didn’t let you know exactly who he was. you knew he was a constant liar before you voted him the most powerful man in the world. [parenthesis]the most powerful creature on earth is the leader of a large colony of termites in australia.[parenthesis] you knew he was an idiot. you knew he didn’t know anything about politics. you knew he was a bigot. you knew he was a sexist. if he’s surprised you as president, you are even stupider than he is.
but even if you did somehow go back to normal, you won’t think about what happened. america doesn’t look back. you think the best way to deal with past wrongs is to ‘look forward’ and pretend it never happened. until it happens again.
i give you all 30 years tops before you have world war iii.
so i say to my fellow rats, ‘let’s start heading south.’
and i say to europe, ‘i think you had better start spending a lot more on your military because fascist america is coming for you and i don’t think russia’s gonna help much this time — but you never know. if america doesn’t have have a complete idiot in charge but just an insane one, the country might attack russia, china, and india as well. still, prepare for the worst.’
and finally, to americans, i ask, ‘is this really how you want to see your empire go down[question mark]’ don’t answer that question americans. it was rhetorical.
cheers,
wendy
Ah-ha! I suspected fake rat (perhaps a badger or tree sloth) via the obsession over rat lifespans. Redwoods don’t worry over lifespans, and neither do True Rats.
The dead damn giveaway involved ripping on Soderbergh, who WAS intolerable 20+ years ago, but is a very warm and human filmmaker now. Certainly not the director of choice for small mammals, yet no rat would remember how overpraised he was for “Sex, Lies, & Videotape.” He’s been terrific lately.
It’s also possible the author is a turtle, I’m not ruling that out. Turtles hold long grudges and move so laboriously that pressing the shift key would be an understandable bore.
So you are saying that a literate rat can’t know about anything that happened before she was alive? So you must not know about the American Revolution. Good to know that. And I think she was thinking more of Traffic. You can’t hang around a man without picking up some of his hatred. ;-)
Yeah, “Traffic” was awful. I loved the heck out of “Contagion” and “Logsn Lucky.” Soderbergh’s just a prolific fuck, when you churn out two movies a year, some will be bad.
Not sure if I’ve heard of the American Revolution. I’ve memorized every tune in two musicals about the thing, but those musicals with their stirring songs might have somewhat lied.
Ah, what the hell. It’s not like humans are particularly amazing. At least rats don’t happily worship other rats who are obviously fucking mean, a thing humans will gladly do if they think it can turn out well. Which it never does, but humans are not the brightest of mammalian creatures.
My response to Soderbergh: Takashi Miike. But really: I don’t dislike Soderbergh. I’m just suggesting what Wendy might be thinking. You know rats! I really like The Limey. Even though it has everything that normally bores me about his (early, I guess) films, it’s basically psychotronic. Especially this badass scene:
Rats are much more communal than humans. I believe I wrote an article about that after Pizza Rat. I don’t know of them to have a pecking order. So humans are more like chickens. And that means they are more like dinosaurs. And you know what that means…
I hated that “Limey” scene until the very last seconds, where the old guy is tossed on the ground, left for useless, then gets revenge on everybody who left him for useless. Not really a morally appropriate action, but that’s kinda what the movie is about. Our dumb paramecium brains react to “revenge is fun,” yet in the end that character gets no resolution from his revenge.
Terrance Stamp is one hell of a compelling actor. I can’t think of a single thing he’s been in where I didn’t want to watch every second.
And, there’s this, back from when nobody took comic book movies seriously:
https://youtu.be/UKDFop0aqYQ
Stamp commits 100% to those lines like the total trouper he is. The dude scared the hell out of me when I was 10, though.
That scene is well set up. He believes his daughter has been murdered. He’s a thug. He acts the way he thinks is right. It is a comic book scene though. Everyone likes to see that kind of thing because we’ve all been the old man on the ground and we didn’t have an extra gun and nerves of steel to walk back in and kill everyone except the kid who sweeps up. And then there’s the total badass, “Tell him I’m coming!” He’s so confident that he’s going to terrorize the guy in exchange for having the element of surprise. Of course, he doesn’t kill the guy. He learns a valuable lesson and sees his own culpability. The denouement is really brilliant.
I didn’t even know that was Stamp in Superman II. He is a great character actor and he always commits to his roles. The first time I really noticed him was in The Hit. Then there was one great scene in Wall Street. And finally, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. That was probably when I learned his name. He’s up there with Tom Wilkinson, although I think Wilkinson has more range.
I really wish superhero movies were more like the Batman television series and those first Superman movies. The truth is, the new films are no less silly. They just overwhelm you with sound, production value, and over-written scripts (punched up by comedy writers). The Avengers is the silliest thing imaginable: a group made up of a Norse god, a weapons manufacturer in a special suit that absolutely couldn’t work, a man who got too many gamma rays and so turns into a green monster but somehow always does good, a character designed to fight Hitler (not his army — the man), and two other characters only the nerdiest people even recognize as part of the group. What’s really changed is that the filmmakers seem to think we should take this all seriously. What’s sad is that most people do — and they don’t see that the films are anti-humanity and pro-fascist.
There was one recent comic-book movie I really enjoyed, “Green Lantern” by Micheal Gondry. It took the inherently antihuman, racist source material and played with it, making the superhero realize what an absolute dick he was being. It was a box-office flop (for the production cost) and reviewers dismissed its self-contradictory tone. But that tone is what made the movie fun.
Christopher Nolan killed amusing, silly comic book movies forever with his utterly dismal Batman films. And I’ve liked some of Nolan’s other stuff before/since. Those were pure pain, though. I walked out of the second one and didn’t force myself to see the third, I’d had enough.
“The Hit”! I’d forgotten about that one, it’s fantastic.
I haven’t seen Green Lantern. Since it was savaged by “critics,” I might check it out. But when it comes to movies these days, I’m spending more time tracking down old books for research to write about films than watching them. (This hasn’t stopped me from watching The Last Man on Earth (1964) about 20 times over the last 2 weeks.) The problem I’m having is that when I start writing about a film now, even if I plan to do something short, it ends up taking over my life. Also, I’ve realized that the best hope for Psychotronic Review is for me to deal with minor classics. My novella-length article on Blood Feast — certainly the best thing ever written on it — online or off, ranks at #55 for “blood feast review.” Google doesn’t even return it for the search “blood feast.” Meanwhile, a very skimpy analysis of Bloody Mallory is #5 for “bloody mallory review.” (It’s still better than everything above it.)
Anyway, I did see The Green Hornet, and that film wasn’t too bad because it absolutely knew how silly it was. If it had been twice as silly, it probably would have been half as successful commercially. But I would have loved it.
Oh yeah, The Hit is a fantastic film. It’s amazing that there are these four totally different characters and yet you care about them all. Stamp’s character is particularly interesting because it isn’t clear what’s going on with him. And Hurt has such a pained performance, the final wink seems to indicate that he sees his death in a positive way. Of course, I understand its other purpose: to signal to this young woman that of all the badasses he had defeated, it was her who finally got him. There’s also a sense in the film that there’s a connection between them. They are the strong ones. Stamp and Roth are both kind of silly in their way. I don’t think that Hurt had intended to kill Roth when he hired him. But Roth showed himself to be a liability and Hurt was an extremely careful man.
Good summation of “The Hit.” Stephen Frears is a very underrated director.
By “Green Lantern” I meant “Green Hornet”! I get all these superhero movies mixed up. I never saw “Lantern.” But I did enjoy the humor in “Hornet” a lot. And critics didn’t like it. Not to knock critics, but that was a very enjoyable movie. Seth Rohan was essentially a spoiled, egocentrical Batman (which is to say, Batman) but he stops being quite such a jerk by the end.
Sorry some of the film analysis work isn’t getting the Google attention it deserves. This can’t be new to you, though. What makes nonfiction writing popular is largely trendy tastes, and it’s rare that a good writer gets picked up by the Trend du Jour. I always thought David Rakoff should have been a superstar, but he died relatively unknown. Oh, well. His work made me enjoy life while I was reading it, and I’m sure many others felt the same way. Hopefully his ghost is happy with that.
Yes, Frears doesn’t get as much credit as he deserves. I think part of it is that he’s not pompous about his work. I think of him much as I do Alan Parker. I’m not quite sure why Parker isn’t making films anymore. He may just have made the reasonable choice to retire.
I like the line about Batman.
One thing I think I’ve noticed is that if I post an article here and then transfer it to Psychotronic Review, it gets a lot more Google juice. But there is a lot to that — part of which is that when I transfer something, it has been around a lot longer. I’m not sure if it would work if I just posted it here and then transferred it there. And I don’t want to do that anyway because I’m terrified of a Google penalty.
Yeah, “Traffic” sucked. But I really liked “Logan Lucky.” I just like the heck out of Daniel Craig, and I’m insanely jealous over who he’s married to. Rachel Weisz is probably my biggest crush since Judy Davis. (Or Daniel Craig; the man absolutely rocks a white tuxedo. That is not an easy look to pull off.)
Rachel Weisz is nothing compared to Judy Davis! But that’s really just based on the parts they play. Davis is so good at neurotic, I can’t help but love her. I have Isabelle Carre’s photo on my desktop. But that’s just because of one role. I haven’t been able to get any of her other films. I have tried. Of course, that dates back to when I had no money. I’m sure that I could now buy some. But that might ruin my crush. If you haven’t seen it, Romantics Anonymous (“Les Emotifs Anonymes”) is probably the best romantic comedy ever made about the two most ridiculously neurotic people ever. Actually, her part is the lesser. The male lead, Benoit Poelvoorde, is a comedian. And he gets to perform a Marx Brothers’ quality sequence on their first date. And the ending is perfect. I got it from the library, so yours might have it. I believe it was very successful.