What are you watching?

[Madrigal]

Been taking advantage of alone time to watch movies that I can't convince my SO to watch with me.

Napoleon: The Director's Cut

Terrible. I knew in the first 3 seconds of Joaquín Phoenix's performance that he was going to play Napoleon all wrong. Also, he was too old for the role. That's not all, though; all you see is Napoleon waging war or nagging Josephine. Not a word about the Napoleonic Code and his modernization of the French State.

Doesn't stop there either. There's historical revisionism for the sake of not entering politically incorrect territory. When Napoleon marries Marie Louise of Austria, as she's given up for the sake of peace (and because Austria is very much being extorted), they portray her as fawning over him as such a powerful and desireable man. Nothing further from the truth. She basically grew up seeing Napoleon as a sort of evil troll from a fairy tale, and was devastated she had to marry him. It's basically rape, but that would be too problematic for the movie.

The Substance

Terrible. Disgusting, more than I could have imagined, and totally shallow, faux-feminism, with no actual message to be found. What possessed Cannes to award them anything?

I'm watching one more tonight. Maybe 3 time's a charm.

[Catoptric]

Ukraine upload about 2 weeks ago, where he happens to be in Lviv on the night of the biggest drone strike from Russia.



I can't always tell if he acts dumb at times because he knew that Russia was mostly attacking the east part of Ukraine, but leading up to this attack were sirens because a MIG was flying into their airspace and presumably capable of reaching the western part of Ukraine (where it seems they were able to either knock it out of the sky, or it was responded to and deterred; as Russia likes to test response time.)

This seems to be the follow-up (where he was planning to go to Kyiv.



This was a day ago and it was 43 degrees Celsius (109F) in Romania?







Praetorian Guards would never turn on the Emperor?
(And when Ukraine dealt with their corrupt military leaders, they turned out with a much more competent response to Russia's attacks. . . Who would have thought, when you deal with corruption and make things function as they should, society will end up better; *Looking at Trump and the technofascist Oligarchy, which won't bode well in the near future.*)



Either they are actors that are used to keep the narrative aligned with MAGA's agenda, or they are given a very controlled narrative. Too many odd things seem to be showing up, and none of it seems authentic.






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EVP on Youtube
https://youtube.com/@ngkiernan


1980s Jordan terrorism - CIA and Hezbollah



AI and other potential economic collapse indicators

[Catoptric]

Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959) Randolph Scott, Karen Steele, Pernell Roberts, Lee Van Cleef, James Coburn



A Fistful of Dynamite aka Duck, You Sucker (Sergio Leone, 1971) Rod Steiger, James Coburn, Romolo Valli


Hell Is for Heroes (Don Siegel, 1962) Steve McQueen, Bob Newhart
https://ok.ru/video/3150007831040

(I haven't watched these yet.)

Arthur The King aka Merlin and the Sword (Clive Donner, 1982, and shortened and rereleased on VHS in 1985) Malcolm McDowell, Candice Bergen, Edward Woodward, Liam Neeson


It was a really bad made for TV movie that was miscast (but I'm going to assume it's safe to blame the Director for most of it.) If you look at the background image on here, you almost get the impression Malcolm McDowell believes his acting career had hit an all time low, and the other cast member would seem to agree.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088739/re ... =rw8047327

It would have been pretty cool if Stanley Kubrick directed an Arthurian film, which is probably the only time Malcolm McDowell could truly be utilized fully. The Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981) film is probably the best film made on the topic and I was surprised to notice Liam Neeson had been in this one despite the credits not showing it in IMDB upon first glance.

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Why Stupid People are Destroying Society – The Laws of Human Stupidity
https://theacademyofideas.substack.com/ ... destroying

Why Fatherless Boys Struggle to Become Men
https://open.substack.com/pub/theacadem ... medium=web

Speaking the obvious and how showing resistance will encourage more to turn against Trump.



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I noticed a story about Fanny Mendelsohn composing a significant amount of Felix's compositions and never publishing under her own name until a year before her death, at the age of 41 in 1847, at which point Felix destraught, died with a few months after her at age 38.



List of compositions by Fanny Mendelssohn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... endelssohn

You can find some of them on Youtube but even if the person posting it is female, it seems they mistakenly never noticed Fanny was the original composer. I kind of assume she contributed portions to larger bodies of Felix's work, and just gave recognition to him, much like a ghost writer does (since she might have viewed it as easier to be published that way.)

She most likely died without people recognizing she was a significant part of Felix's oeuvre. Mary Shelley did similar to publishing under her husband's name up until he died in a boating accident, but eventually published under her own name (though a large part of the recognition that Frankenstein received was due to the 1930's films.)

[Catoptric]

Recruitment videos for the Japanese Cult responsible for the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack 1995.

Aleph aka Aum Shinrikyo founder Shoko Asahara


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DPRK films

The only dubbed one? It's also the only DPRK film made outside of NK, even while the Director was still being "held in captivity" or against their will.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0150461/
Trivia
Probably the first North Korean film to be made in locations outside North Korea. The same studio in Prague was used, shortly after, to shoot Amadeus (1984).


An Emissary of No Return (Shin Sang-ok, 1984) (North Korean) Choi Eun-hee
https://archive.org/details/no-return-nk

Nambugun - North Korean Partisan in South Korea (Jeong Ji-Young, 1990) Nam Production (South Korea)

A general summary - https://www.koreanworld.it/nambugun-nor ... uth-korea/

The Tale Of Chunhyang Part 1-2 (1980, Yong-Gyo Yoon) (North Korea aka DPRK)


Some literature on the above
The Tale Of Chunhyang translation by missionary, James Scarth Gale
https://archive.org/details/chunhyang-tale/CHOONYANG/

The Favorite Young Man (1989 DPRK film)


O Youth! (Jon Jong-pal, 1994) (North Korea aka DPRK)



Order No 27 (Ki Mo Jung; Eung Suk Kim, 2011) (North Korea aka DPRK)


Flower in Snow (2011, Hyon-Chol Kim) (North Korea aka DPRK)


A lot more. . . (most are right above these titles)
https://archive.org/details/@randomniravioli?page=10


Some longer series:

Unsung Heroes (1978-1982)


Nation And Destiny (Partially Found North Korean Film Anthology) by Kim Jong-il


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The son of a Psychiatrist:



Patrick Crusius believed he was fulfilling Trump’s wishes in El Paso attack, his attorney says
https://www.yahoo.com/news/patrick-crus ... 35303.html






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Basically was searching for the equivalent Moon on Youtube video with a similar title, where he goes into describing Japan as being the epitome of a terrible place to live, and why people "evaporate."



Why 100,000 People Vanish in Japan Each Year… Without a Trace
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/compani ... Pb#details

People Struggling Like Me Are Fed Up With Our Capitalistic Society — 'It's Like Economic Cancer Mutating Our Lives'
https://www.yourtango.com/self/fed-up-a ... capitalism

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I've already accumulated the vast majority of the decent parts of this series, though I might just resort to this on Youtube.

Mobile Suit Victory Gundam (1993) (the "dark horse" of the series, but their are far worse ones.)
All 51 episodes (and perhaps watch Ep 4 before the first one, since it was meddled with by Bandai corporate.)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... WEcwEObCfO


Incidentally I haven't actually watched anything of the series yet. . .

Mostly I wanted to look into it because it's very clear Xenogears was inspired from Gundam, which according to this website, is inspired mostly from the G series. Looking at Victory Ep 4 (which would have been the very first episode but is turned into a "flashback" episode that confused many people) you can compare it to the intro village in Xenogears.

https://xenogearsxenosagastudyguide.blo ... gears.html

Other inspirations for Xenogears are RahXephon (Yutaka Izubuchi, 2002)

Looking at manga and anime you start realizing where many of the famous videogames got their inspiration (and likewise, movies like Blade Runner inspired Akira.) The M. Bison character in Street Fighter 2 is based on Doomed Megalopolis (1991) AKA Teito Monogatari (Tale of the Imperial Capital,) but also the word "Esper" (pronounced unlike "ESP'er") was probably inspired in part from Esper Mami (1987-1989) localized in the west as Mami the Psychic, since it was more common.

These are far too big of files and the 119 Ep are a bit much (though this series is pretty hard to find.)

https://archive.org/details/esper-mami- ... 080-hd-rem
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0291610/

Most of the time when an RPG game makes reference to antiquity they only vaguely consider the historical accuracy, and this goes the same for Japanese history, such as in 'Wrath of the Ninja' which I recall (circa 1999) in which Oda Nobunaga is basically a Demon Lord sending out supernatural minions.

[Catoptric]

Amangiri Resort in Canyon Point, Utah, United States


https://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Revie ... _Utah.html

The ending of that video, was a cloud pancake, where you whip egg white like Pavlova cake (which I find really nasty, and acridly sweet) and then mix the pancake batter to give it that extra volume.

It made me think about the types of people that would generally go to such a place.



These kinds of people





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Potential parallels with AI.



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This is a story arc comprising of the UC 0083 Stardust Memory (1992) and UC 0087 Zeta (1985) series.



What's kind of annoying is many of the series comprise of various iterations, such as the case for Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin OVA 2015 (UC 0068) which has a 2024 recut into a trilogy that has extended from 1 hr episodes while still cutting back from the 6 1hr episodes, but also was truncated into shorter episodes in 2019, which is similar to what happened to Mobile Suit Gundam UC (Unicorn) into RE0096 (UC Recut) (2010-2014 originally, 2016.) I think this confusion is intentionally to get people to buy stuff they won't know had prior iterations, especially when theirs very little context outside of extensive study of the anime.

When you realize that UC doesn't mean Unicorn, and RE0096 somehow doesn't reference a some new category of chronology (which has a lot of "multiverses" that are "alternative timelines," etc, it's easy to come to the conclusion that it is intentional.

They had a 'Stardust Memory Movie,' that seems to omit the title Afterglow of Zeon (1992) on the cover (though I bet it was a pirated version) yet will show the full title when starting the dvd, and which I can find almost no reference to online though believe it is one of many recuts that summarize several episodes into a 1 hr video, for those that would have to acquire the rest and still cut off 1-2 hours of story they would be missing out on.

Also they kind of tease out story context loosely into many of the series, suggesting that people would need to find out the context of a story to understand it differently (though ultimately you realize the stories aren't nearly complex as they might make it out to be.)

This stuff is very common with the series, which probably expects people to buy manga to fill themselves in on the story, in addition to acquiring the different variations of the story.

[Catoptric]

A lot of Horror B-movies
https://www.youtube.com/@TheFilmCryptYouTube/videos

Some better copies and other movies (each link has about 3 films)
https://archive.org/details/@classic_films830

Microwave Massacre (Wayne Berwick, 1979) Jackie Vernon, Loren Schein


The Awakening (Mike Newell, 1980) Charlton Heston



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Was watching a video where someone was showing off a home that has been abandoned for 17 years with all the possessions inside: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1DdbbPhjBp/ and more reels https://www.facebook.com/shumatsuopostfi/reels/

A similar theme is going on with parts of society, and how society becomes so decayed that people would be forced to create waste or societal ills instead of contribute to the betterment of society. The fact that people are so shamed in Japan that they would rather force themselves on the streets and hide away in western parts of Japan, is all their needs to be known about the absurdity of it.







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Yu Yu Hakusho Ghost Files (1992-1995)


An alternative one (that contains the additional OVAs (Eizou Hakusho II that contains longer character stories) and the actual movie (not the OVA that could pass for an additional episode)
https://archive.org/details/anime-yu-yu-hakusho

Incidentally I already had much of this this but was too oblivious to notice it (though I still needed to edit the files to make them function as I intended, so I wasted a bit of time either way.)

I was concerned I was needing to download 4 gb 30 minute MKV episodes and edit them over several hours to get a decent size file in English, but it's fortunately not the case, and I ended up using some of the files to create a better quality dual audio version (when for some reason just finding the correct English subtitle was a problem for some of it.)



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Tadao Nagahama's Robot Romance Trilogy (Daimos) Kaiju, Sentai genre with English dubbing from the Philippines during the 1970s.
https://manga.fandom.com/wiki/Tadao_Nag ... ce_Trilogy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dsh%C5%8D_Daimos
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ ... nceTrilogy

Series is here (though it also includes a 'Daimos' anime that is the dubbed version of Tosho. I was already downloading the MKV in the hopes it was dual audio, though at this rate I would just accept the Japanese version, judging from what I saw of the dubbed version.)


(Update: The MKV versions have Italian Subtitles after episode 9, and the file names for 1-9 seem incomprehensible but are in fact in sequence when sorted by name, and sound mostly nothing like the English counterpart. . . So either I will use Subtitle Edit to auto-generate a translation, assuming finding subtitles will be hard, or I actually find them. . . Either process is annoying, especially when I feel compelled to change the odd capitalization of words in the translation, specifically if they are a certain letter, since it doesn't differentiate common grammar or distinction between letter sizes. This will probably take a couple hours at a minimum. . . And even if I never watch the series, I at least will attempt to insert dubbing into higher quality video. . . Which may also require extracting/saving the Japanese audio and overlapping where the English dubbing functions, since they have about 30 seconds off in either direction even though it appears to start at the exact same time, and I can't be sure the English version doesn't actually cut out major portions, since censorship will have something like a guy's head being blown off, etc but not show things like SA, even if understanding the context of something might suggest the scene was important, etc? Oddly I've been able to do some pretty crazy file edits, such as in a Gundam series where the opening, and the middle, and the end all had some inserted video that really messed up the flow of the series, and yet I also needed the audio to compile an English version MKV version, and managed to sync it up well enough that the subtitles also matched up. Sometimes having the subtitles and English allows to speed up the video quickly if needing to rush through it, but I can also listen without having to watch what are mostly predictable dialogue and sequences of plot device. . . Kind of like if I were to actually watch Pokemon when I never cared for anything past the first Gameboy game (s +/- if you wanted to get 100 Pokemon. . . I fell for it too. . .)

Update: . . . The 10-44 episodes are all speed up at around (not exact) 1.037500x speed due to matching the video length but adding an ending summary. . . And some of them are also off at the beginning or when it transitions to the English dub over, which can delay and offset it.

Voltes V (1977) 40 Ep https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/VoltesV
Combatter/Combattler V https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ ... ombattlerV (Subtitles https://kitsunekko.net/dirlist.php?dir= ... ttler+V%2F )
Tōshō Daimosu, aka Fighting General Daimos https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/Daimos

And a movie Starbirds from 1982 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1757873/

The series seems well regarded even though it's aged a bit in comparison to later series like Gundam, and you would have a very difficult time finding suitable copies of it (possibly due to the creator dying suddenly right after finishing the trilogy,) and the subtitles are a bit weird to find, though you can find some of these series on Nyaa (which is safer to use compared to more mainstream ghetto crap like the Walking Dead series which has people seeding it that track your IP and try to report you to the internet company with the possibility of a huge lawsuit in the future. . . Which I'm not sure how it's possible since it would actually implicate them for having also seeded it; or I suppose it's because my IP showed it briefly seeded files that they successfully downloaded that it then implicated my IP which I may or may not have actually been responsible for hypothetically?)

[Catoptric]

This is going on in Dallas, where cops just watch ICE as they illegally search people at a gas station, and all of them act like FUCKING DICKS! ("Get a job," as the guy records, or when asked if they were cops they say yeah, wearing ICE on their bulletproof vests.)

And no, you aren't safe around people like that, as evident by the video. The brief interaction with cops from that area (such as being at Katy Trail doing security for a private company while kind of oblivious that Trump as at the AT&T Stadium during the runup to the 2021 re-election bid, where cops literally didn't care if you had pointed out something regarding something even trivial) is they either don't give a shit or they are only good for suicide by cop (hence the one memory I have from that area were Police casually chatting with each other after having some dude enter the station adjacent to a catering venue a I was taking out trash; so were they.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRiH-fnk ... IwNjQ2YQ==

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Around 40 minutes in the guy with the loose dentures stops talking and you have the guy who was featured in the movie, Ghostbusters, starts.

[aether]

40 Life Lessons People Realize Too Late



Why Modern Dating Is Broken (And It Started in the 1940s)



Why Germany Produces So Many Geniuses



The line of code that took down the Internet

[Catoptric]

Crossroads (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1928) AKA Jujiro
https://archive.org/details/crossroads_1928

Since it had no sound, I appended a vinyl recording of this album that matches pretty well (though this video below cuts off the noise of the needle touching the disc, which seems more suitable for this.) You would also need to add the subtitle (second English file on the opensubtitles website.) It's a pretty cool combination and was worth it to mess with.

Ambient Punk Vol II (2020) by Pure Life


Alternatively,

Ambient Punk Vol III (circa 2022) by Pure Life


Audio by itself
https://archive.org/details/ambient-punk-vol-3

It's the first Japanese film shown to the west.

A prior film to it was thought to be lost (but later found by the Director 45 years later.)

A Page Of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926) [Silent] (and I have the black and white version, but this one is an AI colorized one that was easier to find.)
https://archive.org/details/a-page-of-m ... ie-576p-sd

It's designed in the philosophy of Shinkankakuha, where, "the direct, intuitive sensation of a subjectivity that peels away the naturalized exterior aspects and leaps into the thing itself," or otherwise, "new sensations."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkankakuha

The Director takes the unusual approach for silent films, in that when people are speaking, he doesn't give them any dialogue, despite the credits having subtitles to them where it can be translated, whereas the film itself explains itself through visuals. I'm also noticing that the writing used in the credits looks very different stylistically from most Japanese kanji, and I believe it might have gotten more standardized near the time of WW2.

The Director is mostly known for a colorized 1953 film, called, 'Gate of Hell' and it along with the above film are all you find with ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, and IMDB shows a much longer list with more ratings. He also was one of many Japanese Directors to do the 47 Samurai/Ronin movies, but also seemed to fizzle out around the end of the 1960s, coincidentally as people like Akira Kurosawa would find difficulty finding work in cinema.

It's worth noting the stylistic elements and how often people were often overlooked because what they created was mismatched from societal expectations, and the way tonality is represented in visual median.



https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0455938/



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I'm going over some more of the silent film era, though this can take longer to go over than longer films, depending on how obsessed you get with the topic. I compiled some music for some of them, and many are already adding their own where it's missing.

Georges Méliès (1861–1938) Collection
https://archive.org/details/le-voyage-d ... -moon-1902

Glad I didn't have to try to download them individually; I can't say the same for these:

Alice Guy-Blaché (who color painted film in a similar approach to Georges Melies, and is the first female Director.)
https://archive.org/search?query=creato ... h%C3%A9%22

Segundo de Chomón
https://archive.org/details/segundodech ... &sort=date

Some other's worth noting are Oscar Micheaux (though his films are full length and not too much info exists on him apart from him being the first black Director who was inspired to respond to movies like The Birth of a Nation and created race commentary that might seem preachy to people.) https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0584778/
https://archive.org/details/@screen_prism?page=3


Charlie Chaplin and other silent era films
https://archive.org/details/@archivesph ... Chaplin%22


Some 'Public Domain' movies, which doesn't give the year or the Director in the title, so it would be kind of annoying finding out some of it, though most of these are the more well known ones.
https://archive.org/details/publicmovie ... anets.webm

Films from Canada, which I only recognize about 2 of them (Black Robe, Johnny Mnemonic, and maybe a few others.)
https://archive.org/details/can-film-archive


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Sci-Fi - Iain M. Banks' Culture series (1987-2012)
https://www.goodreads.com/series/49118-culture

[Catoptric]

One of several films I incorporated music into (and I'll probably add some more that I already finished.)





Optional
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v3-k-q ... sp=sharing

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It's getting there:



Foreign tourists could be required to disclose 5 years of social media histories under Trump administration plan
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump- ... rcna248337