biscuitdough wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 6:52 pm

Kniferide wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 6:32 pm.
Goodfellas is a pretty bad movie, and Ray Liotta is a terrible actor.

Scorsese is a hack.

I tried watching the Wolf of Wall Street recently. And then gave up because Scorsese was being such a bore. As he was ineffectually grinding through all his well-worn Scorsese tropes on a slow boat to nowhere, I had a bit of a "fuck this guy" moment and bailed on him. Perhaps for good.

I haven't had the stomach to sit through his recent computerface ganster movie, but I saw some clips and De Niro and Pachino are never going to come across like their young selves no matter how good your digital fleshmask is, because those old geezers now work their faces with the over-practiced familiarity that you only get from top-shelf veteran hams. It's creepy to see that playing out on a young face, even without the additional incongruity of their doddery old bodies.

Scorsese was probably inspired by the scenes in Wolf of Wall St where Leonardo DiCaprio is the fresh-faced young kid arriving in the big city for the first time, and looking about 50 years old.

Scorsese the person gets a Not Crap for helping to restore and reissue lesser known films from around the world, for walking the walk where cinema literacy is concerned, for panning super hero movies, and for being a good talk show guest/raconteur.

As a filmmaker, though, his body of work is mixed. Some high highs, and some stupendous lows. Granted, the perception of this can boil down to personal taste, but at their worst his preoccupations lapse into a kind of shtik, one that's functioned better at certain parts of his career or against the backdrop of certain milieux than others. And while I do think his not so secret weapon Thelma Schoonmaker is very talented, the use of musical cues in his work that she/they implement, isn't always wisely thought out. There are times it can be irritating or seemingly arbitrary, though again the perception of this may come down to personal taste.

DaveA wrote: Tue Dec 14, 2021 4:16 pm Maybe this is close to inevitable when it comes to a lot of longstanding categories and genre signifiers, but to me the term "rock music" has come to encompass such a wide variety of styles and sensibilities that its accuracy is almost suspect.

When the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame inducts non-rock acts like Madonna and ABBA, the term has become basically useless.

I lost interest in Breaking Bad midway through the third season. I could have been burned out from all the binge-watching though.

Could be because the second season was crap.

I thought the whole business with the aeroplane was very silly. It's a silly show, but that was really pushing it.

But I heard that they were caught on the back foot a little, not knowing if they were going to be a one-season show, and then suddenly getting extended for multiple seasons. I think they ended up having to pad out the second season as storylines were extended.

To be fair I have never rewatched any of it so it might be better than I remember. But it definitely seems to lose some viewers around this point, viewers who would probably enjoy the later seasons much more.

Breaking bad was more or less a good show, but it's incredibly repetitive.
A lot of shows seem to be like this lately, where our protagonist is well meaning, but can't help but continually do the stupidest shit.
Then when faced with the consequences of their stupid decision making, they double down, every time.

Now I'm picturing Breaking Bad set to the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme.

Arsenal is better than Big Black

Wasn't big black a way to remember resister color coding?

I never quite got Big Black.

Albini just got better with the years IMHO, with Rapeman and then Shellac.

Gregg Ginn supposedly developed his distinctive lead style through a thorough academic exploration of music theory. Nonetheless, you can mimic it by mashing the strings somewhat randomly with the right phrasing.

Later Coltrane is the same, except with a saxophone.