your least favourite shakespeare play ?

[Ecurb]

I don't know the "domestic violence" stats (I assume women are more likely to be hurt because men are stronger, most domestic couples are heterosexual, and men are more violent than women). However, men are far more likely to be the victims of violent crimes than women are (this is true for murder, assault, and armed robbery -- in other words for all the major violent crimes except rape). Also, if we include child beating in "domestic violence", I'd guess (I don't know) that boys are more likely to be victims than girls. (As Clopin confirms from his child care experience, this is probably true for no other reason than that boys are more rowdy, badly behaved and annoying than girls, and because some parents are sexist and think their sons can "take it" better than their daughters can.)

[Clopin]

Yes, one of the male privilege checklist items was something like "I'm not taught to fear walking alone in a dark alley as much as women are". Well maybe we should be since men are the overwhelming majority victims of violent crime. And of course I have felt fear in certain situations and areas, a dark alley probably being one of them.

[Clopin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H24sLF3CkMo

Haha hey Morph, is this rape culture in action? I mean she does say the cop is raping her! Imagine if she were a man pulling this kind of ****... He would be tazed - or worse - in about six seconds.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...jason-richwine

Some talk about the false rape accusation stat.

And here's a video I just found while googling around for some stuff on male privilege/what-have-you, and okay I admit I have no idea now valid this video actually is, but I've seen this story in action and there are absolutely fathers and men who suffer unjustly and far beyond proportion during and after a divorce.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zxNRtObt8no

Male privilege right?

http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2015/0...lent-epidemic/

Divorce a major factor in male suicide rates. Gee remember when you couldn't imagine what societal factor may have been causing male suicide rates Morph? Well we could possibly improve them by making divorce a little more fair. In North America more than two thirds of divorces are initiated by women! Gosh it's so hard to imagine why! I mean it's almost as if one side (determined entirely by gender) has all of the incentive to proceed with a divorce while the other side (again, determined entirely by gender) has the privilege of losing everything! So is this male privilege yet or what?

Now I know you'll say that all of the examples I can possibly bring up are irrelevant because they don't disprove the areas where women struggle (man it's convenient to have an argument which can automatically never be disproven, I mean if all my stats and figures are meaningless what am I supposed to say?) but where's the tipping point where I bring enough evidence of men seriously struggling in society due to their gender before we can accept that being a man is not really a benefit in itself? Never? I mean can you lay out for me a situation where you would actually believe that men are not socially elevated over women?

[Gutted]

Well, that's what we're all discussing in this thread! Here's a good checklist that runs through the major examples. If you click on "more" you'll be taken to articles that have references to peer-reviewed journals that you can check out, just to make sure they aren't pulling the claims out of their backside.

No, you haven't touched on social privilege at all. Also, I'm not sure what a passed around checklist from 1990 is supposed to prove to anyone.

[mortalterror]

I have no problem with that, personally.

So, basically, violate the separation of Church and State?

So you have no problem violating some amendments but not others?

Also, I'm not sure that does violate separation of Church and State if they don't play favorites and are pluralistic. Besides, we already have tax exempt status for them as non-profits because of their charities, and Bush had that big push to downsize government and let private organizations do things. This would be an extension of that. The churches already get government funding for their schools and hospitals. Remember the voucher program?

Well, now we're getting down to semantics, but I think you know what I meant. For "sound" I meant "films that had recorded sound and authorial/directorial intended scores" and for "color" I meant "films not in B&W."

You're free to prefer it, but you are not free to pretend this preference is either objective or has anything to do with the fundamental art of filmmaking.

And your own opinion is of course objective as usual.

The Man with the Movie Camera. Sans Soleil. Dog Star Man. Meshes of the Afternoon. Wavelength. Koyaanisqatsi. Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. Zorns Lemma. Un Chien Andalou. Close-Up.

Those films suck. Nobody likes them but film school rejects. Although, I do like Man with the Movie Camera, but it wouldn't make my top 200. Un Chien Andalou was alright as a short film, but it would have pissed people off as a feature. There's a reason why half of those are just shorts. That kind of thing doen't entertain people. It annoys them. You can't possibly compare those films with the greatness of Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, or Apocalypse Now.

I'd even hesitate to say that films like Tarkovsky's Mirror, Last Year at Marienbad, Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Playtime, really have "stories." They have scenarios from which they execute their cinematic experimentation.

Yeah, I really don't like those ones either. Godard is probably my least favorite "great director" and Playtime by Tati bored me to tears.

Hitchcock proved you can, even telling Truffaut he selected Psycho because of its terrible source material, to prove that film is a director's art-form, not a writer's.

I think he proved pretty well that a writer is important with that one. Psycho is a lousy movie. The writer is an important collaborator, just not the chief collaborator on a film. The same goes for the actors. Hitchcock claiming that the writing is unimportant was pure hubris on his part. The best films are the ones where every part works well. That's why so many great films are adaptations of great books and plays. It's like having a solid foundation for your house.

"You can drive a car with your feet if you want to. That don't make it a good idea." - Chris Rock

Really, all of noir falls under the category of what would be considered "poor stories" as pure literature. The Third Man even knowingly mocks this notion with its protagonist being a writer of shlock westerns who's thrust into a detective story.

There are plenty of great stories in noir: The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street, The Big Heat, Asphault Jungle, Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, LA Confidential, Bladerunner, Blood Simple. Not all detective films or genre films have poor stories. The Third Man I've never liked except for the cuckoo speech on the ferris wheel, but even that I'd hesitate to call it poorly written given that the writer was short listed for a Nobel prize in literature. I'm not sure if the protagonist being a writer of westerns is meant to undermine the importance of writing, or the genre, but I know that a lot of writers love writing about other writers. It's typically a narcissism thing rather than an actual important statement.

Going back through the last pages using CTRL+F, I can't find where I said this. What I may have said was that Griffith and Eisenstein perfected the art-form, meaning the art of mise-en-scene and editing. This is different than saying their films are perfect.

I'll give them points for being good at editing or mise-en-scene. I'm not sure I'd say they were the best at it, although my distaste for their works, precludes my seeing all of it to make a better judgment; so I leave open the possibility they've done better work which I'm unaware of. However, I'll add the caveat that when I see the techniques they've pioneered in other people's films, I like the latter more. For instance, that scene in Untouchables is way more watchable than the Odessa steps sequence.

I was just watching a clip from the OSS and it seemed to run on too long. Once again, I was struck by the ugliness of the woman, which at first I wasn't sure was a woman, or the mother of the child being trampled. Then when the kid is being trampled in the panic Eisenstein cuts back between them four or five times, and I'm like "Alright, I got it the first time. Now, you're just in love with yourself." It kind of reminds me of this scene from Dolemite the Human Tornado, starring, co-written, and produced by Rudy Ray Moore who is so proud of his stunt work he rewinds the shot to show us it again with the voiceover "So y'all don't believe I jumped huh? Well, watch this good ****!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raplinC5tEI

Of course, nobody is going to say that Dolemite perfected the craft of film.

I actually do not. To say color is not innately better simply means that it comes down to preference. This is no more controversial than saying chocolate isn't innately better than vanilla. Besides, painting is not photography/cinematography. Choosing to limit colors is always a conscious choice in painting, while for many years it was mandatory for photography and movies.

I'll give way on this point, since there are some good black and white films that use their palette effectively.

Well, yes, they go through better and worse eras (to echo the Third Man reference, see Welles's Cuckoo Clock speech), but this is different than saying that they progress towards some ideal that will only be achievable in the future.

But don't you think that the more senses that are stimulated the more engrossing, absorbing, and realistic the work becomes? We see in color. We hear sound. Watching a silent film sometimes feels like removing a sense and being deaf. You get a lack of input and stimulation to the part of your brain that processes hearing. Ultimately, it's about as satisfying as sitting in the dark listening to an audiobook. You can do it, and even be entertained by it, but it won't have the full powerful effect of being completely engaged at every level like you can with colored sound films. That's why tv and movies are way more popular than books in our age. They appeal to people on more levels.

Absolutely, but this is because they were still figuring out how to use photography expressively, period. It took a painter like Murnau to really perfect it.

He had a good eye, and got some interesting shots, but I'd still take Ridley Scott over him.

Absolutely as well, but most cinematographers aren't Storaro and Nykvist (or Mark Lee Ping-Bin, to throw out a contemporary master).

I wish they could make every movie.

Not entirely. Bergman had an excellent eye even before Nykvist. Go back and look at the compositions and his use of contrast in The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, or even earlier (the best thing about his sub-par early films are the visuals). Plus, Bergman understood using color symbolically coming from the theater; the use of red in Cries & Whispers was his idea, and Nykvist executed it.

I remember watching one of his first films from the 40s and thinking it looked stagey. Then stuff like The Magic Flute, you can tell Bergman is drawing on his experience as a director of opera. And on the criterion DVD extras he goes on about how much he loved the work of the playwright August Strindberg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc8DpjM4c-c His films have sort of the same tone as the plays I read by Strindberg in college. I can definitely see him being an influence on the way Bergman wrote, like I can see the influence of Max Ophuls tracking shots on Kubrick.

Of course it's film! Firstly, technically, anything shot on "film" is technically "film," but the more accurate term, movie, is itself is short for "moving picture," so the fundamental aspect of the art is literally the moving picture. It makes not a whit of difference whether that moving picture is in color or b&w, whether in sound or silent, or whether it's telling a story or being used experimentally as in the films of Brakhage or Vertov. This has nothing to do with a "reductio ad absurdum" and everything to do with understanding the fundamental art of cinema is, literally, "moving pictures," and that moving pictures typically involves two fundamental elements: mise-en-scene (what's in front of the camera) and montage (whenever any editing is involved).

Probably just a bad name that doesn't fully characterize what the medium is, or perhaps a name that stuck from a time when film was soundless, an anachronism, a vestigial holdback if you will that no longer applies. It works as a shorthand though, and you'd confuse people if you tried to come up with a new name at this point, so I guess it's here to stay. Although, a friend of mine has brought up the inappropriateness of the moniker with me before. I suppose they aren't called movies in every language though. I bet there's a way like in German or Hindi to chain enough compound words together to come up with an appropriate title.

Of course, definitions do change over time, and words change their meanings. I think that if 99.99% of films in the last 8 decades have had sound, then most people assume that sound is a part of the medium, and the definition has changed since the days of Eisenstein. You are arguing for the exception to define the majority and that doesn't make any sense at all.

I wouldn't say they thought of everything and you're absolutely right that the crude technology limited what they could do; but most of this involved what happened in front of the camera, not how to use the camera and editing. Eisenstein literally thought of everything when it came to editing, to the point nobody has added anything new since.

I'm not sure about that. I'm thinking that the machine gun editing of MTV music videos might be an innovation, or the unrelated action and multi-tiered splicing at the beginning of Peckinpah's Wild Bunch, might count. I remember my cinema teacher in college screening a scene from the 1998 film The Celebration, at the beginning when a car is going down the road and they pass the driver's brother. The editing and cinematography was all over the place but the professor said that was intentional and had such and such an effect. Of course, he had nice things to say about the way Michael Bay edited Armageddon, so take that with a grain of salt. I also can't help but think that the French New Wave directors added something, jump cuts maybe or linking scenes with audio. I'm sure Godard and Truffaut added something, and Andy Warhol or John Cassavetes probably did something nobody had done before, but which was nonetheless a complete artistic failure.

First, film is not a hybrid of painting unless you're doing Brakhage's painting on film. Secondly, I already said that music makes film a hybrid. Thirdly, everything else is inherent in narrative, not inherent in the medium of film. They're things the medium of film can be utilized for.

First, the painting I was referring to would be part of set design usually, sort of the way that fashion is implied in costumes and wardrobe. The art of makeup isn't essential, but many films employ it. Secondly, I think you are making a mistake by defining film only by what is unique to it, since this leaves so much of what it is outside of your definition. It is an incomplete definition, not a lie but a half-truth.

"Without color" just simply means "not shot in color," and color tinting is hardly the same as film stock. There are such a thing as silent films. Again, Dreyer expressed his preference for POJOA being shown silent, and in most silent films the filmmakers weren't actually involved in the scoring.

Without color means clear. I don't know that it matters what the director preferred. The film belongs as much to the producer or to the audience, in the end. I also don't think it matters if the director wasn't a part of the scoring. A lot of directors delegate various tasks like that.

Well, yes, but this isn't really what I was discussing. The evolution of film acting involves recognizing the difference between how acting registers on a camera VS how it registers in a theater. Brando and Kazan were two of the first to recognize that the kind of "projection" necessary in theater became too melodramatic in front of a camera; but even many earlier actors/directors knew this. One of the young actors in Stalag 17 noted how William Holden told him "there's a 135mm lens on the camera, that means they'll be in real close, so don't overplay anything." Obviously in silent film the exaggeration was used because filmmakers were concerned that without audible dialogue the audience would miss the emotional substance. This turned out to be wrong. Yet such styles didn't really die out: Kurosawa was heavily influenced by Noh and preferred that exaggerated mode of acting (which made Mifune such a perfect fit for him), eg.

As I recall, the silent film Pandora's Box was praised for the naturalism of it's acting; so people had caught on before Brando or Stalag 17. I also think there was more to the change than just theater to film, since theater acting was undergoing the same revolution thanks to Stanislavski.

Go watch some Brakhage and tell me what you feel. To me, his is film in its purest, most poetic form. I'd recommend 23rd Psalm Branch as a great introduction that's powerful without being too long.

I watched some Brakhage the last time you recommended him and hated it. I'll give it a little look though. You know who I do love from around the time of Griffith and Eisenstein? Lang. Give me him over those two any day. Metropolis and M are two of my favorite films. The first couple minutes of The Testament of Dr Mabuse is spellbinding. I even like the stuff he did in America: Scarlet Street, the Big Heat, Fury.

I'm not "really liberal," I'm a "really rationalist" who endeavors to align my beliefs with reality. If proof was produced that showed anything I said was wrong, I'd immediately change my mind. I have zero reason to prefer them to be true; they just seem to be based on the research I've done and based on the research others have done and have related to me.

You are pretty liberal and you use liberal logic to rationalize your prejudices just like conservatives use conservative logic to rationalize theirs. Logic is just a tool. It can't tell you if what you believe is right. It can only tell you if the statements you've made are self-coherent. Liberal premises, with liberal syllogisms come up with liberal conclusions. Conservatives and liberals don't use the same facts or start with the same assumptions. How could they come to the same conclusions though both should use logic and reason?

But that doesn't really matter, because people don't change their minds based on facts and reason. They adopt values and ideas that have persuasive aesthetic value to them. That's basic psychology and an hour or two on the internet ought to convince anyone of that. Ideas may be true but unpersuasive or false and highly persuasive. Most people just accept the facts or viewpoint that most gels with their previously accepted ideology. Opinions are gratuitous and self-serving, because they are based on things like self-identity instead of an objective evaluation of the external world. Men claim to be objective, rational, but there's no such thing. There's only choosing what feels right and then rationalizing after the fact.

[Clopin]

No, you haven't touched on social privilege at all. Also, I'm not sure what a passed around checklist from 1990 is supposed to prove to anyone.

He hasn't made the case because it's totally inonceivable to him that people could seriously take any stance other than "men are heavily privileged by society"', a fact which he has suggested is "blindingly obvious" to anyone who does any research. Well this thread would indicate that he's wrong there at least as it seems to be only him who finds men to be favored overmuch by society in this day and age. Also he'll stop arguing mid thread but continue to pop in and tell you you've provided no evidence against his totally insane positions on things like "society being a literal rape culture"... I dunno, it's more funny than anything else.

Anyway if you provide arguments against this notion he'll just say something like "oh but no examples of widespread suffering of men due entirely to their gender (combat deaths due to draft, chronic injuries due to trade work, suicide after divorce, suicide in general) disprove male privilege". Indeed, so what would 'disprove' it? I have no idea.

Really liberal social justice warriors love these types of hysterical positions where they try to make it impossible to argue against them. If you disagree with women on some of these debated points you're "mansplaining", "deactualizing them" or not accepting their "lived experience". If you feel that as a man you do not have this elusive "male privilege" because you have never felt it while working your ****ty minimum wage job, well, don't worry you have the "privilege" of being unaware of your privilege! Your very disbelief of there being societal conditions which overly favour you based on nothing but your gender is, in fact, a part of that sociological structure itself! Whipee, how convenient! Never mind that when you bring up your own "lived experiences" as a male, you are totally devalued and told that they "don't matter" and don't in any way disprove privilege (though somehow female experiences are very relevant to the discussion, unless they go against the narrative) because you're such a damned privileged monster that you're just not aware of all the innumerable (never actually numbered though) benefits you enjoy simply by being born a male.

[Ecurb]

Of course, nobody is going to say that Dolemite perfected the craft of film.

.

"Dolemite, The Human Tornado" is the "Citizen Kane" of blaxploitation flicks. If given a choice of watching "Dolemite" or "Birth of a Nation", I'd have to flip a coin. I'll grant that Dolemite's shenanigans get a little old by the end of the film, but the first 15 minutes of Dolemite is classic -- as stunning in its own way as the long, single-take panning shot at the start of "A Touch of Evil".

I hadn't thought about Dolemite for some years before reading your post, Mortal. Thanks for reminding me. Dolemite rules! Who wouldn't like to see Dolemite and his "ladies" roll up to Patrick Swayze's "Road House" for a quick drink?

[mortalterror]

They're equal in the eyes of the legal system assuming the contexts and results are the same.

Men Sentenced to Longer Prison Terms Than Women For Same Crimes, Study Says
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1874742.html

"The study found that men receive sentences that are 63 percent higher, on average, than their female counterparts.

Starr also found that females arrested for a crime are also significantly more likely to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted."

[Ecurb]

I was talking to my son about Dolemite (he's the one who turned me on to the films). It turns out that I was conflating "Dolemite" and "Dolemite: Human Tornado". Mortalterror linked the opening scene of "Human Tornado", which is actually the sequel. There's a third film, "Disco Godfather", which I have never seen. The first few minutes of both "Dolemite" and "Dolemite: The Human Tornado" are great (although neither film quite sustains that manic quality).

By the way, all of the stats suggesting that women are really the "privileged" ones are telling, but concentrate on social privileges rather than cultural ones. I'm sure children get lighter sentences for crimes than men, just like they get to be first into the life boats on the Titanic. Those are both "privileges", but at the same time children aren't entitled to the same liberties as adults, and the privileges are the result of children being perceived as helpless and incompetent. Women might be socially privileged, while men are culturally privileged -- the social privileges (shorter sentences, access to life boats, etc) being the result of the lack of respect they are afforded. It's difficult to cite statistics here -- but perhaps men are honored for going down with the ship while the women are hopping in the life boats with the kiddies.

[mortalterror]

Even as a Mayweather fan, I found that funny!

Oh, of course you're a Mayweather fan too.