Oh, jeez, yeah that kind of thing comes out all the time and I pretty much just ignore it, since there's never much reason to believe that random people have the insider knowledge they claim to have. Also (here's another one of those unverifiable claims, ha ha, but it's true) I got to meet Ted Chiang and heard some of…

I'm not sure where you were getting that impression - the other reviews I've seen have been almost all positive and very similar to this one, and I'm pretty sure that included some people who were familiar with the story. I don't know what would count as "completely bastardized" but it certainly sounds (from other…

Before my time too, but people did write about it as a scene— "Cinema of Moral Anxiety" is the usual name. Obviously I can't argue about what you've seen or haven't seen, I'm just saying stuff was out there and was being talked about. (Still not sure I understand your premise though… I don't think the prominence of…

Huh… I never thought of that part as cryptic, seemed to me she was pretty clearly gesturing "help me get out of here, and I'll marry you again."

And then "Two" is the flip side of that: you could say that the doctor is "taking God's name in vain" by swearing he knows something he can't really know, but it's hard to blame him given how he's being pressured, and it's hard to blame the woman for wanting him to give her some certainty. And I think there's a strong…

Well… that's all in there, but I think it deliberately undermines/complicates even that message. I mean, the guy double-checks all his calculations, but then (without telling the kid) he goes out on his own and stomps on the ice too! He's using every tool he has, including "common sense" and "actual experience." The…

Hahaha, I just found the quote and it's great: K told Idziak, "If you want to make green shit, it’s your affair."

Ha, I forgot about that guy! Looking him up now, I see there's a theory that he was named after a red ale.

Er… if by "that is the correct order" you mean "Blue, Red, White is the correct order" (since you were replying to abcdefz)… see D'Angelo's comment, but also, that is not the order they're in on the French flag.

I don't think Tomek's naivete is supposed to be typical of his generation. He's a weird nerdy dude with a job at the post office, and no friends.

And Idziak of course went on to use some similar techniques to totally different effect in Veronique and Blue. At the time though, Kieslowski thought the filters were a terrible idea and only agreed to let him do it that way because Idziak gave him an ultimatum along the lines of "I can't stand this script, it's so…

Btw, Kieślowski co-wrote all of these with Krzysztof Piesiewicz.

I think it just goes to show how open to interpretation these stories are, even when you think they're being heavy-handed - I can see how you saw it as being about "God will punish you", but that's definitely not the only way to read it.

The earlier movies were harder to find in the US for a long time, but were definitely known to cinephiles (I mean, not to be snobby, but if the subject is "Eastern European directors you've heard people talking about" then it seems reasonable to include people who are likely to talk about Eastern European directors)……

"Maybe Poland holds him back in the sense that there is no scene for him to stand above the rest"… ? Not sure what you mean by that - Kieslowski was part of a pretty fertile film scene. Despite censorship, the Communist government was a big supporter of Polish film and the Łódź film school was pretty prestigious - two…

It's not my cup of tea, but it doesn't have much in common with Monstress besides "female lead(s) and monster stuff."

It depends. I mean, I won't try too hard to convince you, and I don't have specific passages on hand to point to, but I'd say that there are definitely parts of his work where he wasn't just hacking out hyper-verbose imitations of his favorite Victorian pulps but actually got into an interesting prose groove, where…

The whole Lonnie subplot was full of nicely ambiguous moments like that. If it weren't for the insurance/lawsuit angle, it would've been totally plausible that he was trying to step up and be something closer to a real parent… but even so, he still would've been an asshole, because it's so clearly tied to his…

Yeah - I'm pretty much the stereotypical target audience for it, but my partner is younger and also wasn't really into any of that stuff as a kid (except for D&D) and still dug it a lot.

I think showing Steve finally ditching his asshole friends is a pretty good shorthand to convey that he's made some serious changes beyond just being willing to fight a monster. He's been with those shitheads for presumably as long as Nancy has known him, and his life seemed to pretty much revolve around them.