What about "We Didn't Start the Fire?"

Regardless, the the human toilet in that movie is impeccable!

I'd say Duke's tone and aesthetics are rooted in a 'Gothic' sensibility, in the sense of both the 1800s romantic-fantasy literature that prefigured 'horror' as we understand it today and the Hammer-style mid-century re-configuration of its candle-wax-and-lace tropes. It's a Gothic film that isn't a horror film -…

If I remember right, The Duke of Burgundy also has a "human toilet consultant" listed in the credits - that would be a technical position, not the character.

I know a few people who complained they 'didn't understand the plot'. I think in practice it means it didn't have the same plot as every other summer movie.

While I haven't seen Jupiter, I'd argue what I think are similar things about the The Theory of Everything: Redmayne does well enough what's expected of him, but he's stuck inside a film that is entirely made of overbaked ham.

I think we mostly agree on the theoretical stuff ('realistic' is a weird trigger word with me).

I think its fruitful to read Django in terms of the conflict between Tarantino's impulses toward earnestness and elaborate world-building - and certainly think the movie its more directly indulgent than Inglorious Basterds and doesn't accuse its audience in a way Basterds does.

As someone who unsuccessfully tried to ford the Canal de Saint-Quentin, I'm mourning for the oxen lost and pissed the local council couldn't spring to build a bridge.

Eh. Tarantino's politics are a mix of a proactive desire for social justice in the form of the revenge film; Christ-like love for all cinema's most maligned and disreputable elements; and an unhealthy obsession with a particular racial slur.

The analogy isn't exact, but (as you suggest) for us viewers, the films are all a part of the same cinematic conversation, and the fact that Tarantino chose to make certain decisions comments upon / compares with / contrasts with McQueen's approach (or Spielberg's in Lincoln, for that matter).

This is why you clarify your ethics before you start research.

You're presuming this isn't a drive-in theater.

Decades from now, I have a feeling historians will hold this (and American Sniper, Lone Survivor, etc…) up as information-rich documents about how America coped with decades of ongoing conflict abroad. Namely, as evidence of how we primarily considered them in terms of our own victimization.

Sure enough, I checked and it'll be playin' back at my single-screen small town Midwestern theater. Which means the regional distributor and the local oligarchs (who decide such things) thought it was something the rural folk would enjoy.

"This is the American nuclear family…under threat from within and without by bogeymen: video games, software piracy, gun traffickers, small-town criminals who spend an inordinate amount of time threatening high-school freshman-age kids."

As an American presently living in England, it was weird to watch the local press when this whole affair heated up again earlier this year. Like, I appreciate that the British press is more openly partisan than American papers, but this was one of those topics where even the oft-reliable Guardian seemed to just be a…

I agree about the appeal of the story, but wouldn't equivocate - while Amanda Knox was cast in the role of beautiful innocent in hostile foreign territory, this also seems like one of the rare cases where Americans actually had evidence on their side (or at least, Occam's Razor).

A film with no visuals would be a radio show. A gimmick would be a film with no visuals where all the dialogue was basically "Gahh!! I can't believe you just did that! Why did you do that? No one does that!"

Verbal could have been tweaking the truth or making up his story 100%, and it wouldn't make any difference. The twist reveals there's really been nothing at stake narratively except whether the police realize he's been lying, and its reveal is bound up in that bit of tension being resolved.