Top 10+ Music, Movies, and Visual Art of the Week (2019) - Music Diaries

Facetious

Gender: Male
Age: 24
Location: Somewhere you've never been

Can you please post a detailed analysis of Pulp Fiction?

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

Facetious wrote:

Can you please post a detailed analysis of Pulp Fiction?

I dont know if Ill have the time for a "detailed" one but I do plan on revisiting it again very soon to further verify its merits/my thoughts & observations about it. When I do (probably within days or no more than a week) Ill get back to you with at least the key bullet points.

Im really immersed in a slew of Classical works that Ive been revisiting over the last 1-2 weeks, and when Im this focused on a number of works all in one art form, it can be tough to jump right into serious analysis/detailed thoughts about another, such as film/Pulp Fiction. But yeah - for sure - Ill get back to you on it soon...

(Its definitely a more profound film than it might appear to be and it has been through a pretty wide discrepancy of ratings for me, in part due to this "elusiveness" and the difficulty in pinning down its merit: from 7.9 to as high as 8.8 and currently 8.3 and probably every rating in between those over the last 10 years or so)
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Facetious

Gender: Male
Age: 24
Location: Somewhere you've never been

What do you think of Pather Panchali?

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

Facetious wrote:

What do you think of Pather Panchali?

Sorry -- totally absorbed in Classical and can't get back out right now. Very Happy

I'm trapped in the lightning bolts of awe!

I will get back you on Pulp Fiction -- it will just be a little longer than I thought...

Pather Panchali seems to me a precursor to Mahid Majidi's cinema (Willow Tree, Color of Paradise). A cinema of faith and humility, but mostly lucid and simple. Both naive and profound simultaneously (profound in the way that a child views the world with wonder and epiphany, not the depth or complications of a wisened philosopher). It should be on my 7.3+ list unless I erroneously removed it?
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Facetious

Gender: Male
Age: 24
Location: Somewhere you've never been

Not sure where it was, but I think I remember you mentioning The Waste Land once as an extraordinary piece of literature. What did you find extraordinary about it and what other works of literature do you find amazing?

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

Facetious wrote:

Not sure where it was, but I think I remember you mentioning The Waste Land once as an extraordinary piece of literature. What did you find extraordinary about it and what other works of literature do you find amazing?

I do not consider myself reliable on rating/ranking literature simply because I dont have the time to go through its essential works as I have for much of Classical, Rock, Jazz, Film, Paintings, so any assessment for it would be an educated guess based as much on intuition as actual evaluation.

This in mind, I would say that Eliot's Wasteland, the major works of Shakespeare, Dante's Divine Comedy, Ulysses, Dostoyevsky, Kafka's Trial, are some of the more obvious candidates I would delve into and eval more if I were to start putting together an "8.8+" list of literary masterpieces.

Wasteland seems a masterpiece of multi-faceted illusion/modernist structure (freedom of form, multi-layered metaphors) combining many styles & languages into a very personalized vision/idiom, perhaps anthropological (more likely in terms of influence/inspiration than "hereditary"). It seems an apocalyptic vision from a very profound, isolated and personal perspective (perhaps terrified at being the only one cognizant of what he sees).

"Let me go straight to the heart of the matter, fling my poor little hand on the table, and say what I think The Waste Land is about. It is about the fertilizing waters that arrived too late. It is a poem of horror. The earth is barren, the sea salt, the fertilizing thunderstorm broke too late. And the horror is so intense that the poet has an inhibition and is unable to state it openly.

"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish ? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images."

He cannot say 'Avaunt!' to the horror, or he would crumble into dust. Consequently, there are outworks and blind alleys all over the poem—obstacles which are due to the nature of the central emotion, and are not to be charged to the reader. The Waste Land is Mr. Eliot's greatest achievement. It intensifies the drawing-room premonitions of the earlier poems, and it is the key to what is puzzling in the prose. But, if I have its hang, it has nothing to do with the English tradition in literature, or law or order, nor, except incidentally, has the rest of his work anything to do with them either. It is just a personal comment on the universe, as individual and as isolated as Shelley's Prometheus."

--EM Forster
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Facetious

Gender: Male
Age: 24
Location: Somewhere you've never been

What do you think of Apocalypse Now's original cut vs the redux version?

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

Facetious wrote:

What do you think of Apocalypse Now's original cut vs the redux version?

Redux is still a superb film but I don't recall much of the extras being truly necessary. Original cut is superior as it already has everything that's needed to develop/express its themes while still leaving the proceedings quite eliptical/ambiguous/suspenseful/haunting.
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Facetious

Gender: Male
Age: 24
Location: Somewhere you've never been

Planning on catching Joker in theaters? It's good, a pretty bleak and intense origin story unlike anything else in mainstream comic book adaptations. It's the sort of gritty adaptation that's the logical follow-up to what Nolan was going for in his Dark Knight trilogy. Joaquin Phoenix clearly gave it his all, the cinematography is gorgeous, the atmosphere unrelentingly tense. I predict a 7/10 on your scale.

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

Facetious wrote:

Planning on catching Joker in theaters? It's good, a pretty bleak and intense origin story unlike anything else in mainstream comic book adaptations. It's the sort of gritty adaptation that's the logical follow-up to what Nolan was going for in his Dark Knight trilogy. Joaquin Phoenix clearly gave it his all, the cinematography is gorgeous, the atmosphere unrelentingly tense. I predict a 7/10 on your scale.

I am 99.9% immune to comic book movie hype (on purely my own interest & determinism, not counting going with some friends or as a date) ... but your recommendation might get me to it! It does look more interesting than most and I liked Nolan's.

Overall, Tarantino's latest would be my top choice to see in theaters right now.
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