Deep thought

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• Matthias Galvin says:

  May 28, 2009 at 11:10 pm

  Don’t watch House
  If you haven’t already, watch The Wire.
  It’s bet­ter than Berlin Alexanderplatz! (please don’t quote me on that in front of par­tic­u­larly large cinephiles).
  P.S. Though I don’t quite get the movie (does any­one get this man though, really?), the Brakhage film is awesome.

• Aaron Aradillas says:

  May 28, 2009 at 11:42 pm

  Yes, The Wire is the shit.
  I will also defend House. It is quite an acco­plish­ment for a show to still find ways to be cre­at­ive when the cent­ral char­ac­ter dies not change. House is more or less the same per­son from epis­ode one. It’s the people around him who have changed through­out these past 5 seasons.
  The Shield is anoth­er show worth invest­ing in. The first couple of sea­sons may be uneven, but it was worth stick­ing around for the extraordin­ary final two sea­sons. And the series finale is one of the all-time greats.
  And I still defend Entourage for its Diner-like por­tray­al of male friend­ship in the Age of Defamer.
  Finally, TNT’s The Closer is this gen­er­a­tion’s Columbo. Think about it.

• Rudy Mett says:

  May 29, 2009 at 11:36 am

  There is no way The Wire is bet­ter than Berlin Alexanderplatz.

• bill says:

  May 29, 2009 at 11:51 am

  I think I’ll watch “The Wire” when every­body stops telling me it’s the best thing that’s ever been. So, in about eight years, I guess.

• bill says:

  May 29, 2009 at 11:59 am

  Also, I’m adding that Criterion Brakhage antho­logy to the queue next time I have two free slots. I’m diving in, goddammit…

• Kia says:

  May 29, 2009 at 12:43 pm

  Can someone tell me if either of the two antho­lo­gies via net­flix con­tains Window Water Baby Moving?

• Matt says:

  May 29, 2009 at 1:35 pm

  Kia: Disc 2 of BY BRAKHAGE has Window Water Baby Moving.
  Glenn: I have mixed feel­ings about the autopsy movie – it’s undeni­ably power­ful, but the length seems kind of arbit­rary (it would have had a sim­il­ar effect at 5 minutes or at 50), and I find Brakhage’s need to avoid show­ing any identi­fy­ing facial fea­tures increas­ingly dis­tract­ing, even though (1) it was, under­stand­ably, the only way he could get per­mis­sion to film and (2) I might not have thought so if I had­n’t known about that “restric­tion” going in.

• Dan says:

  May 29, 2009 at 3:52 pm

  My Brakhage set wound up get­ting stolen. The sadly-gone DVD Journal’s hil­ari­ous review of the set can be found here: http://dvdjournal.com/reviews/b/bybrakhage_cc.shtml
  For the record, the three films really worth watch­ing are “Window Water Baby Moving”, “Wedlock House”, and well, “The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes”. They make me wish Brakhage had left the lab and poin­ted his cam­era at PEOPLE more often.
  “Seeing” isn’t quite as hard a sit as you might think. If you can handle an ’80s slash­er movie, it won’t gross you out TOO much. It does, how­ever, become almost unbear­ably sad; the film’s length emphas­izes how much people, once they die, become objects.

• Matt says:

  June 1, 2009 at 2:10 pm

  The Brakhage film is worth see­ing. It should be noted, how­ever, that it’s one of the most har­row­ing things you’ll ever see. I watched it without much fore­know­ledge and found it to be some­thing I’ll nev­er for­get. It made me real­ize how bank­rupt and phony “tor­ture porn” is in the face of actu­al trauma.

• Dan says:

  June 1, 2009 at 2:32 pm

  “It made me real­ize how bank­rupt and phony “tor­ture porn” is in the face of actu­al trauma.”
  I dunno, to me that’s apples and oranges. Not that I dis­agree, I just think the com­par­is­on is kind of point­less; they’re going for entirely dif­fer­ent effects.
  On some level, tor­ture movies WANT to be phony, they want to reas­sure the audi­ence that this is not actu­ally hap­pen­ing to real people. Brakhage cer­tainly was­n’t aim­ing to reas­sure anybody.
  That said, I frankly find what goes on in “Seeing” a hell of a lot less troub­ling than the fact that the “Saw” movies clearly think that Jigsaw is a char­ac­ter worth root­ing for because he’s less venal than the people he kills. And we’re up to movie SIX with no end in sight. Yeah, I sleep well know­ing things like that.