L'ATALANTE is, in my opinion, not half bad. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Watched it because it was the ranking film in the They Shoot Films Don't They 1000 list I had yet to see. What can I say? Most of the films so honored make the case for their placement obvious. This, while not without charms, did not.
I think the big mistake is making the husband a grump and a dick in almost every scene, then making the movie about getting them back together. Did not care about that a bit, don't think it's going to work out with them either way.
Let him get fired (he almost does) and then have her rejoin the boat and find that a) it's now commanded by the far more kind and interesting Père Jule; and b) she actually prefers that arrangement.
There's a moment in Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic where the newly freed drug boss says to the drug lawyer who had been working behind his back "do you know the difference between a reason and an excuse? Because I don't."
At this point the lawyer knows he is in deep shit. 🧵
(By the way this thread is part of a longer essay, but if I lead off the thread with a link to an outside source, it usually gets crushed by this site's dork owner and his algorithm shenanigans, so here you go.)
Anyway the lawyer knows he's in deep shit because "do you know the difference between a reason and an excuse" means "I'm not buying your bullshit," and if newly-freed-drug-lords-behind-whose-back-you've-been-working aren't buying your bullshit, then it is murder goon o'clock.
One thing I’ve noticed is, the meanest tables are often popular ones. Sometimes they are the most popular. My observation here would be that bullies know that cultivating friendly relationships is useful and necessary for effective bullying.
Any abuser knows they need accomplices. If dad is getting drunk and beating mom up he’s going to need everyone to keep nice and quiet about it, and if anybody squawks then it’s got to be quickly framed as something bad being done to him rather than the other way around.
If it looks as if the truth of the story is about to get around he’s going to need people to stand up for him in that moment and say things like this: “Nooooo! Not him. I know him. He would never. He has never been anything but nice to me.”
When people decide to leave the place they are and move to a different place, there’s an observable order to it. The order is very important.
So, in movement, there is the moment of arrival at the destination.
But before that moment, there is the actual journey. We began here. We moved until we got there. We put one foot in front of the other. We set sail and kept going until we arrived. The aircraft cut its way across the sky. This is the journey.
There's so much scandal all the time, it can be hard to remember where we are, much less how we got here. But they say it's important remember the lessons of the past, or else we're fated to do...something, I forget what, I forget, I forget.
It's really hard to know where to begin when it comes to where we are. There's only so much sheer volume of blatant corruption and noxious hate that a person can stay aware of even if they're trying. Eventually something pushes out.
It came out this week that NC Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson has in past years spent his time posting pro-slavery and pro-Nazi comments on porn sites, and other things of that nature, many of which are so bad CNN, who broke the story, declined to print them.
Conservatives keep telling us they're oppressed, and when they define what form the oppression takes, they explain that other kinds of people ... exist.
You know what? Let's do it. Let's actually do it. I think we ought to oppress conservatives.
Other people *should* exist. 🧵
Let's oppress conservatives with a kind and open and generous world that they will hate and fear specifically because it will care for everyone, even them, while it refuses any longer to accommodate the revenge fantasies that they call "self-defense."
At the bottom of it all, it strikes me that conservatives are driven by fear. They're big fraidy-cats, scared specifically of the ongoing danger of good and necessary things, of openness and diversity and peace and plenty.
Last Tuesday Donald Trump shat his pants on national TV. Ever since, he's been scooting his butt around on the national carpet to dislodge the detritus of loserdom. It's standard wounded narcissist self-care behavior, and it would be nice if all of this could be *only* funny. 🧵
Unfortunately, it can't be only funny; Trump and his gang are engaged in some shockingly evil rhetoric even for them—promising that, for the crime of existing while undesirable to conservatives, as many people as possible will be hurt, as soon and as badly as possible.
Incidentally, this thread is part of an essay that you can read right here on my weekly newsletter, The Reframe.