Possibly the most prolific chess player in the world is a retired German man who plays on lichess. Since signing up in 2012 he has spent 923 full days (22155 hours) playing 571726 games. Just over 40 hrs/week. He played 142 games today. The best part is he’s loses 84% of the time
The cinematography reddit is full of people asking what certain types of ridiculously specific shots and lighting techniques are called and it just occurred to me that it’s people trying to get AI prompts. Bleak stuff.
He plays super fast games and doesn’t improve at all. Just in it for the love of the game I guess. His rating has stayed pretty consistent over the years though.
I find Siskel’s excitement about Ran so moving. Look at his hands! To be so overwhelmed by a film and the technique of a great director is such a precious joy. That’s what it’s all about.
As far as I can tell all that anybody knows about him is from this comment. Someone asked if he was a bot and he felt compelled to respond. Lichess has confirmed he’s a real guy.
1. Memoria
2. Drive My Car
3. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
4. The Works and Days
5. The Card Counter
6. Licorice Pizza
7. Annette
8. The French Dispatch
9. The Souvenir Part II
10. The Tragedy of Macbeth
A list of movies I haven’t seen
I’m devastated to hear Takahashi Yukihiro has died. Yellow Magic Orchestra is one of my favourite bands. Plus every once in a while he’d pop up in an Obayashi movie, like this scene in The Discarnates where he tries on some hats and then exits the movie completely.
I’m seeing people talk about what movies they should be downloading so I figured I’d share all of my folders I have up in case it saves you some trouble. I’ve shared all of these before I think.
People need to stop talking about the Kubrick/Shelley Duvall myth and start talking about the actual psychological torture he inflicted on George C Scott by beating his ass at chess all the time.
I’m terrible at bullet chess, and only slightly better at blitz, but I’ve got to try and get a game with him. Apparently (and unsurprisingly) he often accepts challengers. If I can get a game I’ll report back.
The chess reddit is currently talking about Maya Deren’s film At Land, which is something I never would have expected, and yet is going exactly how I’d have to expect. Someone figured out the game shown in the film was Andersson’s 1851 “Immortal Game”. Amazing stuff.
I don’t play bullet because I find it too stressful. I just can’t think anywhere near fast enough to not make constant blunders. But after seeing this guy… the anxiety is just gone. I’m going to lose two games in a row, fuck it.
@MateuszOsiak_
I just checked that out. He straight up gave away a bishop and still managed to win. He’s aggressive and seems to able to spot a couple move mate pattern pretty well so he’s not to be taken lightly. He mostly just loses on time.
Ozu's lost film from 1928 called Pumpkin sounds like a banger. "An office worker, whose wife treats him to pumpkin as a side dish every day, gets drunk the next day and goes to work wearing a casual sports shirt, when his company president brings him a gift of pumpkin."
"Not true that there was a cabal preventing Orson Welles from making more films. He simply never fulfilled himself after that magnificent start; his own fault– lack of self-discipline"
--- Robert Wise
It’s wild to think about how much of a role youtube’s algorithm has played in the vinyl reissue market. Japanese records in particular, but jazz, funk, and pop albums from around the world have found new audiences. It’s a weirdly reliable source for recommendations.
LISTEN: Award-winning playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner tells Haaretz Podcast why he's baffled by the controversy over director Jonathan Glazer's "unimpeachable and irrefutable" remarks at the 2024 Oscar Awards
Great idea. I had been putting off watching La Commune (Paris, 1871) because of its nearly six-hour runtime, but if you speed up by 103500% it becomes an exceedingly manageable 20 seconds!
PSA those Criterion Channel $10 coupons they email out don’t expire and can be stacked, so I just got the Once Upon A Time In China set and Chimes At Midnight for the cost of shipping.
Sometimes I take for granted how great Sunrise is. I saw it young so it’s just always been there, and its greatness is so obvious and unquestionable that I just don’t think about it much. But look at this shit. There’s nothing better.
There was a great worker co-op cafe in my town for many years that ran a vegan soup kitchen. It was a community hub where a lot of poor/homeless people could hang out with the types of weird artists/leftists you’d expect. It helped a lot of people and it… didn’t look like this.
Movies lost many editing/blocking possibilities when we stopped using intertitles. It’s a full screen reset that allows for a sequence of images that wouldn’t flow without the interruption. Timing that reset and using it to visually surprise or reorient the audience is a lost art
@capybaroness
Good blocking, smartly cut. Scenes feel composed from start to finish, nothing feels like coverage. Simple but not obvious. Rare in movies these days, almost non existent on tv
Not to diminish his musical career, but it was really cool when David Crosby called Scott Feinberg a dipshit (because Feinberg is a colossal dipshit) and walked off his show. RIP, king
A turning point my in my cinephilia was when movie trailers were functionally replaced by someone on here posting four screenshots and a few people replying “whoa” and “good movie👍”
Every time a Mullen part dropped was like Christmas. I didn’t really care for any crazy tech skaters, but he was different. Graceful, playful, truly one of a kind. He was 38 when he filmed this.
A couple tweets lately about the cinephilic path from high to low brow taste. Can’t relate. As I get older stuff like Bergman resonates more deeply, and my enjoyment of king fu/kaiju/exploitation/etc has lost any ironic detachment. I’m more sincere and sentimental about all of it
@livinmediocre
I try not to get too worked up about how these morons talk about their own disney slop but it's nauseating to see this mindset overtaking the rest of movie culture.
Why did we just stop lighting faces? It's not for naturalistic reasons—this look is as contrived as any high-key lit sitcom, which I'd argue is closer to how we actually perceive the world than this mud. It's beyond ugly. It's malpractice.
Later crazy Coltrane is precisely what got me into jazz. Fuck this attitude about accessibility—availability is all that counts. It’s easy to find most of the films on the list, including Jeanne Dielman. Let people have their minds blown or be repulsed or bored. Who gives a shit.
Apparently for Avatar 2 they released a ton of different versions to not only accommodate screen size, 3D, and frame rate, but even brightness of screens. If they knew certain theatres and systems would have sub par brightness, they would send an adjusted version to help fix it.