This video had a profound formative influence on me when i first saw it as a young preteen on PBS. It changed my perspective, and i have never thought about things in quite the same way since.

Peter Russell - The Global Brain

Watched “The Apartment” (1960) and “It Happened One Night” (1934). Both good. I never saw either.

Slow Horses Season One - intermittently engaging British espionage series. I was expecting more. This one was a somewhat pedestrian account of an extreme right group in Britain who kidnap a Pakistani stand up comic. Gary Oldman is ok but his lines sound contrived to make him seem more interesting than he is.

Unfortunately, the audio isn't very good. I had to use my large speakers along with captions.

White Lotus season 3.

Mike White is great.

@Baden @ssu

I remember having deep conversations about The Troubles with you, lads.

I am currently watching 'Say Nothing' on Disney+. A very well-dramatised version of the Irish and NI issue. The actors are very good, and wow, the scenes are so realistic that it feels like it is happening nowadays.

I thought you would be interested in watching it. :up:

Don't have Disney+

In fact, if one has to say the absolutely best movie about urban insurgency is The Battle of Algiers (1966). Really a truly amazing war movie about urban insurgency and terrorism. You would be also interested to compare the French action in Algiers and Algeria to the British actions in Northern Ireland. You see, the French did lose Algeria, the British didn't lose North Ireland. And notice the similarities and the differences in the counter-insurgency methods.

Here's the trailer of this great war movie:

Interesting, ssu. :up:

Thanks for letting me know!

This is art by Kelly Boesch.

More AI art.

@T Clark -- It's been a while since I recommended you a film. :cool:

I watched two amazing and unique Russian films this month. I am aware that Russian film directors are great and original, but I chose these two because of the difference in time span between them and the iconography used.

Come and See (Idí i Smotrí): a 1985 Soviet epic tragedy film directed by Elem Klimov. Klimov had to fight eight years of censorship from the Soviet authorities before he was allowed to produce the film in its entirety... The starring were two talented kids called Aleksei Kravchenko and Olga Mironova. The flim mixes surrealism with a bit of existentialism that we used to watch and read in Russian arts.



The other film is more recent but also interesting and worthy to watch. It is called Petrov's Flu.
Just before the start of the new year, Petrov's family gets sick with the flu. Then he meets a trickster named Igor who can mix the world of the living and the dead. The Petrov family begin to suffer surrealistic hallucinations and the line between reality and hallucination begins to disappear.

Come and See — javi2541997

I’ve heard of “Come and See.” It sounds brutal and disturbing. Descriptions I’ve read make it sound like a book I read back in college - “The Painted Bird,” by Jerzy Kosinsky. After 50 years, I still remember how harrowing and difficult to read it was. Difficult not because of the language, but because how hard it was to face the storyKozinski told.

The other film sounds a bit more up my alley. Thanks for the recommendations.

This film shocked me in an indescribable way. What scared me the most is that it is based on a real-life story: the murders of Danish serial killer Dagmar Overbye.

The film is set on a black-and-white screen and in 1919 Denmark. The main protagonist did a very nice job, convincing. There are scenes which are "hard to swallow", and it might not be for all kinds of audiences.

Anyway, it is a great film.

, maybe there's a lesson to learn from the Horst Wessel story. It's different, yet has parallels. (Is the Trump administration getting into compiling snitch lists of those who didn't adequately mourn Kirk...?)

:up: Yes, Horst Wessel is comparable. I think the US DoJ is collecting a database of "persons of interest" expressing "far-left" opinions. Public and private sectors employees are being fired everyday lately for even the slightest and apt criticisms of that pos Charlie Kirk. The actual victim of assassination turns out to be, in addition to a far-right advocate of 'free speech' (of hate, conspiracies, disinformation), free speech itself (i.e. First Amendnent of the US Constitution).

Watched A House of Dynamite (2025).
Similar theme as The Day After (1983) released 42 years earlier, different angle, well, angles, literally.
Danger hasn't dissipated since then (Piper (2022), Andersen (2025)).

When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it — memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis 
(remembrance of a guest who tarried but a day) — the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. — Blaise Pascal, Pensées

:smile:

@T Clark

Hey Clarky, I come with a 1950s American film recommendation this time. Perhaps you have already watched it or heard of this film.

It is called Edge of the City. It was directed in 1957, starring John Cassavetes and Sidney Poitier.

I really love black-and-white films. This was very good.

I searched more info on Google and it says that In 2023, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."

Hey Clarky — javi2541997

Thank you for looking out for my cultural education.

:wink:

The original sin: creating a being self-aware of having been created ...

“The Game,” with Michael Douglas. An underrated David Fincher movie. They currently have it free on YouTube.

Come and See (Idí i Smotrí): a 1985 Soviet epic tragedy film directed by Elem Klimov. Klimov had to fight eight years of censorship from the Soviet authorities before he was allowed to produce the film in its entirety... The starring were two talented kids called Aleksei Kravchenko and Olga Mironova. The flim mixes surrealism with a bit of existentialism that we used to watch and read in Russian arts. — javi2541997

One of the great warfilms ever.

I’ve heard of “Come and See.” It sounds brutal and disturbing. — T Clark

Oh, this surely is that. A real anti-war film.

Have to say that this film is the warfilm that made me the most impact when I saw it as a child. After seeing it, I felt sick that I had so made model airplanes from WW2 on my bookshelves. Well, that feeling of pacifism brushed off after a day or so...

Come and See genuinely is one of great war films, the surrealism makes it as mesmerizing as Terrence Malick's "Thin Red Line" from 1998, but is far more unpleasant. "Come and See" shows just how horrible the war in the Eastern front was when the enemy civilians were "Untermenschen" to the Germans. A true masterpiece from the Soviet era.
.

Thin Red Line" — ssu

Still a good movie. Used to like it a lot more as a kid, but still better than the crappy Saving Private Ryan, which was and is one of the most overrated, cringey movies ever — with the exception of parts of the D-day sequence.

“The Game,” with Michael Douglas. An underrated David Fincher movie. They currently have it free on YouTube. — Mikie

Yeah I like that one.

I'm thinking there's a movie subgenre, or sub-subgenre, that nobody has identified before: secret organization approaches main character at a crisis in their life and either invites them to employ their (mysterious) services or otherwise begins a program of obscurely guiding their life. Other examples are Seconds from 1966 (recommended), The Adjustment Bureau, and maybe The Substance fits too—it uses a similar structure though it's tonally completely different, delighting in body horror.

Other examples are Seconds from 1966 (recommended), The Adjustment Bureau, and maybe The Substance fits too — Jamal

I haven’t seen any on those yet. I’ll give them a watch if I can find them on one of these damn streaming services. You may be on to something.