I review movies over on Letterboxd and Sufficient Velocity.

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Cake day: September 4th, 2023

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  • Not just any propaganda network, Radio Free X is the umbrella under which the CIA disseminates black propaganda abroad, and also the organ which delivered kill lists to the anti-communist kill squads in Indonesia during the us-backed mass killings there.

    All of this is declassified and public knowledge btw, not a conspiracy theory, although plenty of folks would like to still pretend that the US grew a conscience at some point and stopped wielding the CIA as a cudgel against global democracy, but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.

    If you are interested in learning about Radio Free Asia, or US led mass killings in general, I recommend The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins.


  • MC_Lovecraft@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlTelegram alternate
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    2 months ago

    https://www.opentech.fund/news/february-2018-monthly-report/

    It’s not a secret. It’s on their website. Note: the Open Technology Fund is the CIA. Just like Radio Free Asia (or Radio Free X, they’re all CIA-run appendages of the US state department) which the fund grew out of. The US government very often funds technologies and startups that have the potential surveillance applications (among other things) and Signal was one of them. The people calling this a conspiracy theory have no idea what they are talking about, but that’s not uncommon when it comes to Americans and swallowing their own propaganda whole.









  • I used to watch Mary-Lou’s Flip-Flop Shop every Saturday morning as a kid. Apparently it was locally produced in Houston, where I lived, so I wonder if it was even known about elsewhere? Basically she had a Saturday morning kids’ show that ran for one season, and it aired at like 6:30am. For some reason I was obsessed with it (despite being slightly older than the target demographic by the time it was airing) and I would wake up ungodly early on Saturdays to watch Mary Lou do somersaults and tell jokes.





  • The difference is that ‘color-blind’ liberals who co-opt the language and appearance of the civil rights movement without actually understanding or living the ideals behind it were the target of the joke, it wasn’t supposed to be funny just because it was blackface. I feel that the backlash to that movie is 100% the result of a lack of media literacy. Like, it’s not Citizen Kane, but to accuse Downey Jr. of racism for taking that role is to miss the point so hard it’s hard to imagine that the people who feel that way watched the same movie that I did. You have to be coming from a place of total refusal to engage with the subtext (or really just the text, absolutely nothing about Tropic Thunder is subtle in the least) of the work, and an axiomatic understanding of certain actions as always-racist without regard for context.


  • God I miss dollar theaters. The last one I know about closed down in 2012, but for about a year I saw movies there almost every weekend. They would get the reels from the local cinemark after they had run there, and they ran two screens all day, starting at 9am. The local film society would screen cult classics there too, and I saw some things I would never have discovered on my own. It’s a little slice of the human experience that is just kinda gone now.






  • I’ve been giving this some thought (far more than it actually merits, but that’s what I’m here for) and I realized that I don’t know how Michael knows that Laurie is his sister. She was two years old when he killed Judith, so there’s no way he recognized her (discounting a supernatural connection, which would be a totally valid explanation in this series) at 17. In the intervening time, he clearly learned some things about the world (like how to drive, and what Samhain means) but I think it would be very strange if Dr. Loomis were telling him anything about his family, at least after the first few years of their relationship, given the way that Loomis talks about Michael. So he should have no idea that his parents are dead, or that Laurie was adopted by another family in Haddonfield. In fact, we don’t know for sure that Laurie is even the same name he knew her by. She was adopted at four, but I can imagine the adoptive parents changing her name to try and shield her a bit from the notoriety of her birth family.

    So, Michael shows up at his childhood home, ready to finish the job he started fifteen years earlier, but finds it empty, something he probably never even considered. Then, a girl about the same age as his remaining sister would be, who another person calls Laurie within his hearing (assuming this is actually her birth name here), just happens to turn up on the house’s doorstep? I think he decided in that moment that Laurie was his sister, and that he was going to kill her, completely absent any hard evidence to back that conclusion up. He happened to be right, but that’s probably down to Fate or some bullshit, not any actual knowledge that Michael possessed. From there, the only other people he kills in the first movie are canoodling teenagers, which is what (apparently) set him off in the first place, and he uses them to make a shrine to Judith, which makes me think their murders were really just auxiliary crimes, subordinant to his true goal of offing Laurie and making her the centerpiece of his Idol.

    In any case, I no longer know whether this plot element makes any sense at all, but I’m pretty sure I need to just move on to the one without Michael, to wipe my brain clean and smooth again.