The time spent being snarky in order to perform intellectualism about cinema could probably be better spent cultivating an environment where people feel encouraged to explore niches that appeal to them instead of talked down to because they don't know what's out there
We must make peace with the fact that lots of younger people do, in fact, think that "recent horror movie" is the best one they've ever seen bc they haven't seen many, and instead of belittling them for it we need to meet them where they're at and expand off what resonates
A left which has a culture of contesting politics online, in long comment threads, in WhatsApp groupchats, will find these spaces dominated by people who do a lot of posting, who have poor self-regulation, and often behave in ways which are disruptive and bad vibes.
'Normal' isn't quite it – every movement needs its avant garde! It's more being able to think about how social media incentivises us all to be hostile, reactive, cruel, mean-spirited and ego-driven, in ways which leech out into our offline lives.
Forgive me for being cynical but I just watched 10yrs of “realignment” media guys promise me there was an authentic antiwar movement in MAGA then Trump got in office, starved Gaza and Cuba, kidnapped Maduro, continued the genocide, attacked Iran and increased the DOD budget 50%
Cool how we’re just memory holing who this person actually was: one of the principal voices in the Trump movement preventing any form of foreign policy realism and restraint, cheering on the genocide, and promoting retaliation against those who opposed it.
side note: i feel very sad about @77WABCradio framing of this video. we were extremely kind to their reporter, nino denino (pictured below), and answered his questions about why we were protesting a nearby israeli sale of illegal, stolen palestinian land in the west bank
Mad Max depicts the apocalypse as a process not an event. I think they stumbled into this approach basically by accident, but it's a much more grounded portrayal of state failure and societal collapse than you normally see in film.