I'll fill this out later


lmichet
@lmichet
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love
@love

Talking exclusively about what's available here, everyone is going to tell you to watch Seven Samurai and Rashomon and Yojimbo and whatever, they're correct. You already know those ones are great, you've already seen them, you know that Kurosawa is an incredible director. If you haven't, yeah, go watch those now.

But if you have, here's the low key Kurosawa picks I think you should check out:

The Hidden Fortress
This is the movie that George Lucas was copying beat-for-beat when he made A New Hope. The thing is... watching this is just going to make you appreciate both Lucas and Kurosawa even more, because it turns out, it's a great movie either way! Just a real great adventure. Guest starring the most powerful eyebrows you've ever seen on a fired-up princess. I love her.

The Bad Sleep Well
Obviously the best Shakespeare adaptation in the world is Ran, Kurosawa's version of King Lear, but this is him doing a great job at pulling gold out of Hamlet, starring Toshiro Mifune investigating post-WWII corporate corruption, and the most dramatic deployment of a cake at a wedding that you've ever seen in your life. Genuinely interested in using adaptation as an excuse to explore its own conclusions about revenge and evil.

Dreams
Laura is correct. This movie is wild. Watching the absolute master of black and white movies do colour is like seeing Piccolo throwing off the weighted training clothes. If you wanna see some fucking i m a g e r y, you gotta watch Dreams.


reccanti
@reccanti

Also want to add that I've been able to find stuff from a lot of Japanese filmmakers that isn't readily available in the US. Stuff by Shuji Terayama (a big influence of Ikuhara) and Gakuryu Ishii, who made a lot of stuff with the Japanese counter-culture/punk scene


love
@love

YES!!! The only Gakuryu Ishii I've seen so far is August in the Water, an incredible vibes-only new age story about a supernatural drought, but it may be one of my favourite movies ever for how it manages to nail its emotional core with some great water imagery. For Shuji Terayama I would highly recommend Pastoral: To Die In The Country, an inscrutable semi-autobiographical bleeding on celluloid with a great score by JA Caesar, of the Revolutionary Girl Utena duel music fame. (They were part of a theatrical milieu that I only really know a little about how it inspired Utena but I really want to learn more.)

If anyone else has any recommendations for other movies by these directors I would love to hear them!



zedecksiew
@zedecksiew

Enjoying my time here, so far. It feels nice? There is a frontiersy, untamed air.

In terms of how a TTRPG community could use this space:

I like how some folks have been using it to pose design questions and muse over unfinished ideas. These invite comments that respond and muse about the OP idea, extending it into wild tangents.

Some example chains I have personally responded to:

@ian- 's Knight School pun resulted in @noise musing about playing knights that carry around their "knightly virtues" like a kind of mental / spiritual inventory:

be I a DM for the Knights in this situation I'd made it so that the physical inventory is not really important – because I don't recall in knightly literature a knight being halted on their quest by the lack of prepackaged rope or torches, all Knights in this setup are supposed to have all inventory necessary (be it a lance they carry themselves or said rope, tucked away by the squire). It would be interesting to assume that the method of solving a problem is a creative combination of Lessons We Took With Us (from Knightly School).

Or @annabelle-lee figuring out the best way to do Dreamlands in RPGS:

My experience in playing through a few of people's dreamworlds where anything can happen has been mostly bad, because it's hard for all the players to understand the physical space that they are in, and frustrating to try to interact with a world that doesn't respond in a sensible way.

Basically giving me a blogpost's worth of stuff to think on.

The way OP posts appear; the way comments are handled (longer wordcount; no "likes", so the only way to feel like you are participating is to participate)---seems to invite actual conversation?

It reminds me a little about how stuff used to occur in G+'s heyday:

  1. OP post with a question or idea;
  2. Folks would build on / hash out said idea in the comments;
  3. Somebody would post a new OP post, inspired by something in said comments.

A kind of communal blog, maybe? Something that neither Discord (an IRC window where conversations roll endlessly away from you) or Twitter (where threads are basically TED talks) ever could be.

A place to figure out questions, and talk minutiae, and first-draft ideas. A salon and workshop, not a marketplace.


What cool conversations have you seen on here? I wanna see I wanna see!