Everything is Political

[der kulterer]

not sure if to post it here or in the James Bond thread...

am watching for the 1986 poll HE STANDS IN THE DESERT COUNTING THE SECONDS OF HIS LIFE.

"The film consists of 124 brief sketches, each half-a-minute to about two minutes long. Portraits of people I have spent time with, places, seasons of the year, weather (storms, snow, blizzards, etc...), many of my film-maker friends, streets and parks of New York, brief escape in nature, out of town - nothing spectacular, unimportant celebrations of life that has gone, by now, and remains only as a record in these personal, brief sketches." Jonas Mekas

in one of the sketches appears this dude...


due to my senility, am consulting the dilettante encyclopedia who the fuck is this DB???
and besides saying it is a hero from Solaris, it also says the following...

Vladimir Putin once stated that Banionis' part in the 1968 Soviet spy film Dead Season was the reason why he joined the KGB.

obviously, watching films can sometimes have sinister (political) consequences!

[Silga]

Donatas Banionis was one of the most popular Lithuanian actors who worked in Lithuania, Russia and East Germany.

He started as a theater actor before achieving fame as a standout performer in Lithuanian films like Adam Wants to be a Man (1959) and Nobody Wanted to Die (1965). He later had a very funny cameo role in Soviet comedy Watch Out for the Automobile (1966) and co-starred in Mikhail Kalatozov's The Red Tent (1969) along with Sean Connery, Peter Finch and Claudia Cardinale. He also found success in East Germany with leading roles in films like Konrad Wolf's Goya (1971) and Beethoven (1976).

Of course, Solaris remains his most famous role.

He passed away in 2014.

[der kulterer]

he seemed familiar (i like Solaris a lot but was not able to associate the hero from the film with the person in the vignette -- despite the Solaris cover hint) and i was completely ignorant of his name (now i might remember -- especially if knowing his James-Bond-like character had such an impact on Putin (i am somewhat curious to watch Dead Season now) -- it is a pity Putin was not charmed rather by Solaris -- he might had found a job on the Cosmodrome Baikonur and not mess up with the KGB).

[der kulterer]

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin recommends...

https://letterboxd.com/film/the-dead-season/

Soviet spy Ladeynikov learns that in one of the pharmaceutical centers in a small resort town works a former German war criminal Dr. Hass, who is finishing the creation of a deadly chemical gas RH development of which he began during WW2 experimenting on war prisoners. Since Ladeynikov doesn’t know Dr. Hass’s appearance, Soviet intelligence recruits an actor, Ivan Savushkin, who during the war escaped from a prison camp where Hass was testing his gas. Together they must identify and stop him before he finishes and unleashes his weapon of mass destruction.

[sally]

can't imagine putin watching movies. does he do best of year lists like obama does?

[der kulterer]

so far, i am searching in vain for his top10 (of any kind).
tho i am suspicious he is a sucker for poison flicks -- Dead Season, The Name of the Rose, and alike.
however, i can already say with full confidence Vladimir Vladimirovich is absolutely against censorship!

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/n ... box-office

Vladimir Putin has torpedoed proposals to introduce a quota system limiting the number of Hollywood films which can be shown in Russian cinemas. Representatives cancelled a parliamentary debate on a bill to introduce quotas on Thursday, after the Russian president spoke out against the idea last week. “It would be wrong to deny our consumers those goods they would like to have,” Putin told a forum of the All-Russia People’s Front last week, according to the Tass news agency. “It is applicable to the motion picture industry too. It would be unwise to turn down what is profitable.” He added: “The Americans are talented and successful people and there is a lot we can learn from them.”

[rischka]

https://twitter.com/Cato_of_Utica/statu ... 49312?s=20

el facho al tacho

https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1472728454676115457?s=20

[sally]

how on earth did that happen

[sally]

today in the uk someone got convicted of bestiality (sex with an alsatian in wild cocaine binge), so today i learnt that we still have bestiality laws, and it's so weird that they're categorically different from animal cruelty/abuse laws which you'd think would cover it, but they are very specific in detailing the prohibition of penetration of or by a (living) animal. it seems so archaic & insane, like the medieval laws against sodomy and 'unnaturalness' just erupted into my everyday. have just been scratching my head about it all afternoon

even the freeman of the land nautical court stuff makes more sense

[---]

i dont support fucking animals, but generally, its insane for a society to punish having sex with someone, but not punish killing them

[rischka]

Wonder if thoxans will ever return. I still feel bad about kanafani insurrection anniversary

[Lencho of the Apes]

I thought about reaching out to K. awhile back, 'cuz I was missing him... but I saw that he's unfollowed me. Which hurts, and I think it's not just narcissism.

[flip]

what happened with kanafani? i thought he was just taking a break

i'd love to see kanafani and thoxans and umbugbene back, and also james• and m penalosa and so many others who have left on what i assumed were temporary hiatuses but which have turned out not to be

[Lencho of the Apes]

bestiality

Can I just leave this here? Poor Max...

3 bes.JPG (123.33 KiB) Viewed 1727 times

[sally]

LOL! so sweet

[rischka]

I thought about reaching out to K. awhile back, 'cuz I was missing him... but I saw that he's unfollowed me. Which hurts, and I think it's not just narcissism.

Ha! He unfollowed me too. Never thought to check before

[sally]

sorry can't watch movies at the minute. i stop looking at twitter for oooo, ten minutes and something more ridiculous has happened each time

https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1 ... 5996335105

[der kulterer]

Thatcher, Thatcher Corpse Snatcher!

in Prague, there are several cemeteries.
one of them (the most "mysterious") is a lunatic cemetery adjoined to a local lunatic asylum.
and i just heard a mind-blowing story that the ill-reputed baroness snatched a corpse there in 1996!
i heard it in the local/regional news but then also discovered the following article (in English) describing the "morbid incident".

https://thepraguereview.com/2020/07/01/ ... -prague-8/

The gravestones at Bohnice Cemetery are covered with ivy. The small chapel is in ruins. Ex-patients of the nearby asylum slumber here. So why did Baroness Margaret Thatcher pay a secret visit in 1996?

The 19th Century psychiatric hospital in Bohnice was one of the largest in Europe. Eighty patients a year were buried in the nearby cemetery. In addition to the patients, there are nurses, locals and Italian prisoner-of-war soldiers who caught typhoid in 1916. In the six decades of operation, about 4300 people were buried within the 2.5 hectares.

The cemetery was abandoned in 1963 and became a popular spot for teenagers, ghost hunters and urban explorers. In 1984, director Miloš Forman, used the gloomy atmosphere for a scene for the movie Amadeus.

...

In 1996, Baroness Margaret Thatcher (British Prime Minister 1979 to 1990) visited Prague and met with the then Czech Prime Minister, Václav Klaus. There was no mention of her planned visit to Bohnice Cemetery, only the locals, tending their cottage gardens, knew something was happening when a series of limousines arrived and the Baroness stepped out.

They were looking for a specific grave but were unable to locate it. The story goes that some assistants were sent to a local pub (The Tattooed Ferdu) to find a local derelict who used to drink with the former cemetery manager and knew the burial locations. In exchange for a bottle of rum, he agreed to guide them to the grave.

The remains were identified by the presence of a ring. The body was exhumed and taken back to England. Nobody knows who the person was – rumour has it that it was an ancestor of Denis Thatcher.

the only difference between this article and the news report is that the news said "the tattooed Ferdy" was a nickname of a local derelict (not a name of a local pub) and that the price for which he disclosed the spot (where a lunatic ancestor of baroness's hubby was buried) was not a single bottle of rum but dozens of bottles of rum (the tattooed Ferdy was not that cheap and baroness had to pay the full price for the corpse!).

[wba]

what happened with kanafani? i thought he was just taking a break

i'd love to see kanafani and thoxans and umbugbene back, and also james• and m penalosa and so many others who have left on what i assumed were temporary hiatuses but which have turned out not to be

Yeah, I second that?
What happened?
Somehow I tend to miss all the (good/fun/scary/weird?) stuff...

[rischka]

whatever happened is in this thread i assume. i only expressed my distaste for greenwald and other fascist adjacent 'libertarians'

he's the one who insisted on having a politics thread in the first place. and yes i am opinionated and obnoxious

[wba]

aaaaaah politics!
I should have guessed it...

[wba]

sorry, I don't usually use or read this thread (I think I visited it last about 2 years ago?).
Who needs a politics-thread on a film forum anyways?

[rischka]

i heartily agree. trying to center myself for the long haul and avoid stress lol

[---]

damian's talons run deep

[rischka]

Was it 1972 when the US sponsored a trucker strike against allende in chile

[der kulterer]

https://twitter.com/DzamilaStehlik/stat ... jbkNvtb8lw

my fellow citizen is a Kazakh-born lady/politician (psychiatrist by profession) — i.e. familiar with morons in the governments & asylums — who said two days ago that the delusion grandeur of paranoid dictators is often morbidly magic (and magic also means numerology).
thus considering that Putler invaded Georgia on 8/8/2008, she expects he will invade Ukraine on 22/2/2022 and here we go...

and, while one moron just started his "peace operation", another moron (a notorious liar) is starting "truth social" these magic days!

Who’s gonna tell Macron the Biden-Putin summit is off?

Trump on Truth Social

[sally]

Holy fuck, Germany. Well i guess it was inevitable but goodbye 20th century. End of an era.

[sally]

fucking hell sweden! europe has turned upside down

[Silga]

Holy fuck, Germany. Well i guess it was inevitable but goodbye 20th century. End of an era.

fucking hell sweden! europe has turned upside down

what do you mean?

[sally]

what do you mean?

reversing their no weapons/pacifist policies? i mean swedes were just chilled, but it's massively symbolic for germany....

how's lithuania? i saw there was a state of emergency declared but no idea what that means....and the news sort of...moved on.....since then...