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by Troler
Free Software fundamentally misses the point. It fails on a practical, ideological, economic, and political level. Let’s examine precisely how (in a slightly different order for the purposes of presentation).
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"I like you"
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"That's very sweet of you <...>, I like you too"
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"I mean, I don't like many people"
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Seldom do I eat the same food twice, reread a book or even rewatch a movie. Barely do I ever want to rewatch the movie as I am watching it. You did not misread, not after the ending, but during the actual viewing. If you somehow didn't read the title, the movie in question is Robert Mulligan's Summer of '42.
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I came across it when I was reading Quentin Tarantino's review of 40s nostalgia pieces. What piqued my attention was the radiating love and affection for the picture and his knack for collecting film prints ("if you haven’t seen Summer of ‘42 projected in an I.B. Technicolor 35mm film print, you haven’t seen Summer of ‘42). I set down at the middle of the night and saw something I cannot unsee. Neither did the audience in 1971, since this slice-of-romance film about horny teenagers beat Dirty Harry and even Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange in the box office. To say it was impactful is an understatement.
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What was it that caught the attention of the viewers? Well, it was sex of course! Imagine this, the Sexual Revolution has swept the United States, arguing that all this restriction on sex is making people grow into perverts. The tidal shift of demographics, as brought by the Baby Boom, resulted in American cinema unshackling itself. This change is known as New Hollywood. In 1971 Robert Milligan was one of these crazy New Hollywood men. At a budget of a million (lead actress Jennifer O'Neill says it was 8 million) created relatively simple movie. Simple, yet effective. To a point where it deeply touched Kubrick ("climax of the film is quite simply one of the most devastating sequences I’ve ever witnessed (apparently Kubrick felt the same)". Do not take Tarantino's word for it, watch what Wendy is watching in The Shining
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The story follows a group of 3 ragtags Oscy (Jerry Houser), Benjie (Oliver Conant) and Hermie (Gary Grimes). All of them are a trio of lusting adolescents. They are at a stage where they want to have sex yet paternalism laws do not allow them to. Naturally that gives the same results as boiling water with the lid shut down. A good bit of the half of the movie is about teenagers being stupid bunch of horny bastards. There Hermie falls deep in love with Dorothy (Jennifer O'Neill). Hermie is 15 and Dorothy is in her 20s (the actor was 22). There is this Licorice Pizza scenario. The movie corrupts the audience into believing the relationship between a teenager and a woman is okay. WW2 is in the background: you have soldiers strolling the town, Dorothy sending her husband to France, radio broadcaster talking about the war. It is in the background... until it is not. The movie is set during 1942, it is a nostalgia piece after all. The Dorothy observed is meeting this 15 year old, while her husband is out fighting Nazis. At one point she buys flowers, keep that in your mind, it will be relevant later. For a good part of the film, the focus is on the "Terrible" trio and their quest to get laid.
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Since the budget of the film was not that high (a million), it resulted in quite simple camera arrangement. Most shots were done out-doors, resulting in less expenses on props. Since the emphasis is on the characters, the shots are done using wide lens. The movie actually becomes quite a bit darker as it progresses. I mean, literally darker. First scenes are bright, moving with life of the beach-goers. Later on you have the shabby "Terrible trio" hut, movie theater, sex during midnight. As mentioned before, it being a movie from 1971, sex in movies was still taboo. Robert Mulligan is corrupting the audience by having a scene where teenagers actually fuck during the middle of the night. None of it is displayed on the screen. It was distributed by Warner Bros. in 1971 after all.
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The music composed by Michel Legrand is nearly non-existent. It starts in the beginning, with the showcase of the important places throughout the movie and resumes only at the end. Upon the rewatch, the beginning slide-show made me tear up.
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The love between Hermie (Herman) and Dorothy (Dorothy) was, by the words of the screen writer Herman Raucher, "had effected a strange relationship". Herman, in a way is a romantic, similar to Steven Spielberg. For him love is more than just putting his sausage into girl's scissors, as did Oscar, who in character, was closer to Luc Besson with his pussy-curse. Naturally having Dorothy's husband was murdered in France, meant "she was alone on an island and drinkin’ and playing their favorite song and in walks this kid and <...> She just thought I (Herman) was him". Powered by mourning, she danced, danced with Hermie (Herman) to their favorite song and went to bed with a 15 year old kid. It was Dorothy's way of curing herself from the trauma. She was alone on island with no-one except that strange Hermie (Herman). The flowers she bought few days ago were thrown out. The vase was left empty. Not even water was present in it.
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30 years later, after the film was released, the writer received "numerous letters from women claiming to be Dorothy". One of them stood out, it had Dorothy's handwriting. The letter mentioned, she had remarried and was living in Canton, Ohio. She was intrigued what effect did she have on Herman. The letter was ended with these words: "The ghosts of that night 30 years ago are better left undisturbed."
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Tell me @BlenderDumbass , are you willing to do a psycho-sexual analysis on one horny teenager and a miserable widow?
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Fin.
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The somber tale of Summer of '42
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/18/Summer_of_%2742_POSTER.jpg)
Troler
👁 12 💬 109
Sex and love are hard to miss on present block-busters. Even topics such as love between a child and an adult are discussed. In early 1970s and before it was hard to find films delving into such topics. A nostalgia film of that. The movie may start out light-hearted, it went deep so to make the illustrious Kubrick cry.
#Summerof42 #1942 #JenniferO'Neill #GaryGrimes #JerryHouser #RobertMulligan #HermanRaucher #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Snake Eyes 1998 is De Palma's attempt at restoring his Hitch spirit
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8b/SnakeEyesPoster.jpg/250px-SnakeEyesPoster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 16 💬 3
Watching the opening scene of Brian De Palma's 1998 film Snake Eyes makes you realize that this motherfucker is trying very hard. We have 13 minutes of Nicolas Cage running around a very crowded set. The scene is clever with its camera, giving us multiple layers of exposition in the same time. Like there could be a TV on the foreground and Cage on the background. And they seem unrelated at first, but the scene establishes most of it's plot details right in this very shot. And then the shot ends ( 13 minutes later ) at the exact moment, the script drops the "inciting incident". De Palma is really trying hard to direct the shit out this movie.
#SnakeEyes #BrianDePalma #NicolasCage #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
How Cuarón builds tension in Children of Men
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/fc/Children_of_men_ver4.jpg/250px-Children_of_men_ver4.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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2027 is around the corner and thank God babies are still being born. That is not the case in the 2006 Alfonso Cuarón film Children of Men. Children of Men is bleak and depressing. It is without hope. Without hope, that was lost, long time ago, because children are not being born anymore. The world has gone to shit. The world has gone to shit because there are no children. There are no Children of Men.
#childrenofmen #AlfonsoCuaron #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Is Hancock 2008 about the tragedy of rejection?
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c9/Hancockposter.jpg/250px-Hancockposter.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 7 ❤ 2 💬 3
Mary Embrey, the blonde woman played by Charlize Theron in the 2008 Peter Berg film Hancock, is surprisingly good looking. For the few people who read through the psycho-sexual analysis of me, you may know that for me in general, the name Mary, or the Latin version of it Maria, or the Russian version of it Masha, especially connected to a blonde, good looking woman, is very important. And yet, back when I saw Hancock for the first time. I didn't quite realize how important it is.
#hancock #peterberg #willsmith #charlizetheron #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
The Naked Gun ( 2025 ) is a descent movie about enshitification, but not as funny as the originals
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/The_Naked_Gun_2025_poster.jpg/250px-The_Naked_Gun_2025_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 16 💬 1
Paramount snatched "The Naked Gun" / "Police Squad" rights from Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams and instead gave the material to a different Jew Akiva Schaffer to adopt. And while Schaffer is a good comedy / parody director, it seems like the movie ended up being just "merely clever".
#theNakedGun #policesquad #LiamNeeson #PamelaAnderson #film #review #comedy #movies #cinemastodon
Predator 1987 was always a B-movie
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/95/Predator_Movie.jpg/250px-Predator_Movie.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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As I observed in my review of Predator 2, the Predator films feel very B-movie-like. And the first film, John McTiernan's 1987 Predator is not an exception.
#predator #horror #ArnoldSchwarzenegger #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Transformers 3 has only 1 flaw
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bf/Transformers_dark_of_the_moon_ver5.jpg/250px-Transformers_dark_of_the_moon_ver5.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 15 💬 1
Megan Fox. Megan Fox is the only flaw of Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The script by Ehren Kruger ( who wrote Top Gun: Maverick and F1 ) was written with Mikaela Banes ( Megan Fox ) as the girlfriend of Shia LaBeouf's character Sam. But because of some drama behind the scenes ( which involved Steven Spielberg for some reason ), she ultimately dropped out of the project, in very late stages of pre-production. Forcing the team to quickly patch her character out in a very forced and obvious way, replacing her with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley who worked with Bay on Victoria Secret commercials. That ultimately made the film very confusing, emotionally.
#transformers #transformersdarkofthemoon #michaelbay #film #review #cinemastodon #movies
Transformers 5 is Too Good to be Good
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/26/Transformers_The_Last_Knight_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 92 ❤ 1 💬 1
There is this satisfaction when it comes to animation, that I know from personal experience where the longer you work on a shot, or a sequence, the more details there is in the animation, the more satisfying it is to later just watch this insane level of effort simply wash over you one frame after another.
#transformers #MichaelBay #film #review #movies #cinemastodon #kingArthur
Why I'm Not Going to Watch Ice Cream Man ( 2026 ) ?
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/thumbs/icecreamman.png)
Blender Dumbass
👁 13 ❤ 2 🔄 1
If you ever read my reviews of films like Ballerina or Weapons or stuff like that, you know that I'm the kind of guy who should very much enjoy the bullshit that Eli Roth put into the trailer of his new movie Ice Cream Man that was just released into cinema. But you can also notice that it isn't a review. I have not seen Ice Cream Man and I will never see it. This is an article about why.
#eliroth #icecreamman #genai #ai #noai #aislop #film #review #movies #cinemastodon #resistance #enshittification #horror
Backdraft 1991 is a HOT film
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a1/Backdraft_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 5 💬 2
Ron Howard is a hell of a director. He knows how to get the image that he wants. And he knows how to do it so that it will hold up practically forever. His 1991 fire-fighters movie Backdraft is not an exception. The fire sequences are so real and so visceral in this film, despite being done 3 decades ago, that perhaps this film is even better when it comes to planning shots that hold up than his Apollo 13 movie ( where he used real weightlessness to shoot the space scenes ).
#backdraft #firemen #firefighters #fire #movies #cinema #ronhoward #film #review #cinemastodon
June and John is Luc being Besson with a smartphone
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/49/June_and_John.jpg/250px-June_and_John.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 191 ❤ 1 💬 1
It was nice to take a short break from the grind of trying to make CGI stuff all day long and watch a movie. And who could be a better film-maker to casually enjoy, but Luc Besson, who after all these reviews I did of his films, I start to feel like I understand, similarly to how a therapist might understand his client? His 2025 low budget film June and John is undeniably Luc Besson, even if the fact that the film was largely shot on a smartphone makes it look kind of weird and slightly amateurish.
#JuneAndJohn #LucBesson #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Blue Steel 1990 is the seed that grew into the reason Avatar didn't win best picture
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/37/Blue_Steel_%281990_film%29.jpg/250px-Blue_Steel_%281990_film%29.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 12 ❤ 3 🔄 1 💬 3
So it's 1990 and Kathryn Bigelow writes and directs an action thriller about a police officer. The police officer is female and the movie almost refuses to sexualize her. Bigelow casts a nice half-Jewish girl Jamie Lee Curtis. And pretty much the whole movie, not a single shot of her emphasizes or admires her body ( apart from one sex scene where we see a very erotic closeup of her stomach ). Making that movie technically feminist. Few years later, in 1994, as James Cameron ( who was married to Bigelow between 1989 and 1991 ) is trying to find the actor to play the wife in his film True Lies. He is reminded of Blue Steel by Bigelow. And decides to cast Jamie Lee Curtis in his film. Giving us that very strange, almost pornographic scene where she does a very erotic strip-tease scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger. More than a decade later, in 2009, both Bigelow and Cameron make a movie. And both of those movies are nominated for the best picture. Yet Bigelow takes home the price. Did Cameron lose due to his pussy curse?
#bluesteel #KathrynBigelow #JamieLeeCurtis #film #review #movies #cinemastodon #michaelbay
Last Breath's story is too short for a feature film
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/15/Last_Breath_2025_film_poster.jpg/250px-Last_Breath_2025_film_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 15
Last Breath directed by Alex Parkinson is based on a real event when a diver named Chris Lemons got stranded on a bottom of the sea for a long time without oxygen. And the movie is about the tense rescue operation that was done to try to save him.
#lastbreath #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Summer of '42 ( 1971 ) is about Empathy
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/18/Summer_of_%2742_POSTER.jpg/250px-Summer_of_%2742_POSTER.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 21 ❤ 2 🔄 1 💬 8
First time I heard of the movie Summer of '42 when reading Tarantino's review of American Graffiti. In his review a large chunk is dedicated to this picture, because he is trying to illustrate the aesthetic similarities between the two pictures and the broader genre shifts of the 60s and 70s cinema landscape, that gave way to something like American Graffiti. Shortly after that, there was the review by Troler. And then finally, which made me grab my lazy ass and put it into the chair to watch this film, was a conversation I had with @Troler , where he so kindly spoiled the ending of this movie for me, while breaking down the cinematic techniques used in the film.
#summerof42 #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
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