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koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

Disconcerting.

Letterboxd notification reading "Keyser Soze is now following you."

November 10, 2025 at 7:25 PM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

Wikipedia plot summary of "Strange Fascination" (1952).

Transcribed Text:

Plot

The life of Paul Marvan (Haas), a world-famous concert pianist, is ruined after his marriage to beautiful femme fatale Margo (Moore). Margo is hardly a femme fatale. She's one of many blondes in Hugo Haas' films who is trying to do her best with men coming at her every second. She's actually sensitive, smart and compassionate. If you actually listen to the dialogue of this movie it's quite grown up, especially the final conversation between Margo and Marvan's patron, Diana Fowler. The level of honesty in this film is as powerful as it is unexpected.

October 11, 2025 at 6:59 PM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

News article headlined "Star's daughter brutally cut after 31 mins" with a picture of WNBA player Shyla Heal, whose father Shane played a handful of NBA games in the mid-90s, in the middle of a lengthy career in the Australian NBL.

October 3, 2025 at 2:36 PM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

End card from BARRY LYNDON, reading "It was in the time of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled, good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now."

September 18, 2025 at 8:59 AM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

Dug up the paragraph in question:

What is most interesting here, perhaps, is that it is the very absence of a signifier which signifies an absence (in this case, the transformation woman-into-cat which remains invisible, incapable of being contained in the image). The film nevertheless strives to image the transgression of what should be the most solid barrier of all—that separating human and animal. It strives to include as interior to the image what its own problematic has located as exteriority. A distinction which is carried by the soundtrack—an indication that the entity it denotes inhabits the realm of invisibility—is translated into the terms of vision, brought within the image as traces, the visible tracks of the transformation and hence the crossing of a barrier. In the process, the film expounds the logic of the trace, a logic which undermines the cinema’s reliance on visibility as a standard of truth. For while the track/trace acts as a kind of evidence (“you can believe your eyes”), it is also potentially deceptive, unreliable, because through the introduction of a temporal delay, it disrupts the notions of presence and immediacy which are usually attached to vision. In The Cat People the camera, framing the tracks which give witness to the transformation, cannot quite “catch up” with Irena until the metamorphosis is complete—she/it is always just outside the edge of the frame. The trace, as Derrida points out, is the “erasure of a presence,” and what the scene ultimately demonstrates is that only through a temporal disphasure, an absence within, can the visible become significant—that is, signifying. The logic of the trace is, in fact, the logic of the photographic image itself which is doomed to “capture” a “having-been-there. ” Visibility contains its own negation.

August 23, 2025 at 5:59 PM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

A Venn diagram with circles reading "incel" and "excel", with the intersection labelled "incorrectly assuming something is a date".

August 1, 2025 at 8:25 PM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

March 15, 2025 at 11:51 AM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

Screenshot of a post identifying an inaccurate AI summary on Storygraph.

March 12, 2025 at 1:57 PM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

Attacks on The Birth of a Nation's content continued (indeed, they have never stopped), and the accusation that he was a bigot disturbed Griffith deeply. In The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America (1915), his counterblast to the film's detractors, he had declared:

"The integrity of free speech and publication was not…attacked seriously in this country until the arrival of the motion picture, when this new art was seized by the powers of intolerance as an excuse for an assault on our liberties…. Intolerance is the root of all censorship. Intolerance martyred Joan of Arc. Intolerance smashed the first printing press. Intolerance invented Salem witchcraft."

Early in 1916, still stinging from charges of racism, Griffith determined to produce a massive cinematic polemic against these "powers of intolerance" as they had endangered civilization throughout human history. The resulting film, Intolerance, was not—as is sometimes claimed—Griffith's "liberal" atonement for his…

February 15, 2025 at 9:48 PM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

FFS @espnaustralia.bsky.social, STOP PUTTING THE NEWS TICKER ON RERUNS. What purpose is this serving, other than spoiling the result of the game I'm watching?

ESPN broadcast of the Bucks-Blazers NBA game, Bucks up 49-40 with 6:38 remaining in the 2nd quarter. A news ticker at the bottom of the screen shows that the Blazers won 125-112.

January 29, 2025 at 10:54 AM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

From "Spectatorship as Spectacle: Screen Composites and Early Cinema" by Katharina Loew:

The iconography of early split screen effects built on imagery familiar from religious art, lantern slides, illustrated journals, and advertising. Such composites typically combined the fictional reality with representations of something invisible or intangible, something located in another space or time. Most frequently, they rendered characters together with projections of their “inner eyes,” i.e., mental images or accounts. For example, in the seventh tableau of Pathé’s Christophe Colomb (Vincent Lorant-Heilbronn, France, 1904), the disgraced and imprisoned hero is seated in the lower left-hand corner on a straw bedding as his recollections of his earlier triumphal reception at the Spanish court appear on the top right. Inserts also indicated speech, as in Pathé’s 1902 and 1908 versions of La Belle au bois dormant, where a stage in the top right corner illustrates the future fate of the infant princess as the wicked fairy curses her.

Representations of parallel action constituted another major application area, as in George Albert Smith’s Santa Claus (UK, 1898), where a circle on the children’s bedroom wall shows a scene that takes place concurrently: Santa landing on the roof and descending the chimney. The juxtaposition of different spaces in one shot is often justified by optical or telecommunication media, including film, television, magic lanterns, and mirrors. As Jan Olsson has demonstrated, three-panel split screen composites served as the standard device for representing telephone conversations on European screens between 1906 and 1916. He calls particular attention to the middle panel that became more narrativized over time. It served to illustrate the content of a telephone conversation or to provide the audience with additional narrative information. In fact, by the 1910s, even in scenes that do not involve communication devices, split screen effects habitually foregrounded the film’s narrative agency to draw comparisons and offer commentary. In Ambro…

January 12, 2025 at 7:39 AM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

Oh, right, of course. I was trying to figure out what film from that era could have had a solo release.

Here's my collection, graphed by year:

Graph of films by year, peaking heavily between 1896 and 1915.

January 5, 2025 at 12:29 AM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

New year, new Letterboxd top four:

REAR WINDOW, MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW, AVENGERS: ENDGAME, and THE TRANSLATORS

January 4, 2025 at 3:13 PM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

Quiet month. #CriterionChannel #FilmSky

My Criterion Channel watchlist for the month, consisting only of HIVE and FLAMING EARS.

January 4, 2025 at 3:12 PM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

I've seen this poster so many times and only just realised that the title is in an actual shape, not just arranged randomly.

January 1, 2025 at 6:02 PM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

Bought exactly one movie too many in the latest @kinolorber.bsky.social sale. Fuck.

Shipping calculation charging a flat fee for the first 2lbs, and an additional per-lb fee thereafter, showing a package weight of 2.1lbs.

December 31, 2024 at 3:40 PM

koberulz

@koberulz.bsky.social

@riderjon.bsky.social Not your problem, I know, but I'm not sure who else to ask: what am I doing wrong here? I assume I've made a grammar error, but I don't know what it is because Duolingo only wants to use plural "you." Keep getting dinged for this, it's very frustrating.