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Which movie did you watch today and how would you rate it?

I'll have to see Requiem for a Dream. I looked at the Wikipedia article and just at first glance I can see I would relate to it, being a person well acquainted with drug addiction and alcohol abuse. Well acquainted meaning: these problems are ongoing. Occasionally reined in and under control, but always rearing their ugly heads.

What really scares me, besides something like the unseen evil and ruthless power as depicted in The Exorcist - is anything that makes me conscious of my primary, lifelong fear: claustrophobia.

Hence, the scariest films for me (many of which which I didn't mention because I find them hard to even talk about) are ones that deal with premature burial.

The Screaming Woman was a made-for-TV film about a woman who was prematurely buried. The man who buried her thought she was dead, but she wasn't. She's in a shallow grave, only barely covered with earth. I don't recall the plot very much, or main details, only a harrowing scene where a man is walking his dog and the dog is alerted to the sounds of the woman moaning under the ground. The owner thinks the dog is just being a dog, until he hears the moaning voice himself. He alerts the police, and the woman is rescued. I have that scene permanently engraved in my brain, where she's dug up and pulled out of the ground, barely alive.

Another classic is The Premature Burial, 1962, based of course on the Poe story. I have major trouble seeing this film, and haven't watched it since I was a lad.

Then there's The Serpent and the Rainbow, 1988. I watched that film twice, since it's not nearly as scary as The Premature Burial, but I'd still have trouble if I watched it again. Which I won't!

Some of the most frightening scenes in Dante's Inferno (the poem, not film versions or the game) deal with extreme claustrophobic situations.

I have a recurring nightmare wherein I'm in some future or alien world, and I'm about to be placed in a tiny compartment for a long voyage across space. I'm either a slave, or used for food (my extensive reading on the unconscionable atrocities of the slave trade has no doubt been a catalyst for this nightmare).

In my dream, I'm promised (vaguely) that I'll be unconscious - in some sort of sci-fi deep sleep - but in my mind I KNOW that I will wake up during the journey, and die horribly, in total blind panic.

Naturally, this is a common phobia. Seminal films have been influential in my particular case, especially Planet of the Apes - which has the female passenger die during transit, and that shocking scene where the men discover her; also Alien, and several others.

There have been quite a few newer films that deal with this claustrophobic element very effectively. One is Eden Log, another is Pandorum with Dennis Quaid. I highly recommend Eden Log. It's a fascinating film.

The Descent, a film about a group of female spelunkers is also terrifying, at certain moments. I have to be mind-altered or thick with a few shots of Rumple Minze to be able to watch that film. There was a sequel, but I don't remember if I liked it.

I was gonna say "The Descent" once you started talking about claustrophobia... Yeah, it wasn't the monsters in that movie that was scary, but the idea of being trapped in those tiny, crushing spaces. Ugh.

So maybe good horror now plays on our psychological fears than rather than the classic supernatural. Because when one generally doesn't believe in the supernatural, it doesn't hold a lot of fear. For example, I first saw The Exorcist when I was 14. It scared the living shit out of me because I was a believer back then. It's still a great movie, but the power of the supernatural element doesn't exist anymore.

I would go even further and say horror movies have been replace with gore, for the same reason you stated above.
 
Siege of Jadotville

It's a Netflix movie, but not a series, so I'll just put it here.

Generally, it's about a group of Irish soldiers who, under the auspices of the UN, have to fight for their lives in 1961 Congo. For the background details surrounding the conflict (but it will spoil the ending if you look at the wiki page, so...) :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jadotville

As for the movie itself, it ventured into being really good at times, but just as often was really clumsy. I won't say they used every war cliche where the underdog fights heroically, but they took multiple pages from that book. The bad guys are for the most part, bad. The good guys are all good. Had this been made in say, 1955, it would've probably been a war classic. But since it's not 1955, it's a move that's a bit better than mediocre.

Battle scenes: they range from downright awful to tolerable. One stupid frontal assault follows another. It reminded me of how kids play war (charge!). But like the rest of the movie, there were some good elements to the battle scenes as well. It's just that the amateurish ones contained some real laughers and head scratchers.

The acting is solid, but being subject to a billion cliches and blunt-force dialogue at times, it couldn't help but suffer.

Overall, it's a hodgepodge of good and bad that mixes to create a tolerable film while learning some history at the same time.

5 or 6 outta 10 I guess.
 
Passengers 0/10

This movie is :sick001:

Can't even begin to describe how much I despise this godawful movie.

Spoilers - it's a tragedy.


Far future. A spaceship traveling from earth to a distant earth-like corporate planet with 5500 would-be colonists and ship crew in suspended animation gets hit by heretofore unknown and uncharted meteor field. The ship sustains damage that erodes some ship systems. Since the ship designers, navigators, planners and engineers didn't plan for ANYthing to go wrong like any smart people would, no one who is in suspended animation can be woken up to address any ship problems. If they wake up, there is no way they can get put BACK to sleep on a 120 year one way trip.

So, of the 5500 folks on board, one sleep tube malfunctions. One guy emerges with 90 years still to go on the trip. Not a farmer or botanist or doctor or accountant, but hey, aren't we all lucky? An engineer. Young guy. Kinda cute in a dorky way. After much desperate seeking, he realizes he is doomed to live out his life alone on the ship.

Being a selfish pig, he looks at one young good looking woman, perfectly safe and asleep in her tube and with plans of her own, and fixates on waking her up and totally fucking up HER life and force her to live and die on the ship alone with him just for his own selfish needs. He doesn't care about her needs or wants.

Now the movie turns to a piece of shit. I don't think the producers intended for the audience to despise the main hero character. But you do.

So, as you expected, the engineer caves and wakes her up. :mad: And he lies to her and tells her her tube malfunctioned just like his.:rolleyes:

Do you hate this guy and want to shove him out the nearest airlock right now?

I sure did.

And of course, after the shock wears off and she accepts that she's doomed, she bonds with her fellow victim buddy, the selfish pig engineer. They're in this together, right? Might as well make the best of it. He was a victim too. It wasn't his fault, after all...

She grows to like him and falls in love and forms a relationship but of course this is just a case of Stockholm Syndrome. They're in a critical situation, they're never going to be in a normal one and there is no one else around. What else would two people do?

I had really wished that the movie would have been a little more complicated - e.g. he wakes her up for company and finds out she's a lesbian and doesn't want to have sex with him. Ever. Or she has a lover/husband on board and wants nothing to do with the engineer, not with her husband right there and she's too selfless to wake him up for HER sake. That would have been interesting, with her showing more self-restraint than him.

But no, the movie is as predictable as it gets.

Woman finds out and is, needless to say, furious and devastated and separates herself from slimeball asshole and starts to live her life separately.

But, being a fucking psychotic control freak, feeling sorry for himself, the engineer guy shows his true colors.

He shows the woman that she is totally under his control and doesn't have any free will. To him, she doesn't get to have the choice to ignore him.

The slimeball GETS ON THE SHIPWIDE MICROPHONE SO SHE'S FORCED TO LISTEN TO HIM WHINE, while she's running and trying to escape his voice before she cracks, screaming at him. :censored2::mad-new:

Woman woken up is pretty, educated, well off and relatively famous but of course, she's single and 'never lets anyone into her heart'. Check.
Woman doesn't care if she never is able to have babies because asshole who woke her up doomed her to a childless state. Check.
Woman is useless. She's a writer, so of course only HE can do the heroic things like fix the damage done and take the chances. She gets to hold the flashlight and blubber when he takes the risks. Check.
And because he took the risks, she forgives him for destroying her life and imprisoning her with him, childless until she dies. Check.

This is a movie that for some reason is reflecting the values of the 1900s - or earlier.

No happy ending. This is a Stockholm Syndrome situation with no way out. The woman lives out her natural life on the ship with the man who destroyed her future and imprisoned her.

Moral to the story? Guys, just lie to a woman, completely ruin and control her life and you, too, will be rewarded.



I spent $5 to watch it on pay per view. I want my fucking money back.
 
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What really bugged me about that movie was, at the end, they couldn't both go back into cryo sleep because there was only one fucking medical bed. This ship with over 5000 people on it who were doing something as dangerous as colonizing another planet and after the movie specifically said that they had redundant backups for everything, only had one fucking medical device.

They didn't even throw in a line like "Oh no, the other 50 we had on board got fried in a power surge and we're only left with one". They just only had one of those.

That was dumb.
 
Passengers 0/10

This movie is :sick001:

Can't even begin to describe how much I despise this godawful movie.

Spoilers - it's a tragedy.


Far future. A spaceship traveling from earth to a distant earth-like corporate planet with 5500 would-be colonists and ship crew in suspended animation gets hit by heretofore unknown and uncharted meteor field. The ship sustains damage that erodes some ship systems. Since the ship designers, navigators, planners and engineers didn't plan for ANYthing to go wrong like any smart people would, no one who is in suspended animation can be woken up to address any ship problems. If they wake up, there is no way they can get put BACK to sleep on a 120 year one way trip.

So, of the 5500 folks on board, one sleep tube malfunctions. One guy emerges with 90 years still to go on the trip. Not a farmer or botanist or doctor or accountant, but hey, aren't we all lucky? An engineer. Young guy. Kinda cute in a dorky way. After much desperate seeking, he realizes he is doomed to live out his life alone on the ship.

Being a selfish pig, he looks at one young good looking woman, perfectly safe and asleep in her tube and with plans of her own, and fixates on waking her up and totally fucking up HER life and force her to live and die on the ship alone with him just for his own selfish needs. He doesn't care about her needs or wants.

Now the movie turns to a piece of shit. I don't think the producers intended for the audience to despise the main hero character. But you do.

So, as you expected, the engineer caves and wakes her up. :mad: And he lies to her and tells her her tube malfunctioned just like his.:rolleyes:

Do you hate this guy and want to shove him out the nearest airlock right now?

I sure did.

And of course, after the shock wears off and she accepts that she's doomed, she bonds with her fellow victim buddy, the selfish pig engineer. They're in this together, right? Might as well make the best of it. He was a victim too. It wasn't his fault, after all...

She grows to like him and falls in love and forms a relationship but of course this is just a case of Stockholm Syndrome. They're in a critical situation, they're never going to be in a normal one and there is no one else around. What else would two people do?

I had really wished that the movie would have been a little more complicated - e.g. he wakes her up for company and finds out she's a lesbian and doesn't want to have sex with him. Ever. Or she has a lover/husband on board and wants nothing to do with the engineer, not with her husband right there and she's too selfless to wake him up for HER sake. That would have been interesting, with her showing more self-restraint than him.

But no, the movie is as predictable as it gets.

Woman finds out and is, needless to say, furious and devastated and separates herself from slimeball asshole and starts to live her life separately.

But, being a fucking psychotic control freak, feeling sorry for himself, the engineer guy shows his true colors.

He shows the woman that she is totally under his control and doesn't have any free will. To him, she doesn't get to have the choice to ignore him.

The slimeball GETS ON THE SHIPWIDE MICROPHONE SO SHE'S FORCED TO LISTEN TO HIM WHINE, while she's running and trying to escape his voice before she cracks, screaming at him. :censored2::mad-new:

Woman woken up is pretty, educated, well off and relatively famous but of course, she's single and 'never lets anyone into her heart'. Check.
Woman doesn't care if she never is able to have babies because asshole who woke her up doomed her to a childless state. Check.
Woman is useless. She's a writer, so of course only HE can do the heroic things like fix the damage done and take the chances. She gets to hold the flashlight and blubber when he takes the risks. Check.
And because he took the risks, she forgives him for destroying her life and imprisoning her with him, childless until she dies. Check.

This is a movie that for some reason is reflecting the values of the 1900s - or earlier.

No happy ending. This is a Stockholm Syndrome situation with no way out. The woman lives out her natural life on the ship with the man who destroyed her future and imprisoned her.

Moral to the story? Guys, just lie to a woman, completely ruin and control her life and you, too, will be rewarded.



I spent $5 to watch it on pay per view. I want my fucking money back.

So... Yet another glamorization of Stockholm syndrome?

My deepest apologies to any meninists who feel I have some how persecuted men by saying that Stockholm syndrome is a bad thing, because I'm pretty sure that's the only way a meninist could attract a woman.
 
WTF do you want from a movies?I knew what I paid for,and I got entertained.Sure the science sucked,so what?The story was different.Be alone for 90 years or make some one like you.the crappy special effects in the middle are way too common.
6/10
 
What really bugged me about that movie was, at the end, they couldn't both go back into cryo sleep because there was only one fucking medical bed. This ship with over 5000 people on it who were doing something as dangerous as colonizing another planet and after the movie specifically said that they had redundant backups for everything, only had one fucking medical device.

They didn't even throw in a line like "Oh no, the other 50 we had on board got fried in a power surge and we're only left with one". They just only had one of those.

That was dumb.

I know, right? Exactly what I thought as well. 5500 hundred people and only 1 med bay and only one medical bed? I guess if they expected no one to EVER wake up along the way, it makes sense not to waste expensive equipment on them, but they were going to a new colonized world. 5500 new mouths to feed, they brought farming equipment, plants, animals, etc., why wouldn't they bring medical equipment too?

- - - Updated - - -

WTF do want from movies?I knew what I paid for,and I got entertained.Sure the science sucked,so what?The story was different.Be alone for 90 years or make some one like you.the crappy special effects in the middle are way too common.
6/10

I didn't know what I paid for. I had no idea what the plot was about. The story was not different. It was completely predictable once you got to a certain point. It's not "make someone like you" it's like the other throwaway character said, "You're drowning so you pull someone in with you." I don't know anyone who thinks that's a good thing.
 
A good thing? No.

A natural thing? Sadly, yes.

What would you have done if you were in that scenario?
 
Passengers 0/10

This movie is :sick001:

Can't even begin to describe how much I despise this godawful movie.

Spoilers - it's a tragedy.


Far future. A spaceship traveling from earth to a distant earth-like corporate planet with 5500 would-be colonists and ship crew in suspended animation gets hit by heretofore unknown and uncharted meteor field. The ship sustains damage that erodes some ship systems. Since the ship designers, navigators, planners and engineers didn't plan for ANYthing to go wrong like any smart people would, no one who is in suspended animation can be woken up to address any ship problems. If they wake up, there is no way they can get put BACK to sleep on a 120 year one way trip.

So, of the 5500 folks on board, one sleep tube malfunctions. One guy emerges with 90 years still to go on the trip. Not a farmer or botanist or doctor or accountant, but hey, aren't we all lucky? An engineer. Young guy. Kinda cute in a dorky way. After much desperate seeking, he realizes he is doomed to live out his life alone on the ship.

Being a selfish pig, he looks at one young good looking woman, perfectly safe and asleep in her tube and with plans of her own, and fixates on waking her up and totally fucking up HER life and force her to live and die on the ship alone with him just for his own selfish needs. He doesn't care about her needs or wants.

Now the movie turns to a piece of shit. I don't think the producers intended for the audience to despise the main hero character. But you do.

So, as you expected, the engineer caves and wakes her up. :mad: And he lies to her and tells her her tube malfunctioned just like his.:rolleyes:

Do you hate this guy and want to shove him out the nearest airlock right now?

I sure did.

And of course, after the shock wears off and she accepts that she's doomed, she bonds with her fellow victim buddy, the selfish pig engineer. They're in this together, right? Might as well make the best of it. He was a victim too. It wasn't his fault, after all...

She grows to like him and falls in love and forms a relationship but of course this is just a case of Stockholm Syndrome. They're in a critical situation, they're never going to be in a normal one and there is no one else around. What else would two people do?

I had really wished that the movie would have been a little more complicated - e.g. he wakes her up for company and finds out she's a lesbian and doesn't want to have sex with him. Ever. Or she has a lover/husband on board and wants nothing to do with the engineer, not with her husband right there and she's too selfless to wake him up for HER sake. That would have been interesting, with her showing more self-restraint than him.

But no, the movie is as predictable as it gets.

Woman finds out and is, needless to say, furious and devastated and separates herself from slimeball asshole and starts to live her life separately.

But, being a fucking psychotic control freak, feeling sorry for himself, the engineer guy shows his true colors.

He shows the woman that she is totally under his control and doesn't have any free will. To him, she doesn't get to have the choice to ignore him.

The slimeball GETS ON THE SHIPWIDE MICROPHONE SO SHE'S FORCED TO LISTEN TO HIM WHINE, while she's running and trying to escape his voice before she cracks, screaming at him. :censored2::mad-new:

Woman woken up is pretty, educated, well off and relatively famous but of course, she's single and 'never lets anyone into her heart'. Check.
Woman doesn't care if she never is able to have babies because asshole who woke her up doomed her to a childless state. Check.
Woman is useless. She's a writer, so of course only HE can do the heroic things like fix the damage done and take the chances. She gets to hold the flashlight and blubber when he takes the risks. Check.
And because he took the risks, she forgives him for destroying her life and imprisoning her with him, childless until she dies. Check.

This is a movie that for some reason is reflecting the values of the 1900s - or earlier.

No happy ending. This is a Stockholm Syndrome situation with no way out. The woman lives out her natural life on the ship with the man who destroyed her future and imprisoned her.

Moral to the story? Guys, just lie to a woman, completely ruin and control her life and you, too, will be rewarded.



I spent $5 to watch it on pay per view. I want my fucking money back.

There are two films I can think of that offended me in the way you describe. The most awful film I ever saw through to the end was Surveillance (2008). The film is technically well made, and the acting is good, but the climax is without doubt the worst I've ever had the misfortune of seeing in a mainstream film. I wrote a vitriolic review of it on Amazon, to which many people commented, all in the negative, telling me how I had misunderstood the movie, and how it was a "keen observation into the minds of psychotic people" - which it was, no doubt. But, the film does not offer any judgment of the sickos involved - it in fact celebrates them, and makes anti-heroes out of them. Or, what's worse, actual heroes to certain people who have nasty skeletons in their closet. The worst thing about this movie were the minor characters, the victims, NONE of whom offer any kind of real resistance to the evil that's done to them. A truly rotten flick.

I won't even name the other film I hate almost as much as Surveillance, since I did that years ago on this very BB and was abused for my ignorance and lack of artistic savvy. It's a colorful, arsty-fartsy celebration of evil, which has no redeeming qualities apart from the fact that it was well-made as a physical object, and starred a great actor, who has done much finer things.
 
this stuff should be in "first world problems".We are so jaded.Everyone is an expert on movies."I know what is great art and film".You know the old saying about opinions,right?
 
Angry Birds (well, the first 10 or 15 minutes) - You shouldn't judge a book by its cover. I did, and figured, I wouldn't like the film. I saw positive reviews, so I figured I'd give it a shot. The result? It appeared to be extremely cliche, not funny, and totally uninteresting. Maybe it gets better, but I ran the numbers on the risk v. benefit and the results indicated not waiting and wasting an hour of my life. 1 of 4
 
The Search for General Tso
7/10

A documentary about a dish called "general Tso's chicken," which is ubiquitous in Chinese-American restaurants, but not anywhere else, apparently.

The documentary ends up being about the history of Chinese food in America and the history of Chinese-Americans. Quite fascinating, and the prejudice faced by Chinese-Americans seems so similar to every other group that came here: violence, vandalism, attempts to restrict immigration from that country, etc.

Why do we have to go through the same racist bullshit with every nationality?
 
A goodthing? No.

A natural thing? Sadly, yes.

What would you have done if you were in that scenario?


It's "natural" to want to destroy other people's lives for your own selfish needs?

Yeah, no.

There's a thing called empathy or compassion that normally stops people from doing that.

In his situation? Unlike he, who didn't seem to have any hobbies other than drinking and wandering around naked, I don't tire of my own company, so I would have been a little more thorough than him in investigating all my options - e.g. medical technology and would have just stayed alone.
 
A goodthing? No.

A natural thing? Sadly, yes.

What would you have done if you were in that scenario?


It's "natural" to want to destroy other people's lives for your own selfish needs?

Yeah, no.

There's a thing called empathy or compassion that normally stops people from doing that.

In his situation? Unlike he, who didn't seem to have any hobbies other than drinking and wandering around naked, I don't tire of my own company, so I would have been a little more thorough than him in investigating all my options - e.g. medical technology and would have just stayed alone.

I haven't seen the movie, but from what you've described it sounds like a situation in which a person made an awful yet also understandable decision. According to Rotten Tomatoes, it looks like critics largely hated it (31%), but audiences largely liked it (64%). And the situation presented does seem thought provoking. I like to think that in such a situation that I'd do the right thing and remain alone until blasting myself out into the vacuum of outer space when it became intolerable, but no one has ever been in that situation, so who knows?

Or maybe the movie is just unwatchable because of idiotic inconsistencies, like that abomination Prometheus. I'll shut up now.
 
A goodthing? No.

A natural thing? Sadly, yes.

What would you have done if you were in that scenario?


It's "natural" to want to destroy other people's lives for your own selfish needs?

Yeah, no.

There's a thing called empathy or compassion that normally stops people from doing that.

In his situation? Unlike he, who didn't seem to have any hobbies other than drinking and wandering around naked, I don't tire of my own company, so I would have been a little more thorough than him in investigating all my options - e.g. medical technology and would have just stayed alone.

I just meant that it's natural for a drowning man to clutch at someone else. Selfish, sure, and potentially harmful to both, definitely. But to me, it's perfectly natural. Am I remembering right that he had spent a year in what is basically solitary confinement?
 
Yes, his actions are understandable, given the situation which he was in. They're just not forgivable. He sentenced an innocent woman to die in the cold emptiness of space because he was lonely. While one can understand his motivations for doing so, he's still the main villain of the movie, not the hero or the acceptable love interest.
 
If they were lonely still, they could just wake up more people and also make babies. Problem solved.
 
Yes, his actions are understandable, given the situation which he was in. They're just not forgivable. He sentenced an innocent woman to die in the cold emptiness of space because he was lonely. While one can understand his motivations for doing so, he's still the main villain of the movie, not the hero or the acceptable love interest.
do you understand at all that per the movie he waited almost 2 years before waking her up?
do you also understand that even a first year psychology student could tell you that most humans would be pants-on-head retarded batshit INSANE after being totally socially isolated for almost 2 years?

there's a point at which pouty-lipped ethical shaming simply no longer applies, though ultimately Passengers is just a rom-com with a sci-fi background and rom-coms in the US have a really bad track record of portraying the shitty things men do to women on a regular basis as romantic gestures.
but it certainly wasn't any worse than basically anything any male has ever done in any rom-com in the history of ever, so at the very least the context around the cliche was a bit different.

which is actually slightly interesting in a very mildly subversive way wherein the whole backdrop of the film just served to rationalize a guy doing the kind of shit guys do to women in rom-coms and have a real reason for it besides "psychopathic behavior is romantic."
 
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Yes, his actions are understandable, given the situation which he was in. They're just not forgivable. He sentenced an innocent woman to die in the cold emptiness of space because he was lonely. While one can understand his motivations for doing so, he's still the main villain of the movie, not the hero or the acceptable love interest.
do you understand at all that per the movie he waited almost 2 years before waking her up?
do you also understand that even a first year psychology student could tell you that most humans would be pants-on-head retarded batshit INSANE after being totally socially isolated for almost 2 years?

there's a point at which pouty-lipped ethical shaming simply no longer applies, though ultimately Passengers is just a rom-com with a sci-fi background and rom-coms in the US have a really bad track record of portraying the shitty things men do to women on a regular basis as romantic gestures.
but it certainly wasn't any worse than basically anything any male has ever done in any rom-com in the history of ever, so at the very least the context around the cliche was a bit different.

which is actually slightly interesting in a very mildly subversive way wherein the whole backdrop of the film just served to rationalize a guy doing the kind of shit guys do to women in rom-coms and have a real reason for it besides "psychopathic behavior is romantic."

Yes, I do understand all of that. This is why I said his actions were understandable - it had to do with my understanding of them. And yes, I agree with you that the majority of rom-coms are filled with deviant sociopaths who need to be on some kind of watch list.

None of that changes the fact that it was a horrific thing for him to do and there's no cause to forgive him for it.
 
None of that changes the fact that it was a horrific thing for him to do and there's no cause to forgive him for it.
i think perhaps the main issue i have with the perspective is wondering why A. a fictional character needs to be forgiven for having not actually done a thing because they're imaginary, and B. why forgiving the character or not has any relevance to the rating you'd give the film as a viewing experience.

meh, whatever... this has already been a significant and pointless derail of this thread. i found Passengers to be a surprisingly tolerable rom-com and nothing more, so i'll say 6/10.

speaking of 6/10... ghost in the shell: 6/10
didn't really get the point of them changing the thematic and narrative focus on the movie, because the original worked perfectly well and is still relevant.
however, the shifted focus was equally poignant to the original so ultimately nothing was really lost, it was just changed in ways that felt very arbitrary.
 
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