“Rollerball” and “A Clockwork Orange” are my 2 favorite movies depicting violence as an art form. Surprising sound track music in both cases, Bach in Rollerball, Bethoven in ACO.
I saw it on TV in the '70s, so I would have been younger than that - probably 9 or 10. This is an all time favorite movie of mine. Norman Jewison is the journeyman director of all journeyman directors. RIP.
Listened to this yesterday went by the thrift store and I find a lightly tattered copy of Rollerball MGM dvd can't wait to watch it for the first time.
Early on Tarantino says he got the impression that the future society of Rollerball had no working class, that everyone was bathed in luxury, but I got just the opposite impression from the film. We see plenty of regular people at the actual rollerball games (wearing t shirts and looking rather schlubby). The arenas themselves are utilitarian and grungy. What we see outside the arena contrasts heavily with the sport itself: the upper echelons that Tarantino is describing aren't dingy, utilitarian, or populated with the mundanes of society:; no it's the deletants and executives and sports stars that fill this world of glittering, shimmering, computerized plenty.
He is comparing it to 1984 - where everyone is "grungy" and everything is dilapidated, there is a state of constant war. Here, there is no more war, crime, want, even human instinct for violence is strictly rationed out to everyone through rollerball - and there's no individualism. Failing to reference the obvious is podcast's biggest flaw. All those things Tarantino "doesn't buy" are because all the time talking about the movie they are ignoring the idea that what they are watching is a society where individualism is the main thing that is being suppressed. I.e. A right-wing-worldview-based idea of communism. Not corporatism they are being presented as that world's form of government. Corporations here might as well be ministries. Jonathan E. is just another version of Harrison Bergeron, only instead of being too smart and living in a satire - he is too strong and too stubborn in a world that takes itself too seriously. And since it is not a corporatocracy but communism, they can't "sell" Jonathan cause they are not a business. Instead, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" makes Jonathan's abilities and needs a danger to the society - he is showing that he's NOT equal to others, he's NOT a team player, he's NOT listening to rules, his needs are NOT being met - and still he's winning. Doing only thing he knows - violence. He's literally showing this calm and docile world where everything is "rational" and rationed out that violence and murder are not just a path to victory but victory in itself. THAT'S why he's dangerous. He's not escaping the Matrix - he's telling everyone to burn it all down. Screw the forever peace. We're all just savages deep down. Which everyone is secretly eager to do. That's why despite having it all they all drool about a tool of destruction - a single pistol, a souvenir of some long past war. Basically, the movie argues that there can be no peace and harmony cause we are all cats. You can't herd us and we need to murder.
I was 11 in 1975. This was the first R rated movie I ever saw. To me, the sport concept was an amalgamation of the NFL, roller derby and motorcycles, all childhood influences of mine. After I watched a television segment about the film on ABC's Wide World of Sports, I begged my mother to take me to see it. The chilling fade-in featuring J.S. Bach's Toccata in D minor kickstarted my love for classical music.
@@mustardegg2 they tried to blood sport football and failed. i think the population is still too civilized to accept gladiatorial or blood sports outside of any form of boxing, wrestling, and hand to hand martial arts.
I always got the impression that the game was more than just entertainment - that it replaced war, and the countries that won and lost gained or suffered real consequences. Johnathon threatened the world balance.
Key idea: suffered real consequences. QT keeps harping on the fact that a typical corporation would exploit his success. He is not using his imagination.
To me, the sport in Rollerball, was just a futuristic version of the old Roman Empire Gladiatorial contests, and the Corporation’s that ran society in the film, were similar to the Roman Senate.
@14:00 or so, Tarantino accidentally taps into the modern paradox of corporatocracy (and don't think we're not already in it) -- Just as in the story, the corporations no longer need to seek profit (or so they think) because they already rule -- they don't give the people what they want anymore, they give the people what the ruling class thinks they need. These aren't 20th century corporations -- 21 century and beyond, the corporations in this movie/story have accurately forecasted the dystopian present, which is that corporations no longer are beholden to their "customers," because they already own the market. You only please the crowd if you need to. The corporations in Rollerball are certainly closer to socialist dictatorships masquerading with the names of old capitalism. Tarantino's naivete here mirrors my own frustrations now (circa 2024, but also earlier) -- "What is going on? Aren't companies supposed to respond to customer demand instead of shaming us all and trying to dictate new products, religions, and cultural mores to us?" And that's his blind spot here, the same one I have/had -- the force of "gravity" until this point was the corporate chase for the customer dollar -- but in an oligopoly forged by corporate warfare and government takeover, a corporation is really just an antiquated label or euphemism. Rollerball shows how, in trying to dictate culture and entertainment in the face of popular opposition (in the story), the powers that be have turned "we know best" into a gradually stifling nightmare of human mediocrity. Jonathan scoring that final point signals his refusal to go along with the change. "This is still a game, not the gladiator spectacle of pointless annihilation, nihilism and hopelessness. I'm hope, and I'm playing the game still." Compare this to companies now -- certain studios (e.g. ones that start with a D) cranking out project after project, doomed to financial failure, chasing certain messages and narratives, in the face of market rejection and in defiance of business logic and fiduciary duties to shareholders. Our corporations are well on their way to the world of Rollerball -- they're already shaming us, pushing medical decisions/whims/fads on us, and other ideas not-tested, not agreed on, and ones that have global consequences to our society and governments, none of which they are prepared to take responsibility for. Ask yourself why so many billboards and ads in the U.S. for entertainment products have guns plastered all over them, and then look at our society, and the one we're exporting globally. That's Rollerball. Sorry Tarantino, you're wrong for the right reasons. The world isn't logical, at least not in a beneficial way for most of humanity. Not lately. Maybe almost never. Regarding some of the points nearer to the end -- the party showed how disposable the people, symbolized by the trees they were burning, are to the upper class -you're easily replaced, except for that darn Jonathan who just won't go away... It also of course commented on human fascination with violence and destruction -- perhaps the real point was that these people now feel like they have meaningless lives and are showing the inevitable result of loss of meaning in the human experience -- a version back to a violent, brainless animal. Perhaps Idiocracy is actually a sequel to this world -- once there was no point in being intelligent, intelligence became the realm of the privileged class -- and then no one.
I think James Caan is very convincing in this movie, and the action/roller ball scenes are really outstanding, just the one scene with the omniscient computer refusing (or failing) to give information is a bit silly, but generally not a bad movie at all.
I'm wondering how that public intellectual's trope from the nineties (?) has aged. "Huxley was right" posited in a false dichotomy that Brave New World was more precient than 1984. 20+ years into the internet age and Orwell is looking as relevant as ever. There isn't the problem of hard baked strata that BNW depicts, for one. Everyone can self publish and whore themselves out, the illiterates can type, etc, and liberal vs conservative billionaires with their corporate selves' cousins in the west are at war for us consumers other cultures' super rich in the east and south who want more for themselves. Neither of those authors of fiction were more accurate about what was to come probably than the historians of the time. The film Idiocracy was as precient as either of those is distilling our dystopic threat.
Seems like a missed opportunity to point out that without this movie there wouldn't be a Hunger Games series. Right down to the executives' fancy clothes on the poster. Cool connections to The Prisoner though.
Both The Hunger Games AND Battle Royale are directly inspired by Stephen King's The Bachman Books - same place as The Running Man. Both Collins and Takami have admitted reading The Bachman Books, which contain all the major and many minor elements later found in their books and other media - only they are dispersed through three different stories. Rage, The Long Walk and The Running Man - Roadwork is in a completely different genre and clearly made little impact on anyone. What is missing is the world building. Stories are very memorable but there's no explanation for how the world got to the place that kids are volunteering for a long march only one may survive, why is it being televised, why are people cheering them on... in The Long Walk. Same for The Running Man, with Rage anchoring the whole thing around teenagers and classroom drama - and murder an violence done by kids. Thus, both Collins and Takami invented a very deliberate world, with maps and all, to make sense of the story you'd get in your head a morning after going through The Bachman Books before sleep, while having some cheese and wine.
"Corporations acting like dystopian governments" - Qentin Tarantino - this is absolutely playing out today. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Disney - pretty much govern everything society says and does.
Umm .. "bathed in luxury"? The crowds that fill the Rollerball auditoriums, in t-shirts & jeans .. are living in the lap of luxury? Obviously, in the society being depicted, there are very wealthy members of the Executive-class; but, clearly, not everyone belongs to that affluent group. What a bizarre interpretation of a film, which so clearly portrays such a distinct economic divide, and the authoritarian conventions which arise from such a divide.
At the 8:00 mark one of the commenters states the post-Mao communist leadership of China "allowed" a Lenin-esque style N.E.P. to make it "work" - this is nonsense and "history" for the mentally challenged. The country very closely came to civil war during the monstrous Cultural Revolution (Mao's survival reflex after starving over 40 million Chinese to death in the second "Great Leap Forward"), during that chaos people in some provinces began doing what people do: trading goods and forming markets. It was beyond the control of the govt and was a bottom-up as opposed to top-down transition.
More like turning to cannibalism than capitalism. And NOT due to a famine. "Forming" anything in Mao's China without government say-so was NOT a thing one would get to do. Unless it was some kind of a cult-like movement praising Mao and his leadership - as in the mango cult. True story. No spoilers. It gets crazy really fast and just goes on from there, somehow managing to be more insane than the cannibalism.
@@d3nza482 @d3nza482 Black Markets had sprung up everywhere, same as all these so-called "communist" countries. It was the thriving, sophisticated black market propaganda officials stumbled across in Yan'an in December 1974 that shocked the govt, Deng didn't even have the reins of power for another four years Red, get your history straight. One village abandoned its commune, and became a pig farm. In order to fulfill their quota of grain deliveries to the state, the villagers used the profit from the pork to buy grain while local cadres, instead of enforcing the planned economy as they were supposed to, sided with the villagers and supervised the entire operation. Entire communes in Luonan took it upon themselves to divvy up all collective assets and hand responsibility for production back to individual families - essentially DE-COMMUNE-IZE. They began cultivating crops that performed well on the black market. Some rented out their plots and went to the city instead, working in underground factories and sending back remittances to the village. It's just the reverse of what you say too, Deng tried to restore the planned economy, they silently said F YOU and instead in the winter of 1982-83, the people's communes were finally officially dissolved. It was the end of an era. It was bottom up, economic revolution from below. Books and dissertations have been written on it.
I thought,for sure,that they would mention the theme of "the individual vs the company/group/corporation"."Bigger than the game" is analogous to the individual having a successful uprising over the corporate structure...to which is what the higher ups are attempting to prevent. The higher ups don't want the masses to get any ideas that the individual has any power at all to achieve individual identity/success...so they distract their senses with a destructive game in order to quash any hope that the masses may have.
YES my favourite ever Movie. I've been justified after all this time. "We had a choice a long time ago between having 'all those nice things' or 'freedom'. Of course... they chose 'comfort'.
Why the executive says Johnathon must retire is because he cannot be bigger than the game. Who controls the game? The executives. No person or game is bigher than the executives. Control. It's about control.
No war, no poverty, no want. Everyone’s needs are met. We keep describing the world of Rollerball as a dystopia, but is that really correct? Especially when most people just want their bread and circuses. Seems to me that, at least for those people, it’s a corporate utopia. It’s not 1984, it’s Brave New World with Rollerball.
I'm way too stupid to see anything but a strong, exhilarating sc-fi seventies movie. It's dystopian for Jonathan E because he's being shit on. Oh ; I don't know but I love this film. Almost just for Thomas Albinoni's music. Oh and filmed in Munich. Cool place, cool sets. I loathe Moonpie (a prick) Love JE.
Rollerball was stupid and I knew it as a kid. It was a movie that some guy who saw Roller derby decided would make a good movie and they reverse engineered it. Logan's Run is another movie in this genre from this period though West World is probably better. That and Silent Running. You guys are reviewing the wrong films. Moonraker is garbage, except it does have great effects.
Logan's Run" is such a bore of a movie, with stereotypes rather than characters, lame and outdated Action and SFX. the only good thing is the idea behind the movie, but the film does not deliver. "Silent Running" is a far better one.
a shame about this great podcast is that they constantly cut to her. she is really only there because of nepotism, has nothing interesting to add and only disturbs the flow.
It seems so. I don’t think he did any research for this and just worked from memory of the past. I think he just expected to go there and everyone give it a beating…
I can imagine that Rollerball, Soylent Green and Logan's Run are all set in the same universe and show different stages in that worlds development.
Good observation !
@@danielspain7231 You´ve never thought of that before ???
And Deathrace 2000!
And Muppets Take Manhattan!
“Rollerball” and “A Clockwork Orange” are my 2 favorite movies depicting violence as an art form. Surprising sound track music in both cases, Bach in Rollerball, Bethoven in ACO.
Vastly underrated film that taught me a lot because at the age I first saw this film I was also asking questions and not getting many answers.
Saw Rollerball when I was 12. It rocked my world. Great movie.
i was 14 lol. but me too m8
I WAS 18 or 19, if it came out those years. Sqw it in the theater.
I saw it on TV in the '70s, so I would have been younger than that - probably 9 or 10. This is an all time favorite movie of mine. Norman Jewison is the journeyman director of all journeyman directors. RIP.
Listened to this yesterday went by the thrift store and I find a lightly tattered copy of Rollerball MGM dvd can't wait to watch it for the first time.
I was 15 when Rollerball came out... and it was a mind blower... it opened my mind up to what to watch out for as the 21st century loomed ahead
Early on Tarantino says he got the impression that the future society of Rollerball had no working class, that everyone was bathed in luxury, but I got just the opposite impression from the film. We see plenty of regular people at the actual rollerball games (wearing t shirts and looking rather schlubby). The arenas themselves are utilitarian and grungy. What we see outside the arena contrasts heavily with the sport itself: the upper echelons that Tarantino is describing aren't dingy, utilitarian, or populated with the mundanes of society:; no it's the deletants and executives and sports stars that fill this world of glittering, shimmering, computerized plenty.
He is comparing it to 1984 - where everyone is "grungy" and everything is dilapidated, there is a state of constant war.
Here, there is no more war, crime, want, even human instinct for violence is strictly rationed out to everyone through rollerball - and there's no individualism.
Failing to reference the obvious is podcast's biggest flaw. All those things Tarantino "doesn't buy" are because all the time talking about the movie they are ignoring the idea that what they are watching is a society where individualism is the main thing that is being suppressed.
I.e. A right-wing-worldview-based idea of communism. Not corporatism they are being presented as that world's form of government. Corporations here might as well be ministries.
Jonathan E. is just another version of Harrison Bergeron, only instead of being too smart and living in a satire - he is too strong and too stubborn in a world that takes itself too seriously.
And since it is not a corporatocracy but communism, they can't "sell" Jonathan cause they are not a business.
Instead, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" makes Jonathan's abilities and needs a danger to the society - he is showing that he's NOT equal to others, he's NOT a team player, he's NOT listening to rules, his needs are NOT being met - and still he's winning. Doing only thing he knows - violence.
He's literally showing this calm and docile world where everything is "rational" and rationed out that violence and murder are not just a path to victory but victory in itself.
THAT'S why he's dangerous. He's not escaping the Matrix - he's telling everyone to burn it all down. Screw the forever peace. We're all just savages deep down.
Which everyone is secretly eager to do. That's why despite having it all they all drool about a tool of destruction - a single pistol, a souvenir of some long past war.
Basically, the movie argues that there can be no peace and harmony cause we are all cats. You can't herd us and we need to murder.
What makes you think they work?
It really isn't clear that we're seeing the entire society just the parts Johnathan moves around in.
Agreed. I just wrote as much before scrolling down, and finding your comment.
@@d3nza482 did you just call me a cat ? I'm not a cat. at least I don't think I'm a cat. Definitely not a cat.
The computer above the corporate class was a great notice.
I was 11 in 1975. This was the first R rated movie I ever saw. To me, the sport concept was an amalgamation of the NFL, roller derby and motorcycles, all childhood influences of mine. After I watched a television segment about the film on ABC's Wide World of Sports, I begged my mother to take me to see it. The chilling fade-in featuring J.S. Bach's Toccata in D minor kickstarted my love for classical music.
At the start of the film it is the corporate anthem at the end of the film cooperate hymn.
One thing that really stood out for me is that no one is allowed to be better or bigger then the Game . That is 1984 . Thank you have a good day
i surprised that no one upgraded roller derby to rollerball. it would be a multi-billion venture.
I think they did. It was chaos.
@@mustardegg2 they tried to blood sport football and failed. i think the population is still too civilized to accept gladiatorial or blood sports outside of any form of boxing, wrestling, and hand to hand martial arts.
I always got the impression that the game was more than just entertainment - that it replaced war, and the countries that won and lost gained or suffered real consequences. Johnathon threatened the world balance.
Agreed. Rollerball represents a stand-in for George Orwell's "Two Minutes of Hate."
Key idea: suffered real consequences. QT keeps harping on the fact that a typical corporation would exploit his success. He is not using his imagination.
Saw this on TV when I was 11 or 12. Still love it to this day.
To me, the sport in Rollerball, was just a futuristic version of the old Roman Empire Gladiatorial contests, and the Corporation’s that ran society in the film, were similar to the Roman Senate.
except that in Rollerball, the game(s) replaced war. Not so in Roman Empire times
"Jonathon Jonathon Jonathon"
Agreed.
The movie was originally developed as a sequel to Thief and was actually released as Thief 2 in some territories.
Rollerball is probably Claus Schwab’s favourite movie
You will eat ze bugs and be happy for it.
@@o74769 🤣🤣
Yassssssssssss.
@14:00 or so, Tarantino accidentally taps into the modern paradox of corporatocracy (and don't think we're not already in it) -- Just as in the story, the corporations no longer need to seek profit (or so they think) because they already rule -- they don't give the people what they want anymore, they give the people what the ruling class thinks they need. These aren't 20th century corporations -- 21 century and beyond, the corporations in this movie/story have accurately forecasted the dystopian present, which is that corporations no longer are beholden to their "customers," because they already own the market. You only please the crowd if you need to. The corporations in Rollerball are certainly closer to socialist dictatorships masquerading with the names of old capitalism.
Tarantino's naivete here mirrors my own frustrations now (circa 2024, but also earlier) -- "What is going on? Aren't companies supposed to respond to customer demand instead of shaming us all and trying to dictate new products, religions, and cultural mores to us?" And that's his blind spot here, the same one I have/had -- the force of "gravity" until this point was the corporate chase for the customer dollar -- but in an oligopoly forged by corporate warfare and government takeover, a corporation is really just an antiquated label or euphemism. Rollerball shows how, in trying to dictate culture and entertainment in the face of popular opposition (in the story), the powers that be have turned "we know best" into a gradually stifling nightmare of human mediocrity. Jonathan scoring that final point signals his refusal to go along with the change. "This is still a game, not the gladiator spectacle of pointless annihilation, nihilism and hopelessness. I'm hope, and I'm playing the game still."
Compare this to companies now -- certain studios (e.g. ones that start with a D) cranking out project after project, doomed to financial failure, chasing certain messages and narratives, in the face of market rejection and in defiance of business logic and fiduciary duties to shareholders. Our corporations are well on their way to the world of Rollerball -- they're already shaming us, pushing medical decisions/whims/fads on us, and other ideas not-tested, not agreed on, and ones that have global consequences to our society and governments, none of which they are prepared to take responsibility for. Ask yourself why so many billboards and ads in the U.S. for entertainment products have guns plastered all over them, and then look at our society, and the one we're exporting globally. That's Rollerball. Sorry Tarantino, you're wrong for the right reasons. The world isn't logical, at least not in a beneficial way for most of humanity. Not lately. Maybe almost never.
Regarding some of the points nearer to the end -- the party showed how disposable the people, symbolized by the trees they were burning, are to the upper class -you're easily replaced, except for that darn Jonathan who just won't go away... It also of course commented on human fascination with violence and destruction -- perhaps the real point was that these people now feel like they have meaningless lives and are showing the inevitable result of loss of meaning in the human experience -- a version back to a violent, brainless animal.
Perhaps Idiocracy is actually a sequel to this world -- once there was no point in being intelligent, intelligence became the realm of the privileged class -- and then no one.
Standard English: 'totalitarian' (5 syllables). Tarantino English: 'totarian' (3 syllables).
Well, you guys convinced me to give it a second look. Got my copy coming to me from eBay, seven dollars.
I have put a lot of thought into this, I want to write a TV script for it.
I have thought about that too. It is ripe for it..
I think James Caan is very convincing in this movie, and the action/roller ball scenes are really outstanding, just the one scene with the omniscient computer refusing (or failing) to give information is a bit silly, but generally not a bad movie at all.
it feels like a sport movie as much as sci-fi dystopia. That's the most unusual, genius achievement here. Top 5 easy.
I just realized the poster is very similar to the one for 'The Running Man,' and then I realized the movie itself shares many similarities.
Saying it reminds you of the Atari 2600 cartridge art was perfect
It's more Brave New World than 1984.
I'm wondering how that public intellectual's trope from the nineties (?) has aged. "Huxley was right" posited in a false dichotomy that Brave New World was more precient than 1984. 20+ years into the internet age and Orwell is looking as relevant as ever. There isn't the problem of hard baked strata that BNW depicts, for one. Everyone can self publish and whore themselves out, the illiterates can type, etc, and liberal vs conservative billionaires with their corporate selves' cousins in the west are at war for us consumers other cultures' super rich in the east and south who want more for themselves. Neither of those authors of fiction were more accurate about what was to come probably than the historians of the time. The film Idiocracy was as precient as either of those is distilling our dystopic threat.
@@SFtastemakers Both Orwell and Huxley were right, but Rollerball is more 1970s Huxley than Orwell. North Korea is Orwell made real.
It is so true, in my gradually failing memory, there are scenes from The Sleeper that I thought were from Rollerball and vice versa!
Watched this film recently again. And how prophetic it was.
Seems like a missed opportunity to point out that without this movie there wouldn't be a Hunger Games series. Right down to the executives' fancy clothes on the poster. Cool connections to The Prisoner though.
Both The Hunger Games AND Battle Royale are directly inspired by Stephen King's The Bachman Books - same place as The Running Man.
Both Collins and Takami have admitted reading The Bachman Books, which contain all the major and many minor elements later found in their books and other media - only they are dispersed through three different stories. Rage, The Long Walk and The Running Man - Roadwork is in a completely different genre and clearly made little impact on anyone.
What is missing is the world building. Stories are very memorable but there's no explanation for how the world got to the place that kids are volunteering for a long march only one may survive, why is it being televised, why are people cheering them on... in The Long Walk. Same for The Running Man, with Rage anchoring the whole thing around teenagers and classroom drama - and murder an violence done by kids.
Thus, both Collins and Takami invented a very deliberate world, with maps and all, to make sense of the story you'd get in your head a morning after going through The Bachman Books before sleep, while having some cheese and wine.
All of the dystopean stories originated from We by russian author zamyatin.
Is Tarantino saying "You will own nothing and be happy".
It's actually scary the road that society going down and this movie was ahead of its time.
"Corporations acting like dystopian governments" - Qentin Tarantino - this is absolutely playing out today. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Disney - pretty much govern everything society says and does.
Just like Carnegie, JP Morgan, Hearst, Rothschild, etc.
You let them.
No, you do
...in the most passive way possible. You have choice. People just choose to be cattle
Tarantino just does not buy the premise as realistic, which indicates that he has minimal awareness of how the large corporates behave today.
Avary's daughter knows her stuff. Very impressive.
Yeah...if I offed someone with my car...I wouldn't be able to spend time with my daughter either.
Avary's twenty something daughter understood the film better than QT.
Umm .. "bathed in luxury"?
The crowds that fill the Rollerball auditoriums, in t-shirts & jeans .. are living in the lap of luxury?
Obviously, in the society being depicted, there are very wealthy members of the Executive-class; but, clearly, not everyone belongs to that affluent group.
What a bizarre interpretation of a film, which so clearly portrays such a distinct economic divide, and the authoritarian conventions which arise from such a divide.
Ummmmmmmmm!!!
Yeah, I got the impression there were onl y two classes Ultra wealthy and working class.
From a time when people were inventive and creative
At the 8:00 mark one of the commenters states the post-Mao communist leadership of China "allowed" a Lenin-esque style N.E.P. to make it "work" - this is nonsense and "history" for the mentally challenged. The country very closely came to civil war during the monstrous Cultural Revolution (Mao's survival reflex after starving over 40 million Chinese to death in the second "Great Leap Forward"), during that chaos people in some provinces began doing what people do: trading goods and forming markets. It was beyond the control of the govt and was a bottom-up as opposed to top-down transition.
More like turning to cannibalism than capitalism. And NOT due to a famine.
"Forming" anything in Mao's China without government say-so was NOT a thing one would get to do.
Unless it was some kind of a cult-like movement praising Mao and his leadership - as in the mango cult. True story. No spoilers. It gets crazy really fast and just goes on from there, somehow managing to be more insane than the cannibalism.
Also, "white cat - black cat" liberalization didn't take place until Deng Xiaoping's reforms. So, again, no "secret" markets or trade.
@@d3nza482 @d3nza482 Black Markets had sprung up everywhere, same as all these so-called "communist" countries. It was the thriving, sophisticated black market propaganda officials stumbled across in Yan'an in December 1974 that shocked the govt, Deng didn't even have the reins of power for another four years Red, get your history straight.
One village abandoned its commune, and became a pig farm. In order to fulfill their quota of grain deliveries to the state, the villagers used the profit from the pork to buy grain while local cadres, instead of enforcing the planned economy as they were supposed to, sided with the villagers and supervised the entire operation.
Entire communes in Luonan took it upon themselves to divvy up all collective assets and hand responsibility for production back to individual families - essentially DE-COMMUNE-IZE. They began cultivating crops that performed well on the black market. Some rented out their plots and went to the city instead, working in underground factories and sending back remittances to the village.
It's just the reverse of what you say too, Deng tried to restore the planned economy, they silently said F YOU and instead in the winter of 1982-83, the people's communes were finally officially dissolved. It was the end of an era.
It was bottom up, economic revolution from below. Books and dissertations have been written on it.
To like Death Race 2000 better than Rollerball... I like QT's cinema better than his taste in cinema.
The danger is when people can't or won't look outside of the box. When AI becomes mind control and the world looks more like panopticon.
The majority unquestioningly toil unaware there is even a box and seemingly don't possess the ability to understand there are alternatives.
I thought,for sure,that they would mention the theme of "the individual vs the company/group/corporation"."Bigger than the game" is analogous to the individual having a successful uprising over the corporate structure...to which is what the higher ups are attempting to prevent.
The higher ups don't want the masses to get any ideas that the individual has any power at all to achieve individual identity/success...so they distract their senses with a destructive game in order to quash any hope that the masses may have.
Great Talk
Great Movie! ABC played this movie a couple times a year at 4pm on Their afternoon movie show
Channel 7. The 4:30 Movie. This was played during sci-fi week.
YES my favourite ever Movie. I've been justified after all this time.
"We had a choice a long time ago between having 'all those nice things' or 'freedom'. Of course... they chose 'comfort'.
Why the executive says Johnathon must retire is because he cannot be bigger than the game. Who controls the game? The executives. No person or game is bigher than the executives. Control. It's about control.
No war, no poverty, no want. Everyone’s needs are met. We keep describing the world of Rollerball as a dystopia, but is that really correct? Especially when most people just want their bread and circuses. Seems to me that, at least for those people, it’s a corporate utopia. It’s not 1984, it’s Brave New World with Rollerball.
Yet society has laser death ball guns.
I’m a Rollerball obsessive.
I'm way too stupid to see anything but a strong, exhilarating sc-fi seventies movie. It's dystopian for Jonathan E because he's being shit on. Oh ; I don't know but I love this film. Almost just for Thomas Albinoni's music. Oh and filmed in Munich. Cool place, cool sets. I loathe Moonpie (a prick) Love JE.
HOU MAD
youtube or youtalk, I don't do podcasts
This is just a Brave New World variant
Rollerball was stupid and I knew it as a kid. It was a movie that some guy who saw Roller derby decided would make a good movie and they reverse engineered it. Logan's Run is another movie in this genre from this period though West World is probably better. That and Silent Running. You guys are reviewing the wrong films. Moonraker is garbage, except it does have great effects.
Logan's Run" is such a bore of a movie, with stereotypes rather than characters, lame and outdated Action and SFX. the only good thing is the idea behind the movie, but the film does not deliver. "Silent Running" is a far better one.
@@ronaldgonko4653 OK, I didn't mean to say it was the best movie in the genre.
why is she allowed to talk?
She brought up better points than QT did…
The remake was way better. 🤣😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
a shame about this great podcast is that they constantly cut to her. she is really only there because of nepotism, has nothing interesting to add and only disturbs the flow.
As is the case with a lot of these podcasts. A woman who detracts from everything let alone not adding anything
Her point about the computer over corporate was a very solid addition.
She seemed to know the film better than QT…
Real simple: One man against the system.
It's a wee bit too intellectual for an American with limited and skewed version film as social commentary beyond Grindhouse.
It seems so. I don’t think he did any research for this and just worked from memory of the past. I think he just expected to go there and everyone give it a beating…
Yee-haw, sam peckinpah, chocktaw frimpong.