Promiseland

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That's an extra 40 minutes of walking, to skip uhhh... street with a sidewalk??

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Watched Black Swan tonight, what an incredibly uncomfortable movie. Apparently by the same director as Requiem for a Dream, and that tracks, though I certainly enjoyed Requiem more than Black Swan. Also apparently they filmed it on shoulder-mounted cameras without steadicam, for the vérité, and that made it very difficult to watch, but also difficult to watch for intentional storytelling reasons like self-harm and abuse &c. Yeah. A rough experience, can't particularly say I liked it but I can see why it was as popular and well-regarded as it was.

I did see somewhere someone being like 'it wasn't advertised as a psychological horror but the director considers it as such' and like??? This is possibly the most psychological horror psychological horror I've ever seen. It is 100% a psychological horror. I guess it would be disagreement on whether it's a horror or a thriller? But I would argue that psychological horror is a subgenre of psychological thriller, and so they share many elements -- and this falls well enough into the horror side of that category.

Anyway, as always that a movie made me uncomfortable I think says a fair amount about said movie, but again YMMV due to the camera work being a decent chunk of that. But also again, the body horror &c is very visceral, and the situations the protagonist is put in are pretty distressing. Definitely all of that overshadows the plot, but this is an instance, I think, where the plot is there to serve the themes and not the other way around. Kind of like Requiem, really.

Also apparently Black Swan has been getting compared to Perfect Blue, eliciting denials from the director that it was in any way an inspiration for the film, which I find incredibly funny what with the exact same thing happening with Requiem (though earlier in his career he admitted to 'paying homage' to Perfect Blue in some scenes). And, I mean, Black Swan is a movie about a performer experiencing severe psychological breakdowns from the stress of trying to be "perfect" at her role, so.

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That's an extra 40 minutes of walking, to skip uhhh... street with a sidewalk??

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None of the options are 'take the train and walk the rest of the way', under no conditions does google think you should walk the 0.3 miles from the station to any business on that stretch of road, instead you should walk 2 miles through the suburb behind it to approach from the other direction, or take a bus.

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Even entering my starting point as that train station and selecting 'walk' as the mode of transportation it still doesn't want you to do it

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OpenStreetMap gets it right, but OpenStreetMap doesn't have public transit options

Also in case anyone was wondering, google does do it for the return trip, too

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I should definitely be going to sleep and not be trying to figure out whatever the fuck it is google has going on