Sight & Sound

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jsteffe
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Re: Sight & Sound

#601 Post by jsteffe » Thu Dec 08, 2022 1:03 pm

It's a thoughtful article, thanks. I was delighted to see that Brody included Godard's King Lear on his list. It's not my favorite Godard, but it's vastly underappreciated and deserves to be restored and officially re-distributed.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Sight & Sound

#602 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Dec 08, 2022 1:10 pm

If I recall correctly, Brody has had that Godard on his Top Ten list forever- he's been its most vocal champion

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hearthesilence
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Re: Sight & Sound

#603 Post by hearthesilence » Thu Dec 08, 2022 1:17 pm

jsteffe wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 1:03 pm
It's a thoughtful article, thanks. I was delighted to see that Brody included Godard's King Lear on his list. It's not my favorite Godard, but it's vastly underappreciated and deserves to be restored and officially re-distributed.
Brody's also written quite a bit on it for the New Yorker, usually to urge people to catch a rare screening somewhere in NYC. (I want to say it's been booked for a screening or a series of screenings by four or five venues here in the past decade, which is probably far more than any other U.S. city.) He and Jonathan Rosenbaum have made a pretty convincing case for it, and what they've written could even help newcomers have a better understanding of Godard's later work as well.

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zedz
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Re: Sight & Sound

#604 Post by zedz » Thu Dec 08, 2022 3:04 pm

colinr0380 wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 5:49 am
zedz wrote:
Wed Dec 07, 2022 5:01 pm
swo17 wrote:
Wed Dec 07, 2022 4:12 pm
With all the foreign critics that were approached, I'm maybe a little surprised that there weren't even more left-field choices. Not only are all of these films available on Blu-ray or DVD, I own all but one of them!
Though as you and I know from the lists project, the more people that contribute, the more conventional / consensus / availability-driven the final list will be. A handful of passionate top ten votes for a brilliant obscurity will quickly be swamped by lots of people ranking an inoffensive standard at number 45. Which is why the claim that Sight and Sound were gaming the system by opening up the vote to hundreds more people from more diverse backgrounds is ridiculous. That's not how you rig a vote.
That makes me think that perhaps to increase the wild cards of film instead of increasing the voter base (though that's fine), the more important thing would be to up the number of films each voter is allowed to nominate, maybe from ten to fifteen or twenty. Then there would be more space for people to vote for the things they feel 'should' be there, plus devote an extra five slots to their favourites that only they may champion, which might lead to more left field films garnering a surprising amount of support.
Based on the lists project, my gut instinct (and swo may be in a position to back me up) is that this will just lead to greater homogeneity: the wild cards will get wilder, but the films everybody's seen will continue to accumulate more votes and push the more interesting choices off the aggregate list. In the long term, low rankings on lots of lists trump everything else. And I don't believe the Sight and Sound list is weighted (i.e. every film on a person's list gets one point), so that will just amplify the consensus effect.

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domino harvey
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Re: Sight & Sound

#605 Post by domino harvey » Thu Dec 08, 2022 3:29 pm

But homogeneity would actually reflect the broad favorites, the purpose of a “Best” list. You’re advocating for a model that now incentivizes being non-reflective.

I think it will be very interesting when we see what percentage of ballots actually voted for the films in the top 100, though with only ten slots, that doesn’t mean anything— I wouldn’t vote for Vertigo in my list but I support it more than anything else in the top 10, but you’d not know that looking at my list

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Sight & Sound

#606 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Dec 08, 2022 3:38 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 3:29 pm
I wouldn’t vote for Vertigo in my list but I support it more than anything else in the top 10, but you’d not know that looking at my list
Really, I would've bet everything on Singin’ in the Rain

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domino harvey
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Re: Sight & Sound

#607 Post by domino harvey » Thu Dec 08, 2022 3:45 pm

Ha, I forgot that cracked the top ten. Yes, I’d support that over Vertigo, but I think my point stands

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swo17
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Re: Sight & Sound

#608 Post by swo17 » Thu Dec 08, 2022 3:53 pm

zedz wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 3:04 pm
Based on the lists project, my gut instinct (and swo may be in a position to back me up) is that this will just lead to greater homogeneity: the wild cards will get wilder, but the films everybody's seen will continue to accumulate more votes and push the more interesting choices off the aggregate list. In the long term, low rankings on lots of lists trump everything else. And I don't believe the Sight and Sound list is weighted (i.e. every film on a person's list gets one point), so that will just amplify the consensus effect.
I've run some tests on this in the past based on lists submitted to me, and I remember getting the impression that expanding the number of picks on each list had about the same effect as getting lists from more people, namely, that well-known films that most people like if not love start to rise above the films that relatively few people like with a passion. (And with the latter, there's no real way to distinguish between a film that everyone else has seen and hates vs. one that few have had a chance to see. Should that metric make a difference?)

I remember Singin' in the Rain was ineligible for our last all-time list despite placing #6 for the 1950s because it had only one impassioned defender. Theoretically, does such a film belong on an all-time list? I don't know

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domino harvey
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Re: Sight & Sound

#609 Post by domino harvey » Thu Dec 08, 2022 4:24 pm

Our lists and Sight and Sound’s have different goals and different audiences. A list like this shouldn’t boost (coordinated or incidental) outliers beyond their fair overall value. Again, why is a potentially boring list most people agree with a bad thing when one is making a list of the films most widely considered to be “best”? Everyone hates the canon but I haven’t seen any convincing arguments against it in the terms of what it is

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Sight & Sound

#610 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Dec 08, 2022 4:54 pm

Right - it's funny, I doubt I'm alone in this experience (and no, sorry, I haven't been combing through every post in this melodramatic thread so apologies if this has been said already) but several of my biggest non-forum cinephile friends have been reaching out about Jeanne Dielman, extremely enthused, asking if it's worth watching. These people are pretty film-literate, but many have little patience for a 3.5 hour film filled with silence and inertia. It's been strange to go from a list where the top ten were all easy "Yes, don't even bother asking, you should obviously watch this" answers, to one where I have to send a long paragraph explaining why it's more complicated than that. I guess a reductive and silly way to say it is... when the number one movie on a (now faux-?)Greatest Popular List warrants an It's Complicated Facebook status qualifier, it's hard to give merit to, or even have consistent feelings about the list's own seemingly inconsistent internal logic, especially given that the next several titles are definite Yeses despite them not being my favorites either

For the record, I think Jeanne Dielman is a worthwhile and important film. I don't know if I "like"-like it, but it's a fine movie, and I own it because I actually plan to watch it for a third time someday. I'm not struggling with its placement on any personal level -I could care less- but it's weird when I get texts from folks thinking it's some buried treasure of "ultimate cinematic experience" akin to Citizen Kane and Vertigo and I start thinking of the Hold My Beer meme

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tenia
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Re: Sight & Sound

#611 Post by tenia » Thu Dec 08, 2022 5:04 pm

I had the same question asked at lunch : Is it any good ?

But on the other hand, most people around me, who aren't particularly "cinephiles", find Vertigo and Citizen Kane to be awful bores.

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swo17
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Re: Sight & Sound

#612 Post by swo17 » Thu Dec 08, 2022 5:15 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 4:24 pm
why is a potentially boring list most people agree with a bad thing when one is making a list of the films most widely considered to be “best”?
So what you're saying is you want #1 to be Shawshank Redemption? :P

If I were running things I would conduct multiple rounds of voting with lower-performing films eliminated each time so that all participants are having a say on the final rankings. I think that would help? Consider for instance Weerasethakul's top 10 posted earlier in the thread. None of his picks made the final top 100, so for purposes of the final rankings he might as well not even have voted. But say that was just his list for the first round (and the one that still gets published in the magazine), while the last list he submitted limited his choices to the films that made a provisional overall top 100. Or perhaps you could go even further and as a last step have each participant rank the provisional top 10 in order of preference. Obviously this approach would require a lot more tabulation, but you would think a lot of that could be automated by computer. Or if it had to be done manually, obviously I'm up for it

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Re: Sight & Sound

#613 Post by beamish14 » Thu Dec 08, 2022 5:37 pm

swo17 wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 5:15 pm
domino harvey wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 4:24 pm
why is a potentially boring list most people agree with a bad thing when one is making a list of the films most widely considered to be “best”?
So what you're saying is you want #1 to be Shawshank Redemption? :P


I am completely convinced that IMDB’s love affair with that film (I think it’s stayed in the top 10 since 1995) is that it makes a lot of men cry, and they believe that signifies great cinema

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Sight & Sound

#614 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Dec 08, 2022 6:57 pm

therewillbeblus wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 4:54 pm
Right - it's funny, I doubt I'm alone in this experience (and no, sorry, I haven't been combing through every post in this melodramatic thread so apologies if this has been said already) but several of my biggest non-forum cinephile friends have been reaching out about Jeanne Dielman, extremely enthused, asking if it's worth watching. These people are pretty film-literate, but many have little patience for a 3.5 hour film filled with silence and inertia. It's been strange to go from a list where the top ten were all easy "Yes, don't even bother asking, you should obviously watch this" answers, to one where I have to send a long paragraph explaining why it's more complicated than that. I guess a reductive and silly way to say it is... when the number one movie on a (now faux-?)Greatest Popular List warrants an It's Complicated Facebook status qualifier, it's hard to give merit to, or even have consistent feelings about the list's own seemingly inconsistent internal logic, especially given that the next several titles are definite Yeses despite them not being my favorites either

For the record, I think Jeanne Dielman is a worthwhile and important film. I don't know if I "like"-like it, but it's a fine movie, and I own it because I actually plan to watch it for a third time someday. I'm not struggling with its placement on any personal level -I could care less- but it's weird when I get texts from folks thinking it's some buried treasure of "ultimate cinematic experience" akin to Citizen Kane and Vertigo and I start thinking of the Hold My Beer meme
But is that so different from Ulysses placing first on the Modern Library's Top 100 novels of the 20th century? How many thousands of people went straight to that book after the list came out only to find themselves baffled and lost, unable to make heads or tales of the thing?

Ulysses deserves that top spot; it's a marvel of literature and a book I love dearly. But when people ask me if they ought to read Ulysses, it's not an unqualified 'Yes' like with many of the books just below it on the list. Ulysses is no small undertaking; it makes heavy demands on the reader, in fact requiring them to reorient their idea of what it means to read a novel, and to pay close attention to what they tend to let flow by them, the language. And it does demand a familiarity with philosophy, history, and literature that only very educated people these days would ever have. It's a "Yes, but..." answer from me, and generally involves me advising they read Portrait and Dubliners first, and tackle the big novel with a couple resources by their side (The Bloomsday Book and Ulysses Annotated).

This isn't a problem with the list or with the book. It's just the nature of demanding and difficult works of art. However worthwhile they are, you can't just throw them at anybody. Sometimes a great work of art demands a particularly adventurous and patient appreciator.

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Re: Sight & Sound

#615 Post by MichaelB » Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:10 pm

I have very fond memories of a university seminar on Ulysses where it rapidly became all too clear who'd lived with the book for some time and who'd tried to speed-read it over the previous weekend.

I'm all too frequently in the latter group, but for once I was in the former, which may be why I remember this so vividly.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Sight & Sound

#616 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:27 pm

Mr Sausage, that's an interesting point, and while there's no response that I can offer that really "differentiates" these examples in a concrete way- at least not to arrive at a definitive endpoint, since the inherent natures of the two mediums are already differentiated abstractly enough as apples and oranges- what comes to mind is rooted in the difference of how people tend to ingest the two.

When people read a book, regardless of how 'difficult' it is, they typically do so at their own pace, over a longer period of time than one sitting. This allows them to engage with it based on a variety of personal factors: If it's too difficult, maybe I'll reread a page several times, or look up a guide to help me better understand it, or take a break for a certain private period individualized to me. It might take me a few weeks, or a month, or a year to finish it; and that's all acceptable to me as the consumer- in fact, consuming literature has been granted a certain individualized elasticity from the moment I learned how to read. Watching movies, however, is slightly different. Most consumers expect to be able to watch a movie in one sitting, and if that's changed in the age of streaming, at least we grew up (maybe not the youngest generation...) with this expectation ingrained from family viewings or going to the theatre, as opposed to reading which was allotted flexibility from the start. "Re-winding" is not as much of a default impulse as "re-reading" if I didn't understand or catch something, not that I'm arguing this is what's 'right'. If something is "too difficult" or has stretching that are "boring" or alienating, the weight given to that piece of the novel isn't always as strong a reflection on the whole experience since we can implement a variety of interventions to engage on our own level. But sitting down for a movie carries a set of expectations that are a little different.

These expectations (sourced in external influence and internal impositions) are different for everybody, but I'd argue that they're (at least) slightly more restrictive than that of a novel. When you sit down to read the Greatest Novel Ever, you know you might be in for something fierce or dense and can plan accordingly, or pivot with some self-compassion and understanding if it's pitched off your level for a while. But when you sit down for the Greatest Movie Ever, and struggle to sit through the whole thing in one sitting, or not pick up your phone (which, especially in a film like Jeanne Dielman where the minute details are the definitive moments that make it 'rich' at all, is a big no-no) it violates what many people expect from not only movies but from themselves in regards to how they should be able to consume cinema. I don't necessarily think this is a counterargument to your point, but I do think the expectations we place upon ourselves, that are conditioned into us through the mediums, are quite different (and intrinsically carry different risks- if you check your phone while reading, you don't miss anything that would alter your perception of the entire work), and the relationship between how we identify as a viewer affects how we approach, understand, and appreciate the medium. For better or worse

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Sight & Sound

#617 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:45 pm

I don't know about all that. Ulysses frustrates most of the expectations readers bring to a novel. Not the same ones, but in the same way. One reason the majority of readers quit Ulysses within the first three chapters is because the book violates what they have learned to expect from a novel and also from themselves as readers. Far from your idealized portrait of the elastic and compassionate reader, when most people find themselves unable to comprehend even the basic events of a novel, they don't tend to exercise self-compassion, they just tend to feel stupid and get demoralized.

So Ulysses is a great example here. While what you're saying may be true if we were talking about, I don't know, War and Peace or The Magic Mountain, masterpiece-status books forbidding in a different way--Ulysses is a good analogous example for Jeanne Dielman for how they both frustrate a lifetime of expectations one brings to them on a first go, how they demand you ignore the way you'd viewed the medium up until that point, and for how you cannot just throw someone into it the way you can with Citizen Kane or The Great Gatsby.

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domino harvey
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Re: Sight & Sound

#618 Post by domino harvey » Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:54 pm

Are you arguing Jeanne Dielman contains a comparable amount of complexities and layers, though?

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Sight & Sound

#619 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Dec 08, 2022 8:09 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:54 pm
Are you arguing Jeanne Dielman contains a comparable amount of complexities and layers, though?
No.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Sight & Sound

#620 Post by hearthesilence » Thu Dec 08, 2022 8:53 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 8:09 pm
domino harvey wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:54 pm
Are you arguing Jeanne Dielman contains a comparable amount of complexities and layers, though?
No.
I think it was pretty clear that the comparison was based on how challenging both works would be in general to someone who typically read or viewed something far more conventional.

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Re: Sight & Sound

#621 Post by MichaelB » Thu Dec 08, 2022 9:44 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:45 pm
I don't know about all that. Ulysses frustrates most of the expectations readers bring to a novel. Not the same ones, but in the same way. One reason the majority of readers quit Ulysses within the first three chapters is because the book violates what they have learned to expect from a novel and also from themselves as readers. Far from your idealized portrait of the elastic and compassionate reader, when most people find themselves unable to comprehend even the basic events of a novel, they don't tend to exercise self-compassion, they just tend to feel stupid and get demoralized.
The Sirens chapter is an absolutely glorious piece of writing in every way, but until you pick up on what it's trying to do - namely, achieve numerous specific musical effects through prose - it's most likely near-incomprehensible at a first encounter.

But I was very glad that I'd read it when I came to write about the opening of Zoltán Huszárik's Szindbád for the Second Run DVD release, because he's doing something very similar to Joyce: opening with a series of near-abstract images whose sense only becomes clearer later on. And Szindbád is an excellent example of a film that's "difficult" by any normal yardstick, yet - like Ulysses - remarkably accessible once you devise a way in.

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Re: Sight & Sound

#622 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Dec 08, 2022 10:31 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:45 pm
I don't know about all that. Ulysses frustrates most of the expectations readers bring to a novel. Not the same ones, but in the same way. One reason the majority of readers quit Ulysses within the first three chapters is because the book violates what they have learned to expect from a novel and also from themselves as readers.
I’ve never read it so I can’t properly comment, but I was more trying to say that what might at least be expectedly unexpected in a best book might not hold the same for a movie. I’m clearly trying to engage in a more general conversation though and so that it’s going to jive with what is apparently uniquely specific about this novel. I kinda wanna read it now, though

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Sight & Sound

#623 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Dec 08, 2022 11:00 pm

therewillbeblus wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 10:31 pm
Mr Sausage wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:45 pm
I don't know about all that. Ulysses frustrates most of the expectations readers bring to a novel. Not the same ones, but in the same way. One reason the majority of readers quit Ulysses within the first three chapters is because the book violates what they have learned to expect from a novel and also from themselves as readers.
I’ve never read it so I can’t properly comment, but I was more trying to say that what might at least be expectedly unexpected in a best book might not hold the same for a movie. I’m clearly trying to engage in a more general conversation though and so that it’s going to jive with what is apparently uniquely specific about this novel. I kinda wanna read it now, though
I don't see how your distinctions would make any difference to my point. And I don't see how you could be speaking generally if your point is limited to details so specific to film that it renders an apt comparison to a Lit list irrelevant.

If Ulysses can both be indisputably great and a tough recommend, then Jeanne Dielman being a tough recommend does not, on its own, exclude the film from the realm of greatness nor call the Sight and Sound List into question. It's just the nature of tough, demanding experimental art. They're not great places to get your feet wet. But they can still reasonably top a list.

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Re: Sight & Sound

#624 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Dec 08, 2022 11:09 pm

They won't make any difference to your point. I ventured into talking about how our relationship to the distinct mediums might affect how much leeway we'd give the artworks and ourselves to ingest them based on something outside of the similarities between the texts themselves. You came back with what's specific about the novel and how that novel affects people; I'm talking about the variety of variables that affect us in consuming the mediums differently. I believe I talked about specifics across both, though, not just film. I tried to preface my initial response by saying you made a good point and I'm going in a different direction with what's popping into my head, but you don't want to engage with that, and that's fine, I don't blame you, because I went off topic into something I thought was broadly interesting but still related to the ideas of distinguishing our relationship between engaging with novels vs films. I thought I made that clear, so never mind.

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Re: Sight & Sound

#625 Post by DeprongMori » Fri Dec 09, 2022 2:58 am

While I appreciate the comment that Ulysses is a great novel despite the challenges it presents, as Jeanne Dielman is a great film despite the challenges it presents, and each leads one having to give a qualified response to the question “Should I read/watch this?”, the nature of the challenges are entirely different. Both undermine expectations of the medium, but while Ulysses creates a deliberately imposing set of intellectual challenges for an immense reading project (I love it, but could not have gotten through it without a guide), all Jeanne Dielman asks is 3.5 hours of patience. One needs no secondary sources to view it and engage it — it uses simple tools of shifting one’s direct perception of quotidian experience in a very accessible way to create a profound response in the viewer. (At least, it did for me.) That was its magic.

Joyce constructs a fortress where Akerman builds a bridge. From the basic description of the film, which I watched about six months ago, I did not expect to have the response I had.

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