easycure

scence=scene

One of my favorites from Argento... even with all its strengths and weaknesses (like the direction of the actors, which is clearly something that has never interested him), I believe the murder scene is exceptional, and overall I find it a great thriller, albeit shot in a somewhat amateurish way, as always.

But it's one of the passages I'm most proud of! :-D ..anyway, cutting it wouldn’t be enough, I would really have to rewrite it, but I repeat.. in the end, maybe not. It's fine as it is.. the beauty was in writing it.

My "thesis" was too long to get a response :-D ..this is the reply I received. I still haven't decided to summarize it, but who cares, really :-D

Jim! Of course! By now I have the Portnoy holy card with a little candle too :-D

So you’re a know-it-all? Tell us tell us :-)

thanks tinybanks :-) ..to save time, I just posted exactly what I had saved, the duration is indeed excessive, I didn’t take the time to rewatch it and summarize it. As for pretazzo, I didn't say they are the same either, but if you wave at me saying that the irony of Elio e le storie tese makes sense and has content, we just don’t see eye to eye on that. Moreover, regardless of their musical ruminations, they seem rather bleak to me. Do you remember the diatribe between Skiantos and Elio on music? I definitely vote for Skiantos :-)

Dream Theater, at their best, on the contrary, claim to resolve expression by crushing it and subjugating it to a few inevitable dogmas, hiding this enormous deficiency under a paroxysmal and grandiloquent form. From this perspective, a strong "clue" is represented by their ballads, which I believe instead serve as important evidence of their expressive nullity; significant because it is not limited to a single album or period, but continues throughout their pseudo-development over time. Now, the ballads of Dream Theater, the moment when their poetics are stripped down to the bone, tackle narration with greater communicative clarity, yet they are undeniably trivial, stale, truly worthy of penny pop bands; they approach melodicism with a blatant, nitpicky, and empty attitude, even more so showing a pretentious tendency to resolve any compositional issue with sophistication and polish. They still flaunt grandiose arrangements to “save themselves,” but even in topics as easy to reinterpret as the "melodic piece," Dream Theater still falls into the cheap citationism (“The Spirit Carries On,” for example, quotes the arrangements from “Dark Side of the Moon” by Pink Floyd sprinkled with some '80s glam street frivolities). The real expressive value of Dream Theater lies in this: in melodies worthy of being performed by Pausini or Tiziano Ferro. In conclusion, I spoke of one of the "worst aberrations" of rock because in everything I've written I see the antithesis of what is peculiar about rock's legacy as an art form: even in its most elaborate components, rock has never forgotten to be substantially universal art—a direct form that narrates and exposes itself as a cultural expression without social constraints, that knows how to be simple yet profound, and when not simple certainly communicative, even when elaborate, with a very strong “Dionysian,” primal component. Dream Theater completely deny all of this, pretending to “resolve themselves” in their formal competence, in a manner even more pathetic than bands like Elio e le Storie Tese, who at least have the intelligence not to take themselves seriously, and attempting to create art with a logic that is empty, superficial, false, decadent, and terribly postmodern in the worst sense of the term.

This is a blatant and unresolved contradiction: because if one could argue that such an approach is motivated by a substantially "jammy" mindset, it does not explain why every element within the piece, despite drawing on very different genres, has an extraordinarily formalized, precise, and unavoidable placement. Primarily, I refer to Labrie's singing, which, with its polished vocal cleanliness, always and only serves a pathetic function in the literal sense of the term, but also the use and position of the guitar solos, or the emphasizing entrances of the keyboards. Thus, beneath the veneer of continuous dynamic changes, theirs is a unilateral approach... maximum formal rigor, which manifests as a noticeable musical conservatism. Not only that; various dogmas and stylistic elements never conform as a style, also because wherever they attempt to integrate them with other references or devices, Dream Theater completely lack meaning: what sense does that Eastern-sounding riff in “Home” make? what sense do the funk inserts that occasionally peek out make? what sense does the explicit reference to Thrash they abuse in “Train of Thought” have? None, except for the pure self-referentiality of the device that exists as such. Therefore, gradually arriving at deeper issues of "substance," their pseudo-poetics are terribly pretentious and aesthetically hypocritical: because formally what they communicate is that they are a 360° group, a band that can express everything, and that not by chance chooses the most high-sounding format, moreover bolstering it with a far more paroxysmal and labyrinthine interpretation compared to the past, and demanding with this to "tell," that is, not at all making a "Zappian" discourse of meta-music, but remaining faithful to the classic "expressing" of art. It is precisely here, however, that they are deeply hypocritical; since their approach is never to elicit an emotion, but always to impose it. Through dogmas or through citation. Or even pretending to express an emotion with nonsensical devices that once again would claim to resolve expression solely through their existence (thus not only imposing an emotion but even imposing the perception of an emotion, evidently leveraging the lack of culture. As intellectuals, they seem to me on the level of the Harmony series books). From this perspective, they are the opposite of a group like Slint, who deconstruct the stylistic element and reformulate a style to serve an expression.

Aside from this, the point I most want to emphasize is how their approach completely lacks style: within their widespread citationism, the framework of their approach generally remains that of the progressive suite or rock ballad, with few and insignificant exceptions (the most "experimental" "six degrees of inner turbulence" is pathetic in its mimicry of more than one period of King Crimson, or "falling into infinity," even more banal in its reproduction of the atmospheric sound of the Floyd during the Parsons era), and yet in the suite format or long piece they bring no real novelty to what has already been expressed in progressive music except at the level of pure addition of other elements, such as some metal stylistic features (double bass, palm muting, 2/4 time signatures) or other hints that, as such, never truly contribute to the "poetics" of the group. In fact, each of their pieces, in disentangling and unfolding dynamic and rhythmic changes, never fails to rely on a few dogmas that cannot help but repeat themselves. And these dogmas, as such, cannot in definition constitute style: for while at the performance level each of them is clearly and consciously an educated and particularly technical musician, at the same time their interpretation is never personal, but always citational, relentlessly pursuing a "already said" in its frenetic mutations. For example, Petrucci is absolutely anonymous in the way he interprets the stylistic features of metal: if I listen to how he plays palm muting, I do not hear at all that expressivity, that precise purpose that someone like Hetfield might have. It is precisely this evident lack of purpose, other than that of the piece’s immediacy, that renders the performance of Dream Theater completely amorphous. And for this reason, their recourse to stylistic features does not involve reinterpretation, but in its superficial reliance on what a passage of a piece unfolds at the exact moment of its existence, it is merely to cite something that, through repetition and the unavoidable nature from piece to piece, constitutes nothing other than a dogma.