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Goncharov - Blog Posts
“Of course we’re in love. That’s why I tried to shoot you.”
“If we were really in love, you wouldn’t have missed.”
genuinely one of the rawest lines in all of cinema holy FUCK
NYT article abt goncharov has comments like 'what is the purpose of this film's existence these kids are just lying' motherfucker how do you think our ancestors survived. how do you think folklore formed. culture. music. art. PURPOSE????? do you think everything must be commodified? sold? weighed to be valued? has the rot in your soul spread so far you cannot find value in anything not spoken in numbers??? it's FUN. THAT'S WHY. THE PURPOSE IS THE ACT, THE MESSAGE IS THE MEDIUM, THE SYMBOL IS THE STORY. it brings people joy for its mere existence and that IS the point. existence is its purpose alone
why did you people come up with russian names for what is supposed to be a movie set in italy. what was the thought process here. why does she sound like she walked out of a tolstoy novel
I think what I love most about current day tumblr and it’s obsession with things like Dracula daily and Goncharov is that it’s a reminder that the internet and social media can be fun. It’s not all algorithms and selling things to you based on data the company got from tracking all your movements. Sometimes it’s about coming together to have fun over something completely superfluous and stupid but ultimately meaningful because we gave it meaning.
not to Goncharov Post but I did go poking around about the real original movie and honestly it's p cool!
it's originally made in a mix of both Italian and Neapolitan, which is a separate language from Italian with a variety of dialects spread across Italy (though yes, centrally in Naples)
the movie came out in 2008 (not at ALL 1973) & did decently at film festivals! there's also a (apparently just as good, 58 episode) tv show also based on the same book
quite a few actual "Mafia" (Camorra) members acted in the movie (and TV show) and were later convicted of Hella Crimes. (Wikipedia has a section titled "Cast members arrested".) It's also alleged that the director (Matteo Garrone, not Scorcese, though their films have other similarities) had to pay 20,000 euros basically as "please don't burn us down" protection money
the movie & tv show are based on a nonfiction book published in 2006 (that you can read! for free! here!) about the actual organized crime in Naples, primarily the Casalesi clan of the Camorra, by a guy who went undercover to infiltrate them (in his late 20s!!)
Unlike the Japanese Yakuza (who reviewed Yakuza 3) with the similar book Tokyo Vice (by Jake Adelstein, who's 10 years older, published in 2009), the book author Roberto Saviano very much got death threats from the Casalesi and had to be under police protection with ten bodyguards at least from 2006-2014 (& possibly still is? I don't want to read Italian to find out)
the Italian govt gave the author police protection after not just the death threats but also an appeal started by six Nobel Peace Prize winners, including (again, all of this is true) Mikhail Gorbachev.
anyways here are your Peer-Reviewed Actually True Facts about Goncharov (1973, dir. Martin Scorcese) Gomorrah (2008, prod. Domenico Procacci).
At this rate, the meme is going to get us to actually make watch parties of Scorsese films and have analyze time afterward. Which I’m cool with, so please don’t pass me over on the invites.
sylvia plath, doomsday
dare i say goncharov vibes. dare i say clock motif
fuck it
heres a google doc editable by anyone. if it catches on, we can do this twitch plays pokemon style. lets go
I’ll stop goncharov posting soon but can I just say how fascinating it is to me that the genre we picked was cold war mafia movie? because if you had asked the internet a month ago what kind of film tumblr would invent, if tumblr were to invent a film, the answers would have been way more woke. a queer coming of age romance or a sexy heist with a super diverse cast or live action infinity train or whatever.
instead, the hive mind, the collective, latched on to something with much narrower boundaries, with stricter rules. no cold war mafia movie would have “good gay rep” or “a happy ending”, like you might expect tumblr to want. we want, we made, something rife with hidden truths, deception and manipulation, suppressed and sublimated emotions. it’s a movie rife with symbolism and suggestion, a text that needs to be unpicked and puzzled over, not one that spoonfeeds us a morally pure protagonist.
the website famous for our shithouse reading comprehension made this complex metatext about methods of interpreting an ambiguous artwork and that’s given me more hope for humanity than I’ve gotten from the internet in a long goddamn time
In a twist, a young director-to-be gets so enamoured of the Goncharov non-existing Tumblr inside joke that he decides to spend the rest of his life in creating a convincing version of a 1973 film nobody has ever directed. He studies the most cutting-edge deepfake technology, spends countless hours editing, hires unknown actors, gets a full soundtrack and, ultimately, produces Goncharov anonymously and fakes the "retrievement" of the original movie. The movie industry breaks. Scorsese, baffled, acknowledges it as its own. The timeline breaks, the universe collapses.
“nice shoes” “thanks they are Goncharov” is 2022′s “i like your shoelaces” “i stole them from the president”
“If it got me to you it was worth it.”
the way Katya’s lipstick stained Sofia’s lips like when Sofia’s wine stained Katya’s dress and how later they are both stained in blood screaming crying throwing up
guys guys i finally watched Goncharov so here's a quick thing
The most interesting thing to me thus far about this whole goncherov thing is that Tumblr has collectively constructed some pretty convincing side characters for this movie. Katya leaps off the page as this frustrated woman caged by her lack of autonomy, Sofia coyly plays both sides and acts above it all when really she's desperate for the same freedom Katya is. Ice Pick Joe is a less developed character who nonetheless acts as a stand in for the inescapable nature of cycles of violence. andrey, loyal to a fault, gets pulled deeper and deeper into goncherov's orbit until there's no way for him to make it out alive
and yet with all that I have ZERO sense of who goncherov is supposed to be himself. i've see a lot of stuff suggesting that the film is theoretically about loss, including the loss of one's identity, shown primarily through the way goncherov becomes unrecognizable to himself by the time of his death at the end of the film (seeing himself in a fractured mirror is a common motif). it's very interesting to me that we have a fine time coming up with a group of collective blorbos based on mafia movie tropes, but somehow the main character feels unknowable, to the degree that we had to make that one of the core themes of the film.
tumblr tuesday: the greatest mafia movie
There's so much lore. An original soundtrack (masterlist here, thanks to @thisisnotjuli). It all began with a pair of boots. Then, a movie poster by @beelzeebub:
And here's how it's going:
@ms-musers:
@lspy:
@monsterhospital:
@waldwynde:
@fireleaptfromhousetohouse:
@mjulmjul:
@marella-moon:
@holl-horse:
@bricktoygrapher:
@greenscircus:
@theshitpostcalligrapher:
@sweetdollface:
@onion-souls:
@onemagpie:
@gregspectations:
@mimiadraws:
@flurgburgler:
@shrugsinchinese:
@runfreebirdrun:
@when-sanpape-arts:
@marblellous:
@ynngaa:
@vanwizard:
@inthefallofasparrow:
@1percentcharge:
And lastly, before she was Wonderwoman, @reallyndacarter was "Dancer #2." She has kindly revealed this hitherto unreleased photo from the world premier of the film:
Obsessed with Goncharov? Need more? If you want to join in, please be sure to use the tags #goncharov (for posterity) and #unreality (for those who need it). Take care out there!