John Cassavetes

(a) this looks good, I gotta get on this.

(b) it's crazy how much the way we communicate culture has changed. my impression is that the level of symbolism here is significantly lower than in any film that came out in 2020, that it was trying to represent "key games" that people play with each other...we should start a list of short clips that capture certain kinds of games. There's one that I'm pretty sure has been taken down everywhere, but it's key, from a crappy movie: 50 First Dates with Adam Sandler. It's the intro scene where he's taking some girl on a date and he's not interested in her, but she's interested in him. She's drinking this massive drink and making suggestive verbal moves and body language signals, and then he reveals that there's not alcohol in her drink. Her face "drops" into sobriety and she asks if they can go have sex anyway. Despite the ridiculousness of someone wanting to have sex with Adam Sandler, this notion that both people at the table were playing their "role" until the underlying excuse evaporated seems key.