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Post by guttersnipe on Aug 1, 2020 15:00:54 GMT -8
Re-upping this from the Film Recommendations three years later to say that I finally finished Schindler's List. I basically watched the first hour in 2017, the second in 2018, and the third in 2020. (I don't think it was on Netflix in 2019.) It's an excellent film, but as you can guess from my slow and delayed viewing, it's not one I'm eager to revisit. Well then, I think you should tackle Shoah next, and tell us how you got on in 2030.
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 1, 2020 19:47:59 GMT -8
I will have to remember that one for next year (and indeed, for several years after that). BoJack Seasons 5 and 6 were the MeToo miniseries I never knew I needed. Probably the best piece of media that's addressed it, too (Season 5 was written before it, but still). BoJack has certainly had the best and most effective MeToo commentary I've seen in pop-culture, though I've heard some good things about how The Assistant and The Morning Show address it as well. (Always a popcorn-fest when Hollywood critiques itself.) Bombshell doesn't really work as commentary, since it wants to depict Fox News as both a toxic environment and a site of Real Lasting Change, and isn't smart or nuanced enough to strike that balance.
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Post by Jay on Aug 9, 2020 11:21:57 GMT -8
I think I'm getting back into movies and TV viewing, or at least I've decided that it's better for my sleep schedule to cut down on video games before bed and have a more physically passive medium to fall back on. So I may yet come back and participate more regularly in these threads (I won't bore you with what I'm reading but that's taking up most of my pandemic time).
One movie I saw was a re-watch in the form of The Devil's Advocate (1997), which I saw at home not terribly long after its release but remained curious about for some reason (fondness for arch-demonic plots? curiosity about Charlize Theron's early typecasting into the helpless love interest? hope for Paradise Lost references having re-read it this year?). This is less a full commentary since I've seen it previously but a few things stood out to me this time. One was that for being released in 1997, the aesthetic and the social commentary were very late 80s New York City, in keeping with the book that it was based on I presume. You could easily do a double feature and claim that it's in conversation with something like American Psycho and not be too far off, it's just that one attributes it to Satanism and the other insanity. A secondary impression was that it feels as if Theron's role is shoehorned in as a sort of Rosemary's Baby subplot, which is a shame insofar is the acting isn't bad, but her mental health crisis comes seemingly out of nowhere given how little we know about her and the desire for a child ends up being backloaded, for similar reasons. It's not that she has no development, but rather that her development is mostly in who she becomes in response to the situation without us really having a firm grip on who she was prior. A third, more nitpicky thing, would be to point out that Leamon Heath's role is rather odd in that he's there to humanize Kevin Lomax's landing at the firm and then... completely disappears in the second half while his wife takes precedence as a figure for evil. On a more positive note, the CGI holds up as creepy 20+ years later
Another I saw last night was The Lighthouse. Were there other remarks on this one at the time? I'd like to see them. For me, it was puzzling because it seemed like the kind of movie that would land right in my wheelhouse and yet I found it more or less unsatisfactory. Mind you, it was relative to hype, and I enjoyed it as a film, it just never really grabbed or surprised me. I was talking to a friend as I was watching it (distraction may have been a factor) and noted that it was trying to be weird like Lynch, moody like Tarkovsky, and tense like Kubrick, but it doesn't actually succeed at pulling off any of those effects. The acting is good (I'll watch Willem Dafoe in whatever), the cinematography and the rather specific use of film / B+W was good, the script definitely wasn't bad for a focused character drama, but it failed to add up to anything special for me and I've been struggling to put words to why the sum of the parts failed in that way. The closest I've come so far is that it tries to invoke a sense of claustrophobia that's not working on me amidst current circumstances, or that it was trying to invoke a whole sensory realm of unpleasantness while really only succeeding with sight and sound, but nothing that would especially make your skin crawl. I can't deny that it's better than most movies that come out in any given year but I'm left with the feeling that a lot of its praise comes purely from those relative terms and not anything novel it created unto itself. Even reading through the four-part "Themes" section on Wikipedia, my only response is "yeah, I get it, it's been done, and I don't see how this was a uniquely special take on it." I wonder if I'm missing something.
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Post by ThirdMan on Aug 9, 2020 12:34:00 GMT -8
Jay, I think some of your dissatisfaction with The Lighthouse may relate back to your earlier comments about Charlize Theron's character in The Devil's Advocate. We don't really have any context for Pattinson and Dafoe's characters prior to seeing them in the lighthouse, so they basically just come part-and-parcel with the whole experience. There's very little psychological contrast between them and their setting: it's "madness" for the sake of madness.
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Post by Jay on Aug 9, 2020 12:38:05 GMT -8
That's a good insight. Probably similar to some dissatisfaction that people had with Kubrick's version of The Shining. It played up the ambiguity of the situation certainly and I don't think you can conclusively say "what happened" on that island, but there wasn't enough variation to make drama of it.
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Post by ThirdMan on Aug 9, 2020 12:46:54 GMT -8
Psychologically, the most interesting thing about the film, to me, is trying to figure out whether Dafoe's character is a full-blown nutjob, or if that's more Pattinson's character's warped perception of him. But it's pretty clear from the outset that Dafoe is, at the very least, extremely eccentric.
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 10, 2020 6:07:57 GMT -8
I watched the first 10 minutes of The Lighthouse a few weeks ago (or was it months? Time doesn't exist anymore) and deduced it really wasn't my kind of film. Or at least, not the kind of film I would want to watch for two hours. (Maybe 30-60 minutes, like a standalone TV episode.) You can of course let me know if I judged it too hastily, but it struck me as one of those films I would appreciate a lot more than I'd enjoy.
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Post by Jay on Aug 10, 2020 12:20:27 GMT -8
It raises some interesting questions about genre in film vs. television. We can think of interesting "bottle episodes" within the context of TV viewing (the fly ep. of Breaking Bad), but it's harder to pull off successfully when you don't have all that other outside material that's built up your impressions of characters and themes. For example, I got a bit of a Solaris vibe off of The Lighthouse, but in truth that's only about half bottled and you get a sense of what makes Kelvin tick before he's on the space station proper. I'm trying to think of other "bottle" films and their successes or lack thereof, but I think that you would have to come up with some pretty clear criteria of how it works or what's at play or else you'd have any number of sci-fi or slasher films breaking in. Gravity is the only one I can really think of off-hand that tried to play a serious hand with it, but even then it was another one that got a lot of acclaim at the time but didn't quite hit it for me.
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Post by guttersnipe on Aug 10, 2020 13:57:49 GMT -8
One movie I saw was a re-watch in the form of The Devil's Advocate (1997)... A secondary impression was that it feels as if Theron's role is shoehorned in as a sort of Rosemary's Baby subplot If you really want to see Charlize Theron in a Rosemary's Baby clone, look no further than The Astronaut's Wife, where she even nods to the homage/rip-off by sporting the same hair. Or rather, do look further, because it's rubbish to the point of convincing the director to never helm a film again. Another I saw last night was The Lighthouse... it was puzzling because it seemed like the kind of movie that would land right in my wheelhouse and yet I found it more or less unsatisfactory. I didn't see this last year precisely because The Witch rubbed me the wrong way, and figured this would slot into the same groove of ostensibly-interesting-concept-quickly-meets-Verhoeven-silliness, this time switching the source couch from Carl Dreyer to Jean Epstein, probably piggybacking "originality" points from people who don't really do film homework (see my views on The Artist for more of the same cinephile sneering).
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Post by Jay on Aug 10, 2020 15:32:33 GMT -8
I didn't see this last year precisely because The Witch rubbed me the wrong way, and figured this would slot into the same groove of ostensibly-interesting-concept-quickly-meets-Verhoeven-silliness, this time switching the source couch from Carl Dreyer to Jean Epstein, probably piggybacking "originality" points from people who don't really do film homework (see my views on The Artist for more of the same cinephile sneering). I do so enjoy your cinephile sneering though! I get the same about poetry / literature when people are praised for their invention but it only seems novel because whomever is reviewing hasn't read anything before the 1950s (if we're lucky). I remember at the time The Witch came out, I knew someone who had studied witchcraft and the period extensively and said that it was excellent in terms of its accuracy and faithfulness. Similarly, as I was looking over commentary on The Lighthouse, it was a lot of "oh and Dafoe is using an Atlantic accent which they colored through an extensive reading of Melville and Pattinson is using a Maine farmer's accent for which they drew from Sarah Orne Jewett..." It's great that people are willing to do research, hell, I love research, but transmuting research into art is something completely different and deceptively difficult.
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Post by guttersnipe on Aug 13, 2020 15:57:41 GMT -8
See, like a lot of film enthusiasts, I've daydreamed a lot over the years about directing something myself, and particularly about the isolation and madness of a puritanical rural community, all hypocrisy, delusions, insidiousness and the like. Then in around 2008 I watched Day of Wrath, and figured right there and then that that was probably the last word on the matter; imitators need not apply. Still, I visit the sub-genre as and when, with certain hopes/expectancies, but I don't think a talking goat played straight was really what I was after.
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 20, 2020 8:21:06 GMT -8
Finally convinced myself to watch The Hunt, though it took a few days for me to gather my thoughts. It is insanely, brutally violent - certainly one of the most graphically gory films I've ever seen. And yet... I actually quite liked it.
I think much of the criticism directed at this film is based on the complaint that it was promoted as saying something bold and shocking about modern-day America, when it actually doesn't have much of substance to say about anything. And this is a fair criticism - the film is not deep, and is mostly content with taking potshots and mocking the current culture war. (It's not even explicitly political - the characters all say "elites" instead of "liberals" and "deplorables" in place of "conservatives.")
But honestly, if the film had tried to take on a serious message about modern America and cake it in violence and darkly comic mayhem - well, we know how people reacted to Joker. People are itching to complain about films that give serious treatment to messages they disapprove of. (Just as they love praising films that accomplish the mere objective of telling them things they agree with. But I've whined about that enough in the past.) So any film that tries to provide a serious-yet-entertaining commentary on modern-day America is going to be raked over the coals by half the country no matter what.
So The Hunt wisely refuses to take itself seriously. The plot – even when you learn the twist - doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It presents both sides as insane and unlikable (though in the end, the elites are hit harder than the deplorables, since the story – like all Most Dangerous Game clones – naturally sides more with hunted than hunters) and invites the audience to laugh at themselves and the opposition. Much like a good South Park episode, the comedy succeeds by encapsulating the absurdity of the current moment, while deftly avoiding a firm stance that could undermine half its jokes.
How much you enjoy the film will probably depend on how well you connect with the lead character (excellently played by Betty Gilpin), who represents the closest thing the film has to "normal America." Not necessarily in her background or attitude (both of which are pretty abnormal), but in the sense that she's only one who sees through the empty slogans and paper tigers that are all too common in the modern culture war. She’s a great audience avatar, expertly played by Gilpin, and I’d say the film is probably worth seeing for her alone. Just a word of warning about the violence – it’s depicted as comically over-the-top, but it can still be pretty gross.
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Post by ThirdMan on Aug 28, 2020 14:17:38 GMT -8
I thought about writing a mini-review of Chris Nolan's TENET, but honestly, I think the IGN video review of the film covers most of my feelings on the subject. On an unrelated note (aside from actor Robert Pattinson being featured in both), reaction videos for The Batman (?0?1) teaser, where viewers are nerding-out over Batman pounding the living shit out of that thug, never fail to amuse me. It seems some folks have been waiting to see that happen for a very long time. Catharsis!
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Aug 30, 2020 7:55:00 GMT -8
I remember a quote in some article (Film Crit Hulk maybe?) positing that each incarnation of the Batman franchise makes the "realism" of the previous franchise looks silly, and that the "gritty realism" of the Nolan films would eventually be looked back on as cartoonish when some future trilogy of Batman movies is just a guy in a bat suit going around punching people. The Batman, from all I've seen of it, looks like the apotheosis of that theory.
To be honest, I think I'm going to really like Tenet whenever it comes out on DVD. Is it actually confusing? Inception was not a confusing movie, although it was fun to joke about how confusing it is.
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Post by ThirdMan on Aug 30, 2020 12:54:10 GMT -8
I remember a quote in some article (Film Crit Hulk maybe?) positing that each incarnation of the Batman franchise makes the "realism" of the previous franchise looks silly, and that the "gritty realism" of the Nolan films would eventually be looked back on as cartoonish when some future trilogy of Batman movies is just a guy in a bat suit going around punching people. The Batman, from all I've seen of it, looks like the apotheosis of that theory. To be honest, I think I'm going to really like Tenet whenever it comes out on DVD. Is it actually confusing? Inception was not a confusing movie, although it was fun to joke about how confusing it is. Well, the Snyder Batman movies were less "realistic", than the Nolan ones, so I don't know that it's a direct pattern. Re: The Batman, it does seem to be drawing from David Fincher's Se7en, and have more grounded character designs, but also seems to feature more stagebound gothic architecture, which places it a bit more in the realm of Burton's Batman '89, art-direction-wise. We'll have to see how the physics of the film shake out before drawing any conclusions. We should also remember that only ~25% of the film has been shot thus far, so I'd imagine more extravagant (third-act?) action elements have yet to visually emerge. At any rate, it's nice that they've built a Batsuit for Pattinson and his stunt-doubles that allows them the flexibility to throw a series of quick punches. We'll see if they're able to throw some decent kicks as well. Re: Tenet, well, much like Inception, there's an overabundance of (sometimes difficult-to-hear, due to the loud sound mix) plot exposition that probably makes the physics of the film, and the character motivations, seem even more complicated than they are. I think you'll perhaps enjoy Washington and Pattinson's work in the film (they DO have personality), but they're certainly slaves to the plot, in many regards. There's definitely some inventive, "How did they do it?" staging during the action/suspense sequences. I doubt you'll care that much about any characters in the film, but you might enjoy the elaborate ride nonetheless. Basically one of the most succinct lines in capturing the film's interpersonal approach is "We know each other, but we haven't met yet." Characters interact, but you probably won't understand the context, at least initially. I wanted to see it in 1.43:1 IMAX, BTW, but seats for my local IMAX theatre are so limited due to social-distancing that a regular theater was my only option. Mind you, given how difficult some of the dialogue was to hear on a regular screen, that might be compounded in IMAX. Also, you may be happy to hear that there are no dead wives in the picture, but there IS one wife who is in near-constant peril (heh).
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