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Post by Incandescence 112 on Feb 26, 2021 15:10:04 GMT -8
Yes, well said. It usually takes me a few episodes to connect with a TV series beyond the surface level; movies by their nature don't have the luxury of time to do the same. There are of course a lot of films that are engrossing and engaging on their own, but if one doesn't click with me, there isn't much I can do to alter that. That's why it's so impressive when you come across one of those films that manages to suck you into its world in an exceedingly short time span. It takes a hell of an efficient filmmaker to pull it off.
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Post by Jeremy on Feb 28, 2021 21:23:05 GMT -8
I'm probably never going to be the biggest Quentin Tarantino fan, but I watch another film of his every now and then. Someone recommended Death Proof to me, and I went in cold, having heard almost nothing about the film beforehand.
I can see what Tarantino was trying to do with this film - it's clearly a sendup of shlocky exploitation flicks, with everything from the grainy film to the saturated color emulating the feel of a 1970s drive-in. The problem is that, story-wise, it doesn't really feel like something that would come out of the exploitation era; it too often feels like Tarantino wallowing in self-indulgence, with multipe conversations that go on forever and feature lots of inside-baseball references to Hollywood and its ilk - which are quasi-charming but don't really develop the characters into feeling like people.
The final twenty minutes of the film are highly entertaining, with a manic vibe suiting the era the film is meant to honor. But everything leading up to it feels dry and lumbering. If the first half of the film had been compressed into 15 or 20 minutes, and the second half been tightened considerably, I expect I would have really liked the film, perhaps even loved it.
(Note: I watched the standalone director's cut, not the Grindhouse double-feature. Maybe the shorter cut may have improved my feelings toward the film; I may have fast-forwarded through one of the "extended" scenes, that being the gratuitous lap dance. Also, wasn't Harvey Weinstein a producer on this film? Gah, I should stop now.)
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Post by ThirdMan on Mar 1, 2021 2:11:16 GMT -8
I'm kind of surprised you haven't gotten to Kill Bill: Vol. 1 yet. It doesn't have nearly the amount of profanity as his films with Samuel L. Jackson, and it's certainly got a fair amount of action and bizarre humour. It's very violent, of course, but most of it is so over-the-top that it works on a more surreal level. The most violent (live-action) scene actually switches to black-and-white (done to avoid an NC-17 rating in the States). It's also not as self-indulgent, in terms of extended passages of dialogue, as many of his other films. And it's got a Japanese woman in a schoolgirl's uniform, named Go-Go, wielding a chain-mace (heh).
On the subject of Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror is so ridiculous that you may actually enjoy it more than Death Proof. It's got quite the cast, as well.
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Post by guttersnipe on Mar 1, 2021 4:27:10 GMT -8
I'm probably never going to be the biggest Quentin Tarantino fan, but I watch another film of his every now and then. Someone recommended Death Proof to me, and I went in cold, having heard almost nothing about the film beforehand. ... (Note: I watched the standalone director's cut, not the Grindhouse double-feature. Maybe the shorter cut may have improved my feelings toward the film; I may have fast-forwarded through one of the "extended" scenes, that being the gratuitous lap dance. Also, wasn't Harvey Weinstein a producer on this film? Gah, I should stop now.) You arrived at my response with this statement. Both halves benefit from their truncated format (particularly Rodriguez') and the full package also includes all of the fake trailers, making it feel like a real 'event'. Because the double-feature tanked in the US, the pictures were hastily released elsewhere with unnecessary embellishments to make them feel like full features in their own right, so all of the added pieces feel like incongruous padding, such as the lapdance, as you observed. Also, because the concepts were intentionally 'meagre' by dint of the fusion, there's an odd feeling watching the individual films, like "why are accomplished directors suddenly doing Corman stuff?" (Having said that, I do think Tarantino's looks marvellous in either format.)
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 1, 2021 14:21:12 GMT -8
Yeah, it's clearly a film where the novelty of it was meant to be the selling point, rather than the story or characters. Probably would work better in context, particularly with a shorter runtime.
I've avoided Kill Bill for years due to the insane levels of violence (not to mention the four-hour length), but I may at least give Vol. 1 a shot. It's got an impressive cast on its own.
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Post by guttersnipe on Mar 4, 2021 6:35:16 GMT -8
Even if you don't want to go any further with it (Rodriguez' standalone or the full Grindhouse as-intended (which I absolutely recommend)), I think you should definitely check out the fake trailers. You said you felt QT was trying for a certain vintage; well if trailers are basically a context-free highlights reel, then these have no obligation than to deliver just that. Eli Roth's death metal voiceover for his Thanksgiving is particularly choice.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 4, 2021 21:19:42 GMT -8
Okay, that Thanksgiving trailer was wild. Every time the announcer restated the title of the film, I went into another paroxysm of laughter. Such a gross and gratuitous yet bizarrely funny promo.
The other trailers were pretty funny as well (Don't has a great rhythm to it) and while I'm not too familiar with old grindhouse flicks, they do seem to recapture the sense of sensationalism and exploitation that Death Proof did in movie form. The trailers are pretty clearly about providing atmosphere to the double-feature they're a part of, and while I didn't watch them in the intended context, they did the trick. Had I not known otherwise, I'd suspect some of them were real trailers. (And I guess some of them were, since Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun were later made into feature films.)
I'm reminded of the faux trailers that opened Tropic Thunder - which I still maintain were funnier than the actual movie. An entertaining means for Hollywood to poke fun at itself, or at least its marketing wing, in a way that is tied to the film yet stands perfectly on its own.
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Post by guttersnipe on Mar 6, 2021 6:39:52 GMT -8
I love that Thanksgiving (and indeed ParaNorman) managed to get the cheap, foreboding keyboard score bang-on.
And I really like the Tropic Thunder trailers, also. I'll quite happily watch those in isolation too.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 7, 2021 21:29:32 GMT -8
March is a busy month for me, life-wise, so I'm sticking to shorter films - mostly under two hours, and preferably around ninety minutes. (As movies should be. Ahem. Sorry, ignore that.)
But, still checking out a lot of stellar films. This Is Spinal Tap was hilarious - an early example of the mockumentary, and a better example of the form than many of the clones it inspired. Good performances and a lot of funny (presumably improvised, to some extent) dialogue. I laughed far too hard at the "Stonehenge" scene.
Night of the Living Dead and The Graduate both hold up pretty well (the latter especially), and they both manage to disturb and disarm in very different ways; I can see how the rise in late-60s button-pushing films led to the creation of the MPAA.
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Post by Jay on Mar 8, 2021 14:46:05 GMT -8
Hell yeah, Night of the Living Dead. Not all of its elements have aged well (thanks to quite a lot of borrowing from ultimately lesser films), but there's a lot going on in there, more than people expect, and so I've often used it as an example of how art can be "about" something other than its plot in the strictest sense, in tandem with the MUBI article, Dead Reckoning: The American Nightmares of George A. Romero.
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Post by ThirdMan on Mar 8, 2021 20:57:40 GMT -8
I laughed far too hard at the "Stonehenge" scene. Years ago, the second time I watched this film, I started laughing uncontrollably about 30 seconds before this sequence started, in anticipation of it. It's this perfect mix of shame (from the band members) and visual absurdity.
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Post by guttersnipe on Mar 9, 2021 14:11:00 GMT -8
One of the amazing things about the Stonehenge scene (as with Derek getting stuck in the prop and the band struggling to find their way to the stage) is that it provides a really prolonged laugh. Most comedy scores with quickfire jabs or a big payoff to an ostensibly-unrelated build-up, and whilst the film has these in spades, these scenes just keep you laughing heartily throughout the whole piece even though they're running just one gag.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 9, 2021 21:14:49 GMT -8
It feels like an archetype for the modern mockumentary style - multiple Office episodes make use of the slow, deliberate punchline to heighten the level of discomfort and thus the humor. Obviously This Is Spinal Tap did not invent the genre, but it feels like a number of hallmarks can be traced to the film. (Along with the phrase "up to eleven," which I knew was used in the film but did not realize had originated there.)
I watched a different type of deconstructed documentary this week: F for Fake, by Orson Welles. I'm a bit fuzzy on the origins of the film - apparently, it was first intended as a straightforward documentary about a noted art forger, but some twists in production inspired Welles to take things in a stranger direction. The resulting film is rough and patchy in spots, and doesn't feel like a fully complete work (if it was ever intended to). But it's a distinctive mix of explorative docudrama and Wellesian ego trip (he spends a non-negligible amount of time bragging about how gorgeous his girlfriend, Oja Kodar, is). Plus, I'm a fan of films that explore the facets of fake news and public misinformation, and there's some interesting commentary here.
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Post by Jeremy on Mar 14, 2021 20:19:20 GMT -8
This week's lesson is that films featuring heavy Cockney accents need to be viewed with subtitles on. Could not understand half the dialogue in Snatch, and fared only slightly better with Sexy Beast (which, despite its awful title, is in fact a reasonably entertaining movie). Watching two early-00s British gangster films in one week was certainly fun, but deciphering the verbal gymnastics can wear a guy out.
And I finally saw Adaptation, which isn't quite at the level of Being John Malkovich (a film I was pleasantly surprised to see directly invoked in this follow-up), but is still a really smart and twisted deconstruction of the creative artistic process. Multiple layers of meta-humor, delivered by an excellent cast - including two Nic Cages for the price of one - kept the story engaging through turns both funny and achingly sad. I've given it an 8/10 rating, but - much like other Kaufman films like Eternal Sunshine or Anomalisa - I can picture it improving with repeated views.
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Post by ThirdMan on Mar 15, 2021 0:05:00 GMT -8
I'll be curious to hear your thoughts when you get around to Synecdoche, New York. That one, in some ways, is more ambitious than any of the other Kaufman films, but it's probably also more self-indulgent and depressing.
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