Movie Discussion Thread

Tonight its Denis Villeneuve's 4th film "Incendies". He'd go on to direct Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 (and the upcoming Dune). But his early stuff is aces.

 

Rachel Getting Married

A pretty extraordinary exercise in cinema verite from Jonathan Demme starring Anne Hathaway. The film has a remarkable "fly on the wall" feeling where everything seems spontaneous.

 

Sorry to be pedantic, but the term cinema verite has evolved over the years to mean something completely different from what it originally meant. The style originally meant a style of documentary where the director interacted with the subject to bring out their version of the truth. The term has been later conflated with direct cinema which is what you are describing. This diagram on the wiki page summarizes the differences. This page gives a more detailed explanation of the two styles.

 

It's kind of a dumb argument you're making. I don't see a problem with using "verite" to describe the film in question in order to convey the style of filmmaking, as it's generally accepted as a nod to a more natural/authentic style of acting and mise en scene. I say verite people generally know what that means and would understand what to expect if they decide to watch the film. The nitty gritty of dissecting the terminology is for pendantic finger waggers who have nothing better to do.

And from your own link:

 

Quite a twist in that one...

 

Did anyone see Mile 22?

This movie seemed to me to be a huge missed opportunity. A lot of good action & a very capable cast, but the script seemed to be pasted together with flimsy plot points. The surprise twist in particular (no spoiler) could have been fleshed out, but instead I found it somewhat unbelievable.

An enjoyable watch if you're looking for eye candy I guess, but I just felt this movie could have actually been quite memorable.

 

Villeneuve is as good as it gets with contemporary directors.

 

Watched "Hereditary" last night. Great "horror" movie. Usually I find horror movies rather boring and not scary.
It's the same thing over and over, often nosogoodacting. However, this movie was very interesting, never boring and kinda tense. Actors did a great job aswell.

8/10

 

Holy shit, took me a while to catch up to GOOD TIME, but what a blistering, hallucinatory thrill ride through hell. Robert Pattinson is unrecognizable, completely disappears into the role of a heavy accented New York thug. And the music!

 

Brawl in Cell Block 99... Holy f**k balls.

That is all.

 

Now that I've gotten that out my system, I'm calm enough to elaborate.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 is one of the best films I've seen in some time.

I saw the filmmakers first effort, Bone Tomahawk which I remember liking, but it didn't stick with me really.

This film is a whole other story and is a pretty massive jump in quality.

It's brutal, cold calculating efficiency is startling. It's hyper violent at times, but it's the kind of violence that doesn't seem exploitative. What I mean by that is Hollywood violence tends to be more offensive to me because of how blase and thrown away it feels. It's slick, silly and unrealistic. As a result it gives the impression that violence has no consequences. When you contrast the prison violence scenes in this with something like the same prison violence in Fast and Furious 8, the latter comes across as more ridiculous, even though it is less brutal and leas realistic. People getting hit in Fast 8 makes it seem like they're having a bad day and will get over it quickly. The brutal blows in Cell Block 99 seem downright life altering. Fast 8 makes violence seem fun and almost attractive. Cell Block 99 makes you never want to get into a fight. Ever.

And at the center of all this madness the film never loses sight of its main character. Vince Vaughn is tremendous in this (my only criticism being the accent not coming across very well at least initially and I don't see why he couldn't use his normal accent). Vaughn has probably never been better. And as much of a piece of shit he is, you still root for him, because everyone around him is possibly worse. As vicious of a brawler as he may be, he's still a lump of sugar down deep with nobility... and that never fails to come across. His vicious brutality only stems from an immense practically and uncluttered mental capacity to foresee issues and to remedy them as quickly and efficiently as possible.

This is far more than a mere prison flick. It's a towering work of art and I couldn't recommended this highly enough.

Streaming on Amazon prime.

 

I know I'm prejudging this movie before I've even seen it but based on what I'm about to say I may not want to.

I think the movie JOKER is another attempt to demystify a very simple character. And it's that simplicity that made him such a classic force. It is the same issue I had with Rob Zombie's Halloween flicks. The "Shape" isn't the shape, it isn't a force of nature like the original Halloween brilliantly hinted at ... he's a dumb hillbilly raised by irresponsible parents.

What is it with this idea that we need to understand everything? In movies it's sometimes best to leave things ambiguous. One of the great things about the Joker in the Dark Knight is that he gives three different, contradictory accounts of his origin. This only added to his mystique and made him more terrifying because for all intents and purposes he has no origin. He just is. A force of nature, or more accurately, a force of chaos that wants to watch the world burn. And that's why he's terrifying.

The Joker in the new JOKER film isn't a force of chaos. He's a sad, lonely, depressed mama's boy who's been fucked over by the system.

He's a f'ing incel !!!

I admire the desire to ape a film like Taxi Driver and graft it onto a comic book movie, but why Joker? Why this need to explain the unexplainable? I don't want to see this movie because I want the Joker to retain some semblance of mystery for me like he always has. That's always worked for the character. Batman has an origin story because he's supposed to be an ordinary man who became extraordinary through relentless training and a warped psychology. He's a MAN dressed as a bat, not a force of nature. And this makes him more heroic... his humanity.

I don't want humanity in the Joker.

 

Hasn't Bruce Wayne always been a fucked up weirdo from the beginning though? He witnessed the murder of his own parents as a child which set the course for how psychologically complex and disordered Bruce/Batman turned out to be. He never overcame that fear of parental loss and turned that into a weapon for vengeance. Then there's all the other shit that went on in the comics to feed Batman's insanity. Joker is just as insane as Batman is, but in his own ways.

As for the film, I don't want to see it either. However this blockbuster, like Dark Knight Rises before it, precisely points to once again the political situation we Americans find ourselves in. Hollywood just has this knack for generating blockbuster films that serve as the vehicle for cultural criticism. But yeah from what I have seen, the origin story doesn't look that interesting. I don't like the cinematography from watching the trailers, it looks amateurish. I prefer seeing Joker on screen with Batman as they are the perfect foils for each other.

 

That's what I said. He has a warped psychology. He's warped but he's still heroic because he catches bad guys.

My point is the Joker doesn't need a psychology.

 

Yes.

Today, it's the need to understand these sad, lonely (usually white) men who commit mass murders. The alt right, incels, whatever... I'm not very up on my politics so forgive me if the terms aren't completely accurate.

I think they're using Joker as a way to take a creative dive into these issues. I just don't think Joker has anything in common with those people.

 

The Joker is a blank canvas.

His origins in the current DC universe are largely shrouded in mystery, as you'd noted, and as a consequence thereof it's well possible to make political statements using him as a vehicle. Am I against this? Speaking as a massive Batman fanboy (because of course I'm basic that way), not really— I love that people feel empowered to explore these enigmatic personas and carve out their own stories using them as tools. I'm one of those who gave a resounding "who cares?" when DC comics teased that they were planning to reveal the Joker's identity in the comics some time back— who gives a flying bother about who he was, yeah? What matters is who he is now and what impact he's had on the Batman and the rest of his merry gang. That wasn't my reaction to this though— I don't see this as a prequel to Batman: Origins Mk. 29 so much as a self-contained story that just happens to feature some familiar characters.

Not that there weren't a few nods to the greater Batman cosmere, but I'd say you could easily crawl out from under that rock you've been living under since 1939 and still enjoy this film on its own merits.

And it does have merits; were this a film with no redeeming qualities whatsoever I'd happily crap all over it on as many platforms as I can be bothered to. Thing is, the film is not complete shit.

I've gushed about this film in a status update recently, to no one's greater surprise than my own. Does it portray a poor guy with mental health issues getting shafted by society? Yup. Does it reek of exploitation? Hell yeah. Is it a film that I nonetheless enjoyed watching in spite of my own biases for how well-crafted each scene feels and for how it's just ridiculously good at making audiences squirm in their seat? f**k yes.

I've talked with strangers online about this one, and that's not something I very often do. There's one scene in particular that's so dark and royally fubbered that nonetheless, as far as I'm aware, has yet to fail to elicit at least a few laughs from audience members across multiple screenings. When I laughed, it was at the expense of an individual I'd normally kick myself in the balls for laughing at, but it was entirely involuntary— tension was at a breaking point from happenings immediately preceding it and the entirety of the story up to that point— so my brain took the first opportunity afforded it to cut the tension.

I'm not making excuses for how the film villifies mentally ill individuals because of flipping course that ticked me off, but even through it fulfilled the trope to a tee it handled the matter with a deft hand. I wouldn't say it's SJW-approved by any stretch despite its obvious leanings, but damn if I didn't have a butt cramp walking out of the cinema from all the anxiety the film managed to inspire.

 

Understand from a certain perspective, and then tell this skewed story to a "mainstream" thereby profiting...

 

I'm usually ideologically agnostic when it comes to watching movies. I don't care what something is about, I'm all about taking in the spectacle of craft and seeing talented people do their thing.

But being a filmmaker, and living in the shitshow film business for a while tends to make one jaded.

Once you've seen how the sausage is made, it isn't the same experience eating it.

I tend to take the more 30,000 foot view of things these days so something like Joker and what's it's trying to accomplish makes me grimace.

No disrespect to the film intended and it may actually be great. But I'm skipping it for the aforementioned reasons. It's just another IP being exploited while trying to gain a few political brownie points because everything somehow has become political now.

You even have the director Todd Philips talking about how the woke cancel culture forced him to react with something like this movie.

I can't help but wonder if something like Taxi Driver was made today, the shitstorm of online thinkpieces and social media outrage that would ensue.

 

An apolitical stance is a political one - it simply sides with the status quo.

Haven't seen the film. Normally when enough $$$$$$ gets globbed onto a film's budget, the ideological scope of the film gets watered down and often loses sight of itself. Nothing that gets widespread theatrical distribution is remotely edgy or thought-provoking in a meaningful way (though the craft and spectacle can still be there) - everything is made only for profit motive. If the people will consume it, it will be produced. All press is good press when you're trying to get returns on investments for executive producers et al. The film has been successful, so similar films are likely to be produced. It's as simple as that.

Good ideas don't get financed by production houses because they involve too much risk.

edit - the only films that have fucked me up in a truly disruptive and mind-altering way have been documentaries. The Act of Killing still haunts me to this day.

 

I should be clearer. When watching a movie, there's no political act involved with the viewer. It's generally a passive experience. Ideologically agnostic means you're not lettting a film's ideology influence your opinion of it on an artistic level.

This is contrasted to stuff like Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation getting a standing ovation before it even started at one of the festivals. The film's ideology had already influenced the audience to liking it before seeing it (Parker is black and the film is pretty heavily politically charged with regard to slavery). Or you have something like Captain Marvel getting likes on twitter before people saw it, proclaiming it a great work of important cinema because of the girl power narrative. Or Black Panther being deserving of a best picture nod because of its unprecedented depiction of an all black cast in a blockbuster film. Forget the fact that it's a barely above average Marvel film and rather pedestrian when compared to other great action flicks. There are many more examples of a film's ideology trumping it's aesthetic value.

I don't let these kinds of things influence my movie watching. If I avoid something it's generally because I'm not interested or in the case of Joker, don't want that character to lose his strong sense of mystique for me.

My comments about the film's political aspirations is just an observation and not really why I'm avoiding it