The Official Movie Thread

As Above, So Below - the poster is cooler than the film. this could of been better if it focused on the cult

The Prowler - generic 80s slasher with lame chase scenes, forgettable characters and plot. a 5 minute youtube compilation of the kills would be better than sitting through the whole thing

Nightcrawler - based on the title i thought this was going to be about the x-men character. Gyllenhaal gives a good performance but the plot is predictable

The Poughkeepsie Tapes - the internet seems to hate this but i thought the footage from the killer was done well. the interviews and documentary parts are usually brought down by terrible acting. "realistic portrayal of serial killers" is a pretty niche genre of film but i'll have to check out some more. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer will be hard to top
 
the great critic kevin b. lee polled his twitter feed (290 top 10 lists inc. mine) on the best movies of the decade so far, and the results were mostly awesome (and nicely presented):
https://vimeo.com/116202003

i recommend everything on the list aside from HER and BOYHOOD, and the godard which i haven't seen. the list contains 6 of my 10 choices, including its entire top 4.
 
Really, Springbreakers is a top24 movie?

But whatsup with no Ida or Birdman? The snippets they picked are not very drawing to the films imo

Under the Skin was fucking out there too, not sure I want to try and watch that again.
 
rms said:
Really, Springbreakers is a top24 movie?

But whatsup with no Ida or Birdman? The snippets they picked are not very drawing to the films imo

Under the Skin was fucking out there too, not sure I want to try and watch that again.
Click to expand...

i'm a pretty big fan of SPRING BREAKERS. wrote about it here for anyone who cares. one of the most hallucinatory movies i've seen in a long while, i get why it's divisive though obviously lol

also the transition between MOONRISE KINGDOM and THE SOCIAL NETWORK in that video gives me chills, and i'm not even that huge on either.

BIRDMAN is grosssss
 
in fairness i probably like it more than half the other best picture nominees (anything is better than THE fucking IMITATION GAME, ugggggghhhhhhh) - keaton and norton in particular owned their roles and played on their own personas in ways that were really fascinating and awesome. i had fun with the virtuosity and sheer audacity of the faux-one take too, but it also seemed like an extension of one of the film's worst qualities: inarritu's hubris. the problem, in a nutshell, is that the best hollywood satires never come across as being either smugly above the industry or shamelessly pandering to it, whereas BIRDMAN somehow managed to feel like both at once.

on the one hand there's the awful satire of our modern age which is essentially just the whining of a guy who's still butthurt over the shallow twitter rabble not taking to Serious Important Art Cinema like, uhhhhhhh, BABEL and 21 GRAMS - it's that moment where a grumpy old man stops being endearing and starts being embarrassing, over and over. inarritu thinks he's bela tarr or something, there's so much implied condescension in this idea that the philistine masses have forced him to lower himself to their level in order to be loved - i know he tries to skewer his own egotism at the same time, but that felt very have cake/eat cake to me because this movie is all ego.

and of course, this IS his sellout movie, just because he openly calls attention to that fact at times doesn't make it any less so. there's something disingenuous to me about the way he would have us believe he's taken to the rooftops and spent a couple hours spitting on the heads of everyone in hollywood, while simultaneously obviously making this tailor-made for awards season audiences after getting tired of being rejected. its primary function is to make every single viewer feel like they're in on a joke that, in reality, isn't really at anybody's expense. the critic is a good example of him setting up a strawman to knock down so everyone can feel superior. even if it's not entirely a strawman (criticising film critics for their laziness is probably fair enough, myself included haha), it's staged in such an exaggerated way that nobody is ever going to see *themselves* in it, they're just gonna have a good time feeling like they're better than the people it actually applies to. inarritu knows what he's doing; if you wanna be loved, you hide audience-congratulation under the guise of edgy outsider art and big, showy filmmaking and hey presto. just leave me out of it thx

i still haven't seen IDA btw but it looks pretty cool.

oh, and re: einherjer, i realise i'm hugely in the minority when it comes to HER, a lot of my very tasteful buddies love it. i just felt like it was exactly the kind of movie you'd expect to have a lead character called theodore twombly (yeuch, really?), and its conception of love felt utterly manufactured to me. i found certain scenes to be really cringeworthily juvenile as well (the one with the profanity-laden video game comes to mind). maybe i'd like it more on second viewing, but i went into this with really really high hopes 'cause WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE is one of my favourites of last decade and the concept for HER seemed, in theory, fairly close to my heart. i was really disappointed to be left so cold.
 
Where do you get your insight on the director? I don't know why you're so critical of this guys ego.

Black Swan and Birdman basically have the same premise. Would you consider that film a portrayal of Aronofsky? If not, what's the difference?
 
no country for old wainds said:
oh, and re: einherjer, i realise i'm hugely in the minority when it comes to HER, a lot of my very tasteful buddies love it. i just felt like it was exactly the kind of movie you'd expect to have a lead character called theodore twombly (yeuch, really?), and its conception of love felt utterly manufactured to me. i found certain scenes to be really cringeworthily juvenile as well (the one with the profanity-laden video game comes to mind). maybe i'd like it more on second viewing, but i went into this with really really high hopes 'cause WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE is one of my favourites of last decade and the concept for HER seemed, in theory, fairly close to my heart. i was really disappointed to be left so cold.
Click to expand...

This isn't to get into a big debate with you, because I actually really enjoyed what you wrote on Spring Breakers; but I can tell that our tastes run in slightly different directions (film-wise, at least).

Anyway, it's interesting you say that its conception of love feels "manufactured"; I actually see this as a positive aspect of the film. Now, I may be intentionally misinterpreting how you're using "manufactured" in this case. You may just be saying that it felt contrived, or inauthentic somehow; but I would take that to its logical thematic extreme and say that the movie itself is concerned with love as a manufactured concept - I mean, love between a person and an operating system seems to tease that boundary between manufactured and authentic, no?

What I really enjoy about Her is that it chooses to leave us completely in the dark about whether the OS was actually feeling love for Theodore, or whether it was imitating love in order to gain a better sense of human behavior/psychology (in this sense, maybe Her should have been called The Imitation Game). As I like to read it, there are two directions in which we can oscillate in our interpretive tendencies: either the machines were experiencing genuine connections with their owners, and thus the film was arguing for a kind of humanizing of the machines; or this was entirely faked, and the film is suggesting that humans are in fact more like machines than we want to think (in other words, even something we take to be as authentic as love is ultimately only a manufactured effect between consensual actors). I personally find the second route more appealing.

At any rate, this isn't to convince you, just to share a bit about what I thought.
 
BIRDMAN is obviously *about* inarritu on one level, riggan is one of the most obvious director surrogates i've ever seen (even moreso than he's a stand in for keaton IMO, although he's obviously that too) and it's just an extremely self-aware film in general (much moreso than BLACK SWAN), it's begging to be viewed in that way.

i mean, all movies are a reflection of their creators, all directors have motivations for making particular movies in particular ways, you can glean much about artists from the art they make and this also applies to movies (obviously movies are a collective endeavor, but generally speaking the director is the boss and the one with the cinematic vision, and certainly in this case). you can also unpack a movie much more easily once familiar with the rest of that director's body of work methinks (and the writer's too, in many cases), although most people don't care about 'unpacking' anything and just wanna have a good time and that's cool, nothing wrong with that. but still, that approach (auteurism) is the direction film criticism has gone toward ever since the cahiers guys revolutionised everything, and it's really the only reason guys like hitchcock, n. ray and hawks are revered today when once they were ignored.

anyways, this approach doesn't really affect my gut reaction, i'm careful not to bring biases into my movie watching (to the best of my ability anyways) and i don't really tend to get too analytical til im done watching. i just immediately felt like this movie was a combination of weary pandering and smug condescension, you're entitled to disagree of course. i feel that way about plenty of hollywood movies (well, usually one or the other rather than both, but still) tbh, it's not an unusual reaction.

aronofsky is actually another guy with absurd self-confidence in my experience, he loves to overreach and showboat and whatnot, although sometimes he'll strike on moments that are absolutely singular and genius. BLACK SWAN actually never feels like it's taking itself very seriously to me though, or if it is then it's kind of earnestly, endearingly campy and that's probably why it worked for me. if i started really trying to take it seriously it'd really pale in comparison to something like, say, MULHOLLAND DRIVE or PERFECT BLUE or even THE RED SHOES though.
 
Einherjar86 said:
This isn't to get into a big debate with you, because I actually really enjoyed what you wrote on Spring Breakers; but I can tell that our tastes run in slightly different directions (film-wise, at least).

Anyway, it's interesting you say that its conception of love feels "manufactured"; I actually see this as a positive aspect of the film. Now, I may be intentionally misinterpreting how you're using "manufactured" in this case. You may just be saying that it felt contrived, or inauthentic somehow; but I would take that to its logical thematic extreme and say that the movie itself is concerned with love as a manufactured concept - I mean, love between a person and an operating system seems to tease that boundary between manufactured and authentic, no?

What I really enjoy about Her is that it chooses to leave us completely in the dark about whether the OS was actually feeling love for Theodore, or whether it was imitating love in order to gain a better sense of human behavior/psychology (in this sense, maybe Her should have been called The Imitation Game). As I like to read it, there are two directions in which we can oscillate in our interpretive tendencies: either the machines were experiencing genuine connections with their owners, and thus the film was arguing for a kind of humanizing of the machines; or this was entirely faked, and the film is suggesting that humans are in fact more like machines than we want to think (in other words, even something we take to be as authentic as love is ultimately only a manufactured effect between consensual actors). I personally find the second route more appealing.

At any rate, this isn't to convince you, just to share a bit about what I thought.
Click to expand...

thanks, this is a good response! i think my comments on HER were kinda lazy.... i really need to watch it again, 'cause i like all the personnel involved and it's possible it just caught me on a bad day. everything you say actually does fit with my thoughts on the film's concerns, but i will clarify that it didn't just leave me cold in terms of the romance (which, as you say, actually benefits from a certain amount of artificiality, thematically speaking) but emotional investment in general, i didn't get a *feel* for the thematic scope at all, i might as well have been reading a plot summary. that's not to say these aren't interesting topics, only that the film didn't really present them to me in a way that i found challenging, stimulating, unnerving... anything, really. might just be different strokes and all that, but i appreciate that there's an appeal in the way it explores the questions it poses without offering any concrete answers, and at the very least you've convinced me i should give it another try.
 
Without a doubt the auteur idea applies to Birdman, specifically because he wrote and directed it, but I don't see it as blatant as you do. Riggan reminds me of Keaton's possible life following Batman. He was never loved for anything except Batman, and in his fake later life, he wants to plunge into the artsy/passionate/serious role of adapting the Carver novel/story into a play. I'm sure knowing the Carver story would give more insight into the understanding of the film entirely, but I don't know it.

With your logic, Inarritu goes from obscure -> popular, but the film's direction is the desire to be respected both internally and externally imo. You talk of the twitter/old man who doesn't appreciate technology, I don't think that's really played into here. He doesn't need a twitter or some sort of PR tool, he is nothing now. He's just the Birdman guy!

The main aspect of the film is portrayed often anways, I think. The conflicted/crazy/mental artist and his self criticism pushes him towards greatness or away from it etc. If he invented this idea I might agree, but I don't think it's as clear as you think.

Now that I think of it, The Wrestler by Aronofsky is really similar to the plots of Black Swan and Birdman too.
 
fair enough, i mean i don't disagree with any of your interpretations, i was just piling extra ones on top haha - i do think some knowledge of inarritu's history makes an analogy unavoidable though, and i don't think it's much of a stretch to see a lot of the satire as reflecting his feelings about the industry rather than just serving the keaton/riggan analogy.

anyways, the riggan/keaton analogy is a great idea in principle, i found the execution hit and miss but i loved keaton's performance. there's plenty of really clever (and sometimes not so clever) self-referentiality with regards to many of the actors actually, some of which i probably missed. there was a MULHOLLAND DRIVE reference with watts, SPIDERMAN references with emma stone etc, they were all essentially playing a version of their own legacies as far as i could tell. i dig that as a concept, and i feel like there's a movie i could love buried in there, but the writing for me was just trying way too hard to be clever, edgy etc and seemed to be harboring some resentment. my problems were with the tone and the jokes more than anything else, and rarely moreso than with the twitter/youtube/etc references which just came across as really out of touch and grumbly and, worst of all, unintentionally unfunny. it is really difficult to do effective self-aware satire of an industry you're simultaneously a part of though, i suppose i don't envy anyone that task.

i didn't really get the use of carver and i'm a big carver fan, it seemed more of a thematic signpost than anything deeper than that. same goes for some of the other literary references as well (i recall borges and one or two others), but maybe i missed something?

WHIPLASH is another movie that bears similarities with BIRDMAN, the climactic scenes onstage had some clear comparison points. not sure an overall comparison would prove very fruitful but it was interesting to notice such close similarities.
 
went and saw John Carpenter's The Thing at the New Beverly Cinema in LA tonight. It's a theater owned by Quentin Tarantino, so they show a lot of old school and B-movies, all in 35mm or 16mm. The Thing is one of my favorites, and to see it on the big screen was a real treat. Just fantastic. What was really cool was beforehand, the "previews" were of Star Trek 2, 4, 6 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers in tribute to Leonard Nimoy. Then they showed a Looney Tunes cartoon before the movie.
 
Yeah it's a really cool theater. I don't go there as often as I'd like because it's about 45minutes to an hour away from me, so I only go when they're showing something REALLY cool. I went for a David Carradine tribute night a few years ago and stood in line for the bathroom behind Christoph Waltz...that was cool. I felt bad for the guy though because people were coming up and asking for autographs. He was nice about it, but the guy was in line for the pisser. Give him a break
 
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