CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
I have some nostalgia for H20 because my older cousins watched it all the time around '99 but yeah, it's pretty trash lmao. The ending was so gay.
The Official Movie Thread
- Thread starter Manic Ferocity
- Start date
Oblivious Maximus
I am the worm
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
Just finished The Irishman, and I loved it for the most part. The de-aging SFX took some getting used to but ultimately I think it worked and it helped to remind myself that de-aged Pacino, De Niro and Pesci weren't supposed to look like the actual actors when they were those different ages, they were supposed to look like the actual real life characters they were portraying.
It was great to see Scorsese return to his mob movie days of the 90's, and this one definitely felt like a spiritual successor to Goodfellas and Casino (albeit not as good as them) and it also feels to me like the true 3rd film of his "American Gangster trilogy" as opposed to The Wolf of Wall Street. However unlike Goodfellas and Casino, The Irishman welcomes quieter moments instead of filling every scene with pop music and stylishness. In that sense it does owe a lot to "epic" cinema besides the film's length itself, the cinematography is one of the definite strong points for me.
That's not to say there weren't any goofy moments or things that didn't quite work, as much as Scorsese was returning to a comfort zone here he did also take some chances with new technology. Anyways this is the most I've enjoyed a new Scorsese film since maybe Gangs of New York or something, as much as I did like Silence this surpasses it in my book, and of course it was so so so cool to see Pesci back in movies again.
It was great to see Scorsese return to his mob movie days of the 90's, and this one definitely felt like a spiritual successor to Goodfellas and Casino (albeit not as good as them) and it also feels to me like the true 3rd film of his "American Gangster trilogy" as opposed to The Wolf of Wall Street. However unlike Goodfellas and Casino, The Irishman welcomes quieter moments instead of filling every scene with pop music and stylishness. In that sense it does owe a lot to "epic" cinema besides the film's length itself, the cinematography is one of the definite strong points for me.
That's not to say there weren't any goofy moments or things that didn't quite work, as much as Scorsese was returning to a comfort zone here he did also take some chances with new technology. Anyways this is the most I've enjoyed a new Scorsese film since maybe Gangs of New York or something, as much as I did like Silence this surpasses it in my book, and of course it was so so so cool to see Pesci back in movies again.
Vegard Pompey
ALLY TO GOOD, NIGHTMARE TO YOU
Saw The Lighthouse yesterday. Utterly compelling from beginning to end and I feel like I'm only beginning to unpack this thing.
@Einherjar86 thoughts?
I'm sure the movie could be read as allegorical in myriad ways. Above all it's just a killer drama though. It constantly tests your sympathies for both characters. "Wake" is hypocritical and dishonest but most of his criticisms of "Winslow's" character seem merited. Each character was both the other's lifeline and noose. It's the hedgehog's dilemma, essentially. By the end of the film I did not feel like either character was especially in the wrong but rather that they had both collectively failed the test of coexisting with each other and paid for this with their lives.
So I'm not really well-versed enough in Marxist theory to develop this line of thinking more but one observation I had is that "Winslow" experiences alienation in a very Marxist sense. He performs backbreaking labor maintaining a lighthouse but is denied access to the lantern room and thereby the fruits of his labor. His superior monopolizes the lantern and idolizes it in a sense that is analogous to Marxist fetishism of commodities. Considering the time period, the emphasis on industrial labor and the subordinate-superior conflict throughout, this seems relevant.
So I'm not really well-versed enough in Marxist theory to develop this line of thinking more but one observation I had is that "Winslow" experiences alienation in a very Marxist sense. He performs backbreaking labor maintaining a lighthouse but is denied access to the lantern room and thereby the fruits of his labor. His superior monopolizes the lantern and idolizes it in a sense that is analogous to Marxist fetishism of commodities. Considering the time period, the emphasis on industrial labor and the subordinate-superior conflict throughout, this seems relevant.
@Einherjar86 thoughts?
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
The Neon Demon isn't Refn's best, but the film's third act
is a personal favourite stand alone piece. Just put the movie on from that point today, so great and fucked up.
(roughly from Jesse's dream about Keanu making her give oral to a knife, through the lesbian necrophilia scene, the swimming pool murder and Gigi regurgitating Jesse's eyeball and then disemboweling herself with the scissors)
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
challenge_everything
Active Member
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
I think I have an idea, and it was in some ways a logical conclusion to the first half of the film.
To me the whole film is fundamentally about consumerism, and he addresses the subject by coming at it from a pretty unique angle - that youth is the ultimate commodity. They quite literally consume youth by the end. Or, taking a step back even further, it depicts how the fashion industry (and other industries) devours young beautiful people until they're spent and discarded.
Besides the obvious "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" reference at the end tying directly into the film's opening shot of Jesse's eye as she plays dead for a photoshoot, I think the reason Gigi was throwing up Jesse's remains was because her "fake" body rejected the natural beauty of Jesse.
I also thought the scene after Jesse is killed with Ruby naked in her home under the moon with all the blood gushing from between her legs was supposed to represent menstruation, a symbol of life returning to her for the eating of Jesse, she stole - consumed- her youth and got some in return. I think that's the ultimate motivation behind the lesbianism, she was possessed by Jesse's youth and natural beauty because she was either not beautiful enough to be a model herself or was retired by then due to her age.
There's also the symbolism of the swimming pool that caught my attention, the scene before she's killed where Jesse seems to come to terms with her beauty being a curse, she's standing on the diving board of an empty pool, and I think this represents her conception of beauty by the end of the film; empty. Right at the end before the eyeball-regurgitation two models, one of them brand new to the industry, are now modelling in front of a sparkling pool filled with crystal blue water. She's still naive.
Besides the obvious "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" reference at the end tying directly into the film's opening shot of Jesse's eye as she plays dead for a photoshoot, I think the reason Gigi was throwing up Jesse's remains was because her "fake" body rejected the natural beauty of Jesse.
I also thought the scene after Jesse is killed with Ruby naked in her home under the moon with all the blood gushing from between her legs was supposed to represent menstruation, a symbol of life returning to her for the eating of Jesse, she stole - consumed- her youth and got some in return. I think that's the ultimate motivation behind the lesbianism, she was possessed by Jesse's youth and natural beauty because she was either not beautiful enough to be a model herself or was retired by then due to her age.
There's also the symbolism of the swimming pool that caught my attention, the scene before she's killed where Jesse seems to come to terms with her beauty being a curse, she's standing on the diving board of an empty pool, and I think this represents her conception of beauty by the end of the film; empty. Right at the end before the eyeball-regurgitation two models, one of them brand new to the industry, are now modelling in front of a sparkling pool filled with crystal blue water. She's still naive.
Just some thoughts.
challenge_everything
Active Member
That's a good explanation, I got the idea of the fashion industry 'preying' on girls but you've picked up a few things that slipped by me. I did struggle - and still do to some extent - why the film focused on the dog-eat-dog female rivalries in contrast to the chauvinistic elements.
I see a lot of parallels between The Neon Demon and the Suspiria remake btw.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
I still need to see that remake.
I remember reading an interview with Refn where he was asked about the males in the film and he said that each male was a fragmentation of Jesse, and he wanted to subvert the tradition of women being plot devices and little more (the damsel, the girlfriend, the wife etc) and so each male has little use beyond being a mechanical piece to drive the plot, and then when they're no longer needed he just made them vanish from the film.
I get where he's coming from, but it sounds like an unsatisfying explanation to me. I am glad he tried to put the focus on the females in the industry though as I feel like the more masculine chauvinism on the industry is somewhat played out as a subject. For the men in the industry they probably exploit a new beautiful boy or girl once a week and discard just as many, it would be like telling a prison story from the perspective of the warden in a sense.
For the women in the industry what might be a daily occurrence for industry insiders (firings, exploitation etc) is the literal beginning or ending of a model's life. In that way it makes way more sense that the women would destroy each other to get to the top of the food pyramid, only to be consumed and discarded by people who don't give a fuck about them.
I get where he's coming from, but it sounds like an unsatisfying explanation to me. I am glad he tried to put the focus on the females in the industry though as I feel like the more masculine chauvinism on the industry is somewhat played out as a subject. For the men in the industry they probably exploit a new beautiful boy or girl once a week and discard just as many, it would be like telling a prison story from the perspective of the warden in a sense.
For the women in the industry what might be a daily occurrence for industry insiders (firings, exploitation etc) is the literal beginning or ending of a model's life. In that way it makes way more sense that the women would destroy each other to get to the top of the food pyramid, only to be consumed and discarded by people who don't give a fuck about them.
arg
Active Member
- Jun 4, 2008
- 5,745
- 1,442
- 113
so fucking good. simple story but very well executed. kind of like an xmen movie but more moody and atmospheric. loved the cinematography and smoky lighting
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
Some thoughts on You Were Never Really Here:
*Just some ramblings based on notes I took down last night while rewatching YWNRH.
A film about a corpse whose only connection to the world of the living is his dying mother, but is re-animated in the process of doing a task that directly leads to the murder of his mother.
I think partially the film makes a statement about the nature of masculinity and fragility, here's a man so deadly in his capabilities, so competent in his violence, with a military history that could have him living a much larger life of wealth, yet for the entire duration of the film he's contemplating suicide. Regularly wrapping a plastic bag around his own head in his closet, or while waiting for a train slowly willing himself to jump on the tracks, and of course the water burial scene where he fills his pocket with rocks and tries to drown himself, but of course either through a sense of duty to his mother (or in the case of the last example, a sense of duty to the kidnapped girl) or through a deep cowardice, he never follows through on these attempts.
In a way I kind of view Joe as the living embodiment of the idea that men bottle their emotions.
It's just as much a Phoenix film as it is a Ramsay film in my opinion, for example Joe was supposed to be a more meticulous mercenary, in the script (by way of the novella) Joe was supposed to use gloves and have a elaborate toolkit of weapons and gadgets, but apparently Phoenix said that it seemed inauthentic to him and he basically tweaked the character to prefer more simplistic brutal methods like a hardware store hammer. I can't even imagine this movie with a Joe that carries around a bunch of kit a la Léon: The Professional, the more brutal method compliments the idea of Joe being bottled emotions incarnate for me, because with a hammer the violence goes from 0 to 100 the moment he lets it pour. I thought that was a nice touch and just one of the reasons Phoenix is one of the best actors working right now.
(The hammer also ties in to his childhood flashbacks of his abusive father using a hammer, which kind of implies I think that whenever he's murdering men with a hammer, he's murdering his father over and over - meaning his job keeps him reliving his traumatic upbringing which only fuels his suicidal tendencies and PTSD.)
Not sure if anybody else who saw this film thought this, but I also think it subverts the 'damsel-in-distress' trope quite beautifully. Here you have this deranged ex-military anti-hero hired to rescue a young senator's daughter from the clutches of a pedophilic governor who is holding her in his mansion (essentially a warrior rescuing a princess from an evil king's castle) and along the way, while giving his mother a water burial Joe attempts to drown himself too but has a vision of the young girl and swims to the surface (here we have the damsel actually rescuing the warrior, already a subversion). He has decided to remain alive and carry out his duty to save the girl, but by the time he gets inside the mansion the girl has already slit the governor's throat and is fixing herself something to eat when Joe finds her. She has saved herself and is having a victory feast, am I the only one that loved that? All that mayhem and trauma he went through and the young girl saves herself in the end, it's a tragic kind of irony especially given that, because of this job, his beloved mother was brutally murdered.
The director described the film as a kind of cavalcade of tragedy and trauma, one caused by the last, and in that sense it's definitely true. That's also why the comparisons to Taxi Driver are a bit tired to me, yes the plot revolves around a man trying to save a young girl being exploited by an underworld sex industry, but this film subverts that plot in how it plays out.
One of the film's best qualities I think is how it balances beauty with brutality, or violence with weakness. It's clear Joe is an imposing figure physically, but he's also slowly dissolving as a presence in the world. The cinematography is obviously a standout quality here, but the music is just as necessary to the film in my opinion.
Using "Angel Baby" for the whole security camera scene was genius, yet Ramsay said it was just her first choice and treated it as a temporary stand-in until something better came along. I can't imagine it without the song, the way it added a perverse sweetness to what was obviously an extremely brutal sequence, it was like anti-Hollywood or something, openly rejecting the glamour and gloss of Hollywood violence by showing it through the grey tones of security footage, and we're welcomed to this sequence by Joe puking on the doorstep before he punches in the code. Definitely up there as one of my favourite moments of recent cinema.
Another great scene is when the governor's two hitmen dressed as cops come to take the girl from Joe, and one of them leaves with the girl so the remaining hitman can execute Joe, they fight and Joe kills him, and all the while they're struggling to kill each other warped news coverage of the pedohile governor is playing in the background, talking about how the accusations against him are a smear campaign and so on. Ramsay denies having foresight of #MeToo baked into the film but it's hard to ignore the subtext of power run amok.
(This scene also has some important symbolism, when Joe is wrestling with the hitman on the floor the pistol goes off and he looks up at the ceiling where a big now cracked mirror reflects a fragmented image of his own violence back at him. A cracked mirror represents Joe, symbolically mirrors tend to represent light, truth, and the soul, and so the cracked mirror can mean the distortion of someone's soul, who they are as a person - and so in this scene the cracked mirror is how Joe sees himself during the violence. Fragmented, lifeless, soulless, dead.
I see symbolism even in something as insignificant as the scene where he's on the couch of his handler talking about a job, eating jellybeans, he holds one up and squeezes it until the pristine candy coating cracks up and becomes ugly and fragmented in his fingertips.)
Most of the film's violence is presented as an aftermath which I personally don't think was just (or at all) an artistic choice for aesthetic purposes. To me this is another subversion of convention in that YWNRH is mostly made up of moments before and after the violence of a hitman's life, from the opening sequence of Joe discarding a rubbish bag of bloodied items and leaving a recent job, and catching a taxi away from the scene, to him discovering his murdered mother in her bed. The film attempts to leave viewers dissatisfied with the lack of showing the violence as it occurs in order to better portray Joe's dissatisfaction with the violence he commits after the fact. For example after he shoots the two hitmen that were waiting for him in his mother's house, he interrogates the one still living before eventually lying on the floor with him and singing along to a song on the radio, the dying man reaches for Joe's hand and he reciprocates as he slowly passes on, then Joe sits up and is clearly very sad about the whole situation. He draws no satisfaction from the death of a man who just killed his mother.
This flies in the face of convention on so many levels, from only showing glimpses of violence if it's even shown at all, to not allowing any sense of victory or triumph in an act of revenge.
The title of the film perfectly sums up who/what Joe is in his own mind. You can discover this easily from all the flashbacks, when he was a child witnessing domestic violence, he'd hide in the closet unable to stand up to his father, he might as well have not been there. When he was in the military and witnessed a kid with a chocolate bar get killed by another kid so they could take it, he couldn't save the kid or do anything about it, he might as well have not been there. When he was in the FBI he discovers a truckload of dead bodies, and this imposes a strong sense of uselessness in him. Again, he might as well have not been there, as in - in the world. He exists solely in the aftermath of traumatic events. The constant shots of him seeming to disappear onscreen deliver this message wonderfully, like for example the water fountain scene or when he vanishes in the blur effect a passing train. His sole potency or agency in his world is through violence, and in every other aspect he was never really there.
The final scene of the film is an obvious reference to Joe's conceptualisation of himself as having never really mattered. He daydreams of brutally blowing his own brains out in the diner, to which absolutely nobody notices, reacts or even cares, then the girl touches his hand and wakes him up and they leave. It's a beautiful day.
I think partially the film makes a statement about the nature of masculinity and fragility, here's a man so deadly in his capabilities, so competent in his violence, with a military history that could have him living a much larger life of wealth, yet for the entire duration of the film he's contemplating suicide. Regularly wrapping a plastic bag around his own head in his closet, or while waiting for a train slowly willing himself to jump on the tracks, and of course the water burial scene where he fills his pocket with rocks and tries to drown himself, but of course either through a sense of duty to his mother (or in the case of the last example, a sense of duty to the kidnapped girl) or through a deep cowardice, he never follows through on these attempts.
In a way I kind of view Joe as the living embodiment of the idea that men bottle their emotions.
It's just as much a Phoenix film as it is a Ramsay film in my opinion, for example Joe was supposed to be a more meticulous mercenary, in the script (by way of the novella) Joe was supposed to use gloves and have a elaborate toolkit of weapons and gadgets, but apparently Phoenix said that it seemed inauthentic to him and he basically tweaked the character to prefer more simplistic brutal methods like a hardware store hammer. I can't even imagine this movie with a Joe that carries around a bunch of kit a la Léon: The Professional, the more brutal method compliments the idea of Joe being bottled emotions incarnate for me, because with a hammer the violence goes from 0 to 100 the moment he lets it pour. I thought that was a nice touch and just one of the reasons Phoenix is one of the best actors working right now.
(The hammer also ties in to his childhood flashbacks of his abusive father using a hammer, which kind of implies I think that whenever he's murdering men with a hammer, he's murdering his father over and over - meaning his job keeps him reliving his traumatic upbringing which only fuels his suicidal tendencies and PTSD.)
Not sure if anybody else who saw this film thought this, but I also think it subverts the 'damsel-in-distress' trope quite beautifully. Here you have this deranged ex-military anti-hero hired to rescue a young senator's daughter from the clutches of a pedophilic governor who is holding her in his mansion (essentially a warrior rescuing a princess from an evil king's castle) and along the way, while giving his mother a water burial Joe attempts to drown himself too but has a vision of the young girl and swims to the surface (here we have the damsel actually rescuing the warrior, already a subversion). He has decided to remain alive and carry out his duty to save the girl, but by the time he gets inside the mansion the girl has already slit the governor's throat and is fixing herself something to eat when Joe finds her. She has saved herself and is having a victory feast, am I the only one that loved that? All that mayhem and trauma he went through and the young girl saves herself in the end, it's a tragic kind of irony especially given that, because of this job, his beloved mother was brutally murdered.
The director described the film as a kind of cavalcade of tragedy and trauma, one caused by the last, and in that sense it's definitely true. That's also why the comparisons to Taxi Driver are a bit tired to me, yes the plot revolves around a man trying to save a young girl being exploited by an underworld sex industry, but this film subverts that plot in how it plays out.
One of the film's best qualities I think is how it balances beauty with brutality, or violence with weakness. It's clear Joe is an imposing figure physically, but he's also slowly dissolving as a presence in the world. The cinematography is obviously a standout quality here, but the music is just as necessary to the film in my opinion.
Using "Angel Baby" for the whole security camera scene was genius, yet Ramsay said it was just her first choice and treated it as a temporary stand-in until something better came along. I can't imagine it without the song, the way it added a perverse sweetness to what was obviously an extremely brutal sequence, it was like anti-Hollywood or something, openly rejecting the glamour and gloss of Hollywood violence by showing it through the grey tones of security footage, and we're welcomed to this sequence by Joe puking on the doorstep before he punches in the code. Definitely up there as one of my favourite moments of recent cinema.
Another great scene is when the governor's two hitmen dressed as cops come to take the girl from Joe, and one of them leaves with the girl so the remaining hitman can execute Joe, they fight and Joe kills him, and all the while they're struggling to kill each other warped news coverage of the pedohile governor is playing in the background, talking about how the accusations against him are a smear campaign and so on. Ramsay denies having foresight of #MeToo baked into the film but it's hard to ignore the subtext of power run amok.
(This scene also has some important symbolism, when Joe is wrestling with the hitman on the floor the pistol goes off and he looks up at the ceiling where a big now cracked mirror reflects a fragmented image of his own violence back at him. A cracked mirror represents Joe, symbolically mirrors tend to represent light, truth, and the soul, and so the cracked mirror can mean the distortion of someone's soul, who they are as a person - and so in this scene the cracked mirror is how Joe sees himself during the violence. Fragmented, lifeless, soulless, dead.
I see symbolism even in something as insignificant as the scene where he's on the couch of his handler talking about a job, eating jellybeans, he holds one up and squeezes it until the pristine candy coating cracks up and becomes ugly and fragmented in his fingertips.)
Most of the film's violence is presented as an aftermath which I personally don't think was just (or at all) an artistic choice for aesthetic purposes. To me this is another subversion of convention in that YWNRH is mostly made up of moments before and after the violence of a hitman's life, from the opening sequence of Joe discarding a rubbish bag of bloodied items and leaving a recent job, and catching a taxi away from the scene, to him discovering his murdered mother in her bed. The film attempts to leave viewers dissatisfied with the lack of showing the violence as it occurs in order to better portray Joe's dissatisfaction with the violence he commits after the fact. For example after he shoots the two hitmen that were waiting for him in his mother's house, he interrogates the one still living before eventually lying on the floor with him and singing along to a song on the radio, the dying man reaches for Joe's hand and he reciprocates as he slowly passes on, then Joe sits up and is clearly very sad about the whole situation. He draws no satisfaction from the death of a man who just killed his mother.
This flies in the face of convention on so many levels, from only showing glimpses of violence if it's even shown at all, to not allowing any sense of victory or triumph in an act of revenge.
The title of the film perfectly sums up who/what Joe is in his own mind. You can discover this easily from all the flashbacks, when he was a child witnessing domestic violence, he'd hide in the closet unable to stand up to his father, he might as well have not been there. When he was in the military and witnessed a kid with a chocolate bar get killed by another kid so they could take it, he couldn't save the kid or do anything about it, he might as well have not been there. When he was in the FBI he discovers a truckload of dead bodies, and this imposes a strong sense of uselessness in him. Again, he might as well have not been there, as in - in the world. He exists solely in the aftermath of traumatic events. The constant shots of him seeming to disappear onscreen deliver this message wonderfully, like for example the water fountain scene or when he vanishes in the blur effect a passing train. His sole potency or agency in his world is through violence, and in every other aspect he was never really there.
The final scene of the film is an obvious reference to Joe's conceptualisation of himself as having never really mattered. He daydreams of brutally blowing his own brains out in the diner, to which absolutely nobody notices, reacts or even cares, then the girl touches his hand and wakes him up and they leave. It's a beautiful day.
*Just some ramblings based on notes I took down last night while rewatching YWNRH.
zabu of nΩd
Free Insultation
- Feb 9, 2007
- 14,620
- 805
- 113
First time seeing this since college. Probably in my top 20 movies of all time. Unforgettable combination of teen angst, metaphysics, and ideological subversion.
I have a morbid fascination with suicidal teens, and the fact that the metaphysical layer of Donnie's path to suicide is so integral to that path just blows my mind. He thinks the world would be a better place without him, and he acts on that thought by discovering a time loop which erases his existence. ("The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I ever had.")
Main plot aside, this movie just creates so many beautiful quirky moments, like the English teacher talking about "cellar door" as she leaves the school after getting fired, and Donne and Gretchen kissing right after Gretchen says "Some people are just born with tragedy in their blood". The new wave soundtrack creates a lot of great moments too.
Main plot aside, this movie just creates so many beautiful quirky moments, like the English teacher talking about "cellar door" as she leaves the school after getting fired, and Donne and Gretchen kissing right after Gretchen says "Some people are just born with tragedy in their blood". The new wave soundtrack creates a lot of great moments too.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
Anybody hear that John Hillcoat is working with Refn to remake Witchfinder General? Hopefully it won't be shit, some good potential to tap into the whole folk horror thing, but also Hillcoat said he won't be doing a straight remake but rather a re-imagining. I still need to see Ghosts of the Civil Dead.
I also just read that Zahler's next film will be an adaption of his horror book called Hug Chickenpenny: The Panegyric of an Anomalous Child and he's partnering with The Jim Henson Company to make it.
I also just read that Zahler's next film will be an adaption of his horror book called Hug Chickenpenny: The Panegyric of an Anomalous Child and he's partnering with The Jim Henson Company to make it.
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Einherjar86
Active Member
Cool reading that I hadn't considered.
Personally, I find overtones of Beckett all over the place, even down to the names. Wake and Winslow are waiting for the ferry. Wake is somewhat like Endgame's Hamm, who's confined to a wheelchair (Wake has a bum leg), while Winslow is like Clov, performing various tasks around the setting. And Beckett's surreal absurdism permeates the narrative.
Of course, Marxists have read Beckett favorably too, and I think you can make the argument; but the film feels a bit too purposefully ham-fisted to support it, I think. A major tenet of alienation is that everyone suffers from it--the laborers, but also the industrialists. In The Lighthouse, both Wake and Winslow experience (at some point) the unadulterated beauty (or horror?) of whatever the lighthouse represents. For Marx, overcoming alienation is a good thing; workers should be reunited with the fruits of their labor, so to speak. But in The Lighthouse, this is a cause of undoing. It's more Lovecraftian than Marxist.
That being said, elements of what you suggest ring true, particularly the fetishism aspect. Marx uses fetishism very purposefully: it connotes religiosity. Once capitalism reaches the M' stage (when money becomes "capital"), it achieves a quasi-religious status. I'd agree that The Lighthouse makes use of this element, albeit more in an explicitly religious sense.
If there's a scathing and elegant critique of class relations in 2019 cinema, I think it's Parasite.
Of course, Marxists have read Beckett favorably too, and I think you can make the argument; but the film feels a bit too purposefully ham-fisted to support it, I think. A major tenet of alienation is that everyone suffers from it--the laborers, but also the industrialists. In The Lighthouse, both Wake and Winslow experience (at some point) the unadulterated beauty (or horror?) of whatever the lighthouse represents. For Marx, overcoming alienation is a good thing; workers should be reunited with the fruits of their labor, so to speak. But in The Lighthouse, this is a cause of undoing. It's more Lovecraftian than Marxist.
That being said, elements of what you suggest ring true, particularly the fetishism aspect. Marx uses fetishism very purposefully: it connotes religiosity. Once capitalism reaches the M' stage (when money becomes "capital"), it achieves a quasi-religious status. I'd agree that The Lighthouse makes use of this element, albeit more in an explicitly religious sense.
If there's a scathing and elegant critique of class relations in 2019 cinema, I think it's Parasite.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
Krow
Garbage Connoisseur
Bourbon
Active Member
- Nov 13, 2019
- 575
- 1,647
- 93
- 38
Watched The Irishman this past weekend. Honestly, kind of shocked I was able to, as these days I'm barely able to find the time watch a two hour movie, let alone a 3 1/2 hour behemoth. Just lucky it came to streaming on a holiday weekend, I reckon. Anyway, I loved it. As good as Scorsese's greatest? Nah, definitely not. But it's a good swansong as far as his organized crime films go. Examining the effect organized crime and the violence that comes with it has on those involved as they grow older and begin losing the people they care about makes it a pretty good bookend to his work in the genre.
I know everyone either loves or hates the de-aging CGI, and when I first saw the shot of DeNiro de-aged in the truck I thought "Oh fuck this is gonna be a long 3 hours." But as the movie went on I didn't find it distracting at all and rarely thought of it.
Robert DeNiro is really good and it was great to see Joe Pecsi back and I really enjoyed his super subtle performance. One of the highlights of the film for sure. Al Pacino's is the one that really impressed me, though. There was a little of the OH HAH of many of his post Scarface performances but it worked and was complimented by a mostly restrained performance that reminded me of Michael Corleone in Godfather Part II at times. Good shit.
Overall, one of the best of Scorsese films since Casino. The story was engrossing, especially once Frank meets Hoffa, and it was gorgeously shot.The movie really flew by despite its running time (which is always a compliment from me as far as long movies go, if my ass starts burning from sitting so long it's like being in my own personal hell) and I definitely want to give it another watch should I ever find the time.
I know everyone either loves or hates the de-aging CGI, and when I first saw the shot of DeNiro de-aged in the truck I thought "Oh fuck this is gonna be a long 3 hours." But as the movie went on I didn't find it distracting at all and rarely thought of it.
Robert DeNiro is really good and it was great to see Joe Pecsi back and I really enjoyed his super subtle performance. One of the highlights of the film for sure. Al Pacino's is the one that really impressed me, though. There was a little of the OH HAH of many of his post Scarface performances but it worked and was complimented by a mostly restrained performance that reminded me of Michael Corleone in Godfather Part II at times. Good shit.
Overall, one of the best of Scorsese films since Casino. The story was engrossing, especially once Frank meets Hoffa, and it was gorgeously shot.The movie really flew by despite its running time (which is always a compliment from me as far as long movies go, if my ass starts burning from sitting so long it's like being in my own personal hell) and I definitely want to give it another watch should I ever find the time.
