Author Topic: The Top 100 Club (Sept 2015 - May 2017)  (Read 329202 times)

oldkid

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3400 on: May 28, 2017, 02:35:12 AM »
Timbuktu

"Justice" dispensed by those who do not understand their cultural ass from a hole in the ground.  If justice is pure law, then mercy and God is dead.

What a beautiful, smart film.  The wide shot of a river with nets, with a man crossing the stream is the smartest, best use of wide angle I've seen since Lawrence of Arabia.  This is a brilliant portrayal of the variety of cultures of Africa and the tragedy when one culture lords it over the others.  Very glad I saw it.

Best scene: a woman being flogged, with the sound of the leather tongs against a back being a familiar sound for those who have watched films about slavery.  But she finds the rhythm in the beating and begins singing to in, in defiance to the "no music" law.  I was just floored.

It was a bit slow, and I wish I had seen it on the big screen.  But the message and character building and cinematography was spot on, and possibly will make my favorites list.

4/5
« Last Edit: May 28, 2017, 12:18:55 PM by oldkid »
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pixote

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3401 on: May 28, 2017, 05:43:34 PM »
Shot
Timbuktu - Across the River

I tried.

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Bondo

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3402 on: May 28, 2017, 06:45:29 PM »
Numero Deux (1975)

Normally my first step when identifying films to watch for the club, I highlight those I feel I'm most likely to appreciate. A film by Godard would be rather the opposite. However the second step when identifying films is to see what is readily available, and with my move this was one of two films available in my new library district so with low cost I figured I'd give it a shot. It is definitely a Godard film. I reckon it is better than Film Socialisme. I was intrigued and oft horrified by the sexual content of the film (the characters definitely take a different approach to sex education), but ultimately the Godardness was too much. I'll just never be on board with his habit of waiving his nouvelle vagues in our face by stylistically obscuring the content. I say this as someone who more or less likes Peter Greenaway. Godard's formal choices never seem to have Greenaway's playfulness, rather seeming self-serious.

Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3403 on: May 29, 2017, 10:15:45 AM »
Interstellar (2014)

There are so many moments where it’s clear Interstellar wants to be the 2001: A Space Odyssey of the 21st century. But screenwriters Jonathan and Christopher Nolan never have the guts to leave the audience perplexed. Stanley Kubrick’s arthouse science fiction classic is mostly notable for lengthy, wordless sequences, many of which leave the audience gasping for some understanding of what is happening.

In contrast, Interstellar is filled with sequence after sequence of in-depth explanations of astronomical phenomena and every detail of the mission. It confuses complexity in the details with intelligence. The obsession with details results is an unnecessarily complex plot that Nolan has to explain ad nauseam. It’s the same problem Inception has, a plot with so many layers that a large chunk of the movie is explaining the layers.

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a farmer in a bleak future where Earth is slowly dying. When a scientific anomaly starts communicating with his daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), it leads him to the hidden remnants of NASA who work in secret to save humanity. Before Earth declined, Cooper was part of a failed NASA mission and remains the only human on Earth to have been in space before.

NASA sent 12 ships through a wormhole near Venus to another side of the universe to find a habitable planet. Problem is they need someone on the other side of the wormhole to find which planet will work, either (a) come back and take a human remnant to that planet or (b) start the process of growing human embryos on the planet to breed a new home for humanity. And they decide Cooper should be a part of the mission.

There are so many details along the way, the need to explain every last move and step of the mission, details one would think NASA would go over with everyone before they launch the mission, but since this is a Hollywood film, Nolan strings along the audience and spoon-feeds Cooper the mission details over an hour and a half second act.

And there are so many little nagging details along the way that start putting stress on the complex house of cards. Why did Cooper become a farmer and why didn’t NASA keep track of him if he was the best they had? How come NASA is so far inland and coincidentally so close to where Cooper ended up farming? Why doesn’t their advanced robot TARS go down to the planets and deal with all the dangerous situations solo since it seems the humans are just the things he has to save when the situation gets risky.

At some point, one has to decide to either look at all the flaws in the trees or just enjoy the forest. And there’s surprisingly a lot that still works with so many flawed trees. The emotional beats are consistently good and the main players all come across as people longing for connection but driven away from those they love by the drive to survive and keep the human race going.

And as a hard-science piece of sci-fi, it explores interesting concepts of how time becomes this enemy when doing space exploration. It’s one thing to explain it intellectually, but there’s an emotional impact and weight to it that makes the harsh realities of it feel a lot more human. It makes sense to tell a story that pivots on the relativity of time in the medium of film where time can be expanded and condensed through editing.

The exploration of space allows for great visual moments, particularly the wormhole and black hole sequences. Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography is gorgeous to behold and he captures a lot of that magical wonder that the best films about space are able to convey. It’s just a shame so many of his visuals have to be explained instead of absorbed. Once again, this film lives in the monolithic statue of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It’s refreshing for a science fiction film to be about the science and practicality of space in an era where space is mostly a background for action (Rogue One, Fury Road)  or high-concept, low-budget thought pieces (Midnight Special, Snowpiercer). It exists in this middle ground that vanished in the 21st century where everything had to be a big, dumb action blockbuster or a small, intimate Oscar contender or indie flick.

Interstellar would be quickly followed up by The Martian, a film with less ambitions, but a similar hard science sensibility and a much better execution. It too also has a lot of explanation, but frames it as scientific work instead of explaining to the new crewmember all the things he should have taken note of during the briefings.

There’s a wonder to this films existence, but there are many moments where it becomes clear that it could have been a much better film. Less exposition and more mystery would have gone a long way to making for a much more thoughtful film. Instead, Interstellar comes across as a compromise, a film that wants enough smart moments to get hardcore sci-fi fans, but enough explanation to make sure the average moviegoer won’t leave the film too confused or perplexed. The film’s boldness is executed to be safe and profitable, hampered by its desire to appease instead of having the boldness to challenge and confuse.

Bondo

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3404 on: May 29, 2017, 12:28:45 PM »
Cyrano de Bergerac (1990)

With an adaptation of a story as well known as this, it seems a weakness will generally be scenes that are doing heavy plot lifting because as a knowledgable viewer (even if I knew only the skeleton of it), we don't need the labor. The film starts smartly with the scene at the theatre, playing on Cyrano's character, all banter and bravado. It was at these lighter moments that the film felt freshest. But this is a rather long-feeling movie with many of the other scenes grinding it down at times. I could see a 110 minute cut of this film being a full-throated success.

oldkid

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3405 on: May 29, 2017, 12:43:08 PM »
"It's not art unless it has the potential to be a disaster." Bansky

colonel_mexico

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3406 on: May 29, 2017, 08:10:26 PM »
@Sam and INTERSTELLAR, while I don't share some of your feelings particularly in regards to THE MARTIAN being better executed, what a fantastic review. I enjoyed reading that immensely.
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smirnoff

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3407 on: May 29, 2017, 08:41:11 PM »
The exploration of space allows for great visual moments, particularly the wormhole and black hole sequences. Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography is gorgeous to behold and he captures a lot of that magical wonder that the best films about space are able to convey. It’s just a shame so many of his visuals have to be explained instead of absorbed. Once again, this film lives in the monolithic statue of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Nolan wilfully pulls at your heartstrings, and injects dialogue and music into everything. Kubrick wouldn't know a heartstring from a G-string, he doesn't explain anything, and uses music only in very specific moments. You could point to the tesseract sequence and say it's not as good as how Kubrick would have done it. Maybe's it not. And I could point to  this scene of dialogue and say it's not as good as how Nolan did it. I mean it's awful. There's no emotion, the dialogue is horrible, and he does nothing to bolster it in the way of music. He just wanted to shoe-horn his daughter in to the movie somehow and there it is. It is a completely pointless scene that wastes the audiences time. What's he doing, fumbling around trying to lay emotional groundwork for a tragedy that never unfolds? But nobody criticizes 2001 for that scene, because Kubrick is not writing an emotional family story, he's creating an empty vessel into which you can pour ideas. Nolan isn't making an empty vessel, he has very specific ideas which he wants to communicate to the audience. The silent white hotel room ending of 2001 has it's strengths, but having a specific meaning isn't one of them. The tesseract sequence has it's strengths but being open to interpretation isn't one of them.

I think the comparison between 2001 and Interstellar certainly demostrates your stylistic preference, but I would say your comparison between The Martian is and Interstellar is a better measure of Interstellar's quality (apples to apples, so to speak).

There’s a wonder to this films existence, but there are many moments where it becomes clear that it could have been a much better film. Less exposition and more mystery would have gone a long way to making for a much more thoughtful film. Instead, Interstellar comes across as a compromise, a film that wants enough smart moments to get hardcore sci-fi fans, but enough explanation to make sure the average moviegoer won’t leave the film too confused or perplexed. The film’s boldness is executed to be safe and profitable, hampered by its desire to appease instead of having the boldness to challenge and confuse.

I take issue with the term confuse, because I think it suggests that underneath that confusion there will still be an explanation. As if it were a matter of Nolan having less dialogue, thereby dividing the puzzle into many more pieces and making it more difficult to solve, but ultimately still resembling the same thing when it's all put together. I do not thing that is the case though. For each sequence of dialogue you remove, you do not make the puzzle harder to solve, you make the resulting image have great big white blotches on it where nothing is seen. Kubrick, being the other extreme of this, produces an less populated canvas, but what is there is intriguing and beautiful. And however you choose to fill in the blanks is up to you. It's not a confusion, it's an omission. But imo if you start omitting stuff from Interstellar you do not get 2001, you get Ghost Dad. Interstellar's ability to thoroughly explain it's own premise is what separates it from pack.
« Last Edit: May 29, 2017, 08:49:40 PM by smirnoff »

Teproc

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3408 on: May 30, 2017, 01:39:45 AM »
I've been absent, but I will catch and respond to everyone soon.
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Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: The Top 100 Club
« Reply #3409 on: May 30, 2017, 08:22:41 AM »
@smirnoff

I think most of this is simply ideological differences in how we watch movies. I do agree that Interstellar has more emotional weight, but 2001 inspires more of a sense of wonder and awe to me because it doesn't sit there and try to explain scientifically what the monoliths are and how they work.

I'm hesitant of calling any film empty and I hardly think 2001 is an empty film, I think it just lets the visuals do a lot of the heavy lifting where Nolan tends to let his dialogue do all the heavy lifting.