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Author Topic: Respond to the last movie you watched  (Read 683943 times)

Teproc

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #260 on: January 22, 2017, 03:09:00 PM »
Everyone is taking Bondo's throwaway one-liner awfully seriously, lol.

pixote

I don't know, it seems the people who reacted very poorly to EWS found the guys attitude despicable, which... they definitely are objectifying women, but I didn't think anything was beyond the pale, or even close to it.
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Bondo

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #261 on: January 22, 2017, 03:29:49 PM »
The guys' attitude toward women was normal; that's the problem. I don't consider the status quo particularly tolerable so I want to denormalize it.

pixote

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #262 on: January 22, 2017, 03:30:22 PM »
Ah, right, I forgot this was a rehash of old arguments.

It's worth noting I guess what a weird political island Austin is amid the rest of Texas. Linklater himself is one or more of the characters in EWS!!, and he's for sure a Texan but not very likely to have voted for Trump.

edit: I had to add the exclamation points, since bringing Eyes Wide Shut into this discussion would've confused things. (Cruise's character definitely voted Trump, though.)

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« Last Edit: January 22, 2017, 03:32:38 PM by pixote »
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Junior

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #263 on: January 22, 2017, 03:38:40 PM »
I hear you. There's a line of dialogue about their cultural shifts (in terms of which bars/parties they're going to) that speaks to an openness of some sort. There's also no hint of racism towards the (one) black character. But I still don't think it's a bit stretch to think along the lines I wrote about. This is one of those deeply personal reviews where I don't expect anybody else to have the same thoughts I'm having and expressing. But I still thought those things, so I thought I'd share them with you. I'm just at the beginning of the last semester of my Master's degree. I'm thinking about teaching a lot. There you have it.
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Bondo

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #264 on: January 22, 2017, 03:40:10 PM »
I don't want to imply anything about Linklater in saying this, but it is a fair point to disconnect this particular type of male behavior from partisan alignment. There are a lot of left-leaning groups (for example the atheist community) where many of the men involved behave rather poorly toward women.

Junior

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #265 on: January 22, 2017, 03:44:58 PM »
I could (if it wasn't a break of trust/the rules) provide you plenty of essays about sexism on college campuses written by my freshman writing students. Yeah, it's not a conservative or progressive thing at all. But it is one of the things that Trump voters thought was not a big enough problem to keep from voting for him. It was also, I suspect, part of why some people felt very free to abandon Hillary. But further discussion of this should go in the politics thread if we're moving away from the actual movie.
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pixote

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #266 on: January 22, 2017, 03:57:43 PM »
I understand what you're saying, pix, and I agree that directors can have an impact on performances, apart from communicating to the actors.  But I see it differently.

I'm really looking forward to Fences simply because it is a "filmed play".  For great performances, the fewer distractions, the better.  In the Before Trilogy, I loved the conversations to be held with pleasant, but basic backgrounds-- cities whose images we've seen a number of times, simple farmland, so we could focus on the dialogue and performances.  To me, it's like a microscope, focusing on these aspects of film.

What I don't care is for directors to take great performances and to give us so much else to look at that we are distracted from what is truly great in the scene.  Then I don't know if the scene I liked was the actor or the director.  A scene I didn't like, should I blame the actor when I love the actor under other directors?  I think that a simple direction highlights performances, and too much distraction is often a cover for a weak performance.

I've been thinking more about the "magic trick" of film.  How a good director can take a contradiction or a poor aspect of their film and use editing and other tricks to cover it up so we never notice it, or we don't care.  At the same time, they can certainly highlight a great aspect of their film.  For me, a bare stage is all that is necessary for a great performance.  It's like the director standing out of the way and allowing the actor(s) to just shine.

I keep meaning to come back to this. I feel like I agree and disagree with you at the same time. I'm often a defender of film adaptations of plays that don't open things up too much (A Raisin in the Sun (1961) is in my Top 100, for example), but there's still an opportunity for those films to be cinematic — and to capture performances that are equally cinematic. I don't mean flashy and I don't mean style over substance. I just mean, movies should be movies, and the performances therein should be cinematic performances. Before Sunset, for example, is a very different film if Hawke and Delpy are just sitting in a cafe the whole time, and their performance aren't set against those lovely tracking shots through Paris. I wasn't able to catch up with Titus as part of the 1999 Retrospots, but I suspect that the performances of Hopkins and Lange, as filmed there, are more cinematic — and thus better film performances — than the best performances in a BBC production of Titus Andronicus. That's more of what I was trying to get at when I said, "Stage acting and film acting are different crafts, and it's not really enough to point the camera at the former and label it the latter. It has to be transformed." It's not about the director distracting from the performances; it's abuot them enhancing those performances.

A better example — that I meant to include in my review but forgot — was imaging what 20th Century Women might have looked like had Pedro Almodóvar directed it instead of Mike Mills. I suspect that his cinematic sensibilities would have enhanced the performances of that whole ensemble, taking it from very good to great, with his colorful art direction doing nothing to detract from the cast.

(I'm in a rambling mood lately, putting no pressure on myself to make actual sense.)

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« Last Edit: January 22, 2017, 04:00:37 PM by pixote »
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Teproc

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #267 on: January 22, 2017, 04:59:54 PM »
It was a not-so-great day at the movies :

Ballerina / Leap! (Eric Summer & Eric Warin, 2016)

French animation can suck too ! This is not an offensively bad movie, it's just... the script feels like it could have been written by a computer having been fed animated movie plots from the last twenty years, and the voice acting doesn't particularly elevate the material. There just isn't any reason for this film to exist, it has a potentially interesting setting (1880's Paris, it's about an orphan girl from Britanny who becomes a ballet dancer) but doesn't do anything with it other than "hey look, it's the Tour Eiffel and the Statue of Liberty under construction... neat, huh ?". Its inclusions of Sia songs feels like a particularly desperate attempt to be hip and cool, because ballet is boring right ? It almost never goes over the top either, and thus stays painfully bland throughout.

3/10

The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 2016)


About what you'd expect : dumb, occasionally fun, but mostly dumb. The real disappointment here comes in the acting department : Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe, two actors I generally like a lot, are actively bad in this, Andrew Lau gets nothing to do, and Jing Tian is... fine. Pedro Pascal is the "highlight", because he's the only one who gets to relax a little and crack some jokes, some of which are pretty forced but that's still better than whatever Damon is doing. He's a mercenary with a dark past trying to become a hero... we're told, because there's just nothing going on in his performance. There is some decent action in there, especially in the first 20 minutes, the costumes are colourful and cool... but that's about it.

4/10

Kollektivet / The Commune (Thomas Vinterberg, 2016)


I don't exactly know where to begin with this. It has a great ensemble, and some strong performances across the board, especially from the central couple (Ulrich Thomsen and Trine Dyrholm)... but this isn't as much of an ensemble film as you might think. It is about what living in a commune does to this couple more than it about the commune in general, and it has some interesting things to say about private life and boundaries.

The problem though, is that this film is filled with character making very obviously poor decisions and putting themselves in intenable situations... and those situations predictably blowing up in their faces. But it also seems to want us to believe that what they're doing is good ? I get the feeling that Vinterberg likes the idea of living in a commune, but everything he shows us in this film seems to prove that is a terrible, terrible idea, at least for these characters... for reasons that are completely obvious from the start, even before affairs start happening and make everything even more awkward. Yet, it ends on a note that feels like it'd belong in a bad Sundance movie, and that stark thematic dissonance left me with a very sour taste in my mouth.

4/10
« Last Edit: January 22, 2017, 05:01:40 PM by Teproc »
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Jeff Schroeck

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #268 on: January 22, 2017, 05:41:02 PM »
Middle School: The Worst Years Of My Live (2016)
Dir: Who cares? Really? Honestly?


The boy wanted to watch this. All I can say is that I found a movie worse than Batman V Superman in 2016.

D-/F+

Was Andy Daly entertaining, at least?

smirnoff

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #269 on: January 22, 2017, 06:23:24 PM »
The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou, 2016)[/b]

About what you'd expect : dumb, occasionally fun, but mostly dumb. The real disappointment here comes in the acting department : Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe, two actors I generally like a lot, are actively bad in this, Andrew Lau gets nothing to do, and Jing Tian is... fine. Pedro Pascal is the "highlight", because he's the only one who gets to relax a little and crack some jokes, some of which are pretty forced but that's still better than whatever Damon is doing. He's a mercenary with a dark past trying to become a hero... we're told, because there's just nothing going on in his performance. There is some decent action in there, especially in the first 20 minutes, the costumes are colourful and cool... but that's about it.

4/10

Well, that's enough for me to never bother seeing this. I don't know that I was even on the fence, but I'm happy to take your word for it.

 

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