Author Topic: Top 100 Club: 1SO  (Read 51313 times)

Sandy

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Re: Top 100 Club: 1SO
« Reply #380 on: March 26, 2022, 09:04:56 AM »
Actors love mouthfuls of great dialogue, but this isn't great like endlessly quotable. The kind of dialogue we can all recite from memory after a few viewings. This is pages and pages of intelligent, verbose wordage, the kind that's difficult enough to just remember, let alone internalize and deliver through complex characters. The hardest kind of great dialogue

Exactly this! Hard for me to express, but you captured it perfectly. During the movie, I understood quickly why this densely, complex screenplay lands in your top 100.

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and for me the award clearly goes to Dunaway. While the men mostly get to sit or stand in a fixed position, she has to go through all the complicated physical gymnastics of a sex scene, an act for the camera that can be as difficult physically as the dialogue is mentally. The men give me the impression that they love to speak their mind, but for Dunaway, this single-minded obsession is all she knows. It's who she is, to the core.

That was quite a feat! I thought it was the funniest part of the movie and also so sad to see someone so caught up in that obsession, she was missing everything about life that really mattered.

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There was a brief period where reality TV removed the freshness of this material, but now I think it wouldn't take much to move everything into the world of podcasting, a modern field where the primal forces of nature circle white men who love to preach.

They sure do love to preach. :/

I felt the film was as timely now as then.  Full circle, really.

jdc

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Re: Top 100 Club: 1SO
« Reply #381 on: April 08, 2022, 09:07:37 AM »
Mammoth
But then, there's another moment, the final moment. After all I've witnessed, it all comes down to "We need to hire a new nanny," and that knocked me on my ass a little bit.



My thought was he better not get a nanny from Thailand


Managed to watch it tonight but also was a long, difficult day.. so need a bit of time to process it to make comments, some on the movie and maybe some on Eric’s reaction as well


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jdc

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Re: Top 100 Club: 1SO
« Reply #382 on: April 09, 2022, 12:17:14 AM »
I actually liked Babel quite a bit when it came out though but that has dropped over time, it does feel a bid heavy handed in the approach though it did make me a fan of Rinko Kikuchi

This does feel a lot more natural to me, maybe partly it is a world that I recognise quite well.  I’ve spent a lot of time in Thailand as well as worked there for a bit less than a year.  So it is easy to recognise the different type of people you casually see here, sometimes in a disturbing way.   Also, it is very common in this part of the world that middle class households have “ya ya’s” ie, domestic help/nanny from the Philippines. Economic changes have caused a shift away from Philippines, so not it is more likely they are from Indonesia or Myanmar

Mammoth

Also, the elephant ride, while exactly what a hypocritical westerner, who previously thought they'd had a "moment" with such a shackled creature, is spot-on as far as what would actually happen, still made me cringe. Not cringe as in bad filmmaking, just cringe as in, damn, that is really what this dude would do.

I sometimes think the lense you watch through is a bit too clouded.  The exploitation of elephants in Thailand always put a bad taste in my mouth and I never wanted to feed the market. But you know who are usually fascinated by them and go on elephant rides?  Pretty much everybody but the Thai unless they are making the money doing it.   Maybe I use to seeing more Chinese, Japanese, SEAsian not just western that would all do the same thing. 

I’ve not really known westerners here with live in domestic help that certainly a lot of locals.  Many are in similar situations, often have left their child in the care of the grandmother while they work to overseas so that their child will have a better life. This is all too familiar.

One of the better local films around the theme of having domestic help

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2901736/

"Beer. Now there's a temporary solution."  Homer S.
“The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations” - David Friedman

Eric/E.T.

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Re: Top 100 Club: 1SO
« Reply #383 on: April 09, 2022, 02:29:36 PM »
I sometimes think the lense you watch through is a bit too clouded.  The exploitation of elephants in Thailand always put a bad taste in my mouth and I never wanted to feed the market. But you know who are usually fascinated by them and go on elephant rides?  Pretty much everybody but the Thai unless they are making the money doing it.   Maybe I use to seeing more Chinese, Japanese, SEAsian not just western that would all do the same thing. 

I’ve not really known westerners here with live in domestic help that certainly a lot of locals.  Many are in similar situations, often have left their child in the care of the grandmother while they work to overseas so that their child will have a better life. This is all too familiar.

OK, but what is portrayed is a westerner who thinks they are a moral human being showing themselves to be a hypocrite in several ways, one of which is in riding the back of the elephant with which he had a "moment". No clouding here, just giving an analysis of what's in the film. Whether or not people from other continents participate in this activity is immaterial to Mammoth. Whether or not "pretty much everybody" engages in the activity is immaterial to Mammoth, though a sad commentary on humanity, one of sooooo many.
A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire

jdc

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Re: Top 100 Club: 1SO
« Reply #384 on: April 09, 2022, 07:14:27 PM »
Perhaps immaterial to Mammoth, it is how you view it outside of Mammoth I think I was trying to convey which is probably not what Mammoth is trying to say.

I assume the elephant ride is meant to show that he has moral issues and not exactly going to do the right thing. The most hypocrital thing he does is treating her like a prostitute in the end.  Maybe at that moment he really was thinking about leaving his family and giving her hope when he started talking about a life with her, instead he left her all his valuables and snook out when she was sleeping.  The only difference between their first encounter to the second was the value of the transaction. The second one could have given her a chance to make a choice of what she wanted to do in her life…  But without knowing the value of what he left, she really only made the same as she would have with any other customer.
"Beer. Now there's a temporary solution."  Homer S.
“The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations” - David Friedman

Eric/E.T.

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Re: Top 100 Club: 1SO
« Reply #385 on: April 10, 2022, 12:45:12 AM »
100% right on the character's most major moral failings. I'm just sensitive to animal abuse, so that symbolism provokes a strong reaction in me. But also, in reality those are two actors working on a film, not a tourist from the west and a prostitute, but the elephant with people riding on its back is still an elephant with people riding on its back, unless this dude is on another level with CGI.
A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire

jdc

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Re: Top 100 Club: 1SO
« Reply #386 on: April 11, 2022, 07:24:35 PM »
As to how they filmed it, I would guess it is not CGI as riding an elephant liking falls into the “no animals were harmed” clause even though riding elephants clearly causes harm over time.  I image the same for horses but they don’t ban it in real life or movies. 
"Beer. Now there's a temporary solution."  Homer S.
“The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations” - David Friedman

Eric/E.T.

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Re: Top 100 Club: 1SO
« Reply #387 on: April 11, 2022, 08:10:46 PM »
It also depends on how the animals are being cared for at the shoot. I only ever use it as an extratextual criticism when there is clear neglect or actual abuse of the animals involved, and I didn’t use it to criticize this film. The minimal use of animals, including the extinct mammoth, is actually quite potent.

The treatment of horses on a number of classic westerns ruined the films for me after I read about it. While I don’t love the idea of riding on any animal’s back, I understand that in some sense humans have selectively bred animals for transportation, so my thing is, treat them with love and respect, and phase out unnecessary exploitation of animals as a general principle.  I’m not nearly as worried about it in modern cinema because there are standards, even if they are not perfect, and certainly not applied across the globe. I think America does a pretty good job in this area.
A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire

 

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