Top 100 Club: smirnoff

[Bondo]

Savor all your non-Taco Bell favorites because they’re all going away in next 13 years.

[smirnoff]

Good things from the gar-den (toot toot)
Gar-den in the valley (VAAALLEY)
Valley of the Jolly Green Giant

[Dave the Necrobumper]

Also, any three seashells theories?

Wash, rinse, dry 

[PeacefulAnarchy]

Perfect Sense
I enjoyed it, but at the core 1SO's conclusion matches mine.

I found it all to be a handful of interesting ideas that aren't tied into one multi-layered film experience. I think the love story is meant to tie everything together, but I found it rather bland and often upstaged by the global pandemic.

Except as I think about it I'm actually not sure how to fix what I think the film is lacking because it is deliberately constructed and connected and there's nothing that's not well done.
The film's choice to leave explanations at a minimum and focus on the people, and particularly the emotions, is a good one, but then it makes you wonder why we even need the perspective of the people trying to figure out what's going on. The wider impact of the changes is treated similarly and I feel that's probably my biggest issue with the film. Everyone losing smell and taste is a big deal, but it doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that would cause mass chaos and confusion. The scenes are well done, but while they're meant to set a mood they pushed my mind into asking questions the film was not remotely looking to explore, let alone answer. The love story at the core is compelling but also a bit shallow. It fits the film perfectly, being almost purely about senses and emotion with little depth, but on its own terms its a bit tepid. So, do I praise the film for making me think lots of interesting thoughts or criticize it for not being interested in the thoughts it brought on me?
 
I think that's actually the core of my problem with the film. It's a great film to make us think about our senses and the role they play in our lives, and it ties some core ideas along with a framing sci-fi gimmick really well. It has a strong core and does what it sets out to do. But the almost reverent way it thinks about senses is not the way I think about them. It explores most ideas in an emotional way, whereas those ideas take me in a more utilitarian direction. I don't think about smell as some wonderful trigger of memory and essential part of the human experience, I think of it primarily as a way to detect bad things. I don't think about taste as some wonderful cornucopia of experiences, I think of it as sense I would not mind losing. Ironically, sound I value much more, but the film actually does very little to explore the beauty of sound seeing it mostly about communication, and this is also the part of the film where it leans hardest on the societal breakdown. The sight part is probably where it connects strongest with me, but it's also the shortest and is preoccupied with tying up the wider story.

Yet despite a lot of frustration, I still enjoyed the film because it got me thinking about lots of cool things, even if it left me hanging.

[colonel_mexico]

Good things from the gar-den (toot toot)
Gar-den in the valley (VAAALLEY)
Valley of the Jolly Green Giant

LOL, this makes its way into my head randomly....also in the Oz version isn't taco bell changed into pizza hut?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STwEqxtjMCU

[smirnoff]

Perfect Sense
I enjoyed it, but at the core 1SO's conclusion matches mine.

I found it all to be a handful of interesting ideas that aren't tied into one multi-layered film experience. I think the love story is meant to tie everything together, but I found it rather bland and often upstaged by the global pandemic.

Except as I think about it I'm actually not sure how to fix what I think the film is lacking because it is deliberately constructed and connected and there's nothing that's not well done.
The film's choice to leave explanations at a minimum and focus on the people, and particularly the emotions, is a good one, but then it makes you wonder why we even need the perspective of the people trying to figure out what's going on. The wider impact of the changes is treated similarly and I feel that's probably my biggest issue with the film. Everyone losing smell and taste is a big deal, but it doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that would cause mass chaos and confusion. The scenes are well done, but while they're meant to set a mood they pushed my mind into asking questions the film was not remotely looking to explore, let alone answer. The love story at the core is compelling but also a bit shallow. It fits the film perfectly, being almost purely about senses and emotion with little depth, but on its own terms its a bit tepid. So, do I praise the film for making me think lots of interesting thoughts or criticize it for not being interested in the thoughts it brought on me?
 
I think that's actually the core of my problem with the film. It's a great film to make us think about our senses and the role they play in our lives, and it ties some core ideas along with a framing sci-fi gimmick really well. It has a strong core and does what it sets out to do. But the almost reverent way it thinks about senses is not the way I think about them. It explores most ideas in an emotional way, whereas those ideas take me in a more utilitarian direction. I don't think about smell as some wonderful trigger of memory and essential part of the human experience, I think of it primarily as a way to detect bad things. I don't think about taste as some wonderful cornucopia of experiences, I think of it as sense I would not mind losing. Ironically, sound I value much more, but the film actually does very little to explore the beauty of sound seeing it mostly about communication, and this is also the part of the film where it leans hardest on the societal breakdown. The sight part is probably where it connects strongest with me, but it's also the shortest and is preoccupied with tying up the wider story.

Yet despite a lot of frustration, I still enjoyed the film because it got me thinking about lots of cool things, even if it left me hanging.

I enjoyed seeing you sift through your thoughts on this film. I relate so much to having questions and interests which the film never pursues. The concept is a good one, but also maybe it's so big there's really no choice but to tell it this way. Like observing an eclipse through a pinhole.

That said, for me it's strikes a pretty good balance of covering the emotional and utilitarian side of things... albiet with a very narrow lens (the relationship covers the emotions, the restaurant covers the practical aspects of adaptation).

You're generally not one for big scores in film if I recall correctly. When I saw you select this film for viewing I wondered if I should warn you since this film is quite persistent with the scoring. Did it come on too strong for you're tastes?

[smirnoff]

also in the Oz version isn't taco bell changed into pizza hut?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STwEqxtjMCU#no

Lol. So weird. I wonder how much Pizza Hut paid for that poorly done swap. Also, I'm surprised any big corporation would even want that position in the movie, given how sensitive they are about image. The food looks so stupid! It makes me think of the Beetlejuice dinner scene for some reason.



There's also a scene shortly after where Denis Leary and the underground people raid a food truck with a Taco Bell logo and Stallone beats them up, after which he picks up a container of food which also has a Taco Bell logo on it. I suppose they just plastered over that as well.

[PeacefulAnarchy]

You're generally not one for big scores in film if I recall correctly. When I saw you select this film for viewing I wondered if I should warn you since this film is quite persistent with the scoring. Did it come on too strong for you're tastes?

It was at a few points, yeah, enough that I noticed it but not so much that it meaningfully detracted from my experience. A fair bit of it was in montages/scenes that were pure score, which, while I'm still not a fan of, doesn't bother me as much as when it's used to punctuate scenes. It was also used in a way that meshed well with the film's tone, so I think any issues I had were subsumed into my general feelings about the tone as a whole.

I enjoyed seeing you sift through your thoughts on this film. I relate so much to having questions and interests which the film never pursues. The concept is a good one, but also maybe it's so big there's really no choice but to tell it this way. Like observing an eclipse through a pinhole.

I wouldn't say "no choice but to tell it this way" because there are definitely other ways to tell it, but I do agree it's a concept so big that it's not possible to do everything, and there's nothing really wrong with most of the choices, just that they didn't all match what I would have preferred the film to focus on.

[Teproc]

Perfect Sense (David Mackenzie 2011)

What a cool idea for a film. Senses are the way we interact with the world, with eeach other, and taking them away is an excellent way of attempting to reveal things about humanity, and even reflecting on our very nature (it's essentially what Descartes does in Discourse on the Method after all). It's also quite the filmmaking challenge. As a medium, cinema relies entirely on two senses and can only do its best to evoke the other three, but some do manage it,- at least in the case of touch and smell - I don't think I've ever watched a film that conveyed a sense of taste. Made me hungry, sure, but taste seems like the toughest one to me.

Unfortunately, I feel that Mackenzie completely fails to live up to his premise. He is commited, to a certain extent, and there is an ambition here that I can respect... though I question the choice to leave out touch entirely. One could argue that the film sees touch as the "perfect sense", because it is the one that most intimately connects with this idea of, well, connecting people, and this is a love story after all. Fine, but I was kinda looking forward to what would happen when people lost touch: it would essentially have been the cinematic recreation of Avicenna's "flying man" experiment, and that would be a fascinating thing for a filmmaker to explore. But now that's just me trying to make the film into something that it isn't, which is probably unfair.

The reason I do want it to be something else, however, is because what it is just doesn't work for me at all. As a commentary on modern society, on alienation, it feels trite, the cinematic equivalent of a fortune cookie. As for the romance... I think Eva Green is simply not very good here ? I'm not sure if it's here or the writing : the "sailor" bit does strikes me as something that may work on paper but not on screen, for example. I think she has some chemistry with McGregor, but this film wants more than that from them: from the direction to the overbearing score, it all screams that this is a transcendental love story that's not about these two characters but about the whole concept of love and connection between humans... and that's a tough bar to clear. I think it has the issue of overtly trying to be universal, but the universal is best achieved through specificity, and what attempts there are at that here are too obviously tied in to the main plot (both having jobs that are very strongly connected to the virus) to ever feel real.

Points for ambition, but none for execution, for me anyway. I can certainly see how this would be a favorite though, it's a big swing and when those hit, they hit hard.

[BlueVoid]

I watched this a few weeks ago, but forgot to post my thoughts here.

Hero
I almost certainly did this movie a disservice by watching it streaming on Hulu. This is a movie which leans hard into its aesthetic and I think the quality of my stream did this movie no favors.

That said, I think even with a beautiful and crisp print I'd have issues. There are moments of absolute cinematic ecstasy. And there are moments where the movie feels so hard to push the stylistic bar that it falters and reveals a shallow core. With the type of intense style and extreme wire-work action there is a fine line between cool and comical. I think this movie dips into the latter quite a bit.

The mesmerizing colors and the at times unbelievable action outstrips the negative, but at the same time those cracks in the stylistic mystique cheapens the experience and makes me question the movie as a whole.
7/10