Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Ang Lee)

[dreamdead]

https://posterspy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/BillyLynn_02_v01_web.jpg

[dreamdead]

The barest of yays from me. I'm a huge fan of the novel, which beautifully satirizes concepts of masculinity, of money (favoring athletes over soldiers), and "supporting" the troops; however, Lee's adaptation removes many of the most trenchant political critiques, so that what was once bitter and subversive becomes personal and anodyne. There are passages that still resonate, as the central combat moment that plays out in the middle is both horrifying and pulsing with energy, but whole sequences throughout also feel flatter and more one-note than the novel ever was.

It doesn't help that several of the meta-moments in the book, assessing the Hollywoodization of the Bravo Squad, resonate now as cute rather than anything else. The Tucker and Alwyn mirror sequence is the worst offender. Those passages needed anchored to a different metaphor to work more. Hedlund, Alwyn, and Stewart do good work throughout--it just doesn't quite hit each landing or target.

Just a smidge above average, but I'd expected so much more.

[Ezee E]

It looks like I won't get to see this as I'm sure it's pulled from every theater after this week.

Not like it matters considering all of the theaters are the normal 2D.

[Henry Gale]

Alright. I saw this in 120fps 2D (dubbed "Immersive Cinema") and much like my experience with the first Hobbit four years ago, I find it really hard to divorce my thoughts about the film's presentation from the film itself, which largely feels like it's swimming under something so much more remarkably alien.

The film itself: I think it's okay? It's just hard to grasp like a normal film. The look of it all aside, as much as I think Lee is one of the better directors alive, this just feels like a contently slight and minor work, even with all its big emotions and his eccentric directorial hands. If this was a pilot for a military-themed anthology series (inevitably called "War Stories" or something), I'd keep watching, but hope it went deeper over time. There's just not much there story-wise for me. So much of it hangs on relationships that never feel developed enough, operates on a narrative framework that foils any potential sense of momentum, surprise or suspense, and it banks on so many tonally weird moments that shift the plot drastically that I couldn't quite be sure when it was maybe trying to be dumb as if it had purposely become the cheesy movie adaptation of their lives they fear. But like dreamdead said, that meta stuff never really lands, and the drama at hand never really feels worthwhile enough to feel like it can be pompously superior to anything.

Having said all that, there's undoubtedly strong stuff within its often frantic self. It packs so many ideas in it that I can't be sure which ones it feels like it fully accomplishes because I'm probably forgetting ten more that intersect with it. Also some wooden and cringe-y dialogue towards the end aside, there are lovely moments (particularly between Billy and his sister) and incredibly effective intense ones (the ambush, cross cut with the halftime show). The performances dreamdead also mentioned are solid, while other lesser ones don't feel like any I've ever seen on screen, with the lucidity of their more stilted choices feeling glaring and instantly inauthentic. Basically the 120fps makes the good performances look like something refreshingly new and the weaker ones all that much more noticeably so. Also, having watched so much Broad City, seeing Jaime (Arturo Castro) speak like this was crazier than any of the frame-rate technology.

The frame-rate forces many beats to feel much cornier / cheaper than they should (the cheerleaders saving the day, the limo becoming the Humvee, while other more action-oriented ones significantly more engrossing) like the crew for a telenovela adapted The Hurt Locker. But most of all, apparently this increased frame-rate also makes ADR exponentially more noticeable, since some of it looking laughably bad through much of it.

I think the bottom line is that 120fps (or at least this very first go at it) just de-romanticizes the look of film as we've always known it. More than the dawn of digital cinematography and projection, more than the sharpness of HD, or digital colour-grading -- and obviously this is all of those things at the same time -- it just takes a bigger hammer to any sort of barrier of how cinema looks versus reality, and even then it looks more weirdly fluid than real life. It breaks past that filmic gloss we've known forever that masks the blemishes and imperfections that filmmakers as good as Ang Lee and cinematographers as adept as John Toll have previously known how to navigate for the best possible results. Here, camera moves feel more jarring, focus pulls can be disorienting, handheld shots are unnerving, and cross-dissolves just look gross and bizarre. The skills/tricks everyone's used forever simply don't work the same way with these tools.

Biggest takeaway: Destiny's Child's "Lose My Breath" is a way better song than I remember.

[TGM]

Haven't read the book, so I can't make any comparisons to that, but from what I saw in the movie, I was honestly impressed. I thought it was the perfect blend of smart, stylistic editing with clever cynicism, and was made all the more so by the fact that I saw this movie in an entirely empty theater, a fact that the movie itself almost predicts. A big aspect of the movie is how regular civilians only support their troops so long as it is convenient to them, and are quick to forget them and leave them behind as soon as that convenience expires, and that's pretty much exactly what happened in this instance, is it not? So it's a bit of a shame to see such a good movie like this completely bomb in the theaters, but it appears as if even the movie itself was prepared for precisely that.

But this movie's arguments really resonated with me, and I also got a good kick out of how self-aware the whole thing was. The movie knows precisely where to take itself seriously, and where to be a little lighter, and it was particularly effective in this regard, being both hilarious and extremely tense and emotional at times all throughout.

More than anything else, though, I especially loved the dialogue of the soldiers themselves, which is some of the most realistic military dialogue I think I've ever heard on film. Very satisfying to see them nail that aspect spot on.

The more I think about this movie, the more I think I really loved it.

[Mal]

What everyone else said. Script really fails on bringing bigger, more evident meaning to the story. Hedlund is great, etc.

[Stay Puft]

what was once bitter and subversive becomes personal and anodyne


as much as I think Lee is one of the better directors alive, this just feels like a contently slight and minor work, even with all its big emotions and his eccentric directorial hands

All of that, basically.

I still enjoyed it. It packs in a lot of ideas, as Henry says, but simply doesn't have enough time in its sub-2hr runtime to do real justice to any of them. And as dd says, a lot of the meta stuff doesn't land, and is way too winking cute when it really feels like it needs a more vitriolic voice. I would have liked to see a version of this story that went for the metaphorical throat. As a personal, emotional journey seen through Billy's eyes, however, it was engaging and entertaining and the ending even got to me (it's cheesy, for sure, but that kinda thing is cinematic catnip for me; and I loved Vin Diesel in that small role).

I also saw it in 120fps and generally loved it. I can see why Ang Lee wanted HFR for this particular story. It really brings the Iraq scenes to life in incredible ways, and not just the action stuff. There's an earlier scene where they're walking through a market, and Billy is constantly scanning the crowd for danger, with a lot of back and forth camera panning, and the HFR brings a precise, stark clarity to every movement, conveying Billy's heightened awareness and alertness in that moment. That so much of the film is otherwise not set in Iraq, and not benefitting in any obvious way from HFR, does also make it a little weird, though. This, for example:


and cross-dissolves just look gross and bizarre

...is absolutely true. That stuff was terrible. But I think part of that is down to Lee making some questionable artistic choices in general. This goes back to the work also feeling slight and minor. Those dissolves would have been tacky in any framerate, and there's plenty of weird choices like that that have no relationship to the framerate, like the weird color fading when Billy is projecting his imagination during the press conference. It's a tacky, heavy-handed way of conveying something that the editing itself already ably accomplished. Ang Lee is a good director, but he really needed to take the gloves off here, so to speak. He did not.

[Henry Gale]

I gotta say (even though the heft of my original post might've already suggested this), as many misgivings as I may have had with the experience overall, I've thought about it quite a lot since seeing it. Not to mention I've really enjoyed discussing it with people in my life who both have and haven't seen it in any format.

I'm really glad someone else here got to see it in the "Immersive Cinema" frame-rate. Pretty sure we would've seen it at the same theatre too, Stay Puft. :D


I can see why Ang Lee wanted HFR for this particular story. It really brings the Iraq scenes to life in incredible ways, and not just the action stuff. There's an earlier scene where they're walking through a market, and Billy is constantly scanning the crowd for danger, with a lot of back and forth camera panning, and the HFR brings a precise, stark clarity to every movement, conveying Billy's heightened awareness and alertness in that moment. That so much of the film is otherwise not set in Iraq, and not benefitting in any obvious way from HFR, does also make it a little weird, though.

Oh, totally agree here, and that's probably the most interesting aspect of the technology for me. How many times have you seen a badly calibrated panning shot in the movie theatre and just been dizzyingly trapped there with it for its duration? (Pretty sure it happened to me a few times in Fantastic Beasts within the same week I saw this, even.) Here, there's such clarify and fluidity in those quick, revolving, space-developing shots that I remember going, "Ok. Wow. This is something I love that is actually solving something missing in filmmaking otherwise."

I just hope the press for it doesn't entire discourage anyone from attempting something like this again. (Other than James Cameron, who probably thinks he'll do for 120fps what the first Avatar did for 3D....... Fuck it, we doubt him every time and he always shifts the paradigm with film technology. Let's just give him the benefit of the doubt and say he will!)

[Peng]

Such an incredibly weird, messy film, both in its tonal shifts and aesthetics choices. But it's also consistently... interesting? For all the overly blunt speeches, damn earnest emotional beats, and idiosyncratic stylistic touches, sometimes they weave together and combine into many moving moments, despite myself. Helpห that Joe Alwyn, Kristen Stewart, and Garrett Hedlund are strong throughout. And I haven't expected the last ten minutes or so to sting this hard.

[Ezee E]

Was nobody annoyed by the fake NFL logos, Jerry Jones moniker, and Destiny's Child standins? For a movie that tries to be realistic, this sure got in the way for me.

On top of that, it's something we've seen SEVERAL times just in the last few years. PTSD... again. Normal life will never be the same again... again. Ugh.

Garret Hedlund's character is the only thing that feels like a grounded character in the movie.