I hadn't seen Hateful Eight since it premiered. I remember leaving the theater a tad underwhelmed, but I'll be damned if this ain't a great film.
I've had the blu on the shelf for a while, maybe its time for a rewatch.
I like Hateful Eight overall, mainly because of the performances, but it's the only Tarantino movie where I thought the accusations of gratuitous violence constantly thrown at him were actually kind of deserved.
It's good. Up until Channing.
Ehh.
i agree. It's unnecessarily brutal.Quoting Idioteque Stalker (view post)
Yeah. It dips a bit the last 40 minutes.Quoting Ezee E (view post)
My favorite moment of that movie is when Russel and JJL are eating dinner and he tenderly wipes her mouth.
Sorry I was jesting. I always took that to be a common parody / criticism of the film. Thanks for the links though, it's always good to revisit. I want to do the whole 7 hour thing in one-sitting again. It's probably been 10 years since I've done it.Quoting Isaac (view post)
See my latest blog entry: The Wolf of Wall Street and The New Cinema of Excess
The nightmare I'm finding in coming up with movies for a good fantasy montage is how damn slippery the term is. Obviously there's no problem including movies like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Or any number of the Disney animated films, or different adaptations of "Arabian Nights" stories and Greek myths and Wonderland / Arthurian riffs (one of the things I'm looking forward to is threading together a "pulling of the sword" montage and including everything from Graham Chapman to Mark Hamill). And Miyazaki and other anime. And a few Tim Burton flicks.
But then you run into problems almost immediately beyond that. One of the problems is recontextualized "fantasy" like the recent King Arthur or The 13th Warrior, which aren't actually fantasy - but derive so much from fantasy that it doesn't feel fair to not include them (well, 13th Warrior anyway - I'm a big fan of its macho forward energy). Watching Black Orpheus recently, I was disappointed that nothing actually qualified it for fantasy beyond its allegorical nature (excepting maybe Eurydice calling to Orpheus from behind him... maybe).
Another problem is what I'm calling"magical realism." Stuff like Groundhog Day or The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which qualify as fantasy due to their supernaturalism but are so far removed from some like Orcs crashing into Elves that juxtaposing them feels almost perverse. That perversity could actually be fun - one of the fun bits in the sci-fi montage I made was making space for everything from Primer to Star Wars. But it mostly just gives me a headache, as that means I have to watch Freaky Friday now if I want to be fair, and I really don't wanna watch all of those movies. I'm already worn out catching up with family flicks, Terry Gilliam movies, unseen Miyazaki...
Even right now, watching Little Nemo in Slumberland, which is mercifully dull enough that I don't have to think about categorization too much (since I'm unlikely to include it), it's just all some dream bullshit. You include it, you have to wonder why you aren't including, God help me, Inception. But if you don't include it, then why would you include The Princess Bride or The Fall? After all, both of those films offer their fantasy stories only in the context of a real-world frame. What's happening is clearly demarcated as "not true."
But then the consequence of ignoring some of those fuzzy Venn diagram category circles (movies like Ever After or 13 Going on 30 or 300 (these are just examples)) is that a montage would really start to look like the most boring, safe, predictable choices. Very Anglo-friendly, very "current," very pop-mainstream. And one of the best parts of making these montages is finding ways to juxtapose lesser-known films against poppier ones (like sticking Fantastic Planet right after Close Encounters - hopefully it gets fans of the latter into the former).
This felt like a fun challenge at the outset, but now it feels more or less insurmountable unless preceded with an on-screen apology or declaration of terms.
Last edited by Dead & Messed Up; 08-20-2017 at 01:57 AM.
I personally don't see a problem here. I don't think many would be bothered by excluding those movies, but I could be wrong. At least for me, they're plainly realist movies inspired by fantasy sources. This is more common than you would think, honestly. A lot of great dramas, for instance, might be inspired by or even based on fairy tales, folk stories, myths, and the like, largely because those sources actually use outlandish elements to say something human anyways.Quoting Dead & Messed Up (view post)
There are definitely borderline cases when you bring in magical realism and wonder how to relate it to fantasy. Magical realism might be a certain kind of subset of a broader sense of fantasy, but I don't have much trouble myself excluding something like Groundhog Day from traditional fantasy. A feature that is characteristic of magical realism is that, in most cases, the magical elements occur in an otherwise real world setting that obeys physical laws. This isn't usually the case in straight fantasy, where you typically find yourself in some outlandish or unfamiliar settings / locations where instances of magic as magic occur (where the explicit violation of natural laws is recognized as genuinely magical). This holds for something like Groundhog Day where Phil finds himself in this comically absurd nightmare time-loop scenario, but in a perfectly normal and natural setting where there is an overwhelming strain on credulity for its characters to accept the possibility of magic. This is now common trope among modern day magical realist movies, particularly in romantic comedies and those about Christmas. Although, to clarify, in literary magical realist fiction, magical events often aren't even observed by the characters. The natural, real world settings completely normalizes the violation of physical laws so that the occurrences are only observed by the audience, which has an eerie, surrealistic effect.Quoting Dead & Messed Up (view post)
Also, there are ways of reading Groundhog Day where the premise isn't magical, but ought to be read more as something akin to sci-fi or a philosophical thought experiment (Nietzschean eternal recurrence, etc). There's a sense in which doing a certain kind of metaphysics doesn't fall within the scope of traditional fantasy if it can be interpreted as genuinely plausible.
I'm having trouble seeing the problem here. Inception clearly plays, or attempts to play, as sci-fi. The Princess Bride doesn't really play as sci-fi, no? Once you make the decision you're distinguishing sci-fi from fantasy, it makes things a bit easier. In the context of sci-fi, roughly speaking, the outlandish events are thought to be consistent with natural laws (either with our own or of the characters). In fantasy, in typical cases, magic is magic (and not science, or not governed by "physical" or "material" laws).Quoting Dead & Messed Up (view post)
Last edited by Izzy Black; 08-20-2017 at 06:37 PM.
See my latest blog entry: The Wolf of Wall Street and The New Cinema of Excess
That was more just that I would be bummed by disinviting them. At the moment, I'm planning to include Ever After and The 13th Warrior on the calculus that other people would be happier seeing them than not seeing them, genre definitions notwithstanding (and I'd also much rather young people watch Ever After than Disney's animated Cinderella). That may change though, since I haven't actually built anything yet, still collating.Quoting Izzy Black (view post)
Yeah, I'm not sure where I was going with that Inception comment. Chalk it up to all the allergy drugs in my system.
Interesting. I can maybe see why you'd include Ever After, but, IDK, I'd have to see it again. It doesn't strike me as fantasy. And you'd rather people see Ever After than the Disney classic? Why?Quoting Dead & Messed Up (view post)
Lol no worries. If it helps, it's such a pseudo-science piece of crap movie it's easy to see how someone could not think of it as sci-fi.Quoting Dead & Messed Up (view post)
See my latest blog entry: The Wolf of Wall Street and The New Cinema of Excess
Little Nemo in Slumberland - Sorta dull whenever the characters are yapping, but the festive, imaginative dreamscapes would do Winsor McCay proud.
How to Train Your Dragon - Fantastic. Just so much damn fun, good clean brick-by-brick storytelling.
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas - Either its dramatic beats are too predictable and not subverted or challenged meaningfully, or maybe it's that the voice-acting isn't all there (Pitt's not an expressive voice artist, I don't think). A few lush bits of animation, like the icebird and the battle with a whale. The editing/camera seem a little too close / frantic at times. Not a bad film, but I can see why it got poor word of mouth. It doesn't have the snap and humor of Disney's Hercules (another Odyssean throwback).
One of the best films of the last 10-15 years. The 2nd one is great as well. Probably my favorite family films since Return to Oz and The Neverending Story.Quoting Dead & Messed Up (view post)
Nice, those two are on my list of unseen as well, can't wait to get to them.Quoting D_Davis (view post)
It isn't a good movie by any stretch, but I enjoyed "Soldier" (1998). The whole thing is very much goofy 90s sci-fi, but Kurt Russell's performance made it a pleasant surprise and somewhat memorable.
How to Train Your Dragon 2 - Didn't hate it, but didn't respond to it nearly as well as the first one. It felt busier, louder, with less a sense of what it was trying to say. Something weird about the only non-white being the only irredeemable villain. It captures the surface pleasures of the first film but less of its empathetic spirit.
Beasts of the Southern Wild - Made it about 20 minutes into this. I was getting awfully distracted by the handheld camerawork and framing (in general, I don't think handheld adds any meaningful verite "whoa this is real" element). Maybe I wasn't in the right mindset. Good acting by the girl.
Agreed.Quoting Irish (view post)
Watched a few later Hitchcock's. Family Plot is fine, nothing like his classic films but I was never bored. I liked both Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris even though some of the comedy hasn't aged well (but that's pretty typical for that period). I think De Palma would have been influenced by this one particularly. I rewatched Frenzy which is a near great film. It's too bad he didn't make more films like this in his later career. Topaz is awful awful awful stuff.
The Neverending Story - B-
I watched this movie as a child but remember almost nothing, but real talk, this is maybe the trickiest fantasy flick I've watched yet this year, largely due to the element of reader impacting story (aka metafiction), which... later.
First off, the production design. Gorgeous, unconventional, an effective squashing together of fairy tale and high fantasy. The designs of the creatures carry feel earthy and tactile. A leering snail looks slimy. The rock monster moves with weight. My favorite creature, Morla the Turtle, looks worn down, mud-stained, dusty. There's a weird element to all of their mouth movements - the puppeted characters never look like they're speaking in sync. Their jaws just sorta slide around. I wonder if that's because the film was made on strength of its appeal to non-American markets, so non-synced mouths allow for easier dubbing into other languages. The result, though, is a weird fusion of beautifully designed characters that emote at times about as convincingly as Chuck E. Cheese robots.
Second off, the willingness to cut deep. The film wants to play with real stakes. Artax dying in the Swamps of Sadness is a famous example, but that moment didn't actually work for me. We only get one scene of Atreyu the hero and Artax the horse interacting before that sequence, and we're learning about the risks on-site, as Artax is succumbing to the effects. But killing a horse is still a big deal in a kids' movie. The Nothing is a creepy apocalyptic threat (mostly; again, we'll talk later). Honestly, the most emotional moment in the film, by far, is late on when the Rock Biter sits, weary, aware of the Nothing on the way, and he comments that his hands "look like strong hands," and he cries. It's a huge moment because it's understated - because the Rock Biter isn't actually talking about the fact that he's terrified of his impending death. Instead, it's this sideways lament that respects our intelligence.
Third off, understatement in general is something the film could use more than it does. By the end of the film, characters are essentially lecturing children in the audience as to what the film is about. But ignoring that, nearly every character in this film has one of two personalities: passionate expository or slow expository. Former examples: the elfin folk in the opening, the observatory couple, the Empress. Latter examples: the Rock Biter, the Turtle, Falcor, the Sphinxes, the old wizard guy. But there's little sense of personality except in how characters deliver the information. Again, I think this is why the Rock Biter scene at the end really struck a nerve with me. It's a moment wholly devoted to character, and one where the character isn't saying exactly what needs said to push the story the next few feet. He's not a plot cog.
[Sidebar: It's shocking that the film doesn't have someone explain that the Auryn ouroboros medallion symbolizes the interaction between reader and story, each feeding off the other.]
Understatement would also be useful with the actor playing Bastian, who defaults to loud, wide-eyed questions in the back half of the story.
Now, as to the whole metafictional angle... sigh. The film seems to want to make the link between Bastian and the story about (1) him coming to terms with his mother's death and moving beyond his grief. And so the dying Empress symbolizes his mother, the Nothing symbolizes his grief, he's very clearly Atreyu (or Atreyu is an idealized version of Bastian, all pluck and verve and not an iota of real fear (I mean, he gets sad and fearful when appropriate, sure, but there's no Character Flaw to overcome)). When the film operates on this more personal level, it becomes much more interesting and even revelatory at times, as you realize Bastian's voracious reading is likely a coping mechanism.
But the film also seems to want to make a larger point (2) about society, about how the Nothing actually symbolizes mankind's generalized loss of dreaming, imagination, hope, etc. This means the Nothing actually symbolizes cynicism and despair (sort of a macro version (and evolution) of Bastian's grief). This is all told to us in painful detail by the Gmork (sic), and it complicates the relative grace of the central, more personalized metaphor, where Bastian recognizes that his being hard-headed is actually more evasive to his emotions than "retreating" to books.
[Sidebar 2: I wish I could remember the quote, but Jim Emerson used to have a line on his masthead that said, "I don't think we go to movies to escape, I think we go to movies to return." The implication is that "real life" has a way of dampening our souls by smoothing over and suppressing strong emotion and intellectual curiosity in favor of monotony, familiarity, and mechanical living. The best stories, if anything, are nourishing and essential and live in us as correlatives to our own personal/emotional identities. People don't love Shawshank because it's escapist. They love it because the film speaks to a core desire for freedom and joy and brotherhood.]
[Sidebar to Sidebar: This has gotta be why Shawshank is so high on IMDB. IMDB voters are most likely young, male, and white, and American society encourages the suppression of true brotherhood (gay!) and genuine emotion (feminine! pussy!) among men. It's like Field of Dreams. For two hours, a film allows repressed men to access emotions they withhold, again, in the name of "reality."]
Okay, sorry, back to this movie. By the end, the film is trying to function on two thematic levels: the Nothing as Bastian's grief, and the Nothing as social cynicism and loss of imagination. But then the film does another zigzag by explaining that Bastian's reality is also fictional, and that at this point (paraphrase), "People are reading about him right now." Which I think hurts the point of the film, because instead of the core idea of an interacting story and reader (represented by Atreyu and Bastian), the film now suggests that Bastian's reality is equally fictional to Atreyu's, because we're watching. It's maybe unavoidable as a development once you've opened the Pandora's Box of metafiction (just ask Stephen King and his Dark Tower series), but it adds one layer too many to an already thematically-overstuffed movie. I think this development could've been excised entirely without the film losing anything (and we could take Falcor's appearance in Earth on a dream/figurative level).
TL;DR - Gorgeous design, bland characters, alternately intriguing / frustrating metafictional elements.
Telluride Report to come tomorrow.