28 Film Discussion Threads Later

[MadMan]

Not a fan of Ghost, but it has its moments.

[Ezee E]

Liked Ghost a lot as a kid. Haven't seen it since high school... maybe even longer.

[baby doll]

Ghost exists for one reason: To get your girl in the mood for fucking. That's it. Its aesthetic merits as a film are beside the point.

[Peng]

House (1977) - Ummm, what was that!? The constant throwing of every aesthetic on earth at the audience is so relentless it grows numbing at some stretches, but it's certainly a uniquely batshit experience. Director Nobuhiko Obayashi is also in total control enough of his cinematic tricks for it to coast by on surface pleasure alone, even if there is an intriguing wartime/older-generation-against-youth subtext running throughout, and some affecting emotions near the end. Kinda feel a twinge of philistine that when putting this in my yearly ranking I have it below The Spy Who Loved Me though. To be fair at least, that is one of the most fun Bonds for me.

[Dukefrukem]

House (1977) - Ummm, what was that!? The constant throwing of every aesthetic on earth at the audience is so relentless it grows numbing at some stretches, but it's certainly a uniquely batshit experience. Director Nobuhiko Obayashi is also in total control enough of his cinematic tricks for it to coast by on surface pleasure alone, even if there is an intriguing wartime/older-generation-against-youth subtext running throughout, and some affecting emotions near the end. Kinda feel a twinge of philistine that when putting this in my yearly ranking I have it below The Spy Who Loved Me though. To be fair at least, that is one of the most fun Bonds for me.

This has been in my queue for.... decades.

[Ivan Drago]

House (1977) - Ummm, what was that!? The constant throwing of every aesthetic on earth at the audience is so relentless it grows numbing at some stretches, but it's certainly a uniquely batshit experience. Director Nobuhiko Obayashi is also in total control enough of his cinematic tricks for it to coast by on surface pleasure alone, even if there is an intriguing wartime/older-generation-against-youth subtext running throughout, and some affecting emotions near the end. Kinda feel a twinge of philistine that when putting this in my yearly ranking I have it below The Spy Who Loved Me though. To be fair at least, that is one of the most fun Bonds for me.

I like to think of House as a haunted house movie done in the style of Japanese Sesame Street. It's all kinds of bonkers fun, more so at midnight!

In other news, I saw a trailer for the HD restoration of Last Year At Marienbad. Between that and Ran, Rialto knows how to cut their repertory trailers. The shot compositions especially look just breathtaking. Hoping it comes here sooner rather than later.

[Peng]

Reservoir Dogs (1992) - Wonder how much my QT ranking would change once I go through a rewatch of all his films (Watched them all once, with Jackie Brown being the only one I haven't seen yet). This one took a bit of tumble on this rewatch; used to be my #2 of his. Still an impressive debut and a great story, but I think I just plain prefer him in sprawling mode, where there is more time for plot and digression to flow in and out of each other than here. Also, ouch to Tim Roth's performance when his character is in pain. 8/10

[MadMan]

I like to think of House as a haunted house movie done in the style of Japanese Sesame Street. It's all kinds of bonkers fun, more so at midnight!

In other news, I saw a trailer for the HD restoration of Last Year At Marienbad. Between that and Ran, Rialto knows how to cut their repertory trailers. The shot compositions especially look just breathtaking. Hoping it comes here sooner rather than later.

I would love to see Last Year At Marienbad on the big screen.

Also huge fan of both House (1977) and The Spy Who Loved Me.

[MadMan]

Reservoir Dogs (1992) - Wonder how much my QT ranking would change once I go through a rewatch of all his films (Watched them all once, with Jackie Brown being the only one I haven't seen yet). This one took a bit of tumble on this rewatch; used to be my #2 of his. Still an impressive debut and a great story, but I think I just plain prefer him in sprawling mode, where there is more time for plot and digression to flow in and out of each other than here. Also, ouch to Tim Roth's performance when his character is in pain. 8/10

Reservoir Dogs is still my favorite QT, although The Hateful Eight may be a close second. Sure it's not even close to being his best film, yet the raw energy and power Reservoir Dogs contains always draws me in.

[Yxklyx]

I like to think of House as a haunted house movie done in the style of Japanese Sesame Street. It's all kinds of bonkers fun, more so at midnight!....

The Sesame Street comparison is perfect!

[StanleyK]

Hirokazu Koreeda:


Maborosi - 8.5
After Life - 8.5
Distance - 7
Nobody Knows - 8.5
Hana - 7
Still Walking - 8.5
Air Doll - 4
I Wish - 7
Like Father, Like Son - 8.5
Our Little Sister - 7
After the Storm - 5.5
The Third Murder - 5.5
Shoplifters - 7



A pleasant surprise. I expected some good movies, and it turns out this guy is one of the best filmmakers currently working. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd go with Still Walking.

[Peng]

State of Play (2009)

Loses its way in the home stretch, where it leans hard into too ripe airport paperback territory. Engagingly labyrinthine plotting for the most part though, and all the actors make this fun to watch. Helen Mirren's exasperatedly profane editor is a hoot, while Rachel McAdams’ character here almost feels like a prequel to her Spotlight role. 6.5/10

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

First watch was more than a decade ago so I hope I would warm up to this more, but alas. I just don’t vibe too well with sketch-structure comedies, I guess (Have the same problem with many modern comedies a lot consider very-good-to-minor-classic). Loved a few selected bits (French soldiers, wedding party crashing, women of Castle Anthrax), but most sections generally inspire at most mild smiles. Life of Brian, with some resemblance of a plot and a pointed, focused satire, is more my speed, and A Fish Called Wanda even much more so. 7/10

[MadMan]

I looove Holy Grail. I still need to see Life of Brian.

[Morris Schæffer]

Hello. I'm looking for a link to I think Roger Ebert's answer man column. I think it was about how every opinion is valid because how could an opinion be wrong?!

And Ebert replied quite succinctly that that was an incorrect statement.

[Irish]

Hello. I'm looking for a link to I think Roger Ebert's answer man column.

There are archives going back to 1994, but they aren't easily searchable: https://www.rogerebert.com/answer-man

ETA: There are about 5,000 instances of the word "opinion" appearing on the site, but that probably doesn't help you much: https://www.rogerebert.com/search?utf8=✓&q=opinion

ETA 2: This blog post, about the nature of opinion and "Transformers" sequels, seems pretty close to what you described: https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-jo...proud-brainiac

[Peng]

Sorcerer (1977)

I watched The Wages of Fear a long time ago, but my impression in comparison to Friedkin's film is that Clouzot's feels more elemental and leaned down, despite being 20 minutes longer, probably because Friedkin takes time to introduce each of the four characters. These segments are all engaging and nicely add to the film's overall sense of fatalistic doom, but they feel minor in the grand scheme of things, and ultimately come off like a camouflage to set up that last scene. Asides from that though, this completely stands on its own as a great nightmarish angst of a film, with our protagonists so boxed in by the world that they have no choice but to take that deadly ride. Bridge scene is one for the ages. 8/10

Spartacus (1960)

Romance a bit drippy, and Spartacus himself is such an unwavering figure of virtues that even though his arc is engaging, it lacks the delicious, complex political interplay between Olivier, Laughton, and Ustinov. But Kubrick's technical precision and mastery still make the three hours pass by relatively quick, along with his tougher edges in portraying the harshness and callous nature of that period. Kubrick's direction of the astonishing, epic battle scene feels so ahead of its time that I wish I could see this on the big screen to be immersed in his choreography even more (and also, for Kirk Douglas' truly insane chin dimple). 7.5/10

[PURPLE]

Hello. I'm looking for a link to I think Roger Ebert's answer man column. I think it was about how every opinion is valid because how could an opinion be wrong?!

And Ebert replied quite succinctly that that was an incorrect statement.

Whatever Ebert said was likely entirely bullshit, though, so it’s probably best to leave it in the dustbin of history, unless he was using “objective” in the idiomatic and inherently nonsense way it is often used. When someone uses a phrase like “objective opinion” in a coherent way, what they mean is “unbiased”. It’s all too common that people use the two entirely different denotations of objective interchangibly even though they are absolute contradictions. An object measuring facts doesn’t have “objective opinions” because an object is not a subject, and only subjects can have opinions.

Can a “biased opinion” be invalid? Well, valid has like 3 different denotations that are often misused as well, so... Sounds like a question with a lot of room for a pithy response that is entirely wrapped up in poorly expressed denotations.

EDIT: Here is one such example from Ebert, and it’s even more poorly argued bullshit than I feared. He says an opinion can be wrong... because it just is and even Siskel said so!

https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/im-a-proud-brainiac

[Irish]

Whatever Ebert said was likely entirely bullshit, though, so it’s probably best to leave it in the dustbin of history, unless he was using “objective” in the idiomatic and inherently nonsense way it is often used. When someone uses a phrase like “objective opinion” in a coherent way, what they mean is “unbiased”.

Ebert was talking about taste. When Siskel said "You're objectively wrong" was he's really saying is, "You have bad taste."

The way they approach "opinion" is very different from the way people approach it today, a curious time when nobody has bad taste and every opinion is sacrosanct.

[megladon8]

Dead Man’s Shoes is still effectively painful. Hadn’t watched it in probably 10 years. I wish Paddy Considine had taken off more over here - he’s great in everything I’ve seem him in.

I would call it one of the best revenge films of all time...if it weren’t for the very last scene, which hammers the audience over the head with the film’s message, and ends up losing potency because of it.

[PURPLE]

Ebert was talking about taste. When Siskel said "You're objectively wrong" was he's really saying is, "You have bad taste."

The way they approach "opinion" is very different from the way people approach it today, a curious time when nobody has bad taste and every opinion is sacrosanct.

I don’t think “good” and “bad” taste is a useful distinction, even if it were a real thing.

For an extreme example, in the culinary arts, does a baby have bad taste because he prefers mushed carrot baby food to an award winning saag? It’s difficult to even answer the question because babies’ sense of taste literally functions differently, and their set of experiences is different. However, what is certain is that the baby actually gets more pleasure from the baby formula, so to say he is wrong seems incoherent.

For a less extreme example, suppose you have two insightful, informed, intelligent people: one reacts very positively to and intuitively finds value in opaque, expressionistic art and the other reacts very positively to and intuitively finds value in lucid, symbolically rich and coherent art. There are many films where Person A will provide an insightful, informed, intelligent piece of film analysis that represents both a wealth of knowledge and is informed by and informative of Person A’s particular tastes. If Person B had the same knowledge base, Person B still won’t be able to share the experience of Person A and won’t be able to represent their own experience in the same terms, except by lying. To say that either has better taste is nonsense. To say that both Person A and Person B have better taste than some teenager that has the exact same tastes as Person A and gets the same kind of joy as Person A less the richness that Person A gets from additional years of knowledge and life experience seems awfully peculiar considering they have literally the same inherent tastes. Furthermore, quantifying this is absolutely impossible. Finally, is it helpful, in any way? There are bound to be films that Person A and his teenage self find far better than films that Person B likes - even if those films are Transformer films. Is the opinion of the teenager “bad taste” but Person A “good taste”? Even if it is, who the hell is qualified to make the distinction. Certainly not Ebert.

I would say: IF such a concept as “good taste” were coherent, the difficulty of ascertaining the difference between non-qualitative differences between people’s inherent preferences renders the such a concept entirely useless, so the question is moot and unanswerable.

But, of course, “good” is a subjective term, and taste is a subjective judgment, so in order for there to be a judgment of good taste you would need to determine a person who judges whose taste is good and whose is not, and that person will have inherent tastes that some equally qualified person disagreed with, because attaching a subjective qualified to an already subjective viewpoint is absolute nonsense and a first step down a never-ending rabbit hole of increasingly absurd qualifications that never mean any more than the last, which was already entirely useless.

Who judges which judges get to judge the people whose judgments are to be considered good or bad? And who judges them?

Frankly, only an idiot would sign up to be a judge of “Good taste” because it is an inherently nonsense concept, and thus I would find their judgments both worthless and nonsense.

There are far, far, far more interesting and insightful ways of interacting with others’ tastes and insights than categorizing them as good and bad. Unfortunately, Ebert focuses on the ways which can never be either.

Contrary to treating opinions as sacrosanct, it is far more useful to treat them as entirely worthless but for the nature in which they are expressed and to the degree in which they are beneficial to each individual. No matter what I say about a film, it should be treated as entirely worthless to someone who doesn’t find it worthwhile - even if every other person finds it incredibly worthwhile. There is no contradiction in this, as this is how subjectivity always and inescapably works: nothing is sacrosanct because nothing is the same, but some things appear to be more common than others - and this doesn’t matter at all. No experience of yours can be of value to anyone else, and no other person’s experience should be valuable to you; the way in which this experience is expressed can be valued, but each person will value it differently and no other person’s valuation should be valuable to you at all. This is how subjectivity functions, and it is the only reason why life is interesting. If there were some objective standard of good taste, there would be no point in having opinions, as they would always inescapably be inferior to the objective standard. Since this is nonsense, subjectivity prevails and other people’s actual experiences are irrelevant.

[Irish]

Wow. Okay. Let's wrassle.

- Nobody asks a baby, "What did you think of the filet?" or "How do you like the wine?" The baby might have an opinion ("Oaky, with a hint of cinnamon, I think") but nobody would call it an informed opinion.

- Anything that comes out of a teenager's mouth is bad, for similar reasons.

- Tradition judges --- thousands of years of shared history and Western canon.

- The "everything is subjective" argument is popular now but it's solipsistic as hell. It's an argument that lacks any sort of formal structure, the kind needed to help navigate the world. It also doesn't reduce friction between people; it just increases it.

- This would seem to be important because many middle class values are based on it. (And certain writers and filmmakers, from Bukowski and Ackers to Jackson and Waters, made careers out of refuting those values, by deliberately assuming a guise of bad taste.)

- S&E matured during the era of Old School Canon. Right before they start their careers as film critics, Siskel graduated with a philosophy degree from Yale and Ebert was taking masters in English literature at the University of Chicago. Those seem like good starts for a critic.

- If you find no inherent value in your own opinion or anyone else's, why bother expressing one? And why did you read this post? I know my words are pretty, but c'mon, they're not that pretty.

[PURPLE]

Wow. Okay. Let's wrassle.

- Nobody asks a baby, "What did you think of the filet?" or "How do you like the wine?" The baby might have an opinion ("Oaky, with a hint of cinnamon, I think") but nobody would call it an informed opinion.

- Anything that comes out of a teenager's mouth is bad, for similar reasons.

- Tradition judges --- thousands of years of shared history and Western canon.

- The "everything is subjective" argument is popular now but it's solipsistic as hell. It's an argument that lacks any sort of formal structure, the kind needed to help navigate the world. It also doesn't reduce friction between people; it just increases it.

- This would seem to be important because many middle class values are based on it. (And certain writers and filmmakers, from Bukowski and Ackers to Jackson and Waters, made careers out of refuting those values, by deliberately assuming a guise of bad taste.)

- S&E matured during the era of Old School Canon. Right before they start their careers as film critics, Siskel graduated with a philosophy degree from Yale and Ebert was taking masters in English literature at the University of Chicago. Those seem like good starts for a critic.

- If you find no inherent value in your own opinion or anyone else's, why bother expressing one? And why did you read this post? I know my words are pretty, but c'mon, they're not that pretty.

Tradition judges? Tradition is made up of some collective noise made by unnamed people. Often that collective is a confederacy of dunces. I need say no more.

I did not say everything is subjective. Subjective and objective are two things, and they are mutually exclusive. I mentioned them both explicitly. If something cannot be objectively proven, it is subjective by the very definition of the term. Since all opinions are by definition subjective, the only question when dealing with opinions are questions of subjectivity. This is not solipsistic, this is denotative. If you can’t accept the denotations as the most fundamental aspect of the conversation we are having, there’s no point. I understand the philosophical implications of solipsism and I understand the role of communication in bridging the apparent inescapability of wholesale sollipsism. Merely mentioning the concept of sollipsism does not mean that you have overcome the fundamental issues of the difficulty of fully expressing and categorizing all experiences through communication.

This discussion is heading down a path of such bad faith I see no point engaging further. As for your last question, I already answered it fully.

The “appeal to authority” by mentioning Siskel’s undergraduate degree as an indication of the validity of Ebert’s half-hearted paraphrase of an argument is the very definition of bad faith that we both know you’re better than.

[Skitch]

Therefore, he who consumes the most films, good or bad, has the most distinguished palate!

[baby doll]

Taste is basically a matter of cultural training. It's not as if everybody had some ineffable and unique essence that's revealed through their tastes; rather, people like the things they're trained to like. It's hardly surprising, given the time and society he lived in and the education he had, that Ebert's opinions reflect certain ideas about which qualities are essential for good art that have been pervasive in Western culture for more than two thousand years: e.g., a preference for a logical narrative construction (Casablanca, The Godfather) over violent spectacle for the sake of violence spectacle (Transformers). If someone in North America wanted to make the case that Transformers--which I still have not seen--is a good film, they would need to demonstrate either its conformity to the canons of Western taste or that there is some advantage in its violations of those canons. To fall back on subjective preferences as a substitute for having an argument ("my taste is my taste, so there") is snowflake bullshit.

[megladon8]

So where does the idea of “guilty pleasure” factor into all of this? Or loving something out of pure nostalgia, and acknowledging that about your affinity for it?

Is “it’s garbage, but I love it because I grew up with it” sufficient reasoning?