28 Film Discussion Threads Later

[quido8_5]

Speaking of new and innovative films...

Watched Mandy last night.

Holy wow.

Yes. That movie is bonkers! The pace is unrelenting, just ratcheting up the insanity and violence until the credits roll. Everything is turned up to eleven. And, no matter how insane things get, Cage's performance is enough to sell it. He just inhabits that character. One of his best performances, I'd say.

[baby doll]

I think if you guys would really believe all films of the last few decades have been derivative or unneeded or what-have-you, you would have stopped watching new films by now. Whats the point?

A film doesn't have to be a masterpiece to be worth seeing.

[Skitch]

A film doesn't have to be a masterpiece to be worth seeing.

By your estimation, when was the last masterpiece made?

[baby doll]

By your estimation, when was the last masterpiece made?

I haven't seen many new movies since the start of the pandemic, but Pedro Costa's Vitalina Varela and Joshua Gen Solondz's (tourism studies) (both 2019) strike me as being at least viable candidates (although having seen them only once it's perhaps still too early to say for sure).

[Skitch]

I haven't seen many new movies since the start of the pandemic, but Pedro Costa's Vitalina Varela and Joshua Gen Solondz's (tourism studies) (both 2019) strike me as being at least viable candidates (although having seen them only once it's perhaps still too early to say for sure).

I also never give masterpiece status after one watch...but don't you think its still worth having new movies if masterpieces still trickle out?

[baby doll]

I also never give masterpiece status after one watch...but don't you think its still worth having new movies if masterpieces still trickle out?

I think it's worth watching new movies even if masterpieces don't trickle out.

[Irish]

Anyone want to have a MC movie night (watch party)? - https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/jolt

https://www.amazon.com/Jolt-KATE-BEC...t-video&sr=1-1

Sat night? 745:PM EST start?

Yes, please!

[megladon8]

Yes. That movie is bonkers! The pace is unrelenting, just ratcheting up the insanity and violence until the credits roll. Everything is turned up to eleven. And, no matter how insane things get, Cage's performance is enough to sell it. He just inhabits that character. One of his best performances, I'd say.

I completely agree.his best performance since Bad Lieutenant, and one of his all time best.

That bathroom breakdown scene was just...something else. A crazy actor at the top of his crazy craft.

The movie bounced seamlessly between being dreamlike and nightmarish. Absurd and horrific. Every aspect of the film is dialed up to 11.

It actually hit me very hard, emotionally...

[

Show Spoiler

I spent a good 10 minutes straight crying quite heavily. From the second we see Mandy start burning, right through until Cage is in full in revenge mode. I was a wreck.

]

Then that shot at the end of him in the car, covered head to toe in blood, grinning like a maniac. A man completely gone. No longer human. I really saw no other option for his character past the credits, except suicide.

Brilliant stuff.

[Skitch]

RE: MC movie night

Damn I literally just finished watching that lol. But I would love you hear your takes on it!

[DFA1979]

WarGames (1983, John Badham)



Matthew Broderick foolishly almost starts WW3 with a super computer. There are funny moments and one liners that almost make you forget that we really trust machines to do way too many things and it's probably not a good thing if humans are not still involved. Even then a person may think the computer is right even if it is actually wrong or projecting say, a simulation of nuking Las Vegas. Oh and it's rather bleak that the fate of humanity rests on a slack high school kid and a burned out scientist who is fine with the end of mankind as we know it.

Just never forget that humanity is ever so close to killing itself off, while the world would keep on spinning. Sure better 1980s nuclear war movies exist however this one cleverly draws you in with the seemingly wholesome approach and then let's the horrifying truth slowly dig in. I'm not sure why people are so nostalgic about an era where at any moment or minute humanity would decide to annihilate themselves. "The only way to win is not to play," or however the famous line goes. I'll remember that later on when the US decides to start another war.

[DFA1979]

People don't make me tap the sign aka "Match-Cut: Where People Believe Cinema Died in 1975." None of you are old enough yet to come across as a bunch of grumpy old men. Also come on there has to be black and women directors who have made great films, too. I don't think I saw any of them listed on the last couple of pages.

[Ezee E]

In on a MC Movie night. Sundays would be best but a Saturday in August might work.

[baby doll]

People don't make me tap the sign aka "Match-Cut: Where People Believe Cinema Died in 1975." None of you are old enough yet to come across as a bunch of grumpy old men. Also come on there has to be black and women directors who have made great films, too. I don't think I saw any of them listed on the last couple of pages.

Dude, my avatar is of a film directed by a woman (one coincidentally released in 1975).

Also, making a judgement that certain things were of superior quality in the past doesn't necessarily make one either grumpy or old. Would any respectable critic argue that there are contemporary paintings as great as Las Meninas, operas on par with Le nozze di figaro, or novels as pleasurable as Pride and Prejudice? It's not uncommon for art forms to go into decline or to die out altogether. To point out that there are no contemporary filmmakers as impressive as Mizoguchi or Tati is not to claim that there aren't great films being made today, much less that cinema is dead (the classical Hollywood cinema is not the whole of film), but simply that creativity is not spread evenly across all periods and places. Not all cultures can be ancient Athens or Renaissance Italy.

[StuSmallz]

wat



You're describing a craftsman, not an artist.

In the Western tradition, greatness is directly linked to innovation.

How is that a superior method for judging the quality of a work of art, though?

[StuSmallz]

I find this a rather peculiar argument: namely that Scorsese's derivative remixes are just as great as the work of more original filmmakers because he's adept at swiping ideas. First of all, I think this overstates just how derivative Scorsese's films actually are. It was never my argument that Scorsese's pastiches of classical Hollywood and European art cinema are as mechanical as, for instance, Woody Allen's appropriations of Bergman and Fellini in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and Celebrity (although Casino comes close). On the contrary, my point is that Scorsese's eclecticism in swiping from a range of sources is a large part of what makes him a relatively lively filmmaker in the context of the New Hollywood period and its aftermath (for the most part, a pretty depressing era in American moviemaking)--a point Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson already put their finger on in the mid-'70s when they wrote that Taxi Driver ravishes "the auteur box of Sixties best scenes, from Hitchcock's reverse track down a staircase from the Frenzy brutality, through Godard's handwriting gig flashed across the entire screen, to several Mike Snow inventions (the slow Wavelength zoom into a close look at graphics pinned on a beaten plaster wall, and the reprise of double and triple exposures that ends Back and Forth)." At his best, Scorsese is about as exciting as a filmmaker can be without access to a living tradition, but in the absence of a tradition capable of generating new stories and styles, he's unable to do anything truly original. Hollywood cinema is dead and Scorsese is a sort of Dr. Frankenstein, stitching together parts from different corpses and trying to reanimate them. The results are frequently entertaining but it strikes me as rather astonishing to claim that they equal the work of genuinely innovative filmmakers like Hitchcock, Godard, and Snow for the reasons I've already stated: If something's been done, there's no need to do it again, and in doing it again anyway, Scorsese fails to find a mode of representation suitable for the present. He's American cinema's greatest cover band.

It makes sense for me though, because I don't feel that either innovation or "unoriginality" (or whatever term you prefer to use for it) in filmmaking are inherently positive or negative qualities on their own; what ultimately determines that is the final result they have have on their specific movie, so it all goes on a case-by-case basis for me. If originality results in a better movie than a more "inspired by" approach (and I can think of a number of examples where that's the case), then the more original method is obviously the preferable approach, but the same naturally goes for the opposite scenario as well, and I'm not going to watch something like 'fellas, and think to myself "You know, that was one of the greatest movies I've ever seen, but Marty took some stylistic devices from other movies, so I'm going to decide that he isn't as good as the people who directed those, even though the movie he made is just as great as those, or any other movie I've seen from any other director", and to evaluate it otherwise strikes me as a bit of putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.

[DFA1979]

Dude, my avatar is of a film directed by a woman (one coincidentally released in 1975).

Also, making a judgement that certain things were of superior quality in the past doesn't necessarily make one either grumpy or old. Would any respectable critic argue that there are contemporary paintings as great as Las Meninas, operas on par with Le nozze di figaro, or novels as pleasurable as Pride and Prejudice? It's not uncommon for art forms to go into decline or to die out altogether. To point out that there are no contemporary filmmakers as impressive as Mizoguchi or Tati is not to claim that there aren't great films being made today, much less that cinema is dead (the classical Hollywood cinema is not the whole of film), but simply that creativity is not spread evenly across all periods and places. Not all cultures can be ancient Athens or Renaissance Italy.

Kind of weird you didn't mention her. Also yeah you all come across to me as a bunch of crabby old timers. I've heard the whole cinema is dead thing for years and it's a tired decades long cliche. I think MST3K helped show that they made plenty of old crappy movies before 1980. I bet they had terrible art in ancient times but ok dude.

[baby doll]

Kind of weird you didn't mention her. Also yeah you all come across to me as a bunch of crabby old timers. I've heard the whole cinema is dead thing for years and it's a tired decades long cliche. I think MST3K helped show that they made plenty of old crappy movies before 1980. I bet they had terrible art in ancient times but ok dude.

I have no doubt they did have terrible art in ancient times, but that is irrelevant to my argument. I'm not arguing that all art from previous eras is superior to all contemporary art (I'm not an idiot), but simply that art has a history, film included. Robin Wood has likened the classical Hollywood cinema to the Elizabethan theatre as a period of intense creative activity, but that doesn't mean that every classical filmmaker was as great as Howard Hawks anymore than every Elizabethan playwright was a great as Shakespeare; only that the material conditions were in place in Elizabethan England and classical Hollywood for Shakespeare and Hawks to flourish. But no golden age lasts forever, and a contemporary filmmaker like Scorsese has to operate under conditions that are much less favourable to the production of great cinema than Hawks did (for one thing, Hawks wasn't required to impose himself on the public as a capital-A Auteur in the way Scorsese has had to). To point this out isn't being crabby; it's simply acknowledging objective reality.

[Dukefrukem]

Anyone want to have a MC movie night (watch party)? - https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/jolt

https://www.amazon.com/Jolt-KATE-BEC...t-video&sr=1-1

Sat night? 745:PM EST start?

The hardest thing is accommodating time zones. is 8PM too early for west coast people?

This is a test run to see how it works.

[megladon8]

The hardest thing is accommodating time zones. is 8PM too early for west coast people?

This is a test run to see how it works.

We will be there as long as we can get a decent connection!

[Dukefrukem]

We will be there as long as we can get a decent connection!

Awesome that's 5!

[DFA1979]

I have no doubt they did have terrible art in ancient times, but that is irrelevant to my argument. I'm not arguing that all art from previous eras is superior to all contemporary art (I'm not an idiot), but simply that art has a history, film included. Robin Wood has likened the classical Hollywood cinema to the Elizabethan theatre as a period of intense creative activity, but that doesn't mean that every classical filmmaker was as great as Howard Hawks anymore than every Elizabethan playwright was a great as Shakespeare; only that the material conditions were in place in Elizabethan England and classical Hollywood for Shakespeare and Hawks to flourish. But no golden age lasts forever, and a contemporary filmmaker like Scorsese has to operate under conditions that are much less favourable to the production of great cinema than Hawks did (for one thing, Hawks wasn't required to impose himself on the public as a capital-A Auteur in the way Scorsese has had to). To point this out isn't being crabby; it's simply acknowledging objective reality.

Dude I'm not Irish I'm not going to argue semantics with you or whatever. Don't feel bad though I still think you are a better poster than Wats ever was.

[baby doll]

It makes sense for me though, because I don't feel that either innovation or "unoriginality" (or whatever term you prefer to use for it) in filmmaking are inherently positive or negative qualities on their own; what ultimately determines that is the final result they have have on their specific movie, so it all goes on a case-by-case basis for me. If originality results in a better movie than a more "inspired by" approach (and I can think of a number of examples where that's the case), then the more original method is obviously the preferable approach, but the same naturally goes for the opposite scenario as well, and I'm not going to watch something like 'fellas, and think to myself "You know, that was one of the greatest movies I've ever seen, but Marty took some stylistic devices from other movies, so I'm going to decide that he isn't as good as the people who directed those, even though the movie he made is just as great as those, or any other movie I've seen from any other director", and to evaluate it otherwise strikes me as a bit of putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.

Goodfellas is probably Scorsese's greatest film, and one of the supreme achievements of post-1960 Hollywood cinema, in large part, I would argue, because it represents Scorsese's most successful synthesis of the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema and European art cinema. The narrative is frankly episodic (and thus non-classical), essentially a series of annotations on mob life, and as a result, Scorsese and Pileggi's observations on the subject have a freshness that would not be possible had they opted for a more classical structure. Yet, the film doesn't feel like an art movie because it is constantly in motion, achieving a narrative momentum that eluded Scorsese in choppier efforts like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ, with the voice-overs functioning as a bridge from one episode to the next. Moreover, Scorsese's borrowings from other directors here are more purposeful and less distracting than his citations of Welles and Visconti in The Age of Innocence and Godard in Casino, where they mainly serve to paper over giant holes in the script (if the audience believed in and cared about relationship between Robert DeNiro and Sharon Stone in the latter film, Scorsese wouldn't have had to phone in Georges Delerue's score from Le Mépris to generate a sense of poignancy that the threadbare plot fails to provide for itself). In Goodfellas, Scorsese doesn't merely lift the dolly/zoom effect from Vertigo as an empty homage but repurposes it, to show the walls literally closing in on the characters. Yet, all that granted, is it as impressive as the best Hollywood films of the studio era or the best postwar art movies? That seems to me a rather high bar to clear and I don't think the film quite reaches it. In hybridizing the two modes, Hollywood cinema and art cinema, it loses the narrative unity of the former while sanding the edges off the latter. In the '50s, this would've been called mid-cult, domesticating modernist art in order to make it palatable to a mass audience and thus lacking the genuine vitality of both high modernism and mass culture.

[DFA1979]

I miss Sauron (good dude, posted on my blog actually a coiple years back), Raiders (would love to talk about Southern Comfort with him), Rowland, Izzy Black, Boner, Barry, Father Barry, B-Side (have him on FB though) and Sycophant.

[Irish]

How is that a superior method for judging the quality of a work of art, though?

It isn't, necessarily. Just different.

But then, you're also arguing with an academic (baby doll), while rejecting Western tradition. Makes it difficult to find common ground.

Robin Wood has likened the classical Hollywood cinema to the Elizabethan theatre as a period of intense creative activity, but that doesn't mean that every classical filmmaker was as great as Howard Hawks anymore than every Elizabethan playwright was a great as Shakespeare; only that the material conditions were in place in Elizabethan England and classical Hollywood for Shakespeare and Hawks to flourish.

I think about this a lot, in terms of how it's nearly impossible to have great artists in a culture that does not appreciate art. (And how this trickles down to criticism, too, because you can't have great criticism without great art.)

[Irish]

The narrative is frankly episodic (and thus non-classical), essentially a series of annotations on mob life, and as a result, Scorsese and Pileggi's observations on the subject have a freshness that would not be possible had they opted for a more classical structure. Yet, the film doesn't feel like an art movie because it is constantly in motion, achieving a narrative momentum that eluded Scorsese in choppier efforts like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ, with the voice-overs functioning as a bridge from one episode to the next.

Just to add-on to this:

The script isolates those annotations in a quasi-documentary style, which is brilliant. Every bit of ponderous exposition is offloaded into the VO, Ray Liotta taking you aside and spilling secrets. The visuals are mostly reserved for dramatic action. You go back and forth between Liotta whispering causes into your ear while you can see the effects with your own eyes.

This scene, in particular, which introduces Paulie and explains how the mob functions, has a documentary feel to it. The VO delivers expository details that sound like facts while the visuals have a home movie quality.