Nolan really confounds me. I don't think I like any of his films, though I've only seen most of them just once. His ability to take concepts that should be mysterious and beautiful (memories, dreams, magic, space) and reduce them to a list of plot contrivances presented in a sanitized way, with a few tricks and a dead lady to top it all off is just really off-putting to me.
I was reading some Rosenbaum reviews one day, and found a real mean dig on Memento in his ROOM 237 review, but I think about it from time to time:
"The puzzle aspect of Last Year at Marienbad and Certified Copy may finally be the least interesting thing about them, but it’s probably the most interesting and important thing about a cynical piece of non-art like Memento, which is possibly what makes that film such a cherished cult item and fetish object in certain Anglo-American circles. One way of removing the threat and challenge of art is reducing it to a form of problem-solving that believes in single, Eureka-style solutions. If works of art are perceived as safes to be cracked or as locks that open only to skeleton keys, their expressive powers are virtually limited to banal pronouncements of overt or covert meanings -– the notion that art is supposed to say something as opposed to do something."
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Nolan really confounds me. I don't think I like any of his films, though I've only seen most of them just once. His ability to take concepts that should be mysterious and beautiful (memories, dreams, magic, space) and reduce them to a list of plot contrivances presented in a sanitized way, with a few tricks and a dead lady to top it all off is just really off-putting to me.
I was reading some Rosenbaum reviews one day, and found a real mean dig on Memento in his ROOM 237 review, but I think about it from time to time:
"The puzzle aspect of Last Year at Marienbad and Certified Copy may finally be the least interesting thing about them, but it’s probably the most interesting and important thing about a cynical piece of non-art like Memento, which is possibly what makes that film such a cherished cult item and fetish object in certain Anglo-American circles. One way of removing the threat and challenge of art is reducing it to a form of problem-solving that believes in single, Eureka-style solutions. If works of art are perceived as safes to be cracked or as locks that open only to skeleton keys, their expressive powers are virtually limited to banal pronouncements of overt or covert meanings -– the notion that art is supposed to say something as opposed to do something."
Wow, yeah. Well put, Rosenbaum.
FCH's piece on Dunkirk is a great treatise on Nolan's shortcomings as an expressionist, as well.
Don't get me wrong, I think Nolan is insanely talented, but his limitations are that much more pronounced because he's somewhat preoccupied with exploring them.
That review reads to me like very much a "No no no! You aren't enjoying the right movies the right way!"
It has been a while since I have watched Nolan's films, but I remember them more for the way they make me think about the problem than for their clever solutions.
While Memento can be read as a puzzle movie, it can just as well (and more so, on a second viewing) be read as a film about a guy who needs to turn his life into a puzzle so he can avoid assuming any responsibility for it. That’s something that absolutely works for me on an emotional level. Nolan often approaches emotion through characters who aren’t terribly in touch with their emotions, but he’s far from unable to understand emotions, at least no more so than most of us.
It’s when he’s most overtly sentimental that his portrayal of emotions works least for me, e.g. in Interstellar.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
if you get up and leave at the right parts for bathroom breaks and have to dip out before the end you'll think you saw a masterpiece
override367 on
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
That take on Memento is crazy. Like most noirs, it’s not really about solving the mystery, it’s about the mood and the characters. In this case it’s a pretty unique mood because not only is he not sure of the people he’s meeting, he’s not really even sure of himself.
The movie works moment to moment and would even without the overall “puzzle,” because it’s so strongly and effectively about feeling destabilizing effects of grief. The device of memory loss isn’t just a narrative gimmick, it’s a way to express the eternal renewal of loss, always fresh, always right there behind him, obscuring even the recent past, making him question everything he took for granted. It’s an engrossing and affecting story.
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ObiFettUse the ForceAs You WishRegistered Userregular
Kubrick and Nolan are often compared, which I think is a huge compliment to Nolan and a bit of an insult to Kubrick. Both filmmakers are often called 'cold', but Nolan, I think, is more than cold - his movies often feel lifeless. Kubrick is a space alien with a strange alien heart and Nolan is a robot with a battery where a heart should be.
Nolan really confounds me. I don't think I like any of his films, though I've only seen most of them just once. His ability to take concepts that should be mysterious and beautiful (memories, dreams, magic, space) and reduce them to a list of plot contrivances presented in a sanitized way, with a few tricks and a dead lady to top it all off is just really off-putting to me.
I was reading some Rosenbaum reviews one day, and found a real mean dig on Memento in his ROOM 237 review, but I think about it from time to time:
"The puzzle aspect of Last Year at Marienbad and Certified Copy may finally be the least interesting thing about them, but it’s probably the most interesting and important thing about a cynical piece of non-art like Memento, which is possibly what makes that film such a cherished cult item and fetish object in certain Anglo-American circles. One way of removing the threat and challenge of art is reducing it to a form of problem-solving that believes in single, Eureka-style solutions. If works of art are perceived as safes to be cracked or as locks that open only to skeleton keys, their expressive powers are virtually limited to banal pronouncements of overt or covert meanings -– the notion that art is supposed to say something as opposed to do something."
Wow, yeah. Well put, Rosenbaum.
FCH's piece on Dunkirk is a great treatise on Nolan's shortcomings as an expressionist, as well.
Don't get me wrong, I think Nolan is insanely talented, but his limitations are that much more pronounced because he's somewhat preoccupied with exploring them.
FCH's piece on Dunkirk suggests to me he doesn't understand The Joker in TDK and thus I chalk it up as another one of those times he's talking out his ass.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Holy shit Friday the 13th part 2 is terrible
I can’t believe there are like 10 more of these for me to watch
I can’t believe there are like 10 more of these for me to watch
People will tell you there is a best one of these movies, they are liars, the best one is the last one when the credits are rolling because you have finished.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
I have a boxed set of Friday the 13th movies I bought on a whim once. Contains the first eight movies. My wife (then girlfriend) wanted to watch them. We got maybe to the third movie and was like... "These kinda are shitty movies." I don't think I've actually seen all but three of them all the way through.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
I did think the first Friday the 13th was a good and interesting movie, in part because of smart direction and structure (and wrote a 5000 word review to that effect that hasn’t gone up yet). But the sequel throws all of that away, so who knows.
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MalReynoldsThe Hunter S Thompson of incredibly mild medicinesRegistered Userregular
I like the Friday the 13th remake a whole lot.
"A new take on the epic fantasy genre... Darkly comic, relatable characters... twisted storyline."
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor My new novel: Maledictions: The Offering. Now in Paperback!
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KetarCome on upstairswe're having a partyRegistered Userregular
Jason Takes Manhattan and Jason X are both a lot of fun to watch with friends and booze.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Ebert, on the 1999 Besson movie The Messenger:
Two of the best films ever made are about Joan of Arc: "The Passion of Joan of Arc," by Carl Dreyer (1928), and "The Trial of Joan of Arc," by Robert Bresson (1962). One of the worst, "Saint Joan" (1957), by Otto Preminger, had in common with Luc Besson's movie the theory that Joan must look like a babe. Dreyer's Joan was Falconetti, a French actress whose haunted face mirrored one of the greatest performances in cinema--the only one she ever gave. Preminger's was Jean Seberg, found in Iowa after an international talent search. The search for her talent continued after the film was completed, and it was finally found in Godard's "Breathless" two years later.
TBF she really wasn't that great in breathless either
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
Saint Joan is rough. Seberg's bad in it, but she actually gets burned at the stake in one shot. Yikes.
Seberg was great in Bonjour Tristesse though, which predates Breathless. And Rivette's Jeanne la pucelle deserves to be part of the conversation when it comes to great Joan movies.
The wave planet from Interstellar stuck with me for a long time and is definitely top 5 most horrifying things in film that arent just straight up horror movie stuff.
I'm a big fan of 80''s horror growing up with it, and love f13. You may actally like 5 as it's a little different and you haven't seen it before but I think the best ones are 4 and 6. 7 is decent and a fun watch, and Jason X can be awesome if you turn your brain off.
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TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
Vampire Cleanup Department (Amazon Prime) was a movie I had high hopes for, a legit Hong Kong action comedy horror that so wanted to be a modern version of Mr. Vampire, but it just kept falling apart as the runtime ticked away. I'm actually surprised it was even allowed to be made, what with it being a) straight cantonese b) has a rival government department be the bad guy and c) has vampires in it since, you know.....
It's a movie about a secret government organization that look like your usual garbageman but they actually kill vampires. They help save the life of one doofus whose parents were part of the VCD but were bit while the dude's mom was pregnant with him and gave birth to him before they died, so he's basically Blade, Hong Kong style. And a dweeb. So while he's training you also have the Department hunting down an ancient vampire and a young woman who was to be his servant in the afterlife, but she's actually a nice vampire and creates a love interest for the doofus as he tries to make her act normal 200 years later.
There's some clever moments here. It feels like an episode of Buffy early on (and sadly has the budget of a TV show really) but every now and then you get some clever things to make you think now it's going to pick up the pace. Like these vampires are jiangshi, the ones that hop around in chinese lore like a mix between zombie and vampire. It's super obvious and suspicious, yeah? But just give the girl a hoverboard and let her watch old chinese films and plays that took place in her period in history. Like old Hong Kong films it gets these gentle humor beats right by knowing when to embrace the stupid, but the character growth happens so much offscreen as though it wasn't just edited down, they straight up didn't even think to include a solid story structure because they only had 90 minutes of storage on the cameras, so 15 minutes before the movie is over you've still got all these loose ends that are just ignored or lampshaded. Which wouldn't be a problem if it still delivered some solid action scenes like 80's movies did, but you get none of that here due to small location sets and too much closeups.
But the biggest problem was the translation of the sub. Asiancrush is one of those companies that specialize in quantity over quality hoping for some sleeper hits to make it big over here either as jokes or memes or real legit movies, but they seem to be getting worse when it comes to proofreading and editing the films and goes into stereotypical engrish. What the hellis a bagpack, "my grandma haven't been such happy for a long time," and "might be not" instead of "maybe not" for an answer to a question, it makes the film worse as well as the distribution company.
My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined. But it's still better than most modern mainland chinese movies. But watch Mr. Vampire if you haven't, it's hella clever with some vampire stuff.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
The wave planet from Interstellar stuck with me for a long time and is definitely top 5 most horrifying things in film that arent just straight up horror movie stuff.
Now there’s an interesting list! The other one that immediately jumped to mind was what happens to Seth in Looper. But I’m sure there’s more.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
The wave planet from Interstellar stuck with me for a long time and is definitely top 5 most horrifying things in film that arent just straight up horror movie stuff.
Now there’s an interesting list! The other one that immediately jumped to mind was what happens to Seth in Looper. But I’m sure there’s more.
The wave planet from Interstellar stuck with me for a long time and is definitely top 5 most horrifying things in film that arent just straight up horror movie stuff.
Now there’s an interesting list! The other one that immediately jumped to mind was what happens to Seth in Looper. But I’m sure there’s more.
Almost the entirety of Sunshine
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KetarCome on upstairswe're having a partyRegistered Userregular
The wave planet from Interstellar stuck with me for a long time and is definitely top 5 most horrifying things in film that arent just straight up horror movie stuff.
Now there’s an interesting list! The other one that immediately jumped to mind was what happens to Seth in Looper. But I’m sure there’s more.
"Put your mouth on the curb."
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
The wave planet from Interstellar stuck with me for a long time and is definitely top 5 most horrifying things in film that arent just straight up horror movie stuff.
Now there’s an interesting list! The other one that immediately jumped to mind was what happens to Seth in Looper. But I’m sure there’s more.
Almost the entirety of Sunshine
I wouldn’t say this counts, because Sunshine IS a horror movie, for that very reason
The wave planet from Interstellar stuck with me for a long time and is definitely top 5 most horrifying things in film that arent just straight up horror movie stuff.
Now there’s an interesting list! The other one that immediately jumped to mind was what happens to Seth in Looper. But I’m sure there’s more.
The guy in the tent in The Endless.
PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
The wave planet from Interstellar stuck with me for a long time and is definitely top 5 most horrifying things in film that arent just straight up horror movie stuff.
Now there’s an interesting list! The other one that immediately jumped to mind was what happens to Seth in Looper. But I’m sure there’s more.
Almost the entirety of Sunshine
I wouldn’t say this counts, because Sunshine IS a horror movie, for that very reason
I can't really think of any way to define 'horror movie' where Interstellar isn't one as well.
Posts
Watching the sequence after they return from the wave planet, I think he gets human emotion just fine.
I was reading some Rosenbaum reviews one day, and found a real mean dig on Memento in his ROOM 237 review, but I think about it from time to time:
"The puzzle aspect of Last Year at Marienbad and Certified Copy may finally be the least interesting thing about them, but it’s probably the most interesting and important thing about a cynical piece of non-art like Memento, which is possibly what makes that film such a cherished cult item and fetish object in certain Anglo-American circles. One way of removing the threat and challenge of art is reducing it to a form of problem-solving that believes in single, Eureka-style solutions. If works of art are perceived as safes to be cracked or as locks that open only to skeleton keys, their expressive powers are virtually limited to banal pronouncements of overt or covert meanings -– the notion that art is supposed to say something as opposed to do something."
Wow, yeah. Well put, Rosenbaum.
FCH's piece on Dunkirk is a great treatise on Nolan's shortcomings as an expressionist, as well.
Don't get me wrong, I think Nolan is insanely talented, but his limitations are that much more pronounced because he's somewhat preoccupied with exploring them.
It has been a while since I have watched Nolan's films, but I remember them more for the way they make me think about the problem than for their clever solutions.
MWO: Adamski
It’s when he’s most overtly sentimental that his portrayal of emotions works least for me, e.g. in Interstellar.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
it's like 3/4 of a really, really good movie
if you get up and leave at the right parts for bathroom breaks and have to dip out before the end you'll think you saw a masterpiece
The movie works moment to moment and would even without the overall “puzzle,” because it’s so strongly and effectively about feeling destabilizing effects of grief. The device of memory loss isn’t just a narrative gimmick, it’s a way to express the eternal renewal of loss, always fresh, always right there behind him, obscuring even the recent past, making him question everything he took for granted. It’s an engrossing and affecting story.
Is this what we're gonna do today, fight?
FCH's piece on Dunkirk suggests to me he doesn't understand The Joker in TDK and thus I chalk it up as another one of those times he's talking out his ass.
I can’t believe there are like 10 more of these for me to watch
Happy 1/3rd of the month of October?
People will tell you there is a best one of these movies, they are liars, the best one is the last one when the credits are rolling because you have finished.
pleasepaypreacher.net
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor
My new novel: Maledictions: The Offering. Now in Paperback!
I mean I guess a lot of The Passion of Joan of Arc is incredible to me, so it follows.
Seberg was great in Bonjour Tristesse though, which predates Breathless. And Rivette's Jeanne la pucelle deserves to be part of the conversation when it comes to great Joan movies.
I saw Freddy Vs Jason high out of my mind after oral surgery and it was fantastic.
It's a movie about a secret government organization that look like your usual garbageman but they actually kill vampires. They help save the life of one doofus whose parents were part of the VCD but were bit while the dude's mom was pregnant with him and gave birth to him before they died, so he's basically Blade, Hong Kong style. And a dweeb. So while he's training you also have the Department hunting down an ancient vampire and a young woman who was to be his servant in the afterlife, but she's actually a nice vampire and creates a love interest for the doofus as he tries to make her act normal 200 years later.
There's some clever moments here. It feels like an episode of Buffy early on (and sadly has the budget of a TV show really) but every now and then you get some clever things to make you think now it's going to pick up the pace. Like these vampires are jiangshi, the ones that hop around in chinese lore like a mix between zombie and vampire. It's super obvious and suspicious, yeah? But just give the girl a hoverboard and let her watch old chinese films and plays that took place in her period in history. Like old Hong Kong films it gets these gentle humor beats right by knowing when to embrace the stupid, but the character growth happens so much offscreen as though it wasn't just edited down, they straight up didn't even think to include a solid story structure because they only had 90 minutes of storage on the cameras, so 15 minutes before the movie is over you've still got all these loose ends that are just ignored or lampshaded. Which wouldn't be a problem if it still delivered some solid action scenes like 80's movies did, but you get none of that here due to small location sets and too much closeups.
But the biggest problem was the translation of the sub. Asiancrush is one of those companies that specialize in quantity over quality hoping for some sleeper hits to make it big over here either as jokes or memes or real legit movies, but they seem to be getting worse when it comes to proofreading and editing the films and goes into stereotypical engrish. What the hellis a bagpack, "my grandma haven't been such happy for a long time," and "might be not" instead of "maybe not" for an answer to a question, it makes the film worse as well as the distribution company.
My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined. But it's still better than most modern mainland chinese movies. But watch Mr. Vampire if you haven't, it's hella clever with some vampire stuff.
Now there’s an interesting list! The other one that immediately jumped to mind was what happens to Seth in Looper. But I’m sure there’s more.
The entirety of Irreversible.
Almost the entirety of Sunshine
"Put your mouth on the curb."
I wouldn’t say this counts, because Sunshine IS a horror movie, for that very reason
The guy in the tent in The Endless.
I can't really think of any way to define 'horror movie' where Interstellar isn't one as well.